Veronica: This Woman’s Work

Restraint goes underappreciated in horror, I think. Especially in more modern horror films, though it’s nothing new. Sometimes I get the feeling that filmmakers are afraid that their audience isn’t going to pick up on small, subtle things, and so they go big, with lots of jump scares and loud, broad effects work, jittery editing and a lot of screaming. Sometimes, if you pitch it exactly right, going big and loud can create a certain type of momentum, a sort of headlong rush of energy, but as often as not, it ends up feeling empty and shrill, the cinematic equivalent of those haunted houses that mostly consist of things jumping out at you and going “boo!” There’s something to be said for letting small things do the work, for letting the film breathe a little, for letting things happen without drawing a ton of attention to them.

Veronica works as well as it does, I think, because it has a sense of restraint, relying on careful pacing and inventive visuals to tell its story instead of bombast.

The film begins in 1990s Madrid, with the audio of a police call played over a black screen, intercut with footage of the police arriving at the address. The caller is very young, very afraid, and keeps saying “he’s inside! He’s here!” The police enter an apartment in total disarray and discover something distressing. We hear raspy breathing, and then a smash cut to a title card that says “Three Days Earlier.” Thus, the movie starts off at the end, with something bad happening, with the narrative framed as the events recounted by a detective called to the scene. I don’t usually like flashbacks as a dramatic device, but that’s mostly because when they’re used poorly, they’re completely disconnected from the narrative and just serve to tell us that something bad is happening. And we know that, because we’re watching a horror movie. But because in this case it’s connected to the narrative, it sets us up for everything that comes after. We know it ends badly, but how did it get to that point?

Well, three days earlier, we meet Veronica, a teenaged girl busying herself with getting her younger sisters Lucia and Irene out of bed, then her youngest brother Antoñito. He’s wet the bed again, and it’s just one more thing on top of keeping an eye on her sisters as they try to fix breakfast. She’s got to get the four of them off to school. We get the sense that this is every morning for Veronica. Her father isn’t in the picture anymore for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, and so her mother works long hours waiting tables as the family’s sole source of income. It’s a big day at school, though – it’s the occasion of a full lunar eclipse, and everyone’s going to watch it.

Well, everyone except Veronica and her friend Rosa, and this girl named Diana that Rosa invited along at the last minute. They’re sneaking off to conduct a séance with a Ouija board Veronica brought from home. See, as it turns out, Veronica’s dad died not too long ago, and she misses him. She wants to talk to him again. Diana’s missing a boyfriend who died in a motorcycle crash, so she wants in too. So the three of them set up the board, make the incantations, put their fingers on the glass, all as the shadow of the moon moves across the sun.

They make contact. And then as the sun is fully eclipsed, it all goes wrong. The glass breaks, Veronica bleeds onto the board, and howls before collapsing into a faint.

Something crossed over. After that, things start getting very weird for her. Unexplained occurrences around the house – lights switching on and off, a malfunctioning electronic game, a backpack that won’t stay put, nightmares, and Antoñito says he’s been talking to Daddy.

This film reminds me a lot of The Babadook, in that there are really two different things going on here. There’s the ostensible paranormal stuff, but then there’s also Veronica, a young woman under tremendous pressure, shouldering responsibilities that she shouldn’t have at her age. Her mom is always working, so it falls to Veronica to effectively raise her three siblings, and, like the mother in The Babadook, she’s trying to cope with the grief around the death of a loved one and just be a regular girl when her circumstances dictate that there’s really no room for either. This could just as easily be a story about how Veronica cracked under the strain of her life as anything else. There’s an especially effective nightmare sequence that gives powerful voice to the resentment she must feel, and after the séance, Rosa and Diana sort of freeze her out socially, creeped out by the events of the séance, which serves to leave Veronica even further isolated from anything like a normal girlhood than she already was. In one sequence, she goes to hunt Rosa and Diana down at a party she was invited to halfheartedly, as an afterthought, and the world the kids at this party inhabit feels miles away from hers.

Like the director’s previous film [REC] (which rules), this is very much a Spanish horror film, in the sense that it’s pretty immersed in Catholic imagery and values – the events leading up to the séance are framed like they’re going to smoke a joint or sneak some booze, setting up flirtation with the occult as just as much of a forbidden vice, which I suppose it would be at the parochial school Veronica and her siblings attend. And the séance itself is framed in terms of pagan forces – there’s a lot of sun and moon imagery throughout the film and it’s noted that Veronica’s fifteen and hasn’t yet started her period, which ties back to the moon as well. There’s even the obligatory creepy blind nun, but here she’s a sympathetic and helpful figure for Veronica. Still creepy, but she owns it with amusement.

And all of this care with detail pays off. Whether or not Veronica actually called something malevolent from the other side or she’s just losing her grip on reality, things get increasingly strange as the film moves on. The scares rely largely on inventive visuals, getting a lot out of little details like shadows on the wall, odd stains, malfunctioning electronics and nightmare sequences that (refreshingly enough) don’t repeat themselves, so you don’t really know when they’re coming. As the film goes on, everything’s just off enough to register a sense of wrongness, but it’s not overly telegraphed. The careful pacing makes good use of stillness and silence – it knows when to give us just a little startle, so when it does ratchet up the scares in the back half, it’s an effective escalation of tension without leaning on jump-scares to do the work. The cinematography moves a lot between very bright and very dark spaces – the basement where the séance is conducted and the family’s apartment at night are warrens of half-lit things that could be monsters or not, and light is often just this side of being uncomfortably bright, with lots of lens flare, making it feel almost intrusive in spots, and making Veronica’s few glimpses of life outside of her increasing paranoia seem almost alien. The whole thing is scored with John Carpenter-esque synthesizer and songs by a popular Spanish rock band that Veronica listens to, making it feel both a little timeless and also further centering it on Veronica’s experience as a girl dealing with all kinds of things she shouldn’t have to, supernatural or otherwise. It’s a carefully constructed, tense film that never collapses into melodrama, and that restraint makes it work.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

Grave Encounters 2: More Of The Same, For Better Or Worse

Apologies for the late posting – the shift to working from home that I’ve experienced as someone who is fortunate to be able to work from home right now messed up my internal calendar, and Wednesday came and went before I realized that I forgot to put this up. The week loses a bit of its rhythm when your surroundings don’t change, but I’ve made the necessary adjustments.

Anyway, given how much unprecedented stuff is going on right now, I thought now would be as good a time as any to try something I’ve never really done before. As I’ve pretty well established by now, I’m really picky about found-footage films, pretty much over films set in abandoned hospitals, and am really not a fan of sequels or (ugh) franchises. But last week I discovered that I liked Grave Encounters – a found-footage film set in an abandoned mental hospital - well enough, so I thought, why not keep this train rolling and take a look at the sequel?

What little critical reception I’ve seen of Grave Encounters 2 has been mixed, which is unsurprising to me, given that I think sequels to horror films are bad ideas in general. And some of that certainly comes into play here, though it does make some smart choices along the way as well. I am going to put this one under a spoiler bracket, though, since I anticipate I’ll be talking about the events of the first film and specific things I did and didn’t like about it, so if you haven’t watched Grave Encounters and plan to, maybe hold off on reading this one until you’ve had a look at it.

Grave Encounters: Everyone Gets More Than They Bargained For, Including Me

If you’ve read past posts on found-footage films and other horror clichés, you’ll know that at least at first glance, a found-footage horror film set in an abandoned mental hospital is most likely not going to be my thing, and most of the time, you’d be right. The cynical among you might say “ah, but if A24 or SpectreVision puts it out…” and, well, you’d be right. I’ve got my biases, and arty horror is definitely one of them. But I’m also not totally resistant to films that I keep seeing recommended, over and over again, even if it’s not the sort of thing I usually go for. Just recently I took a chance on Hell House LLC after having it enthusiastically recommended, and though it did have its weaknesses, it was also actually really scary in spots without being cheap or obvious about it. Flaws don’t always overwhelm a film.

And that’s pretty much where I find myself with Grave Encounters. It definitely has its problems, but many of them are, I feel, mitigated by some really good, surprising choices in other areas.

The film opens with an introduction by a TV producer responsible for a number of the kind of reality shows you’d find today on pretty much any cable specialty channel, talking about a ghost-hunter show he picked up called Grave Encounters. It’s hosted by Lance Preston, who strikes just the right level of douchey self-importance that you’d expect from someone making a ghost-hunter show. He’s backed up by three crew members - T.C., Sasha, and Matt - who handle camera, sound, and paranormal detection (thermal imaging, microcassette recorders for spectral voices, the usual) and a psychic portentously named Houston Gray. We’re treated to some footage of an episode where they’re in an abandoned building, imploring spirits to speak to them, cast in the greenish glow of nightvision cameras. It really is the prototypical ghost-hunter show, and the TV producer says it was really successful for him.

Well, that is, until…Episode 6. That’s the one where they decided to lock themselves inside an abandoned mental hospital, notorious for its poor treatment of patients, barbaric treatment methods, and the notably bizarre interests of its head doctor.

Episode 6 is where it all went wrong, and the TV producer has assembled the raw footage to tell the story.

What I think makes this film good and helps set it apart isn’t so much in what it does - the baseline story isn’t surprising, crew locks themselves into a reportedly haunted hospital, crew gets more than they bargained for - as much as it is in how it goes about doing it. First, the crew all feel more or less like real, believable people, if not especially likable ones. Lance, Matt, and T.C. are various flavors of bro, nobody takes Houston seriously, and Sasha is probably the closest to having a conscience out of all of them, but they’re not obnoxious or overly caricatured either. You’re not especially invested in them as people, but you’re also not rooting for them to die, and that’s important for a horror film to be effective, I think. Having this be the raw footage of a ghost hunter show also gives it the same sort of critical remove present in Butterfly Kisses, but as unsubtle as it is in some ways, its critique of found-footage (and paranormal activity shows) ends up being subtler or more naturalistic than Butterfly Kisses. For example, a comment to get some B-roll of the camera sort of floating around corridors is followed by a shot of exactly that. It’s pretty clear from the raw footage that everyone involved knows this is a put-on - the crew set things up to look spookier than they are with practiced ease, and a solemn reading of a room by Houston, who goes on and on about the powerful energies in the place, ends as soon as they call cut, both Houston and Lance break out in laughter at the silliness of what they’ve just done. Much like the haunted-house entrepreneurs in Hell House, LLC, these folks are competent at their jobs, they want to put on a good show, and there’s just the slightest contempt for the supernatural that will of course get scared right out of them when shit gets real. What I like is how the artifice of their show isn’t all that different from the artifice of the film itself. Butterfly Kisses basically pointed neon signs at this idea, and though it was good fun, it did make that film less frightening as a result. Here, it doesn’t really get in the way of the scary stuff.

And the scary stuff here is definitely better than I expected. It’s an abandoned mental hospital, so of course it’s going to suffer from Abandoned Hospital Syndrome, but to its credit, it uses the setting in some interesting ways instead of just letting the creepy old abandoned building do all the heavy lifting by itself. It’s certainly nothing that I want to give away or spoil, but it solves the problem of why the team doesn’t just leave in novel fashion - one which raises the tension before we see a single ghost - by messing with time and space in interesting ways, which is more than a lot of films set in abandoned mental hospitals bother to do. You could probably make this a really scary film without actually having any ghosts in it. But there are also ghosts, and even when you’re pretty sure you know what’s coming, things are well-paced and well-staged enough that even the obvious stuff usually works. It throws a mix of bizarre things at you, and in some cases doesn’t really give you time to dwell on it, so you’re sort of in the shoes of the crew themselves, finding themselves in very much over their heads and ill-equipped to make sense of it all. Sometimes it makes unexpected choices, and sometimes it makes exactly the choice you think it’s going to make, and it’s just enough of a mix that you stay on your toes.

It does have some problems, though, many endemic to found-footage horror films. Some of the effects have not aged well and have since this film’s release become clichés in and of themselves (which isn’t this film’s fault, to be fair) and it could definitely err on the side of subtlety and more deliberate pacing in places. The crew sort of goes from zero to utterly panicked and turning on each other way too quickly, and the end of the film is robbed of some of its impact as it overreaches by introducing a lot of new information at the last minute, as if it doesn’t trust that what it’s shown us is frightening enough by itself. It also suffers some from “we have to film everything for reasons” syndrome in places, and some of the details (archival footage, graffiti on the walls) aren’t convincing enough to stick the landing, but it’s just self-aware enough and well-paced that it maintains a nice feeling of tension throughout. It also shares a major plot hole with Hell House, LLC in that, given the events at the end of the movie, it isn’t really clear how anyone actually recovered the footage we’re watching in the first place. I don’t think that film criticism that boils down to “look at all the plot holes I found” is very good criticism, but in both cases, it kind of took me out of the experience. Nevertheless, there are definitely moments in this film that have stuck with me - almost like I went into something I expected to be another rote exercise and ended up getting more than I bargained for. Imagine that.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Slight Delay

Busy Wednesday at work meant I didn't have time to get something up, but expect my thoughts on Grave Encounters on Friday. For a found-footage film set in an abandoned mental hospital, it was...better than I thought it'd be? Anyway, basically me saying that in more words on Friday.

