Charlie Says (USA 2018: Dir Mary Harron)

In all the excitement of celebrating the 50th anniversary of man's first walk on the moon, it's easy to forget that another, darker 50th anniversary should also be marked this year: the killings by members of Charles Manson's 'family', initially of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski and Steven Parent, and the following night Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

And while the world awaits the release of Quentin Tarantino's Manson referencing movie Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (and attempts to wipe from memory the pitiful The Haunting of Sharon Tate) here's Mary American Psycho Harron's take on the subject, an adaptation of Ed Sanders' 1969 book 'The Family.'

Eschewing any whiff of exploitation, Charlie Says focuses on three members of the family, Patricia 'Katie' Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon), Susan 'Sadie' Atkins (Marianne Rendón) and Leslie 'Lulu' Van Houten (Hannah Murray). Incarcerated following guilty verdicts in the Tate/LaBianca murder trials, their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in the state of California in 1972. However the inmates were considered too dangerous to be integrated into the wider prison community (all three remained unrepentant and still psychologically firmly in Manson's grip), and so as we meet them the women remain separated in the facility's Special Security Unit, with the authorities at a loss how to handle the situation.

As a solution they introduce the prisoners to Karlene Faith (Merritt Wever) a graduate student who has successfully been hosting creative writing classes in the prison, and who the powers that be hope may encourage some reflection and even repentance on behalf of Krenwinkel, Atkins and Van Houten. "Are we going to study shit like Women's Lib?" they ask, as Faith introduces them to feminist texts, and examinations of the psychology of domestic violence. Through flashbacks we learn about the brainwashing process practised at Manson's Spahn Ranch in California, particularly as it impacts on Van Houten, the last of the three prisoners to be indoctrinated into the family. And as the women begin to trust Faith more, the chinks in their own allegiance to Manson start to appear.

Cleverly, where most other films about the Manson family have concentrated on Charlie himself, in Harron's film the supporting cast of acolytes, freaks and hangers on get equal, if not greater screen time. Charlie Says is balanced in its attempts to understand the process of inculcation rather than condemn it. The film also wisely dwells very briefly on the actual murders: it opens powerfully, with the three women plus Tex Watson, seen in the aftermath of the deaths of the LaBiancas, visibly shocked but with no details glimpsed apart from some spots of blood on their clothes and 'Helter Skelter' briefly glimpsed daubed on a fridge door.

Faith's gentle coaching of the prisoners, using feminist concepts to help them reflect on Manson's bullying and misogynistic tactics - women not being able to carry money, the supposed equality of 'free' sex - and her insistence on addressing them by their birth names, not the ones given by Manson, are made more powerful by her refusal to moralise or judge. In other directors' hands, the see sawing between past and present may have been distracting, but Harron maintains tension while never once being exploitational.

Bacon, Rendón and Murray are all excellent as the determined, passionate but ultimately lost members of 'the Family' whose allegiance to Manson stems from a need to be loved. Murray in particular turns in a supremely nuanced performance as Van Houten; she alone occasionally questions Manson's motives and the incongruities of his teachings, and her briefly glimpsed moments of doubt make her involvement in the final acts all the more heartbreaking because of this knowledge. As Karlene Faith, Merritt Wever is calm and professional, equally determined, and on occasion totally overwhelmed by her task. And behind the beard and the wild eyes, Matt (Doctor Who) Smith as Charles Manson inhabits the role perfectly, never over melodramatic, but with a sense of violent menace barely kept below surface: the transition of Manson from beatific leader to psychotic gang leader following record producer Terry Melcher's refusal to record his songs is both believable and quite terrifying.

Charlie Says is out in the UK on Digital from 22nd July and DVD from 29th July.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (USA 2019: Dir Daniel Farrands)

Since the infamous nighttime attack at 10050 Cielo Drive, Hollywood, back in August 1969 - when followers of Charles Manson broke into the home of Roman Polanski and actress Sharon Tate, brutally murdering the heavily pregnant Tate and a party of friends - cinema has had an on/off obsession with Manson and his followers. 1976's two-part TV movie Helter Skelter had Steve Railsback providing a career best (and career haunting) performance as Manson, Wade Williams' 1971 The Other Side of Midnight combined documentary footage and re-enactments to piece together the murders, the 1997 film The Manson Family was a documentary style deconstruction of Manson and his acolytes, and 2009's Manson, My Name is Evil concentrated on 'family' member Leslie van Houten.

Well it seems as if there's life in the story yet - at least Daniel Farrands thinks so. The director - whose CV shows a predilection for movies about real murder, fictional murder, and murders we haven't made our minds up about (Amityville, basically) - dips in to a particularly dodgy nugget of history as inspiration for The Haunting of Sharon Tate. In the May 1970 edition of 'Fate' magazine, celebrity columnist Dick Kleiner wrote an article about a dream experienced by Tate, two years before the Manson commissioned murders, in which she prophesied her own death and that of her ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring (also killed by the 'family' that night). And it's this piece of Tate trivia which drives most of the movie.

In fact The Haunting of Sharon Tate opens with the actress having the aforementioned dream, in which she 'sees' in some detail the fate that will befall Sharon and her friends. We then flash forward a couple of years, to a point three days before the murders are set to take place. We learn that her husband is in England working on a film - the unmade The Day of the Dolphin - and Tate, despite being accompanied by her friends (ex- boyfriend Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger), is lonely and increasingly given to paranoid delusions about being watched. Tate also expresses concerns about the fidelity of her husband, and the discovery of a draft script for Rosemary's Baby and a reel to reel tape of Manson's songs in the house's office (which include strange noises) invites the possibility of the absent director's possible collusion in what's to come.

Only buff handyman/caretaker Steven Parent (another actual character from Tate's story, but given considerably more to do here than his real life counterpart) provides the support that Tate needs; and being a bit of a gadget freak he is able to listen to the weird sounds on the Manson tape and work out that it's a form of 'backmasking' - they're actually the words 'Helter' and 'Skelter' but spoken backwards; "it sounds like some kind of chant or mantra," Parent explains, "or the foretelling of a prophesy."

There is a lot of talk about the fates, and different possible futures, which signposts the movie's big twist and odd denoument, and presumably gives some kind of credibility to Tate's visions - the movie even starts with the massively overused Poe quote "Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?" But actually nothing's credible in this movie, from the pedestrian performance of Hilary Duff as Tate, to the awkward intercutting of actual footage of Tate, Polanski and Manson into the reconstructed bulk of the movie.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate is a poorly thought out and extremely distasteful film, with historical scene setting information clumsily shoehorned into the script to add veritas. There was a possibility of saying something interesting about chance vs causality here, but it was never likely to happen under such ham fisted and lacklustre direction. Just plain embarrassing, but there's worse to come; his next movie is a reconstruction of the last days of OJ Simpson's ex-wife, The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate is available to watch on digital download from 8th April 2019.