Sci-Fi and Horror at Home on Netflix

Netflix put up more than 50 original programs on its streaming service in March, including series, specials and movies. Thus truly began a long-promised deluge of what the kids call “content,” and just how much original content Netflix will put up before the year is over is something not even Netflix can say.

The influx of original programs coincides with news reports about Netflix’s thorny relationship with cinema. The Cannes Film Festival, making good on a pledge in 2017, has codified its ban on Netflix-produced films in its competition. (If it’s a Netflix movie, it will not screen in competition.) This is because of what Cannes regards as Netflix’s intransigence about showing its films in theaters.

Add to that a recent interview with director Steven Spielberg in which he said that films produced by Netflix and other streaming platforms ought not to be eligible for Oscar consideration but compete for the Emmy Awards instead. That brings the immortal question, “What Is Cinema?,” to the forefront yet again. Along with it are the debates over the ostensibly sacrosanct value of the Communal Theatrical Experience. It’s not this column’s job to provide definitive answers to the questions these debates raise. I like going to the movies as much as the next fellow, but I’ve seen plenty of pictures in theaters that made me think afterward, “That wasn’t even a movie.” For the rest of April, I’m going to post my responses to original pictures I watched on Netflix. For starters, I went to my spiritual cinephile home and considered sci-fi and horror fare and was gratified to find that the titles I chose were, it turned out, movies, even.

“Mute,” a sci-fi effort co-written and directed by Duncan Jones, made its debut on Netflix in February and was largely panned by the critics. Jones is known for the films “Moon” (2009), a well-received original, and “Warcraft” (2016), a video game adaptation that confused critics who thought it a little cheesy relative to Duncan’s previous projects.

“Mute,” a passion project that Jones says is set in the universe of “Moon,” is a kind of future-noir in which Leo, a mute bartender of Amish origins (Alexander Skarsgard) searches for a lost love in Berlin, some unspecified years from now.

It’s a peculiar grab bag of ideas and visual modes, and Jones has said it was influenced by his impressions of Berlin during his childhood, when he spent time there with his father, David Bowie, in the 1970s. The movie is dedicated to Bowie and to Marion Skene, Jones’ childhood nanny. Leo’s drawings of dolphins in an early scene recall a lyric from Bowie’s “Heroes,” while the subterranean lair of two characters brought to mind a line from “Funtime,” a song by Iggy Pop that he wrote with Bowie. Recently, I discussed the movie with a friend, who said he found no persuasive reason that the story, a grim one involving underground criminals, illegal medical practices and pedophilia, needed to be set in a sci-fi world. That is, I think, the biggest point against the movie. The most compelling point for it is the audacity of not only casting Paul Rudd as a villain, but also as one whose look and mode echo that of Elliott Gould in “M*A*S*H.”

“Mute” is an oddly messy and occasionally alienating movie, but a real movie nonetheless.

So, too, are “The Ritual” and “Ravenous.” “The Ritual,” a theatrical release in Britain, had its premiere on Netflix here in February. It’s an English picture shot largely in Sweden that begins with a bang: Two men wander, on impulse, into a liquor store without realizing it’s being held up. In a terribly tense you-are-there scene, one is killed; the other survives by hiding and sees his friend die.

The survivor is Luke (Rafe Spall), and several months later he and three friends are on a hike through Sweden, a sort of spiritual quest they agreed on after the incident. One twists his ankle, making hiking painful, and a bright idea is arrived at by the group: cut through a forest rather than hew to a trail. At this point the movie, directed by David Bruckner (the screenwriter, Joe Barton, adapted a novel by Adam Nevill), has accrued enough mojo to get by strictly as a psychological thriller. But supernatural menaces also lurk, and they are doozies.

The production design is inventive, and the director has a real knack for scares; he reminds me a bit of Neil Marshall early in his career, when he cooked up credible, concise horror pictures like “The Descent” (2005). “The Ritual” is not only a real movie; it’s also one that, frankly, I wish I could have seen on a big movie theater screen.

“Ravenous,” which debuted on Netflix in early March, is in several respects a familiar movie, as its subject is undead flesh-eaters. This time they are ravaging rural Quebec. I wonder when we’ll have the world entirely covered, zombie-movie wise. When will the genre start breaking down by county?

“Ravenous” approaches the subject matter in a slightly more realistic style than other zombie movies, focusing on a group of non-zombies thrown together by fate and forced into a nomadic existence by the plague. Armed with rifles as they drive back roads and walk through green fields, they ruminate on the lives they left behind, when they’re not shooting up screeching flesh-eaters and stumbling upon monstrous, mysterious structures, like a tower of wooden chairs perhaps intended to fuel a bonfire.

The film’s writer/director, Robin Aubert, strews crafty visual allusions to the likes of Jean Rollin’s “The Grapes of Death” and the quasi-apocalyptic TV series “The Leftovers,” and shows solid scare-flair throughout. The zombie situation can’t help but yield repetitive confrontations, though: Heroine is pinned down by zombie, almost certain to get the zombieness-inducing bite; there is painful struggle, but wait, then an awful sound, and voilà, friend of heroine has put a fork, or something, in zombie’s neck. So this movie is most optimally consumed by zombie addicts.