Carl Beukes | Through the Shattered Lens

So, put yourself in this situation.

You’re an aspiring writer, which is a really nice way of saying that you don’t have much money. Because you haven’t paid your rent in four months, you’ve just gotten kicked out of your apartment. As bad as that is, you can take some comfort from the fact that your incredibly hot boyfriend owns a really nice and really big apartment and he probably won’t have any issue with letting you live there. I mean, he’s always eager for you to sleep over so why not just move in? So, you head over to his place to give him the news and….

….some blonde that you’ve never seen before opens the door and asks you who you are!

Okay, now you’re in trouble. Not only do you not have an apartment but you also don’t have a boyfriend. You have no money and you have no family to fall back on. While many writers wrote some of their best work while living in boxcars and drifting across the country, you’re not sure that’s what you want to do with the next few years of your life. So, you get on social media and you let the world know that you need a job. ANY JOB!

That’s what happens to Olivia (Carrie Wampler), the character at the center of The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate. It all happens during the first 10 minutes or so of this movie and it does make Olivia into an instantly likable character. There’s no way that you can’t sympathize with her because everything that could go wrong in her life has gone wrong in just the course of a few hours. When Olivia is contacted by Cassidy (Jordyn Aurora Aquino) and told that there is a job opportunity for her but that it requires Olivia to be discreet, you can’t blame Olivia for jumping at the opportunity. What else is Olivia going to do? Starve?

It turns out that Cassidy works for Ava (Brianne Davis) and Hayden (Carl Beukes) von Richter, a celebrity couple who, after Ava’s last few films flopped at the box office, are now mostly famous for being famous. Ava and Hayden hire Olivia to act as a surrogate to carry their child. Olivia will get $150,000 once the baby is born and she’ll get to stay at Ava and Hayden’s fabulous mansion. The main conditions seem reasonable: Olivia will have to be discreet and she’ll also have to stay healthy and be regularly checked out by Ava’s army of doctors. Olivia agrees.

And, at first, everything seems okay. Ava and Hayden are charming, even if Ava is a bit high-strung and Hayden often seems like he’s lost in thought. Olivia bonds with Cassidy and chef Peter (Kenneth Miller). Ava can be demanding but that makes sense and …. wait, a minute, did Ava just do cocaine in a public restaurant? And what exactly is Hayden doing with that hypodermic needle?

Needless to say, Ava and Hayden are not as perfect as they initially seem and Olivia soon starts to have doubts about whether or not they should even be parents. Hayden, especially, seems to get creepier (and more and more gropey) with each passing day. Soon, that fabulous mansion starts to feel like a prison and Olivia comes to realize that her employers are even more dangerous than she originally suspected….

The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate is a film that’s very much of the moment. We live in a society that is obsessed with celebrities, even faded ones like Ava and Hayden. We also live in a world where ordinary people — like Olivia — can actually connect with celebrities via social media. At the same time, though people may not always be quick to admit it, we all secretly suspect that most celebrities are actually crazy and probably have a dungeon underneath their mansion. Even our favorites are often suspected of harboring dark secrets, as seen by the eagerness of the twitter mob to cancel their former heroes. As such, we can all relate to Olivia’s willingness to be a part of Ava and Hayden’s seemingly glamorous life while, at the time, Ava and Hayden’s “quirks” serve to confirm what we’ve always suspected about what goes on behind closed doors in Beverly Hills and on Park Avenue.

The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate strikes a good balance between thriller and satire. It embraces the melodrama while also retaining enough self-awarness to be fun. Brianne Davis and Carl Beukes are both entertainingly sleazy as the celebrity couple from Hell while Carrie Wampler is sympathetic and likable in the role of Olivia. This is an entertaining Lifetime movie that will be enjoyed by anyone who has ever looked at a celebrity tweet and thought to themselves, “What a weirdo.”

Eye in the Sky is many things. It’s a tense and involving drama. At times, it’s a satire of the bland and often cowardly bureaucracy that controls so much of the world. Occasionally, it’s an angry polemic and a sad-eyed look at the state of the world today. It’s a film about drone warfare, one that is remarkably honest about both the costs and the benefits of being able to randomly blow people up on the other side of the world. It’s a film that will make you think and it will make you cry and it will even make you laugh in a resigned sort of way.

But, at heart, it’s ultimately the story of two houses in Nairobi, Kenya.

In the first house, terrorists are plotting their next attack. The film leaves little doubt as to what they are planning. Thanks to a miniature drone controlled by Jama Farah (played by Barkhad Abdi and it’s good to see him giving as good a performance here as he did in Captain Phillips), both American and British intelligence are aware of what’s happening in that house. A British jihadist is planning her next attack. Guns are being loaded. Suicide vests are being prepared. If nothings done to stop their plans, hundreds of people are going to die.

Sitting nearby is the other house. And, in this other house, an apolitical Kenyan family is going about their day with zero knowledge of what’s happening just a few doors down. 11 year-old Alia Mo’Allim (Aisha Takow) twirls a hula hoop while her father watches. Later, in the day, she’ll go out in her village and, while the local militia harasses anyone who doesn’t look right to them, Alia will attempt to sell bread. She’ll set up her table directly outside of the first house.

And what no one in that village realizes is that an armed drone is hovering above them. As they go about their day, they have no idea that there are men and women in America and Britain who are debating whether or not to blow them up.

Colonel Katherine Powell (a steely and totally convincing Helen Mirren) is determined to blow up that house and the terrorists within, even if it means blowing up Alia in the process. However, before Powell can give the order, she has to get permission from Lt. Gen. Frank Benson (Alan Rickman, at his weary best) and Benson has to get permission from the government. And the government is full of people who are eager to take credit for killing terrorists but who don’t want to be blamed for any of the inevitable collateral damage. Everyone passes responsibility to someone else.

Powell may be the most determined of everyone to blow up that house but she is not the one who will actually be firing the missiles. That responsibility falls on two Americans, Lt. Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and Carrie Gershon (Phoebe Fox). As the teorrists prepare and Alia tries to sell bread and the bureaucrats debate, Watts and Gershon are the only ones who seem to truly understand what’s about to happen. If they fire the missiles, Alia will probably die. If they don’t, hundreds of other definitely will.

It all makes for incredibly tense and thought-provoking film, one that is all the more effective because it actually allows both sides to make their case. In Eye in the Sky, no one is presented as being perfect. On the one hand, Powell may be willing to manipulate the data to get permission to fire that missile. But, on the other, the film doesn’t deny that Powell is right when she says that if they don’t blow up the terrorists when they have a chance, hundreds of innocent people are going to die. Towards the end of the film, Alan Rickman says, “Never tell a soldier that he doesn’t understand the cost of war,” and Eye in the Sky appears to understand that cost as well. Nobody escapes this film untouched.

Well-acted and intelligently written and directed, Eye in the Sky was one of the most thought-provoking films of the previous year. See it if you haven’t.