The Lighthouse: Boredom Makes Villains Out Of Men

Sometimes, you don’t even need a monster or a ghost or a murderer. This is the domain of the psychological horror film, where everything you need to threaten your characters is contained in their own fragile psyches, their own fears and doubts and uncertainties. Put someone under tremendous strain, and they themselves become monstrous. Add monsters or ghosts to that, and you have yourself a recipe for a potentially better horror film than one that just relies on the supernatural alone.

The Lighthouse is a nightmarish, claustrophobic story about what happens when you put two volatile people together for too long, with just enough mystery around the edges to make it something more.

It’s the late 1800s, and two men have come to a bleak, windswept island to spend a month manning the lighthouse located there. Four weeks on, then relief. The more remote the location, the better the pay. Thomas Wake is the veteran lighthouse keeper, an old salt too lame to go out to the sea he misses so dearly. Ephraim Winslow is the junior man, recently of the timber industry up in Canada. They’re both dour, damaged men, each brought to this island for their own reasons. They’ll spend the next month bunking together and tending the lighthouse. Wake gives the orders to Winslow - tend to the cistern, fix the shingles, clean the machinery, polish the brass, stoke the boiler. It’s a miserable situation - the drinking water is foul, the work back-breaking, and the company unpleasant. Wake regales Winslow with endless stories of his time at sea, farts constantly, and needles him about his refusal to drink.

Wake also spends his shifts in the lamp section of lighthouse, locking the gate behind him, staring for hours into the light.

The film combines the psychological pressure of close quarters in isolation with constant power struggles between two strong-willed men and the mysteries of an unforgiving sea. It’s clear immediately that both men are hiding things from each other - Winslow is evasive about his past and why he’s looking for a new line of work, and what exactly is Wake doing up in the lamp room of the lighthouse every night? Why is he so possessive of it? These are two strong wills in extremely close quarters with nowhere to escape to, so things are bound to get bad, and there are sudden flashes of violence early on - simple disagreements threaten to come to blows, and all of this is before Winslow kills a gull. Wake is deeply superstitious - to kill a gull is the worst kind of bad luck at sea, and his fears appear to be borne out as the pleasant westerly winds they had been enjoying shift to a nor’easter.

And this is where the mysteries of the sea meet the failings of men. Winslow finds himself increasingly prone to visions of mermaids and other scaly tentacled forms, plagued by the flocks of seabirds all over an island now battered by storms, all travel made impossible and timely return unlikely. Wake becomes increasingly unstable, possessive of the lighthouse, insistent on his authority the more erratic Winslow becomes. They can’t go outside, their food is spoiling, and in the absence of water, there’s booze, and in the absence of booze, kerosene.

The whole film expresses this compression and strain. It’s shot in a square aspect ratio using vintage lenses on a 35mm black and white film stock that makes the whole thing look like a moving tintype, and the film is full of bright light sources creating sharp, dark shadows by contrast. It lends the proceedings the same unreal, out-of-time feel as a film like Eraserhead or Careful. If it’s not stark black and white, it’s gray, relentless gray, a landscape made up entirely of wind, rain, damp and cold. The dialogue and accents are period-accurate - for as much as Wake scoffs at Winslow for being “a readin’ man,” Wake himself is prone to soliloquy, perhaps because he is used to the absence of conversation, and so their exchanges are filled with rich, colorful turns of phrase that, over time, disintegrate into inarticulate shouts and grunts and hooting.

This is a film where very little is certain. It’s entirely possible that Wake is gaslighting Winslow, lying about how long they’ve been on the island and convincing Winslow that he’s spent weeks in a fugue state, but it’s also equally possible that both Wake and Winslow, neither of them especially stable to begin with, have both already cracked under the strain. It's also possible that one is entirely the others’ delusion. It’s the late 1800s, and they’re both manly men, and this means that when their burdens- both external and internal - become too much to bear, they have no real way to cope with any of it. All of their confused anger and repressed rage and pent-up desires come erupting out mixed up together in bursts of violence and frenzied depravity. There’s nothing to do on the island but drink and jerk off, so things start getting really weird as Wake’s stories start to change and Winslow starts drinking (and drinking, and drinking) and starts telling stories that sound more like confessions. All they can do is talk, but they have no means by which they can express their feelings, so they can’t communicate, and everything spills over as the sea and all its denizens close in around them.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon