What do child beauty pageants and rampaging, pollution-spawned mutant creatures have in common? Apart from the obvious. (They’re both solid indictments of man’s continuing inhumanity to man, beast and child.) No, the answer is they bring families — particularly dysfunctional ones — together. That is if the World According to Cinema is to believed, which, I hope, it is.

Little Miss Sunshine‘s (2006) roster of dysfuncts is made up of equal part self-flagellating perfectionists and resigned no-hopers. Oh, and a grandfather who is unapologetically addicted to drugs and porn, having misspent his adult life being sensible. The father is a would-be motivational speaker who divides the world into winners and losers, the eldest son has taken a vow of silence (because of Nietzsche — perhaps because he said “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”), the uncle a failed suicide and the slightly podgy daughter star-struck by the glamour of being a beauty queen. The mother, as mothers quite often are in this sort of film, is the only normal one, desperately trying to hold them all together. When young Olive defaults into winning a local pageant (the actual winner falls sick), the entire family take off in a transparently metaphorical broken-down, beat-up yellow minibus. The result is a journey full of comic embarrassment, conflict and the occasional touch of humanity. The ending, I have to say, had me in tears of laughter, caused by equal parts hilarity and an attempt to fend off the excruciating embarrassment of the whole thing. But it leaves you with a wonderful warm feeling. I recommend it.

Gwoemul/The Host (2006), like Little Miss Sunshine, features a scene in which an entire dysfunctional family jump into a moving people-carrier. If reduced to a Hollywood-esque concept, though, the film wouldn’t sound anything like its US twin (it’s Korean). It starts with a (western) scientist ordering his (Korean) assistant to dump a load of highly toxic formaldehyde down the sink and into a nearby river. Almost immediately, a Godzilla-like monster is spawned and goes on the rampage in a riverside park. So what has this got to do with bringing dysfunctional families together? When the youngest member of the family, teen Hyun-seo, who is snatched by the monster and presumed dead, proves to have merely been stored away alive in the creature’s sewage-works larder (she contacts them by mobile phone), the family (disbelieved by the authorities, who are trying to hush up the whole thing by pretending everyone in the area has been exposed to a non-existent disease) set out to rescue her. The trouble is, the family — including the slacker-father who has a tendency to fall asleep at any moment, and an Olympic archer who always loses because she hesitates that little bit too long — hate each other. Like Little Miss Sunshine, the youngest child is the cause that brings them together.

Another interesting thing about The Host is that it has taken the sort of bold genre premise that would form the entire substance of a Hollywood production, and made it simply the background against which a comic family drama is played out. The traditional commercial formula would be to make the authorities who come in to deal with the monster (or some rogue ex-employee called back from self-exile after clashing with the bosses — you know the sort) the centre of the film. In The Host, which makes no bones about casting the western authority-figures as the cause and continuation of all the troubles, the authorities’ attempts to hunt down the creature are secondary, and just get in the way of the family’s hunt for young Hyun-seo. It’s so refreshing to be out of the standard genre box. The Hollywood assumption that an audience’s imaginations would be so swamped by having to deal with one single fantastic idea (a monster) that they won’t be able to handle anything like genuine drama, or even genuine comedy, let alone depth of characterisation, is being challenged at last. What I liked about Serenity (2005) was that, having come already with a fleshed-out background from the TV series (which I never saw), it felt no need to apologise for being a genre film, and simply got on with advancing its story and characterisation, which subsequently gained a bit more than the ordinary depth. Hopefully this is a direction more films will take, as audiences don’t become more sophisticated, but are acknowledged to be sophisticated enough already.

Night is where you hide from yourself, and where dark deeds are done. Murakami’s latest (published here in June, but available in Japan since 2004, where it was titled, in a Coca-Cola kind of way, Afutãdãku) is a short novel exploring the nightside of human existence: its characters are all either lost, hiding, caught up in or drifting through the dark regions of a city after dark. Covering the events of a single night between 11:55p.m. and 6:40a.m. (the chapters are headed with little clock icons), and taking place in a series of soulless city sets (all-night eateries, a love-hotel, an office after-hours), we follow a succession of rambling conversations between Mari Asai (whose beautiful sister, after announcing she was going to sleep for a while, hasn’t woken for several months) and Takahashi (law student by day, jazz musician by night, on the cusp of deciding which life he’s going to commit to), witness the aftermath of a characteristically Murakamian “act of overwhelming violence” in a love hotel, and get a glimpse of the even stranger, rather Lynchian psychodrama involving Mari’s sleeping beauty of a sister and the sinister Man with No Face.

I mention David Lynch because he (in films like Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) as well as Murakami (in books like Dance, Dance, Dance and The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, and many of his short stories) share an incredible ability to muster a sense of intense, looming psychological menace far more threatening than mere physical violence (though both Murakami and Lynch’s works feature sudden eruptions of over-the-top violence). Both also cast a cool air of light, quirky humour, as well as containment and composure over the surface of their works — Murakami’s prose is friendly, simple, almost innocent, Lynch’s films have an air of innocence that takes you by the hand, as a child would, only to lead you to places no child would ever go. This surface expresses, perhaps, the blank perplexity Murakami and Lynch’s characters feel towards whatever dark inner impulses they are forced to struggle with (a situation often captured through the contrast of a day-life as overbright and perfect as their night-life is sordid, dark and ugly — think of teen queen Laura Palmer’s nights of drugs and prostitution in Twin Peaks). Thankfully, both creators also take their excursions through the dark to the other side, affording at least a glimpse of redemption (Laura Palmer beatified as a glowing Christmas tree fairy at the end of Fire Walk With Me, providing an incredible feeling of hope to the end of one of the most harrowing films I’ve ever seen). Murakami’s moments of redemption are more low-key, but equally poetic in being felt rather than understood. By the end of After Dark there’s a sense that decisions have been made, paths chosen, freeing the two youngsters, Mari and Takahashi, from being stuck in the night-time limbo where the others they have met (the violent businessman Shirakawa, the love hotel cleaner Korogi) are hopelessly mired.

A definite improvement on the rather rambling and overlong Kafka on the Shore, After Dark is not just classic Murakami, I think it is a new a step in an already talented author’s work.

Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits ends with the camera slowly rising away from the shocked young Kevin who, having just survived an encounter with Evil incarnate (David Warner), returns home a second too late to stop his parents from touching the last remaining fragment of Evil and disappearing in a puff of smoke. A brilliant twist on the usual formula of a child’s return from fantastic adventures to find everything exactly the same as when they left, it comes across as a parting joke, but always left me gobsmacked. Gilliam’s latest, Tideland, could be said to be a feature-length expansion of that final moment.

It starts with young Jeliza-Rose and her junkie father fleeing the city, where her drug-addled mother has just died, for her grandmother’s country farmhouse. The farmhouse proves to be semi-derelict and unoccupied. Jeliza-Rose’s father settles down in an armchair and administers himself a fix from which he doesn’t wake up. Suddenly, Jeliza-Rose is alone and parentless in a totally strange world. Most of the rest of film follows her imaginative ramblings as she plays with (and provides the voices for) the dolls’ heads that are her only toys. Apart from the occasional flight of cinematic fantasy where Jeliza-Rose’s imaginings take over, I found the rest of the film oddly unsatisfying. It just wasn’t saying anything, and in fact seemed to be deliberately avoiding trying to confront the emotional effect of Jeliza-Rose’s sudden dislocation. I suppose it could be said that, in this, the film was echoing its young heroine’s inability to face her own deeper distress, but, for my mind, it needed some growing, undermining sense of the encroaching darkness that must surely accompany such a crisis. I like Terry Gilliam, and would love to like him more, but for me his almost medieval love of the grotesque and superficially marvellous often comes at the expense of a deeper emotional connection with his characters — something that works brilliantly in a film like Brazil, which is all about human feeling being crushed by a dark, dystopian future. Perhaps it’s just that, in Tideland, Jeliza-Rose’s reaction to her parents’ death can’t come through in the paradisiacal surroundings of her grandmother’s farm, and it’s only at the end, when we see her wandering through the wreckage of a train crash, that her retreat into her own imaginative world makes sense. She wasn’t involved in the train crash, but is certainly as shellshocked and traumatised as any of its survivors.