By Jill Lawless
CANNES, France (AP) --Tim Roth toned things down for his role in the Cannes Film Festival entry "Chronic."The British actor known for his explosive turns in films from "Made in Britain" to "Pulp Fiction" is tense and taciturn as a nurse who cares for the dying in the English-language debut of Mexican director Michel Franco.
Roth's character, David, is compassionate with his patients but deeply depressed in his own life, and the film adopts a deliberately subdued style. It lets the camera linger on the often-silent David as he washes, feeds and moves patients unable to care for themselves.
The film invites the audience to contemplate the toll caring for the dying takes on those who do it, and makes viewers consider their views on end-of-life suffering and assisted suicide.
Roth, who stars in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film, "The Hateful Eight," said he wanted to make sure that his strong presence did not overwhelm the movie that Franco planned to make.
"It's a non-vanity film," Roth told reporters Friday in Cannes. "It's very much a leave-your-ego-at-the-door kind of portrayal … I kind of stripped myself away as much as possible.
"It was very disturbing to play, I must say."
Roth's performance gained praise from journalists and marks him as a contender for Cannes' best-actor prize.
The actor said he was uncertain how to approach the role until he met and observed real respite-care nurses.
"I kind of gleaned the character from those meetings," he said.
Franco's film is one of the quieter entries at Cannes, where it is one of 19 films competing for the top Palme d'Or at Sunday's prize ceremony.
Roth said his own view on euthanasia had not changed.
"I'm all for it. … That's crazy, to make people go through that (suffering)," he said.
The seed for "Chronic" was sown at Cannes in 2012, when Franco's "After Lucia" won the Un Certain Regard competition for new and emerging filmmakers. Roth was head of the Un Certain Regard jury that year.
"I saw his film and it devastated me," Roth said. "And then we met and I just asked him for a job."
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More