Gonjiam: Facing The Unknown

I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my tastes in scary movies. I definitely have a type, and I definitely have things I tend to avoid. But every now and then something will surprise me. And I’m starting to think that maybe I need to revise my stance on found-footage horror films shot in abandoned hospitals. Sure, a lot of found-footage films are hackneyed trash, and too many horror films set in abandoned hospitals seem to think that the setting should do all of the heavy lifting. But I took a chance on Grave Encounters, and it was a pleasant surprise, demonstrating to me the value of keeping my mind open. 

And I’m glad I did, because it lead me to take a chance on Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, which is another found-footage film shot in an abandoned hospital (well, sort of - more on that in a bit). And like Grave Encounters, it’s actually pretty good. It does fall victim to a couple of found-footage clichés, and I get the feeling the translation of the dialogue isn’t as good as it could be, but once it picks up steam it’s easy to look past these shortcomings. It’s a well-paced haunted-house story that doesn’t get in its own way and tightens the screws to striking effect.

The film starts off with a phone-camera prologue of two kids trying to open a locked door in the hospital and mysteriously disappearing, but this is really just to set up our protagonists, who run a YouTube channel called Horror Time. It’s sort of a paranormal investigation channel, run by Ha-Joon, and his partners, dependable Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook, and bumbling, hapless Je-Yoon. They’re planning an expedition of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital (which is a real place, and supposedly one of the most haunted sites in Korea, though the film wasn’t actually shot there. The government wouldn’t give them access, so they subbed in an abandoned high school in a different town). Even better, they’re going to livestream it - a first for their channel. Ha-Joon recruits three young women to come along - Ji-Hyun will do some additional camera and tech work, Charlotte’s visiting from the U.S. with her dance crew (and brags about having visited three other sites on CNN’s list of freakiest places in the world, which is an actual thing) and Ah-Yeon is a shy, naïve nursing student to whom Je-Yoon takes an almost instant dislike for reasons that are never really made clear. The six of them, then, dub themselves the Horror Time Terror Squad, and it’s just as corny as it sounds.

The whole film starts off a little corny, really, with the six of them trading stories about all of the stuff that supposedly happened at the hospital, and it’s all kind of over the top. Supposedly all kinds of horrible torture and strange experiments happened there, it might have been built on a secret wartime grave to hide its existence, and supposedly the hospital director hung herself in the shower room. Just absolutely stock “hospital with a dark past” stuff, though it’s hard to tell how much of it is diegetically true and how much is the crew hyping it up for the people they’ve brought in and for the sake of clicks. They lay out a plan to sneak into the hospital grounds under the cover of night, and the Horror Time Terror Squad are nothing if not a very modern take on the found-footage protagonist. Their exploration will be livestreamed (or so they say) via YouTube, and everyone will have GoPro cameras strapped to them, which allow them to capture both their point of view and their own faces. This is in addition to the various surveillance cameras that Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook will have installed in different hot spots around the hospital, in an initial foray before they all head in together. Ha-Joon will then stay behind at base camp, monitoring their viewership…and switching from feed to feed in real time, which enables him to add in some post-production freeze-frames and replays, and gives Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook, unbeknownst to the others, time to set up some fake scares in order to spice up the proceedings.

This is something I’ve noticed in a lot of the found-footage stuff I have ended up watching for this thing - to one degree or another, they deal with the divide between reality and artifice. Butterfly Kisses is probably the most obvious about it (to its detriment), but Hell House LLC is about a group of people who devise haunted houses for a living, and Grave Encounters is about a similar paranormal investigation show, whose creators are equally comfortable with fabricating scares. The less said about The Houses October Built, the better, because it was garbage. But in each case, you have a group of people who are in the process of fabricating an experience (with some degree of assumption that of course the supernatural isn’t real) only to have it get away from them.

And boy howdy, does it ever get away from the Horror Time Terror Squad.

The first half of the film is largely table-setting - getting everyone together, some wacky hijinks as they travel to the hospital, setting up cameras around the hospital, stuff like that. But once it gets rolling, the back half is pretty intense throughout - this film does a good job of slowly and gradually ramping things up, starting with little things that seem strange or off (and are faked, for all we know), and escalating and escalating until the last fourth of the film is just non-stop tension. It takes a little while to get there, but I think it’s to the good. When the other “we didn’t plan this part” shoe drops, the film just goes for it. And to its credit, the setting does do a lot of work in terms of establishing a mood. It’s an honest-to-goodness urban ruin, grimy and shitty and full of wreckage, no lighting except what the crew has, and so even before anything goes amiss, there’ a lot of people cutting just the thinnest slice out of the darkness that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm them. We can’t see what’s waiting for them in the dark, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s just…right…there.

On paper, the story isn’t anything especially new - a bunch of teens go into a haunted building and try to gin up some scares for publicity and end up getting far more than they bargained for - but a couple of things set this film apart from its nearest found-footage cousins. First, the use of GoPros for the majority of the footage gives the film an even more claustrophobic feel than the usual limited perspective of found-footage films. We spend a lot of time in close-up on people’s faces under different conditions, and the combination of focus on their facial expressions and inability to see what’s going on around them lends everything a real immediacy. You don’t really realize just how intense it is to just look at someone’s face in close-up for extended lengths of time until you have to - it’s almost like someone decided to make a film that was approximately 65% Heather’s tearful confession scene from The Blair Witch Project, one of the most iconic sequences in modern horror film. And when shit really pops off, the sudden shifts from one close-up to another and the lack of visual information beyond their immediate personal space makes for some of the most effective moments in the film. When something is present in the room with them, you often don’t know until it’s much too late, and it’s startling without it being a cheap jump scare. It really is just evil shit materializing from out of the darkness, and it works.

Second, the filmmakers do a good job of not overexplaining or mythologizing. This film’s nearest comparison is probably Grave Encounters, in terms of not just the premise and location, but even some of the routes it takes through the narrative. I don’t think one plagiarizes the other, I just think that if you’re telling a story about a haunted psychiatric hospital, there are some places the story will tend to naturally go. But Grave Encounters, as solid as it was, had as one of its biggest weaknesses the tendency to explain too much, to overmythologize, and this film doesn’t. It alludes to some stuff at the beginning, and establishes a few setpieces along the way, but doesn’t worry overmuch about making it all make sense, because it wouldn't make sense. Weird, horrible shit happens to the people in this film, and neither they nor we are provided a neat and tidy history that explains why it’s happening. There’s no mythology, there’s no exposition, it’s just happening, and you won’t be alive much longer anyway. Its use of effects is also less artificial and more restrained than similar films (no ghosts with weirdly elongated face here), so the experience is less “this is a fancy digital effect” and more “oh shit.”

It’s also not afraid to take its time with a given scene. There are a couple of points where something bad happens, but instead of it being a sudden, sharp reveal and smash cut to something else, it draws it out, really lets the tension and the weirdness sink in, and I’ve been missing that in films like this. This film makes moving your hand far enough to turn a doorknob into an agonizingly long, life-or-death process, and it’s great. Finally, at no point did I really feel the artificiality of the found-footage conceit. There’s a narrative reason for things like freeze-frames and replays (and even a tiny bit of music) since Ha-Joon is, contrary to the purported live nature of the expedition, managing and curating the feed on the fly. And by the end, there’s even some suggestion that we aren’t always seeing footage they captured, which isn’t explored as much as it could be, but it’s nicely chilling. The GoPros mean that we don’t really have to ask why someone’s still holding a camera while they’re running for their life, because the cameras are winched on - they’re with them at all times. It largely makes narrative sense, and so I didn’t really find myself being yanked out of the experience, as is so often the case for me with found-footage films.

There are some problems. It does run afoul of the “we have to keep filming” cliché to a certain degree- Ha-Joon is obviously invested in capturing a large audience, and a certain amount of denial in the face of the unexplainable is understandable, but he kind of goes from aspiring Internet celebrity to obsessed monomaniac a little too quickly for plausibility, and there are some points in the film where it’s too dark or the camerawork too shaky (or both) for us to really get a handle on what’s supposed to be scaring us at points. It’s sort of ironic, but the commitment to verisimilitude (of course the camerawork and lighting won’t be perfect) sometimes detracts a little from the overall effect. And as I said up front, the translation to English isn’t always great, and so some of the characters may end up being painted with a broader brush than would otherwise be the case. But none of these were major distractions for me. Once things start to escalate, it’s a pretty damn scary ride to the finish, and I really really hope nobody ever makes a sequel to it.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

The Other Lamb: Don’t Tell By Showing

 One of the clumsiest things I think a film can do is rely on exposition to give the audience information, rather than having that information revealed naturally through character action. If you want to establish that two people have a difficult relationship, convey that through their body language, how they say things, and what goes unsaid. Don’t open their dialogue with “well, you know we have a difficult relationship” apropos of nothing. Nobody talks like that. It’s stagey, artificial. This is where the phrase “show, don’t tell” comes from. It’s conventional wisdom that it’s better to build character through action and feeling than just telling us stuff outright. And I tend to agree.

But on that score, The Other Lamb is a really weird beast. It’s a really stylish film that manages to be both oblique, relying a lot on showing over telling, but also obvious in ways that telling usually is. 

We open on two young women - Selah and Tamar - sitting in front of a waterfall. They’re wearing matching blue dresses, their hair in identical braids. Selah tries to scare Tamar, and they laugh. When they return home, it’s to a small encampment of trailers and cabins in the woods. The community keeps waterfowl - geese or ducks - and sheep. They build fires, dye their own clothes. The two young women gather with the rest of the community for dinner. It’s maybe nine or ten women, ranging from middle age to little girls, and one man, whom they call “The Shepherd.” He refers to them as his “flock,” as his “wives” and “daughters.” 

They thank him for “his grace.” They wait for his permission to eat. 

Daughters wear blue, wives wear red.

This film is Selah’s story. Her mother was part of “the flock,” and apparently died giving birth to Selah. Selah was born into this life, among the wives and daughters, watched over by The Shepherd, he and he alone who has given them grace. He who brings women, “broken and searching,” into the fold and gives them shelter. He who chooses wives from among the daughters. And Selah’s getting to that age where she’s starting to question the ways of the flock. The newest wife, Eloise, is Selah’s age and just joined the flock. Why was she chosen over Selah? Why are some wives sequestered from the flock in a tiny windowless cabin, fed on leftover scraps? She’s feeling a complicated mix of uncertainty and inchoate resentment. This is all she’s ever known, but it’s starting to make less sense.

And that’s…well, that’s kind of the movie, right there. The IMDB blurb is “A girl born into an all-female cult led by a man in their compound begins to question his teachings and her own reality.” And…yeah. That’s it. This film does exactly what it says on the tin, and that’s sort of the problem - that’s really all there is to it, and there aren’t really any surprises. Not that I wanted or expected a Shyamalan-esque “twist” or anything, but it also doesn’t really have a lot of depth to it. It’s not a bad story to tell, but almost everything plays out in the most obvious way possible, at least in terms of what’s happening and why it’s happening. The strange tension I experienced when I watched this film was between the triteness of the story and the manner in which it’s told.

To its credit, the film mostly stays away from straight exposition. Much of the story is told using discrete images, alternating between the action in the present day and more expressionistic inserts that communicate Selah’s internal emotional state without being tethered in reality. Which is certainly fine and can be an effective narrative tool, but the imagery feels obvious to the point of cliché - of course they keep sheep, because sheep symbolize unquestioning followers, routinely slaughtered as a matter of utility. Of course Selah imagines herself screaming silently, because that’s how you know someone’s real feelings are being suppressed. Of course Selah imagines herself a typical teenager in a station wagon, because that’s how you know she’s wondering what her life would be like outside of this cult. And of course the Shepherd is the shepherd and refers to his followers as his flock, because they’re sheep - GET IT? 

Symbolic imagery works by using images that directly evoke emotion, they don’t have to be literal. Here a lot of it is just one step away from literal. Like, if Selah had just imagined herself walking away from the flock, that wouldn’t be out of place here. And few of the characters have much of an inner life, but it doesn’t seem like it’s because they’re denied one by The Shepherd, they just…kind of exist to the extent they need to to tell the story. Selah asks one of the shunned wives why she doesn’t just leave the flock if she feels so unhappy, and all the shunned wife can say in return is “maybe…I am…afraid.” Well, NO SHIT. That’s all we get. That’s our character development. A woman who has spent the better part of her life in an abusive cult doesn’t want to leave because she’s afraid. That’s a fleeting glimpse into the obvious. The specifics of the cult aren’t anything especially nuanced or insightful either - just lots of throwing around ideas of “impurity” and “grace” and “rebirth,” stock ideas you can find in any story about any cult based on Christianity. The Shepherd himself isn’t really developed beyond “manipulative dude who likes having a bunch of women to use as he sees fit.” There’s not much depth to the dynamic between him and his followers in either direction - no real sense of what brought these women to him (other than the offhand description of them being “broken and searching” toward the beginning) or what about him keeps them there. 

It also doesn’t help that the acting tends toward wooden - no, that’s not fair. I don’t think it’s the acting per se so much as the dialogue, which is mannered to the point that it feels like outtakes from The VVitch, even though this takes place in the modern day (broadly defined, it could be anytime between the 90s and now from the couple of glimpses of cars that we get). Selah is pretty well-portrayed, at least at the outset, as someone whose feelings are in conflict - this is the only life she’s ever known, and there are things she hates and resents about it even though she can’t put words to it, and that’s pretty well-conveyed. The Shepherd isn’t overplayed, and as the film goes on you can see the layers of paternalistic benevolence eroding to expose the capricious cruelty and need for total control underneath, and there are some bits here and there where the need and desperation for approval that his followers feel are communicated vividly, but the dialogue is on some “we must not have these thoughts, for they are forbidden” and “we are fasting because we are impure” shit like you’d get from, I dunno, a Criminal Minds episode about exactly this kind of cult. Like, I’ve watched my share of documentaries about people in cults, and people in cults only talk like this on television or in movies. It’s cartoonish, and deeply at odds with evident filmmaking skill in other areas.

Because yeah, on a technical level, this is a really well-made film. It’s gorgeously composed - contrasting the color of the women’s dresses against largely drab forests and heaths, the way a single figure or person will be placed in medium to close shots at the center of the frame most of the time to draw our attention, then pitting that kind of close composition against broad rural vistas, but doesn’t do a lot with that visual skill. It’s paced incredibly slowly - it’s only a little over 90 minutes but feels at least half again that, and that can work if it builds up to something, but slow burns work because there’s a burn at all, and this film is so detached for most of its running time that by the time there is some sort of escalation or revelation or payoff, the impact is largely dulled by how long it took to get there and how little happened along the way. There’s a difference between telling a story and revealing things through small gestures that signify something larger and just having everything be small gestures. 

This isn’t as much a horror film as a dark character study, but I think for that to work, you need a couple of things that aren’t really in sufficient supply here - first, you need the darkness to be palpable. You need an atmosphere that feels oppressive, you need to feel the grip the Shepherd has on his “flock,” and this film occasionally falls prey to telling over showing on that front when it moves away from Selah’s direct experience, and the slow pacing and emotional remoteness dull that feeling of oppressiveness. It’s not totally absent, and certainly the opening of the film does a really good job of introducing us to this world and these people in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable without being overly expository, but it doesn’t hold onto that as the film goes on. 

Second, you need to have an idea of the character of whom this is a study. If this is a story about Selah coming to question her upbringing and trying to break free of it, then I think the film would be better served by spending more time with Selah as she actually is and letting that conflict through more and more gradually, rather than leaning on symbolic cutaways to tell us “Selah is having doubts” and “Selah is very angry.” It’s employed more judiciously than, say, nightmare sequences in the average horror film, but it still takes us away from her as a person and makes it all more of an abstraction, which a lot of the women in this film are already close to being. Which is itself a legitimate choice for this kind of story, insofar as the “wives” and “daughters” are functionally interchangeable to the Shepherd, but it also makes it harder for us to get invested, and as a film largely absent of the kind of spectacle you get in horror films, you need something to invest your audience. The result is lovely to look at, but lacks nuance or fresh insight. It shows us a lot, but none of it tells us anything new.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

The Ghoul: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

There’s a particular type of psychological horror film that revolves around issues of identity. It’s an especially abstract type of horror, because it’s less about threats to the body and more about threats to our sense of self, and films of this type tend to focus on how precarious and constructed our sense of self really is, as well as how precarious our sense of the world around us is, how fickle perception can be. Films like this are thematic neighbors to crime films about cops who spend so long in deep cover that their sense of who they really are starts to disintegrate. And so today we have The Ghoul, which is a smart, moody intersection of both types of films.

We open with some shots of someone driving, watching road signs for the London M1 pass overhead, which cuts to two police officers, Chris and Jim, investigating the site of a particularly puzzling double murder. A couple were shot in their home, but as near as the forensics can suggest, it appears that even though both of them were shot multiple times in the chest and face, it took some time before they fell and bled out. In other words, both people were shot by a single intruder, and just kept walking. After being hit once, twice, three times, they just kept walking forward, and eventually the intruder fled. It’s not easy to stay upright after getting shot multiple times.

In the course of the investigation, Chris and Jim run across the property manager - a man named Coulson - who only started managing the building shortly after the murder. Something about this seems suspicious to them, and so they toss his apartment looking for clues. It’s the home of someone who seems really unbalanced, with a wall covered with notes and cryptic drawings, names and news articles and random scribblings. Coulson is seeing a psychotherapist named Helen Fisher, and Chris gets the idea - aided and abetted by his forensic psychologist friend Kathleen - to pose as a patient seeking treatment from Fisher to get access to her notes about Coulson’s sessions. If this seems howlingly unethical, if not straight-up illegal (it certainly would be in the U.S. and I can’t imagine the U.K. is much different in this regard), well, it is. Nevertheless, Chris puts together a history suggesting dysthymia and makes an appointment.

He tells Helen that his name is Chris, and that Jim is a friend who does beverage sales, and Kathleen is a girl he fancied in college but never dated. 

To cope with his depression, Chris likes to fantasize that he’s a police officer in deep cover.

The central conflict here would seem to be who Chris really is - is he really a cop who’s gone so far undercover that he’s forgetting who he really is, or is he really a deeply depressed, fragile man who fantasizes that he’s a cop in order to feel better about his life? And that runs the risk of being really clichéd, but it’s not played as obviously as that story often is. Typically in a story like this, there’s a reveal, a gotcha moment where we find out that we thought he was one of these thing all along, but was actually the other. But this film really doesn’t tip its hand much at all, even at the climax it’s not crystal clear who the “real” Chris is, but the further he (and we) go down the rabbit hole, the less it seems to matter. Things start to get very weird for Chris as Fisher introduces him to another therapist, one who eschews traditional therapeutic techniques for ones involving magic and ritual. And suddenly those scribblings on Coulson’s wall start to make a kind of sense. 

This film keeps a lot of balls in the air - who Chris really is, who the other people in his life really are, what’s reality and what’s fantasy, whose viewpoint can be trusted and whose cannot - and it manages it successfully because it treats all of the possibilities with a fair amount of equanimity. It’s isn’t really clear what is delusion and what isn’t. Part of how it accomplishes this is by telling the story in discrete scenes and exchanges broken up by blurry, hazy, repeated motifs, like we’re witnessing fitful lucidity, and so there’s no real emphasis on one narrative over the other for most of its running time. Issues of mental health, of depression and delusion, are treated realistically - it’s not really a violent film at all, but watching the depressed version of Chris can be really uncomfortable because his pain is so plainly evident, and it’s hard to accept that the confident police detective version of Chris might be a fantasy. But because we see the detective version of Chris and the depressed version of Chris with equal weight, without any tricky “clues” that tell us which world is real and which is delusion, the ambiguity is as disorienting as it must be to live his lives. And right alongside this narrative of uncertain, shaky identity, there’s something going on involving these two therapists, and there’s the murder from the beginning of the film. Whoever Chris really is or is not, something happened to those two people.

In addition to avoiding cliché and easy answers, this film works because it’s made with skill at every level. The acting is consistently strong and played to a human scale, largely devoid of histrionics. These are real people, with real human flaws and failings. The editing is elliptical, terse exchanges broken up by lots of shots of London at night, the London of seedy flats and graffiti-scrawled back alleys, lit fitfully by streetlamps, often blurred into washes of color. Music is largely minimal and somber, with a couple of exceptions that feel claustrophobic instead. When the action moves out into the countryside, it feels freeing, a literal and metaphorical breath of fresh air. It feels of a piece with some other English films I’ve written about here - The Canal, Possum, and Kill List, with whom it shares some personnel and stylistic DNA. It’s not as relentlessly grim as Possum or as horrifying as The Canal, in a lot of ways it reminds me of Kill List - a man way out of his depth, only realizing the extent of it when it’s far too late.

Whoever that man might be. To its credit, the film won’t tell us one way or the other throughout. There’s no reversal or reveal here, we’re told everything up front, and so the uncertainty lies with the audience, with what we decide is most likely to be true or not. Shots that at first seem like they’re intended to convey mood or atmosphere help bring things together in the final act, and offhand comments throughout take on greater significance. Nobody is who they seem to be, in ways both small and terrifyingly large - the people we’re most inclined to dismiss may very well be right, and smiling faces can hide a lot. As Sigmund Freud was reputed to have said, even the paranoid has his enemies.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

The Lodge: Those Meddling Kids

There’s a particular type of film - rare, but not unheard-of - that I like to call the “seven-ten split.” See, most films that I watch for this thing of mine exhibit some degree of consistency. They may be good, they may be mediocre, they may be bad, but whatever it is they are, it’s pretty steady across the length of the film or across aspects of production. But every now and then, I’ll get one that does some things (or even most things) very well, but then fucks something up so spectacularly that it casts a pall over the rest of the film. 

Every film is a set of decisions, and though it’s unusual for one or two to mar an otherwise skillful production, The Lodge manages just that. It marries striking visuals and impressive timing to narrative choices that damn near sink the whole thing.

Richard is a divorcee who is trying to get his children Aiden and Mia to warm up to his new girlfriend (and soon-to-be fiancée) Grace. They’re not having any of it, carrying a fair amount of resentment at how their parents’ marriage ended and the role they see Grace as playing in that. Nonetheless, Richard wants the four of them to spend the Christmas holiday at the family lodge, far up in the mountains and far away from town. He’ll bring Grace and the kids up a week or so before Christmas, return to the city for work, and join them for the holiday. He thinks that if they just take the time to get know Grace, they’ll come around.

So it’s the two kids and the soon-to-be-stepmom they hate, all alone in the middle of nowhere. So that’s awkward. It doesn’t get any better when a blizzard comes in, knocking out the power.

And it gets even wore when they wake up one morning to find their phones dead, and the entire lodge emptied of everything. Clothes, food…

...the medicine Grace needs to keep the nightmares away.

Right off the bat, this film is trying to maintain a tricky balancing act- on the one hand, it’s potentially the story of two kids left alone with a possibly unstable woman, isolated up in the mountains. On the other, it’s potentially a story of the supernatural - why is the lodge empty? Why don’t their phones work? Why can’t they get the generator to function? What happened overnight? Either would work just fine, and for that matter, there’s a way to get these two stories to intersect that could be really interesting, but this is where the problems begin. In order to make those two possibilities work, you have to keep the audience guessing, maintaining a certain amount of ambiguity throughout. And once you commit to a particular resolution, it should be one that feels like we could have seen coming or one that makes sense in terms of the film’s internal logic. 

The first big problem this film has is with ambiguity, revealing something about Grace’s past pretty early on in ham-handed and obvious fashion. It would have been handled better indirectly and through judicious use of flashbacks than just sort of plopping it into our laps all of a sudden. It’s up there with the opening credits of Sinister for “don’t show us this part yet, dammit.” She’s not a new girlfriend with a dark secret if you tell us the dark secret before the first act is out, and yet that is exactly what I see here. A lot of the potential tension is burned off because we’re robbed of the opportunity to discover what’s wrong with Grace, and that’s the kind of gradual realization and escalation of stakes that works well in slow-burn psychological horror.

The second big problem is in how it pays off its resolution, which it does in what strikes me as the dumbest, least probable way I could think of. They way I tend to think of this is in terms of the film’ internal logic. Now, the presence of the supernatural violates the internal logic of, say, a drama, but in a horror film you can bend or even break some of the rules of causality or physics or life and death or whatever. I don’t have a problem with that - what I do have a problem with is behavior from human beings in the film that doesn’t make sense in terms of how human beings behave. It’s really tough to talk about this without spoiling a major reveal in the film, but certain characters in this film behave in ways that are really tough to believe people actually would. We’re talking way less likely than the usual “why did they go into that dark room” stuff, because I think that’s lazy and cheap to criticize - people in horror movies don’t know that they’re in horror movies (Scream aside), but this isn’t that. This is so contrived that it yanked me right out of the film, and it ends up being the least dramatically interesting way you could pay off all of the remaining ambiguity of the first two acts. Not only is it highly implausible, it’s also not very interesting and kills the film’s momentum.

It’s incredibly frustrating (like, I went past “disappointed” and headed straight for “angry”) because, early reveal aside, this film starts off really really well and maintains a nice, simmering sense of unease for the first half or so, and I even like how it ends, but goddamn the path it takes to get there is intensely frustrating in how inept and improbable it feels. It feels shipped in from another, far lesser movie. It has excellent visual sense - there are lots of composed shots of icy landscapes and still, ominous interiors and repeated visual motifs, including an interesting one of a dollhouse interior that mimics the interior of the lodge. There are periodic cutaways to it throughout, and it seems like it should be communicating something, or that it is, but the third-act reveal that pissed me off so much just sort of trivializes it, making what could have been mysterious painfully literal. It does a really good job of using crisp, sudden edits to create tension, and holding a sense of stillness in some scenes just long enough to make what comes next genuinely startling. There’s a sequence early on that made me sort of jump without it being a jump scare. The acting is good throughout - restrained, understated, never really resorting to histrionics. In its staging and performance it’s tremendously self-assured, which makes some of the narrative choices all the more baffling.

In some ways I can’t help but compare this film (unfavorably) to Hereditary. I don’t think it plagiarized it or anything, but both deal with deaths in the family, strained relationships filled with resentment, and both use dollhouses as ways to tell the story. And both have a very strong visual sense. But Hereditary knew how to tease out information and then sort of connect all the dots in the end so you could see how everything fit together. This film just sort of tells you shit right up front, and pays it off in the least interesting way possible. It feels like someone started out to make a smart, icy psychological horror film and ended up with an adult episode of Scooby-Doo instead.

IMDB entry

Available from Amazon

Available on Hulu

Lake Mungo: Death Takes Everything, Eventually

There’s a great line from one of my favorite non-horror films, Unforgiven: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he’s got, and everything he’s ever going to have.” It captures, I think, the yawning, gaping emptiness that comes with grief; the inescapable absence. When someone dies, it’s not just them that’s gone, it’s also all of the future days you’re never going to have together, all of the chances you’d have to make amends for things you regretted saying or doing, any chance to watch them change or grow. 

All of those things are gone, and though I think it’s something easily enough appreciated intellectually, it’s hard to really communicate how it feels, that feeling of finality and the regrets that come with it. One of the things, then, that makes Lake Mungo such an accomplishment, apart from being a ghost story told with skill and restraint, is the way it communicates the specific impacts of grief on the people who experience it. There are a lot of emotional notes that horror can hit, but sorrow isn’t one that gets a lot of attention, and this film does it really well.

It’s presented as a documentary, about the tragic drowning of 17-year-old Alice Palmer during a weekend outing with her parents June and Russell, and her younger brother Mathew. One moment she’s swimming with her brother, the next she’s just…gone. It’s some time before divers manage to recover her body, and Russell takes on the difficult job of identifying her. Alice is gone. One day she’s there, the next she’s not, and each of the surviving Palmers deals with it in their own way. Russell throws himself into his work. June starts taking midnight walks and peering into other people’s houses, desperate to step outside of her own life. Mathew takes photographs.

And then they start hearing strange noises in the middle of the night. And Mathew starts noticing figures in his photographs. 

Figures that look like Alice.

There are a number of ways the story could have gone from here, but instead of leaning hard into scares, it leans hard into the grief that the Palmers are feeling and how it affects the way they think. Russell doesn’t know what to believe - after all, he saw Alice’s body. But June wants so much to believe that Alice is still alive that even Russell starts to doubt himself. Mathew sets up cameras all over the house, trying to see what else he can capture. Eventually, June contacts a psychic. It never tips over into histrionics - their coping methods may not be especially healthy, but they don’t abandon all reason. Mostly what you feel is an impairment in their ability to really communicate with each other - they don’t want to upset or hurt each other, so they keep secrets from each other, let things go unsaid. This is a really common human tendency, there’s nothing unbelievable or melodramatic about it.

But there’s a real tension that develops from this - on the one hand, they’re not telling each other everything, and on the other, they’re desperately searching for explanations, for some way to understand why Alice is gone. So they’re keeping some secrets and digging into others. And this leads to some interesting narrative reversals as the film goes on. What we thought was one thing turns out to be another, new information comes to light, and it turns out that Alice was keeping secrets of her own. As a couple of characters put it, she wasn’t just keeping secret - she was even keeping secret the fact that she had secrets. There were things that Alice didn’t tell anyone about, and so you have this wounded family trying to explain this mysterious presence while not telling each other the whole truth, and so, like any good documentary, as the narrative unwinds our expectations are upended as new explanations come to light. We think it’s one thing, then another, only for an important discovery in the third act to make us question everything all over again.

Also, like any good horror film presented as a documentary, the filmmakers handle the narrative conceit deftly by playing it completely straight. It’s really, really easy for horror filmmakers to screw up a documentary or found-footage conceit by tipping their hand too early, by signposting that something scary and bad is going to happen, when that’s not really how really good documentaries work. Real documentaries are narratives too, and often use pretty standard storytelling devices to craft a particular narrative, including sudden, dramatic revelations. You don’t always want to tell your audience too much about what is coming, and horror films that position themselves as documentaries of one sort or another all too often don’t trust in the restraint that requires, and instead do things like open with title cards describing the “horrible, indescribable events of that night” or something like that, or worse, try to inject scary imagery in the middle of it like the documentary itself is haunted or something like that. It’s trying too hard, and usually the film suffers as a result. Here, the filmmakers give us a documentary first - lots of cleanly produced talking-head segments, with consistently solid, naturalistic performances, interspersed with believable archival footage. The news broadcasts look like news broadcasts, the family photographs look like family photographs, the home movies look like home movies. It might not seem like a big deal,, but those sort of mundane, naturalistic things can be some of the toughest to fake if you don’t have a good eye for detail, and since we’re so used to see stuff like that in our everyday lives, any artificiality tends to leap out and ruin our immersion in the story. 

The archival footage does  a lot of hard work here on its own - a big part of this film is the Palmers believing what they do on the base of photographic and video evidence, and this is all based on early-00s technology, so the level of imprecision contained in the visual evidence reflects the shaky subjectivity on which the Palmers rely to shore up their belief that Alice isn’t entirely gone. Photos are blurry and dimly lit, video footage is grainy and distorted, phone-camera footage is pixelated and low-resolution. It all could be what the Palmers think it is, but could just as easily be something else. Even home-movie footage of Alice is often blurry, as if she’s already fading from memory despite her family’s best efforts.

There are also lots of long, moodily-lit insert shots of the house, hallways and empty rooms which work on a couple of different levels. First, they help establish the sort of atmosphere that a documentary about possible supernatural occurrences would want to establish - plenty of good haunted-house films have shots of empty rooms and hallways as part of their arsenal, but here, accompanying those shots with voicer-over instead of spooky music helps them to read less like a haunted-house film than documentarians trying to capture that same feeling. It’s subtle, but important. Second, they reinforce the sense of emptiness and absence that the Palmers are feeling. The house is a little emptier than it should be, and so it also reads like an attempt to convey the sadness and the grief the Palmers are feeling as well. And because the whole thing reads so much like a documentary about the subject matter rather than a piece of fiction dressed as a documentary, it’s easy to get engaged with it, which makes the third-act revelations and conclusion hit that much harder.

And it’s that third act that really brings the film home. We go on this journey with the Palmers as they look for some kind of explanation for the inexplicable, and they do get closure of a sort, but it’s not really neat or clean in any way, and as the final credits roll, we’re denied any neat conclusions as well. It takes some time to pay off, but it does in a way that settles a bone-deep chill on you, one that is equal parts horror and sadness. Some people can move on with their lives, and others will never, ever have that chance, because was taken away from them, along with everything else they were ever going to have. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon