Possum: The Things We Carry

I really like allegorical scary movies. They work a lot like nightmares, in that they’re rooted in real fears or anxieties we have, but we’re denied all of the defenses that we use to keep fear at bay during waking hours. They press some primal fear button in the back of our brain that more glib, formulaic films miss to focus on cheap startle effects.

Possum is not an especially subtle allegory, but it is very effective, a stark, haunting, story about long-repressed trauma and guilt.

The film begins with a voiceover reciting what sounds like a nursery rhyme about a sinister character called Possum. There is a man, who we will eventually learn is named Philip, taking a train to the small English town of Fallmarsh. He sits ill at ease on the train, a leather bag in his hands, listening to some schoolboys behind him discuss some mysterious bit of business centering around the town’s abandoned army barracks. They view Philip with some distaste and suspicion. You don’t really blame them, Philip’s pasty, with nervous, red-rimmed eyes and a twitchy demeanor. He’s, well, creepy.

Philip disembarks at Fallmarsh, and walks to a dilapidated home sort of in the middle of nowhere. There’s a man there - Maurice - who seems to be expecting him, but not especially happy to see him. Philip is a puppeteer, and there’s been some unpleasantness at the school where he was employed, a “scandal” around a show he put on. Philip thinks it’ll blow over. Maurice doesn’t seem so sure. There’s something in the leather bag that Philip keeps trying to get rid of, but he can’t. Maurice is some kind of father figure to Philip. Philip has come home.

On television, it is reported that one of the schoolboys from the train has gone missing.

It’s hard to really sum up the premise of this film, because it doesn’t really have a plot to speak of, just the cyclical repetition and interpolation of locations and images, all hinting at something terrible, like the intersection of nightmare and uncovered memory: What’s in the bag? What’s behind the door in Philip’s house that he keeps hesitating to open? Why does he call it his house, and who is Maurice, if not his father? What happened to Philip when he was younger? Why does Philip keep a storybook hidden under the floorboards of his bedroom? All we can take away is that sometime in the past, something terrible happened to Philip, and it’s never really left him. The film is a process of gradual revelation and connecting of dots that blends nightmare with reality to communicate Philip’s mental state - it isn’t ever really clear how much of what we’re seeing is real and how much of it is metaphor, but it doesn’t really matter since this is a film more felt than understood as a conventional narrative.

The overwhelming majority of the movie is Philip, who seems broken and alienated and increasingly ill at ease in the world around him, and Maurice, who seems faintly vile and unwholesome and whose interactions with Philip suggest the long history of an abusive parent accustomed to being in complete control. Philip is carrying something around with him - literally, in the leather bag that takes on an almost supernatural quality - that he is trying to be rid of, but can’t quite seem to shake. It isn’t an especially subtle metaphor, but that’s not really the point - we’re supposed to see it for what it is, because the point of the film is Philip coming to grips with something he’s been carrying around with him for his entire life. His childhood guilt and trauma are externalized as the terrible thing that is in this bag. A lot goes unsaid, or is talked around, but between Philip’s twitchy affect, Maurice’s creepiness, the accumulation of little nagging ambiguities (why won’t he go into that one room?) and stories about missing students past and present, all point to the feeling that something very bad is on the verge of being revealed, and although we can make our guesses about what everything means, the film doesn’t give enough away to confirm any one explanation until the very end, so the constant shifting uncertainty also works to keep us feeling uneasy. Every frame is suffused with dread - the weather is constantly overcast, interiors are steeped in squalor and shadows, everywhere is rife with urban decay, backed with a soundtrack of electronics, ambient hums, and discordant strings. Nothing here is new or clean, and the sun hangs red and low in the sky when we see it at all.

Its oblique and elliptical nature mostly works for it because it never lets up on the feeling of unnerving dread, and so even when nothing’s actually happening, there’s still the lingering unease of something just waiting to happen, and though the filmmakers mostly do a good job of pacing the story, there are places where it flags a little, where the revisiting of places and ideas feel like the film is spinning its wheels, but it doesn’t last for long. There’s a mystery here, and the worst thing you can do when you have a mystery that you’re doling out one cryptic clue at a time is not pay it off, but the film does in a way that is not totally out of left-field, but is shocking nonetheless in its intensity and suddenness. The setting, the cinematography, the sound, and the acting and character choice permeate everything with a sense of wrongness, a sense that there’s something very bad hidden just around the corner, and in the final act, as Philip comes to grips with what he’s been carrying around with him the whole time, all the masks come off and the horrible truth is revealed in a sharp denouement that is almost cathartic in its horror, as if something poisonous is being purged from Philip, if not from the world.

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The Blackcoat’s Daughter: Left Behind

Okay, so this week I’m ending up as far away from last week as I can get. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but as I’m sitting here thinking about this week’s film, I realize that it is in a lot of ways the stylistic opposite of last week’s entry. By and large, Apollo 18 looked like actual found footage, but relied a little too much on horror-film clichés in the third act to gin up any tension or feelings of threat, which undercut the whole thing. You could say it lacked…atmosphere.

(I know, I know. I know.)

By contrast, The Blackcoat’s Daughter has atmosphere in spades. It’s stylish, patient, and suffused with slowly mounting dread culminating in a haunting conclusion.

This film is the story of Katherine, Rose, and Joan. Katherine and Rose - both teenagers - are students at a small boarding school for girls in rural New York, and Joan, in her early 20s, has just been released from the hospital for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. When the film opens, Katherine has just had a strange dream in which her father (an unseen figure in a black coat) shows her his badly wrecked car with her mother inside, and Rose is telling a friend of hers that she’s missed her period, and now she has to think about the possibility that she’s pregnant, all set against the school’s annual parents’ weekend, which begins the school’s winter break. Joan, freshly discharged from the hospital, fumbles with her ID bracelet in a bus station bathroom, tries to call a number that turns out to be disconnected, and then, inadequately clothed against the winter snow, sits forlornly at a bus stop.

Katherine and Rose are both called to the headmaster’s office. He has to go out of town on some personal business and unfortunately won’t be there for the weekend. Katherine is upset that he won’t be there for her performance at the parents’ assembly, and he notes that neither Rose’s nor Katherine’s parents have come for the weekend. Rose assures the headmaster that her parents were just confused and would be headed up in a day’s time. Katherine seems less sure why her parents aren’t there.

Outside of the bus station, a man pulls up and offers Joan a ride.

First and foremost, this film sets a very specific mood. Everything is very quiet and still and slightly outside of time - the only real nods to modernity are the models of cars we can see and a few references to cellphones, but otherwise this could be the 1950s or 1980s or 2000s, it’s very hard to tell. This is reinforced by dialogue that is mannered, if not quite stilted, as we might expect to hear people talk in a period drama. It’s a girls’ boarding school, so there is in those scenes a definite feeling of manners and propriety, like a less lurid take on Picnic At Hanging Rock, and that contributes to the timeless feeling.

That said, it’s interesting in how as the film moves on and we learn more and more about what’s going, that opacity increasingly falls away - facades crumble, feelings are revealed, and what starts off as something slightly ethereal becomes more and more grounded, making the horror of what is happening that much more impactful. There are long stretches without any music at all, and what music is in the film is largely ambient swells and industrial hums. So, if anything, it’s sort of Picnic At Hanging Rock by way of David Lynch, which is no bad thing in my book. There are a lot of long, still shots of dimly lit hallways and snowy exteriors, communicating a world away from the hustle and bustle of big cities as seen in the smallest of hours. And in that world, there is something evil, if only one knows where to look.

It isn’t immediately apparent what these people have to do with each other - Katherine and Rose don’t know each other very well, and it isn’t clear what Joan’s role in all of this is. What this film does very well is take this very specific world and specific atmosphere it has created and tell a story through gradually unfolding events, showing us the points at which everyone’s perspectives converge and diverge, moving between different points of view. Katherine and Rose, despite the headmaster’s instructions that they cannot stay at school over the break unsupervised, appear to have been stranded by their parents. Stranded here, in the middle of the country in the dead of winter, in this place out of time. We get fragments of Joan’s past - doctors and nurses looming over her, medication administered, a gunshot, but not much else. She isn’t very forthcoming. Everything is just elliptical enough to maintain the air of mystery and uncertainty established by the setting, the camerawork, and the sound.

But, as the film goes on, we get more information. We see what Katherine, Rose, and Joan see, and the reasons for their situation become increasingly more and more clear. As we’re getting more details, the details we get become more and more unsettling - at first it’s little things, creeping in around the edges, and then in the third act everything and everyone starts to converge, and the tension, so carefully built up over the course of the film, spikes as the audience has enough to put two and two together, to understand exactly who everyone is and what they’ve done. And there is the horror that has been promised by the details revealed to us but also, finally, a sense of overwhelming loneliness, isolation, and grief that you wouldn’t necessarily see coming. Something terrible happened, is still happening, and cannot be undone.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
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Apollo 18: Moon’s Haunted

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear by now, I’m really picky when it comes to found-footage films. I cut them a lot less slack than I do some other types of films, but I promise you, this comes from a place of love. I am an absolute sucker for any kind of story told via recovered documents or ephemera. Epistolary novels, oral histories both real and fictional, documentaries, mockumentaries - this kind of story is completely and absolutely my shit. I like stories told this way so much because when done well, it helps me forget that I’m reading a story. I dunno, I’m pretty sure in another life I could have been a historian, because the idea of teasing out a narrative from a bunch of archival documents sounds like something I’d enjoy tremendously.

(cue a legion of historians shaking their heads sadly because I’ve completely misunderstood what they do)

Anyway, I think it goes back to that feeling of secret discovery, of being presented with some kind of record for posterity, never intended for a wider audience. I love that feeling. But goddamn, do a lot of found-footage films fuck it up. It’s not an excuse to cheap out on the production or the acting or the writing. If anything, they’re harder to make because you have to make everything look naturalistic and still tell a good story. The instant something feels contrived or artificial , it yanks you right out of the story. You can’t fall back on the usual bag of cinematic tricks to evoke horror, because those are things than happen in movies, and you aren’t supposed to be watching a movie, you’re supposed to be watching raw, unmediated footage.

Apollo 18 does some things very right, other things less so, and the result is sort of a mixed bag.

We open with a title card that says, in essence, that what we are about to see is classified footage from the Apollo 18 moon mission. What makes this noteworthy is that officially, Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon that NASA ever launched.

This footage shouldn’t exist.

We’re introduced to astronauts Nate, Ben, and John in short interviews as they prepare for the mission. This is what they’ve been training for, and though they express concern over the mission’s secrecy - their families are told they’ll be doing a training exercise overseas, and they have a liaison from the Department of Defense - they’re excited to actually be going to the moon. The footage is intercut with some home movies of the three of them at a barbecue, wives and kids in tow. And this really highlights one of the film’s strengths - the attention to detail here is impressive. It really does look like footage from the early 1970s (apparently accomplished in part by the use of lenses from the period), the actors are dressed and groomed appropriately for the time, and speak with the plain competence of men who work in high-risk aeronautics. Most found-footage films go for the camcorder look (which almost always looks like pro-grade camera footage with a cheesy camera overlay on it), but here, we have film stock, maybe some very early video - it’s made clear that the DOD think it’s important to record every facet of the mission, using what was at the time state-of-the-art technology. It’s plausible, it makes sense for the type of story it is, not a case of “oh, we’re going to rig our entire RV with video cameras for reasons.”

Likewise, the launch of the mission looks and sounds like actual spaceflight. I’m not an expert, they may very well have screwed some things up, but the way people talk, the sound of the communications equipment, it all more or less jibes with footage I have seen of space missions from the time. So a lot of work goes into making all of this feel plausible, like we are actually watching classified footage of a mission to the moon that did not officially happen. It’s not just impressive, it’s necessary to create a believable story.

This attention to detail, however, tends to be in service of a film that never really coheres. It looks and sounds fantastic for the most part, but it never really establishes a mood or tension as well as it could. Of course something bad is going to happen (it is a horror movie, after all), but how you get to that point matters. This isn’t an over-the-top assault on the senses, this is supposed to be something that really happened, and stories like that, in my opinion, tend to benefit from being developed gradually, in small, subtle ways, so that when the big surprises hit, there’s real impact, real shock there. The film starts with the idea that there’s something wrong a little too early and depicts it a little too bluntly, and the dialogue is a little too on-the-nose at points (John, who is piloting the orbiter, states early on that “it’s my job to bring you home safely,” and at another point Ben says “it feels like something’s watching us.” Like, we know). From a pacing standpoint, it would have benefited from a slower build-up, from everything being fine until the moment it wasn’t. Instead, almost as soon as they’ve touched down on the moon we know things are amiss and it sucks a lot of the tension out of the film. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

That doesn’t mean it’s entirely tension-free - Nate, Ben, and John discover that the official version of events in the U.S. space program doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality. and it starts to become clear that the mission has been kept top secret for a very good reason. When things start to escalate, it does start to pick up a head of steam, albeit late in the game, and to its detriment, it largely does so when it starts to abandon period authenticity for something closer stock horror-film cliches (even given the omnipresence of cameras, the indication that someone’s losing it by showing us high-speed footage of his head whipping back and forth doesn’t read like actual footage, it reads like a horror movie), and so we go from a believable film that isn’t setting mood to one that sets a mood at the cost of believability. Luckily, it’s not too egregious and it’s mostly late in the film, but it rankled. There’s also the matter of how the footage was recovered - I’m not someone who thinks film criticism is about finding all the plot holes, but it’s a big thing to go unexplained and soured me a little on the experience.

Don’t get me wrong, though, this film definitely has its moments. There’s a great setpiece search through a dark crater, lit only sporadically by a flash, that ends with a shocking discovery, a sudden reveal of something that shouldn’t be on the moon, alongside the claustrophobia and isolation of their environments and the sterility and barrenness of the moonscape. In that sort of environment, the discovery of anything out of the ordinary is that much more startling. If the filmmakers had leaned into that a little more, unwound things a little more gradually, and let small revelations do most of the work, it could have been really good.

There’s a way to tell a story within the narrow constraints of found-footage and make it effective. Setting it in space makes survival itself a tougher prospect (see also Europa Report), and makes anything unusual potentially scary. Unfortunately, this film tips its hand a little too early, goes a little too obvious in places and stretches plausibility toward the end (including a mild case of “we have to keep filming” syndrome), which makes all of the obvious care and preparation that went into making it look like it was actually recovered footage stand out in stark contrast. It did a lot right up front, which ends up throwing all of the stuff it does wrong into sharp relief.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
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Climax: Worse Trips

Bad trips are a great source of horror. There’s a sense that everything is out of your control, that there’s no safe harbor, no certainty you can turn to, and because it’s all a product of your own distorted perceptions, there’s no way to run from it. Wherever you go, there you are, and even closing your eyes just brings more awful visions. It’s as close as you can get to the nightmare from which you cannot wake up.

Bad trips played a big part in last week’s Mandy, but mostly as a way to get some really striking visuals up on the screen. It wasn’t even so much about an actual bad trip as it was the way bad trips have been typically portrayed onscreen and using that visual vocabulary to evoke a mood.

Climax is sort of at the other end of the spectrum. It’s less about the imagery of the bad trip, and more about the experience and consequences of a bad trip. It’s a queasy, emotionally exhausting portrait of psychological disintegration.

We open on a figure running and stumbling through snow, sobbing, shot from high overhead. They collapse, the ground streaked red around them. Roll final credits. It’s disorienting, to say the least. Before we can really get our bearings, we cut to a close-up on an old television, broadcasting audition videotapes, and here the story starts to come into focus. A choreographer named Selva is auditioning dancers for a touring production. We’re introduced to 20 dancers, mostly young, varying in how worldly they are. Some are achingly naïve, naked in their desire to succeed, others are more jaded, some come from tough backgrounds.

Cut to rehearsal, the company performing a routine in an empty school that they’re using as a practice space and dormitory. Their dancing is vibrant, raw, libidinous. They’re almost ready to go out on tour and this is their last practice. The routine finished, they gather around a bowl of sangria prepared by Emmanuelle - the company’s manager, a former dancer whose unplanned pregnancy cut her career short - dancing less formally to music provided by their DJ, breaking off into groups to gossip and drink and unwind.

Everyone brings their own thing into the troupe, as evident from their audition tapes and the conversations we observe. Some of them are more emotionally healthy than others, some are downright pigs, and you can see the attachments and divisions and jealousies and resentments that have already formed among them. Who’s sleeping with whom, who’s already slept with whom, who’s slept with everyone, who wants to sleep with whom, tensions and rivalries and yearning. And then, one by one, they start to feel sick and dizzy. They start getting overheated.

Someone’s spiked the sangria with LSD.

So we have all of these people with their hopes and fears and resentments and tangled intimacies, stuck in an empty schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, they’re starting to hallucinate, and they’re totally unprepared for it. Once the drugs kick in, it starts getting very ugly, very quickly. Blame flies and mob ugliness erupts as they realize they’ve been dosed, and then abandoned as they become consumed by their own internal hells. Desires are laid bare - whether to fuck or fight or kill, and the mask of civilization that keeps their worst impulses in check is ripped off. Every grudge, every secret jealousy, every need, it’s all out in the open as the dancers lose their ability to maintain any sort of emotional equilibrium. The way people love each other, hate each other, hate themselves, it’s all naked and exposed to the world, with no mediation, and all sense of good judgment falters. These aren’t the bad trips of Mandy or exploitation film in general - there’s no swirling light or chromatic aberration or imagined monsters and hellish landscapes. Just screaming and tears and piss and vomit and blood, casual emotional cruelty.

The film’s style mirrors the internal state of its characters. We don’t know what they’re seeing or feeling specifically, but everything about the film communicates the disorientation and profound alienation of the bad trip. The opening dance number is shot as a single take, and then the afterparty conversations are quick, short takes cutting fast from one set of people to another, almost like the camera is blinking. Then. once things start to fall apart, the second half of the film is a single unbroken take, the camera fixing onto one person and following them around from place to place, room to room, and as things go from bad to worse, that long, unbroken take becomes a journey through something like a haunted house, where something terrible is likely going on behind any given door.

The camera abandons one person to follow another, and people wander through scenes of others’ grief or rage or lacerating self-abuse, with the natural lighting of the opening giving way to deep shadows and sickly reds and greens, shots tilting at unnatural angles or flipping over upside down entirely to heighten the feeling of disorientation, a feeling which extends to the way the film is structured. The events themselves are chronologically ordered, from the end of rehearsal to the aftermath the next day, but the film begins with its end credits, the opening credits appear halfway through, and the title appears at the end. It all converges to heighten the feeling that things are out of control, out of order, that something has gone seriously amiss, ending in the room where it all started, now lit entirely in reds, shot upside down, bodies writhing and contorting in violence and lust and both intermingled, like something out of Bosch, abstracted and visceral at the same time.

In its raw, jagged displays of emotion, lack of stable center, tremendous harm happening in passing or on the periphery, it’s all like the bright, brittle desperation of that party that’s gone on just a little too long, where the fun’s all starting to look desperate and feverish, but turned up to a deafening pitch. You want to go home, you want to be someplace warm and safe and familiar, but home is a long way away, and by the end, everyone has abandoned themselves and all sense for whatever consumes them from the inside out.

IMDB entry
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