Doctor's Notes: 'Ella McCay,' 'Anaconda,' and More!

More = '45 Years' and 'Untitled Home Invasion Romance'

Welcome to Doctor’s Notes, where I — Charlotte of The Treatment — share some shorter but still Treatment-coded reviews for films I’ve watched lately. This will largely comprise recent and more commercial films so that I can keep my foot in the Rotten Tomatoes door while also introducing the widest possible audience to the New Film Criticism.

If you’re coming here from Rotten Tomatoes, know that “Fresh” and “Rotten” ratings indicate my personal enjoyment of the film only; they are not a testament to whether or not they’re worth watching. If I write about a film, that means I consider it worth watching.

I give star ratings for every film I plan on including here over at my Letterboxd account, where these reviews will then be posted after the Doctor’s Notes post goes live. Follow me to get a sneak peek at what I plan on writing about!

Ella McCay (2025)

Right up to its marketing blurbs, Ella McCay is interested in love’s paradox; how the people we love are both our greatest boons and our most stressful obstacles in life. It doesn’t make sense when you think about it; that’s why we don’t think about it, and why we never really do. In fact, we so instinctively understand and accept this about love, that its paradox as a storytelling engine is cliché to the point of being a narrative cop-out.

But it’s not the narrative engine in Ella McCay so much as it’s just the narrative surface, from which the dynamics of that paradox replicate themselves in both the form and the emotional perspective of the film at large.

Ella’s major political weakness is her tendency to get overly-fixated on details to the point where actual progress on the matter at hand becomes stifled. Meanwhile, her most steadfast familial lifeline, Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), is also the bluntest and most straightforward speaker, while her relationship with her brother Casey (Spike Fearn) evolves on the basis of Ella not getting caught up in her manic pontifications during their interactions. In these ways, Ella is taken to task.

Furthermore, these indictments of hemming, hawing, and putting on of formal sheens are largely accompanied by pointedly exaggerated dialogue and mannerisms, which creates another love-coded paradox; screwball genre artifice that’s nevertheless built upon a distinctly human playfulness. Thus, to indulge that screwballish unseriousness — as these characters do here — is to not only take directly after love itself, but to also actively reject the veneer of formal, detail-oriented presentation.

And indeed, the film at large rejects this, too. The haphazard plotting? The arbitrarily rendered world (we don’t know which state Ella is the governor of)? All of it at once rejects the centring of details, the attention to which — especially Ella’s — is born out of a concern with earning validation and accreditation. “Earn” mentality, of course, is devastatingly detrimental to matters of love, which is why we don’t think about the detail(!) of love’s paradox; why we refuse to consider it seriously.

Thus, this rejection of detail by the film’s many pieces is an act of championing the emergent fact of love; people loving people, humans helping humans. Ella McCay’s characters ending most every interaction with “I love you” is the core thesis of its novel, faux-reckless storytelling approach.

Politically, it’s wishful and naive, of course, but the seed it plants — the destruction of distracting detail and championing of just simply helping people — is ultimately one of neoliberal deprogramming, which is its own kind of love. Would have been an out-and-out blast with the right crowd.

Untitled Home Invasion Romance (2025)

I didn’t enjoy this at all, but I can’t deny that it works. The way it rushes its plot hooks to the front and has its characters unnecessarily verbalize what they’re thinking (among other such dialogue contrivances) suggests a lack of confidence in its ability to tell this story, but you need to consider how this same story centres around a man who plays host to a black hole of confidence (hence the film’s premise), and who subsequently guilts/pressures/manipulates others into filling it for him; an unsustainable self-actualization model that will inevitably fall apart and display the deeply-infected wound. That the film is titled Untitled Home Invasion Romance (the original script was called Getaway, meaning the title is a conscious decision) speaks further to how little this protagonist considers others — be it people or movies/screenplays — in terms of their capacity for individuality and self-determination; he needs Suzie to be a victim so that he can be her hero, and he doesn’t care if the screenplay has a name so long as he can leverage it in service of his black-hole ego.

But it’s those metatextual thematic congruencies with storytelling weaknesses that are key here, and they especially catch the eye because of how underutilized they are; M. Night Shyamalan did it with Trap, George Lucas (accidentally?) did it with Anakin Skywalker. You risk veering into full-blown narrative laziness when you do this, of course, but it’s a testament to craft when you successfully avoid doing that. Best case scenario is something like Willow, whose storytelling self-sabotage is directly conducive to the paradigm it introduces with its perspective.

In Untitled Home Invasion Romance, this strategic self-sabotage extends to the textual subject matter. Generally speaking, you’d be hard-pressed to say there’s something to be gained from watching deeply damaged and insecure people destroy one another while the whole affair centres white incompetence and insecurity as brevity-framed spectacle. And yet, the film wields all of these agents of cynicism in pursuit of indicting the very social landscape that validates these things as worthwhile entertainment/recreation.

Namely, the film’s protagonist, Kevin (Jason Biggs), gets what he wants without actually learning any lesson from this experience, suggesting that the sovereignty and desires of other people (particularly women) will continue to carry negligible weight in this white guy’s attempt at squaring himself in the world, and that he’ll never clue in to needing to address his insecurity in relation to other people if he wants to square himself in said world in the long run.

Moreover, the queer women and ethnic minorities in this film harbour similar struggles with emotional maturity/sense of independent identity (such is how the powers that be hope to engineer those lived experiences especially), and yet they overwhelmingly comprise the body count while Kevin and his hot wife Suzie (Meaghan Rath) hardly suffer anything worse than inconvenience and embarrassment. The white/het farce is the queer/ethnic sealed fate.

Do I think there should be question marks around this perspective on account of its combination of pessimism and brevity/irony? Yes. But do I also think that we should give due to films that play in this specific political paradigm while also intelligently deconstructing the veneer of open-and-shut storytelling standards (as largely decided by white cultural elites) by way of its thematically-measured self-sabotage, even if I didn’t personally enjoy said film? Yes, absolutely.

When they let me reboot Ghostbusters, I think I’ll cast Justin H. Min in one of the lead roles. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

45 Years (2015)

Okay, when I tell you that I capital-H Hate this movie, I’m not saying I don’t recommend watching it; in fact, I very much do. What I am saying is that it wasn’t until I watched 45 Years that I realized it was entirely possible to exercise the prerogative of the New Film Criticism with films that, to you, distinctly resemble the antichrist.

Prior to watching this, I assumed that talking about how much you dislike a film could only involve defining it by what it isn’t, via dime-store critiques (X was dull, Y was unengaging, Z was ugly, blah blah blah). I see now that it’s possible to talk about such movies from a place of wanting to seize actionable perspective.

How? Well, if — per the philosophy of the New Film Criticism — we understand that a film is worth talking about if it introduces the viewer (or the reader of a review) to new perspectives or ways of thinking/regarding the world/art/whatever, then it’s entirely conceivable that a different film can be worth talking about if it similarly triggers a new perspective/way of thinking by way of *severe contradiction* with a viewer’s previously-dormant revelation, awoken by the friction that the film’s perspective — as inferred by the viewer — creates with it.

Suddenly, the New Film Criticism can conceivably recognize “positive” and “negative” reviews.

The positivity and negativity isn’t the point of critique, of course, but it’s nevertheless fascinating how this perspective-first prerogative can be engaged in two distinct ways that each relate heavily to the experiential binary (positive or negative) of viewing the film. In watching 45 Years, the already-infinite possibilities that the New Film Criticism contained for human growth doubled in the blink of an eye. I was floored.

Anyway, I think it’s embarrassing to entertain the kind of emotional fragility that 45 Years treats as its narrative centrepiece. I don’t deny the honesty of what it depicts, but I very much take issue with the implication that depicting something like this worthwhile. This is a story about Kate (the divine Charlotte Rampling) being insecure/unable to define herself without her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay)’s perceived status as a non-fluid fixture in her life, undefined by anything that came before them. What do we stand to gain by witnessing this willful attachment to one’s victimhood in existential defiance of the rich multitudes contained in a lifetime? This certainly isn’t the film you make if want to indict that, so why entertain it?

I detect but a note of redemption here, in the final scene, when their anniversary dance fades to its end and Kate is left there frowning. The most immediate implication is that Kate realizes that marrying Geoff was a mistake, but what if she’s instead realizing that marrying — period, because of who she is as a person — was a mistake? I suppose they’re also old enough that marrying was far less of an option and closer to a survival tactic for Kate, which layers — if dilutes — the clear issue-of-interest here (i.e. her insecurity).

But even if I bought that reading — which I don’t — is this, again, really the film you make in order to indict the attachment to victimhood displayed by Kate? Because I would then say that taking aim at the entire marriage complex — as that ending only very arguably does here — hurts the insecurity thesis more than it helps, as it decontextualizes her attachment from its very personal, very essentially internal nature, leaving the perspective even more listless.

Writer-director Andrew Haigh also made All of Us Strangers, which is a film I both love and also consider one of the best of the decade, so points for range and what not. Would love to be illuminated in a way that makes me not hate this movie anymore.

Anaconda (2025)

If you’re rebooting the Anaconda franchise, the approach taken here is about as close to objectively correct as it can be. We’re talking about the preeminent filmic bloodline of C-grade monster movies that had less than zero pretence at the outset and somehow offloaded even more with every passing sequel, but never dipped so far as to acknowledge its own ridiculousness, at once keeping pure the source of that elusive flora of joy that only these specific cult parameters can cultivate.

Thus, to make a “real” Anaconda movie that acknowledges its own ridiculousness would be to compromise that flora, but there’s also no more practical real estate in playing a “real” Anaconda movie straight. Therein lies the magic of the 2025 film’s approach; cinematically acknowledge the joyful ridiculousness that lives behind, in front of, and in-and-around the scenes of an Anaconda movie and, indeed, movies at large.

Because Anaconda (2025) is a film about films not needing to be about anything; not on the premise that films and stories shouldn’t be about anything, but that it’s insincere — and, in the case of something like the Anaconda movies, downright traitorous — to internally contrive and/or posture deeper significance for a movie that really is just about something like people trying to not get eaten by a giant snake. We see this behaviour out of Hollywood press junkets and red carpets all the time. Anaconda (2025) makes the case that it’s actually preferable to acknowledge most filmmaking as a deeply unserious indulgence of one’s own narcissism.

And, literally, that’s what it means to make narrative movies; taking the aesthetics of something serious (being trapped in the rainforest with a giant man-eating snake, being trapped on an island with mutant dinosaurs, being the universe’s final collective hope against Thanos) and displaying them with categorically unserious make-believe. Doug (Jack Black) does exactly this in the aftermath of the Anaconda’s first kill; the crew is in a blatant fight for their lives and he’s over here trying to figure out how to incorporate it into their indieconda reboot. It all very tongue-in-cheekily speaks to this detachment from reality we have when we insist upon how important movies are in the context of this system we’re living in, when really they’re just expensive, collaborative indulgences of ego; people can’t afford groceries and we’re giving Christopher Nolan $250 million dollars to make The Odyssey (which I myself will be seated for). Meanwhile, there’s a scene in Anaconda (2025) where Doug throws a literal bag of gold into the river. It’s as subtle as a giant fucking snake.

So, yes, movies are deeply unserious, but recognizing that needn’t preface any sort of anti-art stance. In fact, when contextualized with human friendship and collaboration rather than the machine of Hollywood, this indulgent narcissism of filmmaking actually becomes nutritious for the human soul. Consider:

— Claire (Thandiwe Newton) pushing for an emotionally nuanced scene (out of place in an Anaconda film) where her character deescalates a confrontation with the human villain, but Griff (Paul Rudd) insisting that it should escalate to a headbutt (very appropriate for an Anaconda film). And then he does himself one better and insists on a double headbutt. And then a headbutt with “Brazilian spice.” And all of sudden the whole table is creating a spontaneous codex of headbutt technique and choreography in full demonstration of how human joy can escalate and take on boundless, imaginative forms when it’s not preoccupied with being dishonest about how unserious their endeavour is.

— Doug’s kid gifting him a mock Oscar trinket that says “World’s Best Doug,” and his wife lamenting that it doesn’t say something sweeter and more emotionally resonant like “World’s Best Dad.” Except, nothing about the occasion — the film, the gift, the most readily-inferable father-son relationship here — has anything to do with emotional resonance. And indeed, the kid says that it’s funnier if it says “Doug,” because kids aren’t yet afraid of unseriousness like we adults tend to get.

— The moment where Doug is about to make amends with Griff after they had a falling out earlier, and a contrived emotional inflection point is gearing u- Nope! Snake attack!

— How the gang happens upon the Sony yacht in the river and the crew member snarkily remarks on how Hollywood doesn’t do anything original anymore, or how Ice Cube laments how Hollywood just “makes it up as they go along.”

You see? Where Hollywood narcissism is rooted in cynicism that only calcifies when it refuses to acknowledge how deeply unserious moviemaking actually is, that same narcissism — when employed by a ragtag group of friends — can instead become a tool of iterative, knowingly indulgent, full-throatedly unserious joy and unstructured creativity that just might come in handy when you’re scheming up a way to kill the snake that’s trying to eat you and your friends, which the film rightly acknowledges as both the literal and parabolic narrative win condition here.

Honesty about what is and is not serious can save lives, whether that means preventing death by snake or enabling a life trajectory that’s more conducive to joy.

Yes, this whole perspective is blunted by the fact that Anaconda (2025) is itself a Hollywood film that’s essentially co-opting the aesthetic of tru-indie/NonDē advocacy, but that’s no reason to dismiss the thesis. Movies are unserious. Making movies is unserious. But if we leverage this fact responsibly and curiously, we’ll become closer to the humans we truly are at our core, like the ones who made The Quatch all those decades ago.

That metamorphosis, ladies and gentlemen, is profoundly serious.

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