Pure: Pffft Goes The Dynamite

I think it’s important that the arts be able to engage with difficult, uncomfortable ideas, and horror’s no different. Fictional fears can be proxies for real-world ones, sure, and in that mode horror provides a measure of distance, of emotional safety. We can work our shit out without it getting too close, too real. But when real-world fears take the lead and fictional fears are no longer a proxy, but instead a way to heighten those real-world fears, that’s when it gets interesting. When it gets under our skin and we don’t have the comfort of distance. The horror is right here beside us and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

But this is a tricky, tricky balance. It’s easy to mishandle sensitive subject matter, to take the sort of actual horrors people contend with every day and trivialize them as cheap provocation, or worse. (See, for example, roughly 95% of all horror films that feature rape in some form or another.) Dealing with controversial or sensitive subject matter in creative works is like juggling dynamite: It can be done, but you better be goddamn good at juggling.

The people who made Pure are not good at juggling, and end up squandering a potentially powerful story on trite expressions of its central ideas and a raftload of cheap jump scares.

We open on a young woman riding along in a car, eyes closed. She’s dreaming, the kind of reverie you experience on long road trips. Her dream is  unsettling - in it, she walks through a field in a white dress reminiscent of a wedding dress, her face obscured by a veil, and she meets a contorted, twisted mirror image in a black dress, crawling along the ground. It’s actually pretty sinister, and the cross-cutting between her riding peacefully in the car and the dream creates some real tension…

…and then the veils come off, and the one in black smiles in an obviously CG-exaggerated grin. Its artificiality robs the moment of all its power. We aren’t watching a nightmare, we’re watching a special effect.

(As an aside, this is pretty much the movie in a nutshell - there’s the potential for something grim and unsettling here, but it’s undone by cheap, obvious choices throughout.)

The car ride ends with the young woman getting out of the car and getting noisily sick. She is Shay, and she’s come with her half-sister Jo and their father, Kyle to an annual father-daughter “purity retreat” out in the woods. Kyle subscribes to a particular view of Christianity that positions fathers as the keepers of their daughters’ “purity”(read, sexual virginity) ahead of marriage, and for some time, Kyle and Jo have attended these retreats to reaffirm this specific father-daughter relationship at the “purity ball” and subsequent signing of a contract between father and daughter that concludes the retreat. Shay is Kyle’s daughter by another woman, and the recent death of Shay’s mother has brought her back into Kyle’s life. Shay is happy to finally have a father in her life, and Kyle gets another chance to get it right, so Shay’s trying her best to go along. Jo’s very much the bad girl - you can tell because she smokes and wears makeup and flannel shirts and jeans instead of pretty feminine dresses like all the other daughters.

The retreat is run by Pastor Seth, who is very much the consumer-grade Christian pastor, all business casual and bland performative informality, a slick megachurch version of faith. Lots of smiles and glad-handing, all with a gun on his hip. Nobody comments on the gun. Pastor Seth opens the retreat with a sermon about Lilith, the first woman created by God, exiled to Hell for consorting with the heavenly host. Pastor Seth really doesn’t like it when women don’t respect the wishes of men. No he does not.

The daughters are assigned to cabins, and Jo’s exasperated that Lacey - Seth’s daughter - is sharing their cabin as well. Lacey’s a goody-two-shoes sure to snitch on any fun that bad-girl Jo might want to have. Rounding out the cabin is Kellyann, who is sweet, sincere in her relationship with God, diligent about counting her calories and going for a run every morning, just like her daddy wants her to. Kellyann takes a non-specified medicine for anxiety. It’s tough being daddy’s little girl. Sure enough, night falls and the girls of Cabin 4 get into a little trouble, passing a vape pen back and forth while Lacey looks on disapprovingly.

And then Jo suggests they sneak off into the woods for a little adventure. See, Jo found a book about Lilith in their cabin a few years back and she’s been reading it. She thinks Lilith is misunderstood, and she ropes the girls into trying a little ritual she found in the book. It’s all for laughs, it never works. Only Shay notices something is missing from the ritual, and once it’s made complete, extinguished candles flare back into life.

And Shay sees the figure from her dream.

What follows is sort of two movies happening at the same time. On the one hand, you have the quietly but persistently sinister atmosphere of the purity ball, and on the other you have Shay hallucinating this menacing figure, like they really did summon some kind of spirit during the ritual, and ultimately, these two films are at odds. See, purity balls are already really, really creepy, in the way that fathers positioning themselves as the gatekeeper of their daughter’s sexuality (and ultimately, their agency) through rituals that approximate marriage can be. And, like, that’s not an invention of the film. Those things really exist. But the filmmakers don’t trust this to carry the horror of the film, and so instead try to make it an evil-spirit story as well. People like Pastor Seth and people who follow him are, in their way, monstrous. You don’t need another monster - especially one that isn’t that scary.

And that’s the other problem with this film - neither of the two movies it’s trying to be are well-served by the filmmakers. This is a deeply obvious film - everything is spelled out for us in the most simplistic terms possible. The characters are all painted with the broadest possible brush - the fathers and the pastor are all creepy, controlling hypocrites with double standards big enough to park an aircraft carrier in, the daughters (at least, the four on which the film focuses) are less people than specific types - Shay is shy and awkward, Jo is the rebellious bad girl, Lacey is the goody-goody who buys into the whole thing, and Kellyann is a believer breaking under the strain of unrealistic demands. Films like Antichrist and The VVitch have dealt far more vividly and effectively in the idea of pagan, primal female energy as a response to patriarchal control, and it’s clear (exposited by Jo early on) that Lilith is intended to be an icon of empowerment here, which makes it weird that for most of the film her role is that of jump-scare engine, like the girls conjured Bloody Mary during a sleepover. Nobody really talks to each other, they just say things for the benefit of the viewer, and there’s no nuance at all. Everything and everyone is largely what they appear to be (at least, until the very end, where there are some last-minute surprises and betrayals that actually more or less work well).

On top of that, everything’s a little too convenient - Pastor Seth  goes on and on about Lilith so that we know who the mysterious figure is going to be, and Jo just happened to find a book about her in their cabin one year (which makes no fucking sense - is someone as obsessed with control over women as Seth really going to let a book like that hang around?), and she’s been trying this ritual over and over, but Shay just happens to know how to fill in the missing pieces of the ritual for...reasons? Nobody once in all these years has ratted on Jo for her bad behavior? It’s hard to make a film about authoritarian control when that oppressiveness comes and goes as needed for plot reasons.

And on top of that, this isn’t a film with a lot of teeth to it. The ritual is pretty half-assed (but A Dark Song has probably ruined me for portrayals of ritual in any other film). Shay starts hallucinating all kinds of things - she sees Lilith everywhere and starts seeing all of the fathers and the pastor as vaguely demonic figures (which again, no shit, movie), then there’s some vaguely sinister intimations about what happens to recalcitrant daughters and Pastor Seth’s one-on-one “prayer sessions,” but it just kind of goes on like this until everything comes to a head. There’s not a lot of tension or surprise (apart from sudden Lilith appearances scored to loud music stings, which are just the cinematic equivalent of going BOO!) or real visceral emotional stakes at all. The idea of a bunch of dads alone with their underage daughters in the woods, utterly convinced of the righteousness of whatever they do? That could be genuinely horrifying, but this film doesn’t trust that or have the courage to really lean into the oppressive fear that would encourage, to really go there. Instead it makes the dads two-dimensional villains, and the daughters two-dimensional heroes whose summoned spirit helps them get revenge. The production values, casting, acting, and mood top out at “CW teen drama,” so the net result pretty much ends up as a slightly gorier episode of Riverdale, and a lot tamer than that show in some ways.

There are isolated moments that are really effective here and there - the sinister gathering of fathers and pastor behind closed doors, Lacey’s complete breakdown over having kissed a boy, flashes of real rage and vivid imagery at the climax, but it’s not enough. The way men conspire to exert control over women and justify that control as their right is a very real horror that affects millions, and so to turn it into the pretext for a tame, crummy avenging-spirit story is worse than disappointing - it’s frustrating. They had something set to explode, and they fumbled it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

Good Movie Alert

So I noticed the other day that the Turkish horror film Baskin is now available for streaming on Hulu. It's definitely worth a look, so go get that shit.

The Perfection: Alright, Surprise Me

I try to go into films entirely open to what they’re trying to do, with as few preconceptions as possible. Scary movies are about being taken for a ride, and the best ones feel like maybe you’ve gotten onto a roller coaster that’s overdue for its safety inspection. But sometimes that sort of blind viewing isn’t possible. The ubiquity and rapid response time of Internet coverage of pop culture means that it’s getting more and more difficult to approach films knowing nothing about them, and for especially high-profile films, it takes a decent chunk of work to remain unspoiled. In the past, I’ve found that a film’s cultural prominence has robbed it of its power for me, and for that matter, my original pick for this week was an adaptation of a story I’d already read, and I changed my mind about watching it a few minutes in, because I really wanted something that would be surprising for me.

The Perfection was definitely surprising - a twisting, stylized melodrama that kept me on my toes and troubled me in roughly equal measure.

The film opens on an elderly woman, lying motionless in bed, eyes open but unseeing. Everything is very still, and she is even more still than that. There are bottles of pills, all kinds of medicine, and people whispering outside in the hallway. A younger woman sits watching the unmoving older woman. They are mother and daughter. Charlotte Willmore has just lost her mother after a long, long illness and years of being her caregiver. Once affairs are settled, Charlotte makes a phone call to reconnect with two people she knew long ago. She wants to join them, to go where they are. There is a sense of picking back up a life set aside for a very long time.

This takes her to Shanghai, and a concert by a celebrated young cellist named Elizabeth Wells. As it transpires, Charlotte, like Elizabeth, was once a student at the elite Bachoff Academy of Music, and it is the heads of that academy - Anton and Paloma Bachoff - that she’s called, with whom she’s meeting. They are delighted to see her, the protégé whose stellar career was cut short by her mother’s illness, ready to rejoin the fold. Charlotte and Elizabeth meet and hit it off in a big way. An evening of drinking and dance and sex resolves into Elizabeth asking Charlotte to come with her on a trip into rural Western China for a few days, to get off the grid for awhile and away from the pressures of being one of the finest classical cellists in the world. Charlotte agrees, and off they go, still rumpled and a little hung over, on a rickety bus into the country.

And that’s when things start going violently, awfully wrong.

It’s really difficult to say much more than that, because this film’s biggest strength is the way it largely defies predictability. It starts off very much as a lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-decadent story (I mean, come on - Anton? Paloma?) set among the fine arts elite, but neatly and swiftly upends that expectation with turns into body horror, slasher films, and revenge thrillers, all the while maintaining a tone of high melodrama in the writing, the acting, and the composition. Nothing is what it seems here, in terms of the people OR the story, but a consistent style ties all of it together nicely. It’s not naturalistic at all - camera angles, sudden intrusive cuts and vivid color highlight interior emotional states, and flashbacks are presented in a way that highlight the artificiality of the narrative. It all begins feeling very much like a drama about someone who has just suffered a terrible loss and is trying to rebuild their whole life before setting that expectation on fire in favor of becoming progressively more and more unhinged.

And as far as that goes, I was pleasantly impressed. The other side of this, however, is that all of this is in the service of a story with some troubling elements, and I’m not sure if it treats them with the gravity they deserve. Without giving too much away, all is not well at the Bachoff Academy of Music, there is a price to pay for being the best, and there is to be a reckoning for all of this. The idea of an elite academy of the arts with punishing methods is not a new one - if I were to be especially unkind, I’d say this film sometimes feels like a direct-to-video take on Black Swan in places - but part of this is the abuse of young girls and the nature of mental illness, and though there’s nothing overly egregious to me in how they handle these things, they’re also not the sort of things you can (or should, in my opinion) just sort of hang a film on without nuance or care, and that left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

On the other hand , that this film doesn’t even pretend to be interested in nuance, so much as it is in wringing all of the pulp from the story that it can and careening it around a track until the wheels fly off, well, that gives it a bracing, lunatic energy that made it worth watching. I wanted to be surprised, and boy, did I ever get it.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Los Parecidos: It’s A Good Life

I’ve got kind of a soft spot for films that aren’t afraid to get weird, that aren’t afraid to create a feeling of wrongness, of things not working the way we expect them to. It’s less about what happens in the movie than how it happens. Modern horror films are often naturalistic to one degree or another, normal people in a normal setting, acted and shot in ways that don’t call attention to the artifice of film. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it in and of itself, but every now and then I like something that isn’t afraid to twist one or more of those elements into something that keeps the viewer off-balance. It’s a gamble, because sometimes the oddness ends up becoming distracting, but when it works it creates a sense of uneasiness that lays over everything else, a sense that all bets are off.

Los Parecidos (The Similars) is thoroughly, effectively weird.

It really begins with the opening title card and credits, which are formatted in a style more common to films of, say, the 1940s or 1950s than the modern day, and superimposed over an obviously artificial rainstorm in black and white. This transitions into a voice-over about a man named Martin, who we see working behind the ticket counter at a bus station. It goes on and on about how Martin thinks this storm is nothing unusual, and how wrong he is. It’s the kind of “he thinks everything fine, but he’s about to find out otherwise” narration you’d associate with television shows like The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery.

We are introduced, in short order, to our setting (a bus station in rural Mexico), and our cast of characters. There’s Martin the ticket agent, and Rosa, who works at the station with Martin. Then there’s Ulises, an employee of a nearby mine who’s trying to get back to Mexico City to see his wife, who has just gone into labor. There’s Irene, who is eight months pregnant herself, on the run from an abusive husband, and Alvaro, a student radical on his way to a conference, and Roberta and her son Ignacio, on their way to see a specialist who can treat Ignacio’s mysterious condition. Finally, there is Gertrudis, an indigenous woman who sits in the corner, mumbling to herself in a language nobody else understands. It seems to be the late 1960s, and it’s raining heavily outside.

At first, it seems like the biggest problem anyone has is that the rain has delayed the buses, and so everyone’s stuck in the bus station. But the news reports get stranger and stranger - it’s not just rain, but a hurricane. And it’s not just affecting Mexico, it’s a storm that is improbably engulfing the entire world. It is raining everywhere, all at once. The radio cuts in and out. There are warnings to not go out into the rain, and to avoid people who have been out in the rain. There are…transformations.

And then, among the eight people trapped in the bus station, the seizures begin.

To describe where all of this is headed would be a disservice, because a lot of this film’s strength is in its sheer what-the-fuckedness, which is as much down to how it’s all presented as what actually happens. It’s shot largely but not entirely in black and white, with obviously artificial effects throughout, on maybe four sets which comprise the bus station. There’s ominous music throughout, minor-key strings and woodwinds in a style reminiscent of the 1950s horror films it resembles This staginess, combined with acting and dialogue consistently pitched at the high end of melodramatic, makes it feel more like a teleplay than a film, an artifact of a different time when theater coexisted uneasily with television

The archaic presentation is in service of a story that goes to some very strange places. Everyone’s on edge, nobody knows what Gertrudis is saying as she casts stones and implores people in a language nobody speaks (and which isn’t subtitled), Ignacio keeps screaming about how the water is not normal water, and the seizures people experience bring on baffling physical changes. There are a lot of narrative feints at work - first you think it’s the unusual storm that is the problem, then it’s the mysterious seizures, and then it’s the transformations that result from the seizures. These eight people are trapped together while all of these bizarre things happen to them, so and from all of these unexplained events emerges the paranoia that grips any group of people thrown together in close quarters under difficult conditions. There's an undertone of political unrest and intrigue to everything as well. I'm sure I'm missing some specifics, but both Alvaro and Roberta are trying to get someplace that has a place in Mexico's history of civil unrest, and the tension between working stiff Ulises and student radical Alvaro percolates throughout. Nobody trusts anybody, everyone points the finger at everyone else. Slowly the truth reveals itself, and it’s bigger and more horrifying that anybody could have imagined. Once the other shoe drops, we realize how helpless everyone is. It’s all a game, and they’re just pieces, like dolls being moved around for a child’s amusement.

And this is how getting weird with it makes it so effective. The basic story is a solid one, and one that, if told in a more accessible fashion, could be perfectly entertaining. But by choosing to frame the whole thing as a late-60s period piece, and telling it using cinematic techniques that feel even a decade earlier than that, it feels like something out of time, a fever dream of a film glimpsed on a channel that shouldn’t even be broadcasting, on a television that isn’t even plugged in.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix

Enemy: Things Unsaid

Too many scary movies over-explain themselves. Often this makes them less scary than they could be, because the unknown is pretty much the bedrock of scary in all its forms. Sometimes it works, the sudden reveal, the introduction of new information, but often it just makes the unknown more known and robs it of its power. Like, this is one way we teach children to deal with their nightmares - to face them, see them for what they are, to understand them and thus make them less scary. If you’re trying to scare people, deny them understanding.

Enemy reveals almost…almost…nothing, and it makes for a deeply uneasy film.

It opens with a title card: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered,” and this made me roll my eyes a little bit because it’s got more than a whiff of freshman dorm room bong-rip philosophy to it, at least as an opener to a film. But it isn’t necessarily wrong - the different between disorder and order can certainly be a matter of scale and distance, of perspective. And it’s pretty key to understanding what follows.

From the title card, we move to the interior of a car, where a man is listening to a voicemail message from his mother. She enjoyed the visit to his new apartment, though she can’t understand how he can live like that - the passive-aggression wrapped in a tissue of maternal concern. This is Adam Bell, and he’s a history professor. He lectures a class on the ways dictatorships have historically controlled their populations, beginning with Rome’s bread and circuses. Adam teaches, goes home, eats dinner, has sex with his girlfriend, gets up, goes to school, teaches, goes home, eats dinner, and so on. Adam lectures on the cyclical nature of history, on the patterns made by events.

One day, a colleague asks him if he’s seen a particular film. Adam doesn’t really…go to the movies, but asks his colleague for a recommendation. The colleague recommends a film, and Adam watches it.

And in one scene, Adam spots someone who looks exactly like him.

Adam is an only child.

On one level then, this is a story about what happens when someone meets someone like them in every way, with their own life, one very different from their own. It begins as a story of obsession and the confusions of shared identity, what it would be like to walk into someone else’s life uncontested and make it your own, however briefly. Indeed, Adam has a double - not just a twin, an actual double, and he’s a moderately successful actor, and not necessarily an especially nice guy. There’s something existential about it - if they’re just like you, and you’re just like them, where do they end and you begin? There’s also a thriller here, about what happens when someone decides they want your life instead of theirs, or in addition to theirs. And that’d be fine, it works really well on that level, largely because it skips the “how is this possible” stuff (which would invariably be a letdown) and gets right to the “and now this is happening” stuff.

But that’s not the whole film. It’s the framework on which the story hangs, but how the story is told adds something else entirely to it. The film is suffused with a yellowish cast throughout, as if we’re glimpsing the world through the lingering remnants of a dust storm, and everyone is stilted, cold, removed from each other. Conversations are halting, unnatural, pauses conveying yawning gulfs between the people talking. It reminds me a lot of the distant, detached feeling in much of David Lynch’s work, keeping us at arm’s length the whole time, making everything feel slightly unreal and off-kilter. The editing is sudden and sharp, scenes and shots cut from one to the other like half-remembered recollections, and around the edges of the story there are hints that there’s much more going on here. Things don’t add up, offhand comments make you pause, recurring nightmare images punctuate each act. We aren’t getting the whole story - there’s more to this than is immediately apparent, and the film ends abruptly on a note that calls everything into question without really providing any closure at all. It feels like we’ve just watched a nightmare which itself is just a façade papering over an even bigger nightmare, and the denial of any explanation for the things we’ve only glimpsed in fragments lingers like a cold lump in the pit of your stomach.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix