Us: How The Other Half Lives

I’ve been having a conversation with a friend about the role of metaphor in horror films, around the degree to which the supernatural threats in a horror film are “real” within the context of the film. It’s kind of a complicated question, at least for me, and after some time trying to wrap my head around how I actually feel, what I’ve sort of landed on is that supernatural threats are almost always metaphor for real-world fears of one type or another, and the degree to which they’re diegetically “real” varies. If the narrator is unreliable, what we’re seeing may not actually be happening in the world of the film, but I also think that having supernatural threats that are diegetically real potentially adds another layer of fear, especially if we sympathize with the protagonists. If we’re rooting for them to die, I’d argue that’s not really horror. It’s bloodsport, and part of why I don’t really rate slasher films, for the most part. 

I bring all of this up because Us is one of those films that invests heavily in both aspects of its antagonists. And the result is an unnerving, inventive balance of the frightening and the comic made with verve and a unique, impressionistic vision.

The film opens with a title card stating that there are miles of tunnels underneath the continental U.S. - sewers, abandoned subway lines, and tunnels that seem to serve no known purpose. There is, this card seems to say, a world beneath us. Cut to Santa Cruz, California, in 1986, and Rayne, Russell, and their young daughter Adelaide. Things seem strained between Rayne and Russell as they take Adelaide down the Santa Cruz boardwalk, playing games of chance and eating candy apples. Rayne needs to find a restroom, but Adelaide doesn’t want to come with her, so Rayne asks Russell to watch Adelaide while she goes. Russell says he will, and then promptly returns to his game of Whac-A-Mole. Adelaide, of course, wanders off. She wanders off to a remote stretch of the beach, and a hall of mirrors attraction. “Find Yourself,” the sign says. Inside, she gets lost, turned around inside the hall of mirrors, surrounded by her reflections. 

One of the reflections doesn’t move as she does, and Adelaide notices.

Years later, in the present day, Adelaide is married to affable Gabe Wilson, and they have two children, Zora and Jason. They’re in the car, on their way to their summer home near Santa Cruz. Gabe embodies big dad energy, goofy and affable and just out of touch enough. The kids are appropriately surly and uninterested in the things their parents enjoy. It’s clear this trip wasn’t their idea. And Adelaide is uneasy, her mind still on those events of so long ago, her discovery after being lost, and the struggle to adjust. Gabe mentions meeting some friends of theirs at the beach in Santa Cruz, and she’s immediately resistant. She doesn’t want to go back there. It’s clear that whatever happened to her as a child was traumatic and she doesn’t want to revisit the place where it happened. But they go, and it’s fine, and they come back to the summer house that night.

And that night, they are visited by a family - mother, father, and two children - who stand wordlessly in their driveway. They’re wearing matching red jumpsuits, and they’re carrying big, shiny pairs of scissors. 

And they look just like the Wilsons.

Us begins as a siege film, as this mysterious family - led by an Adelaide look-alike who speaks in strained, halting English - terrorizes the Wilsons to an end that isn’t really apparent right away. But the Wilsons are surprisingly resourceful, and soon enough the scope of the film widens to describe something much larger than the typical siege scenario. The end product is probably best described as one of deep uneasiness. Even before things really pop off, there’s a sense of everything being slightly wrong- silences stretch out just a beat too long, there’s a stillness to everything, even where it seems like there should be energy and activity. Sudden sounds are a little too loud, there are a lot of shadows at the beach house at night, and the beach itself during the day is a little too bright. It’s no one thing you can put your finger on, but it’s all just slightly strange, and then the strangeness overwhelms us, engulfs us, surrounds us, and it’s all we can do to keep up.

Alongside the horror runs a strong vein of comedy - rooted mostly in family sitcoms at first (look at the crummy boat Dad bought! It has a cassette player in it! Kids don’t like to get off their phones!) but getting increasingly darker and sharper as the film moves on, without really getting any less funny. This is one of the few horror films that’s had me both on the edge of my seat and laughing out loud at the same time, without one undercutting the other (though the balance is tipped maybe a little too far toward comedy at points in the third act). Normally I don’t like horror comedies - often the comedy is at the expense of the horror, or typically horrific things are played for comedy - but by and large this film manages both in a way that makes the comedy punctuation for the horror, rather than undermining it. It felt like I was laughing as hard as I was as much to release the tension I was feeling as because the comedy was really well-done. And at points, the humor is almost acidic in how it contrasts to and underlines the protagonists’ situation. Some of the gags would be funny even if they didn’t accompany someone bleeding out, but that they do makes them the best kind of satire - astringent, a little painful. The best satire stings a little, because that’s how you know the wound is getting cleansed.

So there’s a strong diegetic threat, rendered in striking, singular imagery, and underneath, a metaphoric narrative arguably about the privilege of class. The Wilsons have a good life - we don’t get details, but they’re doing well enough to have a summer home in northern California, which ain’t nothing. You get the sense that most of them take their lives for granted to a degree, though Adelaide begins the film with an edge of wariness, as if her childhood experience means that she doesn’t. Gabe and Adelaide’s friends Josh and Kitty (and their twin daughters) are complacent to the point of near-inertia, so assured in their privilege that they don’t even see it. The antagonists come across like a dark mirror-world version of the Wilsons, alike in body but…broken somehow. Except for Adelaide’s double, they do not speak or communicate only in grunts and howls, and Adelaide can only manage broken, halting English, describing a nightmare life of extreme hardship. Adelaide’s double feels entitled to something, stating that it’s “their time now.” Even before all is made clear, you get the sense that these mysterious doubles feel that they have suffered a great injustice, and seek to redress it.

This is not a film that overburdens us with explanation or backstory, and that’s absolutely for the good - we’re handed just enough to let us observe what’s going on, and forsaking some complicated technical explanation in favor of letting haunting expressive imagery do the hard work - imagery that, however disparate and strange it might seem initially, actually tells us way more than we realize. I’m reminded of films like Hereditary or Asmodexia in that here, again, we have all the information we need almost from the beginning, we just don’t know it until the end. There are miles and miles of tunnels honeycombing the United States, the opening card tells us, many to no known purpose. Early on, when Adelaide asks their antagonists who they are, her double replies “we’re Americans.” There’s a lot we don’t know about what going on beneath us, the film seems to say, and we remain ignorant at our peril.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

In Fabric: The Fabric Of Our Lives

I try not to go into the films I watch with any specific expectations. I like to be surprised. But it’s tough not to develop expectations, even minimal ones, after watching, say, a trailer or reading a synopsis. A good synopsis is an exercise in understatement, a good trailer gives you a taste of the film’s vibe and premise without putting the whole story up on the screen. If nothing else, they give me an idea of whether or not I’m likely to like or dislike a film. So I rarely if ever go in completely blind, but every now and then, I’ll watch something that, for good or ill, manages to sidestep my expectations and deliver something I wasn’t expecting.

In Fabric is just such a film - what any of the press would lead you to believe is a campy story about a cursed dress ends up being something entirely other, an acid-etched portrait of English life in the mid-to-late 70s, drawn in stark caricature.

We open on a montage of still images, a technique that used to be common in television decades ago. But soon enough, shots of shoppers and crowds on city streets give way to more unsettling things - mannequins, a face frozen in a scream, a bound wrist. It’s not clear what any of it means, but a sense of unease lingers. And we then meet Sheila Woolchapel. She’s what once might have been called “a woman of a certain age,” with a mostly-grown, mostly-self-absorbed son. She’s a bank teller, separated from her husband for long enough that she’s taken to placing ads in what was then called the “lonely hearts” section of the local paper. Dating back then was no easier, nor any more forgiving, than it is today. You just have to wait a few days to get an envelope in the post to find out who the creeps are instead of a few minutes. It’s hard to watch Sheila navigate the world of being single and lonely. She doesn’t get a lot of respect from her son Vince, or from Vince’s girlfriend Gwen. Work is the kind of corporate-speak nightmare that Office Space illustrated so well, with the added frisson of sexism that makes the quality of your smile or the duration of your bathroom breaks a matter for evaluation. Sheila can’t catch a break for trying.

But it’s the winter sales season, when all of the major department stores mark down their remaining stock to make room for next year’s lines. And so Sheila - in preparation for a date that ends up being exactly as disastrous as you’d imagine - goes to Dentley & Soper’s Trusted Department Store to find a nice dress. Something to help her feel beautiful, and if she’s lucky, at a really good price. And she does exactly that - she finds a lovely red dress that fits her just right. Which is odd, because its listed size is much too small for her. And why does the clerk ask her for her address and phone number? And what about the embroidered writing on an inside seam, in another language? Not to mention the fate of the model who first wore the dress. That very same dress.

Only one of them was made, after all.

From the moment Sheila takes the dress home, things start to go wrong - the date doesn’t go well, she gets a strange rash, her washing machine breaks catastrophically, she starts to have strange dreams. But this is not a film exclusively concerned with a cursed dress. This is a film that looks at life in England at that point in time through a cracked lens, one that lets the light leak through and shifts everything askew. Dentley & Soper’s is a very, very strange department store, with employees who dress like something out of Edward Gorey and talk like language itself is their second language. And what happens in the store after hours, once all of the salespeople have been put away for the night, well, it’s never really explained, but it has a kind of internal logic, the way things make perfect sense in a dream, but when you try to explain them out loud upon waking crumble into utter nonsense. The store’s ads on television - no dialogue, just images - are a cryptic rush of gesticulating employees and mannequins, broken up and smeared by tracking errors and chromatic aberration into something almost entirely abstract. And nobody seems to think this is unusual. 

Likewise, as the film progresses, the initially stultifying business-speak of Sheila’s employers starts to become surreal, the narrative calcifies into repeated motifs - of dialogue, of imagery, broken up by more montage. And without giving away too much, the dress is the one constant throughout, as it becomes clear that it, not Sheila, is the protagonist, the one we’re following. It’s not clear (nor is it unclear, we feel what it is rather than know what it is) what the dress’s provenance really is, but wherever it is, there follows misery and ruin. Accidents happen, vegetables wither and rot, and attempts to destroy or return it fail. As someone from the department store says, the purpose of the seasonal sale is to…expunge.

It’s all shot very much as a period piece in terms of design and costuming, though not to the point that we’re meant to think it’s an artifact of that time. It’s more like the filmmakers recognized the inherent strangeness of that period and wanted to jack it up as loud as it would go. There’s something about brass and velvet and wood veneer that communicates…not luxury, but rather some approximation of luxury on the cheap, and it’s evocative. Mannequins figure heavily throughout, and their blank expressions and rictus posture, both human and utterly not, seem to serve as kind of a central thesis, along with the equally blank faces and poses of catalog models, staring off into space, looking at things we can’t see while wearing the latest in casual sportswear. The soundtrack leans heavily on dissonant electronics, and combined with the interstitial montages serves to reinforce this idea of a placid surface thinly papering over the madness underneath. All throughout, the people we follow and the world they inhabit disintegrate into chaos, the veneer of civility cracking to loose snarling animals underneath. Everything and everyone becomes stranger and less tethered to reality as the film goes on. And above it all, the dress flows and drifts and billows, inexorably red. Like blood from a syringe, blooming in water.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Color Out Of Space: Alienation

Just to address this right off the bat, this is an adaptation/re-imagining/call it what you want of the original story by H.P. Lovecraft, whose legacy is permanently tarnished by his abhorrent beliefs about race, gender, and class. But this adaptation - as is true of many adaptations of his work - makes it pretty clear that even though his stories are likely the product of a mind that was scared shitless of anything and everything different from itself, you can excise those elements without really losing what makes them good. Strip away the dehumanizing depictions of nonwhites and the rural poor, and the bones of his stories remain: There are things out there beyond our comprehension, impossibly ancient, and we are nothing to them, to be undone by them in a blink. That all kinds of authors and filmmakers are finding ways to preserve their strengths while discarding the unnecessary bigotry, and even go so far as to use his work as a way to actively critique the very notions of race and class that Lovecraft espoused seems to be both a testimony to the underlying power of what’s been dubbed “cosmic horror” and how much our culture has changed since his time. There’s still (obviously, obviously) a lot of work do and miles to go, as current events so vividly demonstrate, but at least on this front I’m encouraged.

So let’s talk about Color Out Of Space. This story of incomprehensible alien appetite takes its time to get where it’s going, but boy does it get there.

The film opens with a voiceover about the woods west of Arkham, and how the person speaking always knew they were supposed to be haunted, someplace you didn’t go, but only now does he really understand what that means, and this is accompanied by long, slow tracking shots of a forest, fitfully lit through haze and fog, the trees thin and gnarled, almost looking more like stalks or tentacles than anything else. The person speaking is a young man named Ward Phillips (I see what you did there), and he’s a hydrologist, sent to survey the water table in Arkham in advance of a new hydroelectric dam project. And it’s while he’s surveying this area that he meets the Gardner family.

The Gardner family - Nathan, Theresa, and their children Ben, Lavinia, and Jack - are…complicated. They’re former hippies now as up in arms over their children’s language and weed smoking as the previous generation was about theirs, and their kids are just as restless as they were in their youth. Ben mostly smokes weed and watches astronomical models on his computer, Lavinia practices witchcraft in the woods but yearns for fast food. Jack is mostly just a kid, too young to really know any other way of life. Nathan had a contentious relationship with his own father, but still ended up coming home to the family farm, where he now raises alpacas while Theresa is the breadwinner, working as some kind of financial consultant with clients all over the world. Their youthful rebellion has mellowed into complacent eccentricity.

At least, until a meteorite crashes into their yard in the middle of the night - a meteorite that gives off a strange light (specifically magenta - a color not produced by visible light). The next day, Lavinia feels sick, Nathan keeps smelling something and Jack starts talking to a “friend” in the well on their property.

And then strange flowers start to bloom. Magenta flowers. And things and people start to…change.

I guess if I were to try and pin a theme to this film, I’d say it’s about transformation. Some of this is physical - the odd magenta flowers sprouting everywhere, oversized magenta insects, strange contaminations in the water, electromagnetic interference, and soon enough, a sickly, poisonous light that corrupts everything it touches. But some of it is psychological. The events of the film as they unfold put the Gardner family under tremendous stress, and it affects each of them in very different ways, ways that seem to illustrate some kind of fundamental trait or impulse laid bare. Nathan’s fatherly calm warps into denial, Lavinia searches for increasingly more drastic ways to escape her surroundings, Ben, ever the gentle stoner, does his best to do what he needs to, but becomes increasingly forgetful, and Jack and Theresa…well, a mother has a bond with her youngest, doesn’t she? So everything and everyone is changing, and the only one who seems to have a handle on what’s happening is Ezra - an unreconstructed flower child squatting in a shack on the Gardner’s land, and of course nobody’s listening to him. Gradually, things and people start to change, whether they’re aware of it or not. They become, quite literally, alienated. From the world, and from each other.

And this change, this sense of things becoming alien, is strongly communicated in the look of the film. It’s shot in a vivid, almost hallucinatory style, most recently similar to Mandy and Annihilation - colors are highly saturated, and there’s a lot of haze and bloom on everything, so even before things start getting really strange there’s a strangeness to it, a sense of dreaminess. Scenes are transitioned or intercut with almost microphotographic shots of nature, observed so closely that trees and insects and even running water seem alien. And things get strange gradually, first in little details, then increasingly more dramatic ones, then chaos. This is a carefully paced film that runs a measured course from “hmmm, that’s odd” to “what the fuck was that” over an almost two-hour run time, with any sense of normalcy - physical, spatial, temporal, or psychological - disintegrating completely by the end. It takes numerous liberties with the source material, but little nods to Lovecraft are sprinkled throughout, in names of people and places (and the occasional visual Easter egg) and even in some ways to previous film treatments of his ideas and themes. Notably, as things come to a head there’s a shift to body horror that hearkens back to spiritually Lovecraftian stories like The Thing, as well as Stuart Gordon’s pulpy 1980s Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond. The Gardner family comes apart in more ways than one, their essential natures stretched to grotesque extremes, and the film grows more histrionic as they do.

Were I to find any fault with this film (and it’s tough, this is really well-done), I’d say that I felt like it maybe didn’t quite stick the landing at the very end. I spent a decent chunk of the film thinking I knew how it was going to end, based on story beats signposted throughout, and when it didn’t, well, on the one hand I’m glad it wasn’t predictable, but a somewhat subdued epilogue after a pretty bonkers climax fell a little flat to me. But this is a nitpick, it made narrative sense, and the film as a whole is very well-executed. The director has stated he’d like to make two more Lovecraft adaptations. If this is the caliber of what we’re going to get, bring it on.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon