Denerstein Unleashed

Thursday, July 4, 2024

A porn star's bumpy road to fame

At one point in the movie MaXXXine, a porn star (Mia Goth) seeking crossover fame as a horror movie queen, tries to evade a slimy private investigator (Kevin Bacon). To avoid her pursuer, Goth's Maxine seeks refuge inside the famous Psycho house on the Universal Studios lot.

Mark the Psycho house as one of many movie references in the third installment of director Ti West's horror trilogy, which began in 2022 with X and Pearl.

West primes us to see Norman Bates, or a facsimile, pose a frightening new danger, but he purposefully undermines the suspense he creates. Once inside, all we see is the wooden scaffolding that keeps the house from collapsing.

We're behind the facade, a strategy West repeatedly employs as he plays with horror and movie tropes from the 1980s. The result ranges from smartly mounted jests to self-conscious displays of pop-cultural savvy.

MaXXXine feels like an ambitious movie that can't quite shed enough of its genre skin to emerge as something startlingly fresh, even as West works to expose the seaminess behind Hollywood’s bright lights.

The movie's casting probably broadens its reach. Employing a southern accent that makes his words sound as if they've been dipped in grease, Bacon scores as PI John Labat.

The rest of the cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, as Teddy Night, Maxine's unscrupulous agent. Two homicide detectives (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) figure in the plot. Elizabeth Debicki portrays the ambitious director of the crossover horror movie Maxine hopes will make her a star. Of course, it's a sequel.

Then there's Goth, who has staked out impressive territory in three of these movies, most notably in Pearl, the best of the trilogy.

Goth plays the only character who survived the first movie, which saw a group of young filmmakers trying to break into the biz by making a porno. Post X, Maxine traveled to Hollywood where she made a mark in the adult-film world.

Goth's performance embodies one of West's central observations; those who don't wish to become monsters shouldn't aspire to stardom. The movie never forgets that Maxine's past is bathed in the first movie’s bloodshed. Her freckled face looks innocent, until it curdles into an expression of monstrous ambition.

Although it’s difficult to take seriously amid all of West’s showmanship, a story emerges. During the 1980s, a real-life serial killer called The Night Stalker terrified Los Angeles. News footage tells us about this horrific chapter of LA history, which West uses as a springboard to put Maxine in danger. More can't be said without spoilers.

West's movies have become known for adding layers of meaning that elevate them from the usual Hollywood gore ghetto -- while also not abandoning major plasma flows.

The gore in MaXXXine slashes and smashes its way onto the screen like exclamation points.

The movie's conclusion struck me as more risible than chilling; it's followed by a needless epilogue that restates the movie's ideas.

It's also arguable that the parade of movie allusions gets out of hand. West even finds a way to put a bandage on the nose of Bacon's PI. We're clued to remember Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes, the detective who discovered Los Angeles's dark side in Chinatown.

Chinatown (1974), of course, was not an '80s movie, but West uses the reference to draw thematic connections to his LA foray -- the story that festers beneath the surface, the lowdown.

Garish, glitzy, and gruesome, MaXXXine can’t outdo its predecessors. Still, if you’re a fan of the first two movies, West gives you no particular reason to avoid the trilogy’s semi-successful finale.

Oh, I almost forgot an important question: Is MaXXXine scary and creepy enough to haunt you once you leave the theater? I don't think so.

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Kevin Costner’s Western has its virtues

In a perceptive article in Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman assessed the lackluster opening weekend of Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga -- Chapter 1, $11 million for a three-hour Western that cost $100 million to make. Chapter 1 is only the first part of what Costner conceives of as a four-part movie. Chapter 2 releases in August.

Not a fan of the movie, Gleiberman likened Horizon to fare we might see on TV, calling it "the seedbed for a miniseries." Although he admired Costner's courage and commitment (the actor/director spent a reported $38 million of his own money on the production), Gleiberman went on to say that the movie teaches the following lesson:

"Don't turn movies into television."

Initial box office returns appear to be proving Gleiberman right.

But Costner's gamble on the form was interesting and perhaps justified. Audiences, after all, have grown accustomed to watching lengthy novelistic series on small screens; it's reasonable to think they might embrace the form if it were successfully transposed to the big screen.

