The Things We Tell The Ones We Love: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

When it comes to scary movies, I am firmly of the opinion that the best films don’t try to do too much. They find a mood or aesthetic or narrative through-line (or some combination of these) and stick with it. Try to do too much - throw too many premises or ideas at the audience at once - and what you risk is something that does a lot, but does no one thing well.

A recent example of this for me was It Follows, which had a great central premise, but was set in a somewhat off-kilter world that (I think) was supposed to make the whole thing feel somewhat dreamlike, but instead just felt distracting. Maybe it’s reductive, but I think you can either tell a weird story in a normal world or a normal story in a weird world, and either can work. Absentia is an excellent example of the former, and Daybreakers is a pretty good example of the latter. But trying to tell a weird story in a weird world, I think, denies the audience any opportunity for connection, and without connection it’s hard to really engage with a film.

This is especially evident to me in The Things We Tell The Ones We Love, which tells a nominally weird story in a weird world while messing with the medium of film itself, and the result feels really confusing.

It’s the story of Billy and his baby daughter Shelly. Billy lives with his mother and sister in Davenport, Iowa. Both Davenport and Billy have seen better times. Billy’s estranged from his wife Sabrina, trying to support himself and his daughter while chasing his dream of being a successful MMA fighter. Davenport’s run down, what we see of it looks a lot like Rust Belt towns a little further east, towns where the factories closed down and all the jobs went away. Not long into the film, Billy’s sister sees from social media that Sabrina is on a tear again, talking about how she’s going to come over, kick Billy’s ass and take their daughter back. Which isn’t itself unusual - relationships go bad, and sometimes people get violent and irrational. Sometimes people say things they don’t mean in the heat of the moment.

So why is Billy’s mother loading a shotgun Why are they setting traps? Why are they boarding over the windows and hiding Billy and Shelly in the basement?

Now, if this film were telling a weird story in a normal world, this would be a good setup. Seems like a family drama, until we discover there’s something very…wrong…with Sabrina. But it doesn’t make that a reveal - instead, the film opens up with all the explanation we need. This film is set in a near-future America where some regions have been declared Freedom Zones. Nobody pays taxes, everything is deregulated, and all services are privatized, supplied on a pay-as-you-go basis. And into this world, someone has released a “designer virus” - a variant on the herpes virus that attacks the prefrontal cortex of the brain, a region implicated in higher-order cognition and impulse control. The virus flares up and goes into remission, but when it flares up, the host acts in violent, irrational ways. Sabrina has had it for awhile.

So we have a virus that makes people a danger to themselves or others, in a world where basic services are priced out of the reach of most people, and one man trying to make his way through the world with his little girl. That’s…a lot. We have a personal antagonist in Sabrina, and a situational antagonist in this dystopian version of the U.S.. A weird story in a weird world. But that’s not all - the film itself is an interactive story, meaning that it’s divided up into chapters, with the viewer making key decisions for one character or another at specific points. A link appears on the screen, and you click the one corresponding to the choice you want to make, and what happens next is the product of that choice.

So it’s a weird story in a weird world in a weird format. And it’s difficult to really engage with the film as a result. Billy is more or less relatable, but the interactive nature of the storytelling harms that to a degree, because you’re aware that what you see him do is something that emerges not from the character, but from your decision. For me, it lays bare a key difference between the medium of film and the medium of games - in an interactive narrative game like Detroit, you have a similar situation, but the characters are entirely under your control, all the way down to movement. In film, we’re used to watching events unfold in front of us without the ability to intervene, and in horror especially that can be really effective. I mean, why else do people yell at the screen? We are helpless to intervene, and when intervention becomes possible in a medium where it usually isn’t, I think it breaks the spell a little in a way that it doesn’t in games, because in games, that particular spell isn’t really there to start with. And the setting is alienating as well. It’s not totally unrecognizable - the locations all read as real and gritty, to their benefit - but it’s different enough that the bizarre behavior of people infected with the virus doesn’t really feel strange or disruptive. The whole world is weird, so what’s one more weird thing? The sense of dislocation that makes a lot of horror movies work needs some kind of connection to reality to highlight the ways in which reality has been violated. If everything’s strange, in some ways nothing is.

This isn’t strictly true - I’ve seen some films that were weird stem to stern, films that make Possession almost look like a quiet chamber drama, but it’s tough to pull off. You have to go so unapologetically maximalist and go all-in on the weird for it to work, and it’s as likely as not to fail. And this film doesn’t go big enough in that regard - the effects of the virus as we see them aren’t much different from an especially bad meth bender, and living someplace where everything is totally privatized only really comes into play at one point, mostly to delay police response to a break-in, and there’s all kinds of other ways that can be handled as well. That the virus was designed in a lab and released into the environment doesn’t seem to play a role at all in the story (I say “seem” because I’m basing this on a single viewing with one specific set of choices, and I don’t know how different the other versions are). It tells us there’s this weird virus, and it tells us there’s this weird world, but once it’s told us both of these things they end up being largely inessential to the story.

Which is another issue with the film: Maybe it’s that it doesn’t have a very big budget (which is not a problem  - plenty of stinkers out there that did, and good ones that didn’t), but this is a film that does a lot of telling instead of showing. Most of the dialogue is exposition, most character is revealed through dialogue instead of behavior. How do we know that Billy still loves Sabrina? Is it in how he talks to her, or his hesitancy to do the hard but necessary thing? No, it’s because one character tells another that he still loves her while he himself is offscreen. How do we know this country has totally privatized regions? Is it in signage or incidental behavior? No, it’s part of a title card that tells us how the world is, and a sequence where Shelly plays with the television remote and we can hear different programs explaining the whole system offscreen. I liked the changing-channel bit as a narrative device, but why would television news still be explaining the existence of this system to people after it had presumably been in place for years? It’s not an organic part of the world, it’s there for our benefit. Sabrina did some pretty horrible shit to get herself estranged from Billy, but we don’t get to see it - instead, Billy brings it up while talking to Sabrina. Telling, instead of showing. And from a horror standpoint, beginning with a title card telling us everything about the world and virus before the film even starts just sucks all the mystery and surprise out. Horror often lies in realization or discovery or recognition, and if you know what’s going on from the start, then there’s nothing to realize or discover, unless you go with an unreliable narrator.

This introduction of elements that end up not really contributing much to the story even extends, to a degree, to technical aspects of the film. The interactive choice mechanism only came up three times over the course of the film, and the resolution I got to the last one was really hamfisted - one of the characters even asks flat-out why the other character would do what they did, that it was a very bad choice. Which, when you give the audience the option of making the choice, feels a little unfair. Don’t punish your audience for making a choice you allowed them to make. The need to make a choice before the film continued made it feel disjointed - the cuts from choice to outcome felt a little clumsy - and robbed it of momentum. And for reasons that don’t seem to have a narrative rationale, the whole thing is shot in black and white with elements of spot color. At times, it’s effective -the startling blue of Sabrina’s eyes when in the grip of the virus was striking - but it doesn’t seem to be systematic or intended to communicate anything specific. It’s just sort of there, like the artificiality of the virus or the dystopian setting.

I’d never ding anyone for ambition or trying something that hasn’t been done before, but when you do all of them at once, I think the end product suffers. If this were a story about a guy with big dreams in a broken-down town whose estranged wife had turned into Something Else, that’d be a solid story. If this were a story about a guy trying to get custody of his daughter in a world where every aspect of life had a marked-up price tag attached, that’d be a solid story too. But doing both at once diluted it. And I’m not sure horror is a genre to make interactive, since so much of horror is the audience watching what’s happening and being powerless to stop it. Giving the audience power makes it less scary, and maybe underscores the artificiality of the exercise - if I go back and try a different path, consequences feel less meaningful, and I see what events would play out no matter what I did. It’s not the experience I come to movies for (and probably why I’ve never bothered to watch Bandersnatch), and throwing it into the mix on top of everything else when you’re working with just enough resources to tell a small-scale, straightforward story is a hard thing to make work. I think it’s cool to have all these ideas, but putting them all into a single movie doesn’t work so well.

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