13 Sins: No Drama, No Games

I was having a conversation recently with a friend about movies, and we worked our way around to what people mean when they say a film is “pretentious.” In my experience, it’s thrown out pretty casually, when the person finds a film oblique or opaque or ambiguous. In this mode, it’s maybe a half-step above “quit seeing things that aren’t really in the movie” and the idea that directorial intent determines the true, objective meaning of a film on the list of Dumb Ways To Talk About Movies.

But it got me to thinking about what pretense IS, in this context. Like, I can be all smart and shit and say “this isn’t really pretentious, it just went over their head and that angers and confuses them” but that’s a pretty dickish take too, and maybe if I’m going to be a dick about terms, I should make an attempt to define them. What I settled on, for myself at least, is that in this specific context, a pretentious film is one that is didactic and presumes that the audience is ignorant of what is really an easily observed idea, treating it as a huge revelation.

And that got me to thinking about “game” movies. It’s a particular type of scary movie where a single person or group of people have been selected to play some kind of game, one with escalating stakes that promises a considerable prize in exchange for what ends up being considerable moral compromise. Invariably, the point of the film (usually articulated by the antagonist) is that people will do things they don’t think they’re capable of if the stakes are high enough, which, no shit. There are countless examples of this, both in the behavioral sciences and in real-life situations. This is not news to any but the most absolutely sheltered. The Saw films are prototypical examples of the game film, but certainly not the only ones. Kill Theory, 13 Tzameti, Would You Rather, The Task and My Little Eye come to mind as well. Some of these are better than others, but in general I’m not much of a fan of game films. They tend to insult the intelligence of their audience.

I’m not a fan of game films, and 13 Sins is not helping that one single bit.

The film opens in Australia, as a distinguished academic is taking the podium at an event presumably celebrating his retirement. He looks wary, distressed. It’s the look you see on someone who may be in the later stages of dementia, and he opens with a slightly off-color joke. That gets some laughs, but he follows it with an outright filthy limerick that gets no laughs at all. Up to this point then, we could be watching the public disintegration of a once-great mind, and the woman who introduced him comes up to usher him away from the podium, but then - tearfully, apologizing the whole while - he cuts her finger off. The room erupts into mayhem and the man is shot by police.

Cut to our actual protagonist, Elliott Brindle, as his fiancée prepares him for a meeting with his boss. There’s a lot riding on this: Their wedding is coming up, she’s pregnant, he’s solely responsible for the care of his developmentally disabled brother. He’s praying for a promotion, because money is tight.

Naturally, he is instead fired.

Not only is he fired, but he also finds out in short order that his father - his awful, abusive, racist father - can no longer afford his place in assisted living, and will have to move in with Elliott, Elliott’s utterly dependent brother, and Elliott’s fiancée, who did I mention is Black? Because she is. All of this occurs in the first ten minutes or so of the film, quick cuts from one awful thing to another. Elliott, desperate, finds himself on an empty road at night, at a red light. There’s a fly buzzing around inside the car. He has no idea how he’s going to handle any of this, and then he gets a phone call. A genial voice on the other end of the line tells Elliott that he’s been selected to be a contestant in a very exclusive game, once which could make him a millionaire. This genial voice knows a lot - frankly, an upsetting amount - about Elliott and his current woes, and tells him that all Elliott needs to do is complete 13 tasks, each rewarding an increasingly larger amount of money.  To begin, all Elliott needs to do is kill the fly that is currently buzzing around inside his car. He does, and immediately gets an alert from his bank that money has been deposited to his account.

Then the voice tells him to eat the fly.

This begins a chain of events in which Elliott is yanked to and fro by the voice at the other end of the phone, coerced into doing increasingly worse (and increasingly more improbable) things for larger and larger amounts of money. The basic premise isn’t a bad one - I think the idea that we don’t really know ourselves until we’re put to the wall is a reasonable one to explore, and explorations of extreme desperation can be powerful, but it’s so much better when we’re shown, rather than told, and this film is just nothing but telling from start to finish, and is so tonally inconsistent that it’s jarring.

The problems begin with Elliott, and his situation. It’s been said that comedy is the worst day ever of someone else’s life, and this film seems to take that to heart. Our introduction to Elliott is basically “boy, I sure hope nothing goes wrong today!” followed by everything going wrong. There’s no tension because he’s entirely framed in terms of how precarious his situation is. It’s not just his job, it’s his upcoming wedding, it’s his child, it’s his dependent brother, it’s his dependent father, all of this is piled in one after the other with an immediacy that feels less tense than just absurd. His boss is a caricature villain, like a refugee from a dinner theater production of In The Company Of Men, and his father is nothing but verbose invective and contempt. It’s two-dimensional, like an EC Comics story come to life, but not in a good way.

And that’s where the comedy of the worst day of someone else’s life comes in - it’s so absurd that as the film moves on, the tone ends up being a queasy mix of comic goofiness and cruelty. At one point Elliott is ordered to steal a one-of-a-kind nativity scene (made by blind children, no less - everything is pitched at a level of ridiculous) and destroy it, and the whole thing is played as slapstick, rather than the act of a desperate man at war with his own conscience. Elliott himself is drawn as a pathetic milquetoast, and his situation is so cartoonishly dire that it feels less like we’re watching a basically decent person struggle with a moral quandary than it does a bug having its wings pulled off by an especially malicious child.

There’s no real dilemma or tension because there’s no real choice - his desperation is pitched so high so soon that there’s no question he’s going to keep taking the deal, he’s so meek and wishy-washy that we’re invited to laugh at him, rather than sympathize with him, and the challenges he’s put through become so sadistic so quickly that the only tension is seeing what awful direction he’s going to get yanked in next. It’s like something out of a Farrelly Brothers movie right up to the point that people start losing limbs and dying, at which point we’re kind of in Saw territory. The two don’t mix.

This is all undergirded by a weird, muddled take on transformation. We’re never really shown who’s running Elliott through all of this (which is probably smart), and their motives are never really articulated. There are some feints toward the supernatural (that are never really pursued), but also toward the idea this is some game for the wealthy and powerful, who are watching him be put through his paces, via the spies and cameras they have everywhere, but then at other times it’s described as an exercise in moving Elliott away from his old self.

As the film moves on, Elliott starts acting more liberated, or confident (or evil) the more challenges he completes, which is a weird message to send. The film begins with him being a basically goodhearted guy who is mocked for his decency, with a lot of dialogue about how much of a pathetic doormat he is and always has been. So there are a couple of things this film could be communicating: One is that the atrocities he’s committing are in fact a vehicle for self-actualization, which reads like the filmmakers didn’t know Fight Club was a black comedy, or - and this is  reinforced by messages he receives that he’s still “too close to [his] old self,” - we’re being hit over the head with the idea that given enough desperation, anyone can do monstrous things. Which, as I pointed out at the beginning, is not an especially novel or insightful point. So either “we are all capable of being bad,” which no shit, or “being bad should be celebrated,’ which fuck you.

Thematically, this film is a mess, but narratively, it’s a disaster. The writing is obvious, ham-handed, and sounds nothing like how people actually talk. There are odd details stuck in throughout that are never explained or resolved (an ostrich makes an appearance for no apparent reason, a bus driven by a mysterious masked stranger is  never commented upon) and it’s hard to tell how much of that is by design and how much of it is shoddy storytelling. Is it supposed to make the whole thing seem quirky? Why would you try to strike that tone in a film about a desperate man debasing himself? Was it supposed to be explained elsewhere and got edited out? Maybe, there are all kinds of logical holes in this film - we’re expected to believe that after a number of law enforcement officials witness him commit acts of vandalism and serious injury, nobody would continue pursuing him simply because no paperwork was ever filed. Elliott irrevocably ruins his rehearsal dinner and his fiancée’s reaction is “mildly puzzled.” Elliott’s brother is developmentally disabled and requires medication, except he doesn’t always take it to no apparent effect, and even though he can’t live on his own, nobody’s supervising him and his level of functioning varies as the plot dictates. In general, people are who they need to be to move the plot along, not fleshed-out human beings.

Finally, the ending is kind of anticlimactic and… not necessarily obvious, but the “twists” don’t make a lot of sense, so there’s little shock. The people you think are going to be bad guys early on turn out to be bad guys, it seems to take place in a world where all kinds of people play this game run by a shadowy, omnipotent group without anyone ever finding out, and as is true for the rest of the film, people don’t act like people, they act like they need to for the film to end. And after what seems to be about 36 hours of depravity, destruction, and multiple murder, the most Elliott can seem to muster is sort of “whew, what a day.” There do not appear to be any consequences or any real stain on his soul. It’s muddled, and doesn’t open up into anything larger or carry any real sort of weight.

And that’s probably the biggest failing this film has. “Game” movies often purport to serve as moral lessons, but there’s nothing here that really resonates or to which the audience can connect. It’s almost singular in how it undermines dramatic tension by making the situation ridiculous, the decent protagonist an object of derision, and the entire exercise pointless and consequence-free in the end. There’s no drama, there’s no game, just an entirely unnecessary film.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

A Dark Song: The Great Work

There are a couple of books I remember from my adolescence - Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish. They’re basically the story of what happens when an arms dealer contracts a black magician to perform a ritual that sets loose the whole host of Hell upon Earth for a single day (spoilers: it does not…go well). I haven’t read them in years, but what struck me at the time and stayed with ever since was their treatment of the occult.

See, in most popular media, depictions of the occult usually boil down to candles, pentagrams, robes, and maybe a naked woman if it’s going for extra-lurid. And sometimes this works - I have kind of a soft spot especially for music that runs with that kind of grindhouse Satanic aesthetic - but as a representation of occult tradition and practice, it’s shallow and limited. It’s effective as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all that far. The occult (what little I know about it) isn’t just candles and pentagrams and chanting; it’s scholarship, it’s devotion, it’s discipline. It’s a practice as deep and involved as the sciences or arts with which it commingles. Those books by Blish were the first time I saw black magic depicted as an actual practice, with underlying principles, systems and vocabulary. They felt like a glimpse into a larger world.

A Dark Song is an equally serious take on magic, as well as an understated, solemn examination of the costs exerted by a long and difficult journey.

The film opens with a quote from the book of Psalms -“For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” - before introducing us to Sophia. She’s touring a large house in the Welsh countryside that she’s interested in renting for an extended period of time. It’s very important that some of the rooms face east or west, and she’s willing to pay up-front to rent it for a year, and to pay extra for the agent's discretion.

Having secured the house, Sophia shows it to a man named Joseph Solomon. Mr. Solomon has made the trip from London to take a look at the house with Sophia. He hasn’t agreed to anything yet, and he’s testing Sophia, trying to see if she’s lying about her intentions.

As it transpires, Joseph Solomon is a magician, and Sophia wants his help to perform the Abramelin operation, a grueling year-plus process that, if successful, will put Sophia into conversation with the angel set to watch over her, to ask that angel for a specific favor. But to summon angels, one must first invoke demons and bind them, to constrain their influence upon the petitioner.

In Solomon’s words, they will unshackle this house from reality, and things both light and dark will find their way in.

The majority of the film is the ritual, investing it with depth and depicting it as the ordeal it is. This isn’t some candles, symbols and chanting, this is months of preparation - fasting, total abstinence, study in multiple languages of symbols and systems, grueling rites undertaken multiple times to purge Sophia spiritually and physically. Each room in the house serves a different function in the ritual, they are moved through systematically, consecrated to specific purposes. This will take the better part of a year, spent in total isolation. The entire house is ringed with salt, to cut it free from the world. Solomon is equal parts priest, drill sergeant, and dominant, and there’s a constant undercurrent of ordeal as a path to transcendence and purification throughout.

And this leads to the effect these conditions are going to have. These are two people completely shut into a big house in the middle of nowhere for several months, pushing themselves to the limit physically and psychologically. Naturally, the cracks are going to show eventually - Sophia is impatient for results, and as it transpires, she hasn’t been completely honest with Solomon about her intentions. Solomon is both exacting and damaged. He has seen some shit, and begins the process by detoxing from the alcohol he relies on to “deal with the horror.” He insists on adherence to ritual, to protocol, to practice at every step, and his reaction to Sophia’s dissembling is interesting - it isn’t as much one of anger or betrayal as frustration and fear. Intent and drive are critical for the ritual to work, he explains, and any falsity of purpose corrupts it. It is the reaction you would expect from a nuclear engineer who watches someone mishandle a fuel rod. But ultimately, for all his knowledge and desire to keep himself and Sophia safe with a minimum of moral judgment, Solomon himself is just a man, broken and traumatized. So human frailty in multiple forms conspire to corrupt the ritual, and when the cracks open up, things from outside of our world begin to creep in.

Like a lot of the stuff I’ve been reviewing lately, this one’s best described as “stately” - it relies on lots of long quiet moments suddenly interrupted, wide shots of landscapes dominated by looming clouds and very small figures moving across them. The score is largely cello, percussion and some chimes employed to great effect throughout. It’s not as impeccably shot as, say, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House or Hereditary, but it’s generally well-composed and well-acted, and generally gets over on its pace, its focus on the two characters, and the way at every turn the gravity of their situation is impressed upon us. It’s very much a slow burn - the first act is largely about preparing the ritual, the second is occupied with interpersonal tension, and things don’t really kick off in a big way until the very end. It’s initially very small things that seem to suggest greater forces at work, and then things get a little weirder, then a little weirder, and then things really start going bad. This isn’t a film occupied with hysterics or running around screaming - Sophia may not always be honest about her intent, but her drive is never in doubt - as much as it is the slow realization of a first-time drug trip. The shit’s not working until it is, and then, well, strap in.

It drags a little toward the back half - there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Sophia and Joseph that starts to feel repetitive, and there’s a bit toward the end, just before it gets really weird that should pay off a really important part from earlier and doesn’t, but what’s interesting is where it all ends up pointing. This isn’t a film satisfied with glib clichés about messing with powers beyond your control, and so it ends up delivering in ways that aren’t always obvious or spelled-out, ending in a way that isn’t necessarily what you’d expect going in, but makes perfect sense. It’s a really weird set of comparisons to make, but this film strikes me as kind of a mix of Martyrs (albeit much less graphically violent), The Babadook, and The Trip, and to me that’s an interesting intersection for a film to stake out. Rituals and ordeals are transformative work, and that’s the point finally and elegantly made here.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House: Not With A Scream, But With A Whisper

Ghost stories tend to have two central components: The person or people who died, and the place where they died. Not always, you occasionally get stories about what Ghostbusters would call a “Class Five Full-Roaming Vapor,” something that haunts people rather than places, but a lot of ghost stories tie the spirit or spirits to a place. Something happened there that has kept them there forever, and largely films that follow this track present the ghost as a puzzle to be solved - if the protagonists can figure out why this spirit haunts this place, they can put it to rest. Victory (or survival) relies on understanding.

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House is an ambitious film in many ways, not least of which is in how it seeks to overturn those two basic assumptions. Unfortunately, its ambition  sometimes gets in the way of telling an effective story.

It opens with a monologue:

“I have heard it said that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living.

It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind. To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again. Worrying over the floors in confused circles. Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens. They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives. But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain. Impossible to properly see.

There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen. They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking. For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing. And left all alone, this is how they rot.”

With these words, we are introduced to Lily Saylor, a hospice nurse who has just arrived in Braintree, Massachusetts, for her next assignment. She’s going to be caring for successful novelist Iris Blum, whose books Lily describes as the kind often purchased in airports and supermarkets. It’s a nice, economical image. Iris is frail, barely there, her mind going and on the way to gone. It’s a big, old house, and it’s very quiet. Lily’s monologue continues: “Three days ago, I turned 28 years old.”

“I will never be 29 years old.”

So right up front, we know Lily is not long for this world. So the rest of the film is about how it happens, not what happens, and this lends the film a nice, sustained hum of unease throughout. On paper, there’s really not a lot to this film - Lily takes care of Iris, and soon notices that some things are amiss with both the house and Iris. Things go bump in the night, and Iris keeps referring to her as “Polly,” which is weird, because the only Polly in Iris’ life was the protagonist of her novel The Lady In The Walls, a protagonist who meets a gruesome end.

The film is basically Lily’s investigation into these things, and the story unfolds gradually, drawing connections between Lily, Iris, and Polly without being excessively expository about it. This is not a film about excessive detail (except when it is, to its detriment, but more on that later), and it relies on lots of small gestures to communicate information and set a mood. It’s a nice change from more conventional ghost-story narratives where it’s the ghost itself that leads the protagonist to understanding, and really, the film’s thesis is pretty much spelled out in the introductory monologue - we think ghosts are tethered to their places, but they aren’t, and we think understanding their demise will solve their continued existence, but it won’t.

It’s not that we’re denied understanding - we get a sense of what has happened, is happening, will happen - it’s just presented gradually, in isolated moments that all happen in the same place, but at different times. And that feeds into the mood this film sets: Everyone is sort of unstuck in time - Iris by dementia, Lily by being alone in this big  house with Iris, so everything’s sort of untethered to start with. It feels like Lily’s telling us what happened after it already happened. The film is made up of lots of long shots of empty spaces, or at most two people, sometimes talking but as often not, the silences and conversations alike filled with empty air. Everything is punctuated by slow fades and dissolves, which gives it a dreamlike feeling. That, combined with the unease that we feel knowing what’s coming (if not how), is nicely jolting when the dreaminess is interrupted, which it is in ways sparing but precisely sharp.

So, then, this is a slow, mannered ghost story. It creates an evocative atmosphere, but it’s also, I think, perhaps too mannered in other ways. It’s kind of an odd duck in that it’s a contemporary film (roughly speaking, it appears to be a circa 1970s period piece) that feels like it’s going for the kind of stiffness and formality of speech and manner you’d associate with Henry James, and although this and the general airlessness of it aren’t necessarily a bad thing (it certainly helps to sell an atmosphere of slight unreality), there are a couple of points where it tips overboard. For example, the opening monologue as excerpted above begins well, but it goes on a little long and starts rambling, belaboring its point, and the moment dissipates. This film relies heavily on space and silence to create its atmosphere, so when a character starts to rabbit on about how beauty cannot truly see itself (and at its worst it really is some highfalutin’ nonsense), and does so in the stilted  manner in which everyone in this film speaks, it threatens to kill the mood it’s so assiduously created.

I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker - there’s a lot to like about this film, though it’s so stylized as to likely be an acquired taste, but its strength lies in minimalism, so when it abandons that and does so in a way that leads our attention to wander, it’s irritating. This film is at its best in stillness and hush, at whispering its awful secrets to us.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Bone Tomahawk: The Wild Frontier

I’m always a little skeptical about period pieces. Scary movies are already sort of a difficult proposition because they rely on more suspension of disbelief than drama or comedy - people like to be scared, but not too scared, and one way some people modulate their experience is by using improbabilities or inconsistencies in the film as sort of a safety valve. Some folks need to be reminded it’s just a movie, and one way to do that is to focus on its artificiality. And so anytime you set your film in another time, with attendant changes in dialogue and dress and setting, you’re adding artificiality - you’re making it easier for the audience to distance itself, and if you do it badly, it’s just going to look corny and stupid.

Fortunately, Bone Tomahawk isn’t corny or stupid. It’s a Western, set on a merciless frontier, that also serves as an exercise in slow dread.

The film opens cold, on a man having his throat cut by one of two road agents. They’re doing their murderous business and at the same time having a conversation that wouldn’t be much out of place in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The sound of horses causes them to flee, and they take a wrong turn into someplace they shouldn’t be. Someplace holy, adorned with skulls, and one of them meets an end as quick and nasty as the people to whom they’d just been attending. The other flees.

Cut to “Eleven Days Later” and the small frontier town of Bright Hope. We’re introduced in turn to some of the people in town - Arthur O’Dwyer is a cowboy laid up with a broken leg, his wife Samantha is a nurse. Franklin Hunt is the town sheriff, old-timer Chicory is his “backup deputy,” and John Brooder is a man apparently of some means (and arrogance). Bright Hope is a small, but established frontier settlement, and though we don’t get a sense of how populous it is, the people we’re introduced to feel like actual people. In the lead-up to what comes next, the film does a good job of showing instead of telling - we get lots of little details about these people and the town, and not every detail means something to the plot, but they all tell us more about the world, giving it a little more depth, like life was going on here before the movie began.

And so Chicory, in his capacity as backup deputy, comes to Sheriff Hunt with a report: He was out on a walk, and noticed a suspicious fellow burying some suitcases in the ground out on the far edge of town, before coming into town and stopping for a drink at the local watering hole. So the sheriff and his backup deputy take a walk down to the bar to have a polite conversation with the stranger - a conversation that ends with the stranger getting shot in the leg. Sheriff Hunt isn’t cruel, but he doesn’t fuck around. And since the town doctor is drunk (yet again), Samantha is called to the jail to extract the bullet and treat the wound. It’s all calm, and measured. John Brooder escorts Samantha to the jail, and once she’s done with the operation and once the stranger’s fever has abated, non-backup deputy Nick will escort her home. Hunt and Chicory are called away regarding a colt missing from the town stable. When they get there, they find all the horses gone, and the stable boy eviscerated.

And when they get back to the jail, everyone is gone. The deputy, the stranger, and Samantha. There are signs of a struggle. Arrows buried in the wall. Their first assumption is Indians, and so Hunt begins to put together a posse and calls for “The Professor” - a native who lives in town - to identify the tribe that took them. It’s weird, though - usually arrows have heads made from sharpened flint.

These are tipped with sharpened bone.

As it transpires, the culprits aren’t any recognized tribe. As The Professor puts it, you can’t be a tribe when you have no language. These are feral, cave-dwelling people - “troglodytes” who eat human flesh, and they live four days’ ride from Bright Hope, in what is largely terra incognita. And so, Sheriff Hunt, John Brooder, Chicory, and Arthur O’Dwyer, who would not be dissuaded, ride out for the Valley of the Starving Men to rescue their people on what The Professor tells them is a suicide mission.

Now, before I go on, one of the really tricky bits of most Western narratives is the way they, at their heart, are always going to be stories about white colonists subjugating and massacring their way westward. It wasn’t a great time to be a woman or anything other than white, and setting up the monsters of the piece as “savages” is more likely than not going to be kind of a problem. The film does try to get ahead of this with a Native American character who frames the antagonists as being of no tribe, as of being so debased as to not even be Native American, but having this designation made by a Native American who lives among whites and dresses as they do has its own problems.

Like, it’s very difficult to tell this kind of story in this day and age without the ghost of every horrible thing that went into the white colonization of North America looming over it. The film doesn’t lean into Western clichés on this front, thank goodness, but neither does it really engage with or subvert them either. The massacres that came with westward expansion are acknowledged matter-of-factly. They are neither unambiguously condemned nor justified as right, just a fact of recent history, which is probably better than leaning into a more traditional “red savages” narrative, but...when it’s a Western, and there are savages, however un-Native American they’re framed as being, it’s still there, and it didn’t feel right to me to write about this film without at least acknowledging it. Maybe “not actively offensive” is the best we can hope for here.

But, all that said, this isn’t a thoughtless or careless film, or one that goes for the obvious. It’s a quiet film - some somber strings punctuate important moments, but otherwise it’s just the sounds of the prairie, the badlands, the frontier town where the pianist in the local bar has a tidy little pricing scam running, so although we get the obligatory saloon, we don’t get the honky-tonk piano we’ve come to expect. The dialogue is definitely archaic, but believably so, avoiding a lot of the Yosemite Sam-style clichés that would be easy to fall back on. The characters aren’t overstated or cartoonish - they are definite types, yes, the sheriff is very much a Western sheriff, and Chicory has a bit of Gabby Hayes in him, but at every step we’re allowed to see more of them than just those obvious references, and so they never seems like cartoons. There’s also a real vein of wry, understated humor running through the film that helps humanize the protagonists, and because it’s not broad or overplayed, it throws the horror into contrast. In the final act, when things get really dire, it even adds a certain amount of pathos.

And indeed, things do get dire. A lot of the horror comes from the way the film posits the frontier itself as predatory. The elements, animals, humans, humans existing at a level barely above animal, the dangers inherent in even the slightest injury in a time when medicine was primitive and infection more likely than not, resources and help being spread thin and far away - all of these things conspire against our protagonists on their journey. It reminds me a little of The Descent in this respect - they’re going into unknown territory without any backup, in conditions where survival is perilous, where anything going wrong is going to have big costs, and of course things start going wrong. The quietness of the film extends to the horror as well - it’s not telegraphed or overdone, just as much a fact of the environment as anything else. Violence is sudden and sharp, and happens off-screen as often as not. It’s not gratuitously gory, so when it does get gory, there’s real impact. The overall tone throughout is one of restraint, punctuated with awful things that happen without warning.

It’s a measured, deliberate exercise in stripping away hope, in making things harder and harder for the protagonists, before they even get where they’re going, and where they’re going is horrible, a place of atavism and butchery, and it’s scary because we have reason to care about these people, and then when we finally see what they’re up against - covered in powdered bone, making an unnatural sound somewhere between a keen and a roar - and what they do to their captives, it’s nightmarish. The frontier is a dangerous place, with depths you explore at your peril.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Eyes Of My Mother: Little Girl Lost

In films, evil is easy. It isn’t hard to come up with something or someone evil in fiction because you’re the one describing the character, and if you want to make the sum total of their existence that they are evil, you can do that. But that’s not always especially interesting, I don’t think. Sometimes it’s absolutely fine, and heaven knows I do hate excessive backstory and explanation in horror films, but to contradict myself, I also think there’s worth in creating a monster that is more than its monstrosity. So often in life, the people we would call evil are not just evil, their evil comes from human desires and needs and weaknesses, and exploring the tension between the universality of the monster’s desires and the singularity of how they go about achieving them can yield really interesting results.

Consider, for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - the monster does monstrous things, but it also has a mind and an interior life, one preoccupied with the same things so many of us struggle with. Outside of fiction, the serial murderers Jeffery Dahmer and Ed Gein did terrible, terrible things - things beyond the pale of typical human conduct - but were also both by all accounts lonely and awkward, and did the terrible things they did to try and fulfill some basic human need for companionship in the only ways that made sense to them, given their inability to assign value to human life.

It’s that intersection of loneliness and utter absence of anything like a moral compass that gives The Eyes Of My Mother its stark, unsettling power.

This is the story of Francisca, a little girl who lives with her mother and father out in the country. Francisca’s mother was an eye surgeon back in Portugal, and when one of the cows they keep dies, she has Francisca practice dissection on it. She’s teaching her daughter what she knows. Francisca’s father is a silent presence who moves through the house, sometimes drives into town to run errands.

On one of these occasions, while her father is away, a young man comes to visit Francisca and her mother. They’re out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s just Francisca and her mother, and this young man. The young man is pleasant enough, but he smiles a little too widely.

By the time her father returns home, it’s too late. Francisca’s mother is dead.

From here, we follow Francisca as she grows up, in this house in the middle of the country. It’s her and her profoundly repressed father, living with the constant reminder of their traumatizing loss. They don’t talk about what happened. They don’t talk at all, and the rest of the film is largely occupied with the things Francisca does to feel less lonely in this stiflingly lonely environment. It’s hard to say much more about the film without giving it away - it’s not that the story really has twists, it’s just that so much of the film’s impact lies in what happens, what new turn Francisca’s quest to no longer be alone is going to take, that to recount much of it takes away a lot of the movie. However, it’s clear within the first ten or fifteen minutes that there’s something really wrong with her, probably was even before she lost her mother, and the rest is just a matter of what new shapes it takes as she grows up and where it’s all going to lead.

And this is what makes this film as powerful as it is, I think - it manages the very tricky balance of eliciting some kind of sympathy for Francisca while not at all diluting the horror of what she’s doing. Take a young girl who grows up with a surgeon’s detachment toward the body, an emotionally distant father, and a mother taken from her too soon through a shocking, awful act of violence that she witnesses, and something is going to snap deep down. Francisca never really had the chance to learn how to relate to other people, and she’s trying her best with the tools she has at her disposal, but those tools lead to awful ends. We can respond to her profound loneliness and inability to connect with other people, her utter brokenness, but how she’s chosen to cope with it is monstrous.

This by itself could end up overheated and lurid and kind of tedious. I mean, at worst this could basically be a Lifetime Original Movie with gore. But, much to my delight, this is instead yet another in the run of films I’ve written about recently that brings a strong, assured sense of composition to the table. It’s really, really nice to be able to write about horror films and be able to talk about editing and sound design and cinematography on a level beyond “there is sound and lighting and the camera is pointed at people.” I know at some point the streak will run out, but this is yet another horror film that feels like a film. Between being shot in black and white, effective use of chiaroscuro, and a largely affectless acting style, it feels a lot like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film it’s centered largely in one location, in a world where emotions don’t really get expressed and there are lots of long, awkward silences. Wide shots punctuate the film, with people dwarfed against the world, clouds and trees and four walls pressing down on them. Everything is very still, until it isn’t. Shots tends to be long and cuts between them sudden, and all of this - the cinematic style, the spare but effective use of largely ambient music, and the characterization all come together to create a supremely uneasy experience.

There’s a real sense of restraint (and when to abandon it) at work here. In general, this film does a lot with suggestion - it doesn’t shy away from violence, but doesn’t linger on it either. Quick edits just before something awful happens cut to the immediate aftermath, meaning we get just enough to fill in the blanks a lot of the time. A conversation will start to go wrong, you can sense things turning, and then we cut immediately to Francisca scrubbing the floor yet again. It tells you everything you need to know without showing it to you, which makes the times the film doesn’t look away that much more powerful. Throughout, the violence is presented dispassionately, but somehow this just makes it worse - this, combined with an immediate immersion into Francisca’s dysfunction (as well as having seen firsthand exactly where it comes from) creates this deeply uneasy feeling where we’re never permitted the luxury of dehumanizing Francisca, but neither are we spared the horror of her day to day life. We have to feel both, and it’s as disturbing as the suffocating, monochromatic world in which it all takes place. The one thing that didn’t quite land for me was an ending that feels a little abrupt and a little anticlimactic, but it’s the kind of end that feels inevitable given what we’ve seen, and it’s entirely consistent with the mood of the film overall. What Francisca does is horrible, but she isn’t doing it to be horrible. She’s doing it because this is how she grew up, this is the only thing she knows, and nobody was ever really around to teach her any different. Her life is drab and gray and filled with horrors, but because it’s all she knows, they aren’t horrors to her. They’re friends.

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