Or maybe not. Most miniseries are presented in digestible one-hour segments. Pause buttons allow for bathroom breaks, and concessions are no further away than the refrigerator.

So, a quick Q&A on Horizons.

Q. Did it deserve to be widely panned, as it was after premiering at last May's Cannes Film Festival?

A. No. We've all seen plenty of catastrophes on the big screen. Horizons isn't one of them.

Q. Are some of the criticisms of the movie justifiable?

A. Of course.

Q. Is Horizon a commercial folly -- considering cost and possible returns?

A. Not my concern.

Q. Can you summarize your reaction?

A. Horizon held my interest, kept me from looking at my watch, and included enough tension to build a series of mostly involving mini-dramas.

Beyond that, Horizon proves adventurous -- albeit not always in expected ways.

The movie, or more accurately, its form tends toward abstraction. I don't mean to suggest that those who see the movie won't be watching gritty characters who operate in realistic settings. Nothing about Horizon feels avant-garde.

I'm talking about the way Costner breaks his Western opus into chunks. Presumably, upon the movie's completion, all these fragments will cohere in ways that justify the "American Saga" part of the movie's title. Perhaps we'll emerge with a comprehensive picture of the forces that helped shape the American West with all its rawness, fiber, decency, and deceit.

I agree with those who've pointed out that it's difficult to watch Horizon without thinking about Costner's treatment of Native Americans. He did, after all, direct Dances With Wolves, widely hailed for recognizing a Native American perspective.

One of Costner's most gruesome scenes occurs early and involves Apaches. A band of warriors attack a settlement, ravaging those they view as invaders of their land.

Although the movie's Apache attack could have been lifted from an older, less sensitive era of moviemaking, Costner -- who wrote the screenplay with Jon Baird -- adds nuance by including a scene in which an aging chief warns the Apache warrior (Owen Crow Shoe) who led the assault that he's fighting a losing battle.

A later raid on a peaceful Native American village provides an example of bloody white brutality: Greedy marauders collect scalps for money.

The movie's structure might be called partially successful. Like clumsy couples on a dance floor, the episodes in Horizon sometimes bump abruptly into one another. Some episodes are better (and more compelling) than others, and I sometimes forgot characters by the time they reappeared.

It's also possible that the movie has been overpopulated with characters. A mother (Sienna Miller) and her daughter (Georgia MacPhail) survive the early-picture Apache attack. Soldiers (Danny Huston and Sam Worthington) help depict the cavalry as incapable of protecting so much open terrain.

After roughly an hour, Costner appears as Hayes Ellison, and the movie takes on a more conventional Western tone. A hard-bitten horse trader, Ellison kills the brother of an outlaw who's then intent on revenge. In the process, Ellison becomes the protector of a flirtatious prostitute (Abbey Lee) who has taken charge of another woman's two-year-old boy.

That's a lot for one movie, and I haven't even mentioned Matthew Van Meyden (Luke Wilson), the leader of a wagon train that becomes another source of small dramas, one involving a tender-foot Brit and his wife.

But the overriding theme seems to be the settlement of the West, which the movie sees less as a matter of cowboy grit or settler pluck than as a wave of history breaking across the land, leaving plenty of carnage in its wake.

When the movie opens in 1859, a nameless white man and his assistant are seen surveying a remote patch of land. Two Native Americans observe, and a point is made in schematic form: The untamed West is about to be carved into discreet chunks of property.

I suppose we should be uneasy about judging a movie that has yet to finish. It's also possible that "good" -- how I'd describe Chapter 1 -- might not be enough for a movie with so much epic ambition.

Still, in my view, Costner does more than enough to get us to the next chapter. Horizon gives us a version of the West that stems from Costner's knowledge of the genre. The movie often matches the seriousness of its intentions, and Costner doesn't indulge in mythologizing romanticism or cynical deconstruction. The movie acquires its forward motion from the broadness of its sweep.

I hope the remaining chapters of Horizon -- unlike this installment -- will be made available to critics in every market before their release. Chapter 1 was not screened for critics in my city.

So to get back to where we started... Sure, the opening weekend was far from glorious, but it's possible that by the time he's done, Costner will have made a movie that will look quite different.

What some now see as a misbegotten labor of love may, in time, be viewed as a laudable achievement. After the first helping, Costner left me rooting for the latter.

Friday, June 28, 2024

A heartbreaking look at refugees

Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa) takes us to the Polish/Belarusian border in GreenBorder, a gripping look at Syrian refugees desperate to escape their war-torn country.

Holland avoids the kind of hand-wringing that could have resulted from portrayal of a fraught and polarizing moment, smartly shifting our attention to different aspects of a complex problem.

— We meet and empathize with a Syrian family — a grandfather, husband, wife, and three kids — who hope to reach Sweden, where they already have a relative.

—- We’re appalled by the brutality the family faces at the hands of Polish border guards who treat them like a virus that must be prevented from spreading.

— We also meet a border guard whose wife is pregnant. He represses his conscience so that he can do his job.

— We’re introduced to activists who help the refugees at great personal risk. A psychiatrist joins a cause that could bring criminal charges. The activists seem to have as many failures as successes.

Holland imbues most of her characters with humanity, a choice that works against any temptation to adopt holier-than-thou attitudes toward what we’re seeing.

The most moving part of the film involves the Syrian family that’s fleeing ISIS. They’ve been misled to think that they’ll find allies in Belarus.

Dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko offered safe passage to Syrian refugees, but his real intention was to disrupt EU countries by flooding them with desperate migrants.

Belarusian soldiers push the refugees through razor-wire fences bordering Poland. Polish border guards catch them and force them back into Belarus. At times, the guards throw fleeing refugees over the fence.

A Syrian boy named Nur (Taim Arian) becomes a focal point of sadness when he’s separated from his family during a border “pushback” from Poland to Belarus.

Refugees live in a state of sustained fear and panic. They frantically use their cell phones for navigation or to contact relatives who have promised help.

All of this takes place in the cold and rain with characters on all sides caught in a forest nightmare.

The Polish government condemned Holland’s film. Perhaps it should have watched more closely. Holland clearly empathizes with refugees, but she’s presenting a comprehensive portrait of Poles who are trying to deal with an impossible situation.

Holland concludes with an epilogue in which she shows Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland after the Russian invasion. They are greeted warmly by some of the same guards who tormented Syrian refugees, leaving little question that race played a role in the Polish response to some of the refugees.

Green Border begins with an aerial view of the forest where much of the story will unfold. As the camera glides over the forest, the image fades from color to black-and-white but Holland never takes a black-and-white approach to storytelling. Her movie dramatizes the plight of refugees, but it's also a thought-provoking look at the struggle to retain humanity under extreme conditions.

Undeniably harsh and sometimes difficult to watch, Green Border is a rarity, a movie that doesn't give up on humanity, even in the face of so much heartbreak and wreckage.

Thursday, June 27, 2024

A tense new 'Quiet Place' movie

Did we really need a prequel to 2018's clever, scary A Quiet Place, which had a sequel in 2021?

Probably not, but we have one now, and director Michael Sarnoski, who debuted with the impressive Nicolas Cage movie, The Pig, makes the most of it. Sarnoski overloads A Quiet Place: Day One with stomping, leaping aliens, and turns his plot into a swift straight-line affair, sustaining high-pitched tension throughout.

I wouldn’t say the movie is a classic of its kind. But Sarnoski, with help from his creative sound design and effects teams, fills a fleet 99 minutes with the high-anxiety stress movies such as this are meant to deliver.

Day One begins with a title card informing us that the daily noise level in New York City averages 90 decibels, which explains why aliens attracted to loud sounds might seek it out. The aliens don't tiptoe around, either. Their screeching and smashing ways boost both the city's and the movie’s noise levels.

Any success the movie attains qualifies as improbable. We don’t know what the invading aliens want or why they've come. We’ve seen computer-generated urban destruction before, and we know the alien MO from previous movies.

Fortunately for Sarnoski, the urban setting provides a new playground for the aliens. A scene in which ash-covered New Yorkers walk zombie-like through streets evokes memories of 9/11, one line in the grim poetry of destruction.

Dropping an animal into the mayhem might seem like a cheap bid for sentiment, but Sarnoski fully embraces it. A pet cat — cutely named Yoda — belongs to Lupita Nyong’o's Samira, a hospice patient with terminal cancer.

Samira can't beat cancer, but maybe she can outlive the alien onslaught, and, at least, save her cat.

Samira soon meets a fellow traveler. Dazed and bewildered, Eric (Joseph Quinn) follows Samira despite her desire to be left alone. The two develop a relationship, and a major set piece involves Eric's attempt to secure a transdermal fentanyl patch to relieve Samira's pain.

And, yes, without many words, the actors must use their faces in the ways silent film stars might have. Nyong'o proves more than up to the task.

Attempts at humor are marginal. Samira introduces a running joke about her desire to find a slice of New York pizza, which she prizes above any other variety, a subject audiences can debate on their way to the parking lot.

As fast as the movie moves, there's still time to wonder about a few things. Why, for example, does Eric never remove his tie, even amid so much physical trauma? What keeps the white of Yoda's fur from ever seeming dirty?

I've read that Yoda is played by two cats that prove that some cats do have nine lives — at least in movies that are less committed to pinpoint logic than to maintaining the intensity that results from knowing terror is seldom more than a beat away.

Dull movie about a rich subject

Janet Planet explores the complex relationship between a single mother (Julianne Nicholson) and her young daughter (Zoe Ziegler).

The subject brims with possibility. Visitors (some in romantic relationships with Mom) come and go, leaving Ziegler's 11-year-old Lacy to adjust to Mom's fluid living situation.

Writer/director Annie Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, sets her film in a cabin-like home in rural Massachusetts, attuning the story to the viewpoint of a child who craves more of her mother's attention.

Promising, yes, but the movie goes flat.

Baker's directorial choices favor the ordinary over the dramatic, not necessarily a mistake but one that risks tedium. Made with an often static camera and indulging a preference for pauses that threaten to tip into emptiness, Janet Planet drifts into dullness.

Baker structures the movie around the instability with which Lacy lives, introducing various residents of the house occupied by Mom -- Janet of the title -- and Lacy.

Early on, Janet, a recently licensed acupuncturist, is seen living with Wayne (Will Patton), a brooding fellow who seems to regard conversation as a mortal sin. Baker introduces the “Wayne’’ scenes with a title card reading, "Wayne." When Wayne departs, another title card offers a terse, "End Wayne."

The rest of the movie follows suit: Additional chapter headings introduce Regina (Sophie Okonedo), a former friend who moves in for a while.

A bearded visitor named Avi (Elias Koteas) follows Regina into the house. He offers short talks on big subjects, notably the origin of the universe. Avi doesn't converse, so much as lecture, a role he may have adopted as leader of a cult to which Regina once belonged.

I wondered whether Baker found these characters more interesting than I did.

Baker doesn't do much to vary the movie's tone. Lucy leaves home for a piano Lesson. She and another girl run around a local mall. Lacy sets up a small stage in her bedroom and populates it with figurines. Mother and daughter walk into the woods to view a show given by a roving theater company in which performers don large puppet costumes.

The performances have a tamped down quality. A quirky Ziegler convey's Lacy's distress As played by Nicholson, Janet fumbles her way through relationships and agonizes about whether she's capable of finding fulfillment. She makes bad choices in men.

Dry flashes of humor can be found. The movie opens with Lacy calling her mother and asking to be picked up from summer camp. Her suitcase is ready.

"I'm going to kill myself if you don't come get me,'' she says, ridiculously raising the stakes of her request.

Janet Planet felt edgeless to me, a movie that was reluctant to sharpen anything that might have added dramatic seasoning.

When Lacy practices piano on a folding keyboard, it's clear that she's no budding Paderewsky. If that's meant to be humorous, it works for a second, but the joke quickly deflates.

Baker has rich dramatic soil to till but nothing much grows from it. Janet Planet seldom opens up emotionally. For me, it became a slog.

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

An intriguing cab ride in New York

If you've ever hopped into a New York City taxi, you might have encountered a particular type of driver, the guy who seems to know everything and wastes no time telling you so.

Director Christy Hall capitalizes on a cabbie cliche in Daddio, a two-hander starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson. That's not to say, though, that the movie is dominated by cliches.

As the movie's cab ride progresses from JFK to midtown Manhattan, Clark reveals his vulnerability, along with an ability to empathize with a passenger who seems to be facing a pivotal decision in her life.

It's not always easy to believe that Johnson's

character, listed in the credits as Girlie, would reveal as much as she does, but the movie is based on the idea that it can be easier to be honest with strangers than with those who know us well. There's less at stake.

For a two-character drama that's limited to the claustrophobic confines of a taxi, Daddio travels further than you'd expect.

Daddio also reminds us of how good an actor Penn can be. He packs a lot into the character of Clark, revealing touches of misogyny, street savvy, humor, and even tenderness. By the end, it's clear that Clark knows he's not as smart as he pretends to be, even though he reads people pretty well after 20 years of dealing with strangers.

And then there's Penn's face. As he ages, Penn convincingly suggests that Clark has spent too many long days behind the wheel. Life has required that he not only to collect fares but that he pay some himself.

Returning from a trip to visit her half-sister in Oklahoma, Johnson's character initially exchanges banter with Clark, who correctly guesses that she's mired in an affair with a married man. He's only in it for sex, Clark insists.

A third conversation, unheard by Clark, emerges in the background as Johnson's character exchanges texts with her horny lover. The texts demonstrate that Clark is right. The man can't wait to meet for sex. Short of that, he wants Johnson’s character to send him a risqué photo of herself to which he'll happily masturbate.

It takes time for Clark to let go of the reins that drive the conversation. At first, he talks about himself in ways that are intended to reveal the background from which he draws his conclusion. He’s been married three times; he’s had his share of sexual conquests. Take it from him: He understands what goes on between men and women.

Eventually, walls topple and the two communicate honestly -- or at least as honestly as they can. Wisely Hall, who wrote the screenplay, doesn't overdo what such a short-lived bond can accomplish.

Hall was lucky to find actors who could pull this off, and cinematographer Phedan Papamichael dispels the visual inertia that could have come from spending so much time inside a taxi.

I don't want to oversell Daddio; at times, the story required the suspension of more disbelief than I was willing to surrender, but Johnson and Penn play a duet that makes it well worth tagging along for the ride.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

A triptych from Yorgos Lanthimos

I had an oddly mixed response to Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness, the director's follow-up to the well-received Poor Things, which won a best-actress Oscar for Emma Stone.

Was I confounded? At times. Did I find the movie revelatory? Not really. Did I wonder whether Lanthimos has become a prisoner of his own stylized weirdness? That, too.

Yet Lanthimos held my attention, even as I made peace with the fact that this over-extended movie (two hours and 45 minutes) wasn’t accomplishing much more than providing a showcase for the strange flights of imagination that characterize Lanthimos's work.

Among them: severed fingers, intentional car crashes, nudity sans eroticism, a pool full of water derived from tears, and a frantic sexual foursome.

Lanthimos divides his movie into three distinct stories in which the same actors play different roles. A recurring character named RMF crops up in each of the segments.

Reunited with regulars Stone and Willem Dafoe, Lanthimos maintains tension with a signature blend of discordant sound design, unsettling music, and images that tease the surreal, the bizarre presented as if it were normal.

The cast, which also includes Jesse Plemons in a featured role, fully embraces Lanthimos’s approach. Safe to say that actors who appear in Lanthimos films have a taste for stretching the borders of realism.

So what the hell is the movie about? In the first segment, a controlling boss (Dafoe) tries to coerce a servile employee (Plemons) into crashing a car into another car, an act of obedience that could result in the death of the other driver.

In the second film, Plemons plays a police officer whose marine researcher wife (Stone) is rescued after being stranded at sea. She returns but seems to be a facsimile of her “real” self, a synthetic doppleganger who is asked by her suspicious husband to cut off different body parts to prove how far she'll go to prove her love.

Film three finds Stone playing a woman who leaves her husband and daughter to join a cult run by a leader (Dafoe) who expels her after deeming her impure.

None of these brief descriptions do justice to the three segments, which are full of intricacies and digressions and which make room for performances by Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamaoudou Athie, and Yorgos Stefanakos.

I’m not a Lanthimos devotee, although I greatly admire The Favourite and Poor Things. Still, I’d say that Kinds of Kindness qualifies as a lesser work that suggests themes — abuse of power, submission to power, and insanity made commonplace — without exploring them deeply. The movie can be perplexing, funny in a deadpan way, and even off-putting.

Less lavish than Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness feels like a sketchbook in which the director tests various ideas. If you see the movie, you’ll notice that Lanthimos's close-ups have a cruel intensity, unless, of course, you’ve always wanted to examine every pore and blemish on Plemon’s face, to cite just one example.

I felt no ill will toward Kinds of Kindness. Scorn might have been better than a giggle and a shrug accompanied by little desire to unpack the movie's mysteries any further. I'll offer this, though:

At one point, Lanthimos makes use of the Eurythmics hit, Sweet Dreams. The song's lyrics, also featured in the movie’s trailer, provides a strong suggestion about what drives the movie’s characters:

“Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to be used by you

Some of them want to abuse

Some of them want to be abused”

As I said, not Lanthimos’s best work, but the director kept me watching with the mixture of attention and curiosity his work always demands.

Thursday, June 20, 2024

She's old but don't mess with her

Jane Squibb, the 94 year old actress who made a big-screen mark in Alexander Payne's 2013 film Nebraska, lands a starring role in Thelma, a movie centered on characters lucky enough to live into their 90s.

Although the movie begins with a serious problem (older people being bilked by unscrupulous phone callers), director Josh Margolin veers off into a Los Angeles-based caper comedy in which Squibb’s Thelma takes matters into her own hands. She pursues the swindler.

To conduct her search, Thelma commandeers a scooter — really a motorized wheelchair — from a friend (Richard Roundtree) who resides in an assisted living facility. Roundtree’s Ben grudgingly joins Thelma on her quest.

Margolin jams the movie’s aging stars into a scenario in which they battle their infirmities while heading toward the confrontation that serves as the movie’s climax and provides a late-picture role for Malcolm McDowell. The screenplay also contrives to put a gun in Thelma’s hands.

Fred Hechinger plays Thelma's feckless grandson, a young man in need of an ego boost. Parker Posey signs on as Thelma's daughter with Clark Gregg playing her son-in-law.

The scam begins when Thelma receives a phone call saying that her grandson has been in a terrible automobile accident and needs $10,000 for a lawyer. In a panic, she mails the money to a post office box.

Thelma makes a few nods toward the grief of losing family and friends as old age encroaches. Margolin also plays with action movie tropes, but mostly the movie proceeds as a lightweight trifle built around two strong performances that feel more credible than the plot.

In sum: three cheers for the plucky, engaging Squibb and for the dignified and still charismatic Roundtree. Two for the rest of the movie. Thelma marks Roundtree's last big-screen performance. The actor died in 2023.

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

The play's the thing in 'Ghostlight'

Modest but emotionally grounded, Ghostlight tells a story about an ordinary family coping (or not) with grief. Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson slowly reveal the nature of the loss suffered by a suburban Chicago family in which Dad (Keith Kupferer) works construction, Mom (Tara Mallen) tries to hold the family together, and daughter Daisy (Katherine Kupferer) indulges in ample doses of teenage fury. Bordering on the trite and flirting with cliche, Ghostlight emerges as a good-hearted exploration of how an improbable foray into community theater unites a family. Kupferer’s Dan learns about a local theater group when group member Rita (Dolly De Leon) approaches him. After seeing Dan struggle with his temper, Rita invites Dan to visit the group’s rehearsal space. Perhaps sensing a route into emotions he’s been unable to express, Dan joins the group. He winds up playing the part of Romeo to Rita’s Juliet. The company consists mostly of older people who agree to bypass issues of age in their staging of Shakespeare's play. A back story about the death of Dan and Tara's son runs a parallel course to the play. The connection feels a bit forced, but the movie makes a touching case for art as a means of exploring parts of ourselves that otherwise might prove inaccessible. And, no, Dan doesn't become a new Olivier. Gradually, Kupferer shows how Shakespeare's language begins to speak directly to Dan. For the record: A ghost light is the only light that’s left on when a stage is otherwise dark and a theater is empty. Also, the roles of father, daughter, and mother are played by a real family. Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen are the real-life parents of Katherine Kupferer.