Je M’Appelle Agneta: This 2026 Netflix movie has just been released. It is Swedish, with plenty of French and has subtitles. It stars Eva Melander, as Agneta, who is previously unknown to me. I knew none of this cast. Agneta is married in her late 40s, living in Sweden with her fitness-focused husband and they are empty nesters. The kids have moved out, and only seem to reach out when they need money. Agneta has a separate bedroom from her husband with a single bed. She loves France and everything to do with it. The cheese, the wine, the language and the people. She feels unseen in her own house, and she recently lost her job. While sneaking French cheese, crackers and wine into her room, she leafs through some Want Ads and sees a position of a caregiver (au pair) in Provence. She reads the ad to be for the care of a young boy. She sends off the email with her resume thinking “there’s no reason not to”. Very quickly she receives a positive response that she has been offered the job. Room, board, and care giver in Southern France.
It should be noted that Agneta doesn’t speak French. As she leaves, her husband warns her emphatically that she will be lost there and quickly looking to come back home with her tail between her legs. Undeterred Agenta leaves on her adventure. She arrives in the small quaint French town and finds the bar that she is to meet up with Fabien. Quickly she learns that the her care is for an older eccentric gentleman, named Einar, who isn’t look for anyone to assist him. This is not what she was expecting. Einar is single, sometimes forgetful and has lived a full life. He is gay, but had a son from a previous life of his own in Sweden. Einar is fluently bilingual and has his own issues to sort through. Agnta learns this over time. There are lessons to be shared by many of the towns inhabitants. The Bar Chez Fabien is a gathering spot each Friday and we learn why it is important for Einar. In it, there is a slice of small town European life. Einar brings his life attitudes to Agneta and admonishes her for not having lived for herself. She is always focusing on others; her husband, her children, her job. None of these things makes her feel fulfilled. Things happen with the expected and unexpected.
I think that Eva Melander does an excellent job in this role. We can see how she opens up and blossoms when given the proper outlook and encouragement. Even though she looks upon herself as unremarkable with no adventurous in her life, others are quick to point out the heading into unknown France, with no working knowledge of French and no people that this is an adventure. Challenges are put before her as well as others, and they all grow as a result. One of the lessons learned is the time honoured “you’re never too old to learn”. For Agneta it is a sense of belonging and being with her people. That she embraces herself and all that she is and recognizing the value in this. I recommend this movie and not just for the scenery in Provence, with the purple lavender fields among the hillsides. We care about Agneta and those around her. The characters aren’t just caricatures there to provide broad strokes of a type of person. Rather they have more fully formed backgrounds and issues to be dealt with. For those who don’t like subtitles, well what can I say? Get over it. If you don’t then you are missing a lot of quality movies that don’t have to come from Hollywood. This, in these times especially, is a very good thing.
The Thing: This John Carpenter classic sci-fi horror movie is from 1982. I have never seen this from beginning to end, and I wanted to see what all the fuss is about from back in the day. It stars Kurt Russell as MacReady, a helicopter pilot who serves on the remote US outpost in Antarctica. Others on the crew are Wilford Brimley (Cocoon and The Natural), Keith David (Platoon) and Donald Moffat, who is well recongized from those times. I will note that this movie mirrors plenty from the 1979 classic horror movie from Ridley Scott Alien. There is a crew alone in a remote place with an inhospitable environment who must deal with a deadly foreign presence. First their task is to identify what the heck is going on. In this instance at the outpost a helicopter flies overhead and tries to shoot what appears to be a wolf or a dog from above. It runs out the dog belongs at the US sight and there is a confrontation with this Norweigian crew on that helicopter with the US team.
The crew quickly gets grossed out, as does the audience, by a slimy sticky mess with hair and teeth looking nothing like they have ever seen. An autopsy reveals that the anatomy of the mess before them isn’t unfamiliar. It is Earth biology, even though they are not suspecting anything alien at this stage. Wilford Brimley is the doctor/science officer and confirms this. MacReady decides to visit the Norweigian site and see what is going on there. It is unusual for people to go squirrelly after a short while in the isolated ice. The Norweigian site is destroyed with bodies and burning environment. What transpires is very similar to the Alien script. They discover that this presence can imitate the life around it and clone itself to it, also similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except pods and sleeping is not required.
I think that this remains iconic as the make up and effects used were cutting edge for their day. In many respects, they still hold up well. I was squeamish in watching some of it, which was getting higher up on the Gross Out Meter. The humans quickly turn on each other, as they cannot tell who has been “infected” (or gets “imitated”). There is an excellent scene with Russell tying up a few others of the crew in chairs with rope and then performing an experiment before them to see if they have been infected. It involves having a petry dish of their blood, and then putting a red hot wire into the blood. It not infected, the blood just burns. If infected the blood reacts aggressively! The hilarity ensues when a couple of guys aren’t infected, but remain tied when another crew member is found to be infected and basically explodes beside them! They jump and scream and demand to be untied. The fear being seated next to this freak show is real. Ultimately the creature realizes that it has no way out from this camp, and wants to freeze back again into the ice. It wants to infect people and take over the world. MacReady has done a good job at keeping it isolated. In the end, the audience is left uncertain with what remains to be done. This was decent but I had that lingering feeling about the substantial similiarites with Alien were a bit much. Some of the make up technology for sure is from that time with other movies like Scanners or The Fly or American Werewolf in London.
Mondays With Robbie 