Why Marathon Man is only remembered for That Scene I can’t tell you, because the whole thing is so wildly over the top, it’s almost a parody of the paranoid thrillers of its era, from the opening old-fogey car chase to its grand guignol flair, Bond-movie explosions of action and copious hat-doffs to Hitchcock. But if there’s ever a film that essays the absolute futility of torture as a valid information-gathering technique, this is it.
Squarely for fans of the anime, this plays like a condensed version of one of the show’s typically sprawling arcs, only with slightly better animation (we’re not talking Ghibli quality here, but the TV show isn’t badly done itself).
It takes a while to get going, and doesn’t quite need so many slow-burn slow-mo shots to set the mood, but Karyn Kusama’s latest deserves the kudos it’s been getting. There are nods to Ben Wheatley (and Amy Jump, of course) and Ti West in this cult chiller, but it’s very much its own thing, and a film that fits squarely with this new trend of the horror of the banal. Plus it’s got a kicker of an ending to boot.