Wounds: Nothing Happens, Until Everything Happens

Part of telling any kind of story is pacing, and that’s as true of scary movies as anything else. You can feed information out slowly, or in sudden, shocking reveals, or you can bombard your audience right from the beginning. All of these are perfectly effective ways of creating horror, but they all rely on certain rhythms sustained over the course of the film. Screw up your pacing, and you kill the vibe you’re trying to create and risk pulling your audience out of the experience.

Pacing isn’t the only problem with Wounds, but it’s certainly one of the bigger ones.

We open with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, about telling someone things they don’t want to know about themselves, and in retrospect I’m not sure how it’s supposed to inform the rest of the film. It sounds foreboding, but that’s about it. The film proper opens at Rosie’s, a bar in New Orleans, but not one of the big, tourist-friendly bars on the main drag. Rosie’s is a neighborhood dive, not especially pretty, and the clientele tend toward the rough. Will, the bartender, is entertaining a couple with some parlor tricks in between refilling drinks for the few folks sitting at the bar. This is actually one of the stronger bits of the film, as the bar and the relationships between the people in it are communicated economically. Will’s likely an underachiever, too smart for this job, but not ambitious enough to do anything else. The couple - Alicia and Jeffery - haven’t been together long. Alicia brought Jeffery along, and Will clearly has a thing for Alicia. Some folks are shooting pool, and a group of obviously underage college kids come in, fish out of water, though one of them has a legit enough ID. Just another night at Rosie’s.

And then Eric comes in. Eric’s a tough customer, works on an offshore oil rig and gets fucked up when he’s not at work. He’s on a hair trigger, you get the sense he’s hoping for an excuse to beat the shit out of somebody. But he’s a regular, so Will’s got an eye on him, and so when another tough guy bumps into Eric and shit immediately goes south (the college kids recording the whole thing with their phones), Will’s pretty much already called the cops, but not before the other guy takes a broken bottle and cuts up Eric’s face pretty badly. The college kids scatter.

In the aftermath, as Will cleans up, he finds a phone that one of the college kids must have left behind. Unlocking it reveals the usual text exchanges…well, that bit about “that ritual in that book must have worked” was a little odd…and the usual selfies and party pics give way to images of increasing violence, of broken teeth in pools of blood. Of what could be corpses.

A video of something horrifying and impossible.

Normally, what would follow from this discovery could be, say, the gradual intrusion of whatever nightmare thing Will saw on the phone into his everyday life - hallucinations, unexplained calls, a sense of being watched, stalked by something beyond normal understanding. Instead, mostly what we get next is the story of Will and his girlfriend Carrie. She’s a graduate student at Tulane, and there are problems with their relationship. Carrie’s suspicious of Will, wonders why he has some girl’s phone, and Will’s suspicious of the very friendly relationship Carrie seems to have with one of her professors. And, from what we can observe, both are right to be suspicious of each other. Take out the bit with the weird shit on the phone, this could be an indie drama about the downward spiral of an underachieving bartender.

And that’s where pacing comes in. We get this horrifying reveal, this cursed image on an abandoned phone, but then for a good chunk of the movie, it doesn’t really matter. You’d expect that Will discovers this horrible thing, that events would steadily ramp up, that figuring out what’s behind this nightmarish thing would become a focus. But the film kind of meanders instead. A few weird things happen here and there, but there’s no real connection between them or internal logic or vocabulary for what’s happening. Good stories about curses or hauntings will have a specific image or set of images that denote the presence of something evil and some way to know that certain actions will cause the evil to be summoned. Here, it sort of feels like the filmmakers reached into a grab bag of things from other movies - Ringu-style cursed images, hallucinations, nightmare sequences and body horror most notably - without really making it clear how or why these things are the result of Will finding this phone. It all feels really disconnected and sort of assembled from parts in this respect. There are some effective shots or set-pieces here and there, but very little to tie them together - there’s no sense of things being put together or discovered or revealed, and this sort of aimlessness describes about two-thirds of the film. Then all of a sudden everything goes bad all at once and then it ends.

The reliance on technology to tell the story doesn’t help much either - it’s not impossible to make technological devices effective conduits for something evil (see Ringu and Kairo, for example), but it’s not easy, either, and this film relies way too much on checking text messages and looking at small images on a phone to drive the horror, and it isn’t scary - the messages from who or whatever is behind all of this don’t come across as anything more than just texts, and it robs the film of a lot of power. Had they just left it at an image or a video that when viewed does bad things, that would be fine, but then there’s this whole weird subplot where the college kids who left the phone behind are following the bartender around and they take the phone back for...reasons, and then give it back to him for...other reasons, and maybe they’re possessed? It doesn’t make much sense and the overreliance on the phone as the source of horror makes a lot of it fall flat, and that’s on top of the idea that a group of college kids just happened to find a book on ritual magic and tried something pretty horrifying and then went out for beers afterward. It’s better to just not explain it at all.

To its credit, when it comes to the relationships between the protagonists and setting up their world, it does a pretty good job of showing instead of telling. If their circumstances feel increasingly contrived, at least they themselves feel like real people. They aren’t overplayed. If anything, they’re underplayed - there is very little emotional dynamism in this film. For the majority of the film, most everyone feels inert, and it’s only at the very end that voices get raised and emotions run a wider gamut than A to B, as events suddenly come to a head - not because things have naturally reached some horrible, inevitable conclusion, but because it feels like the filmmakers realized they needed to wrap things up with some more horror stuff. The overall experience is one that starts with a strong, natural sense of place and the people in it, and then squanders that by dropping in a bunch of haphazardly selected supernatural elements, as if that would be enough to make it a horror film.

IMDB entry
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