What Keeps You Alive: Running Out The Clock

I know I talk about it a lot, but boy, is pacing ever important in movies, especially scary movies. There are all kinds of ways to handle it, but knowing when to let off the gas and when to floor it is critical in terms of building up tension and mood. Sure, you can go full-tilt from the start, but that runs the risk of numbing the audience. The quiet moments make the loud ones stand out. An expertly paced horror movie plays the feelings of its audience like an instrument, and pacing has a lot to do with that. 

It’s the biggest problem with What Keeps You Alive as well. I mean, it’s also a clumsy, obvious melodrama in a lot of ways, but it’s the pacing that kills it. More specifically, how certain choices mean that the filmmakers have to fill a lot of time that they wouldn’t have if they’d built the story up more naturally, and the results end up blowing past scary and landing somewhere in the realm of the ridiculous.

This is the story of Jackie and Julie. They’re celebrating their first anniversary as a married couple by going up to a big lake house that Jackie’s family owns. It’s a huge, sprawling, rustic place overlooking a gorgeous piece of Canadian wilderness. They’re there for an idyllic weekend, but almost immediately, things seem just a little bit off. Jackie keeps sort of staring out at the lake, and she’s sort of evasive about how long it’s been since she’s been up here. And then, their first night there, a car pulls up to the lake house. It’s a young woman named Sarah, who lives on the other side of the lake and was surprised to see the lights on. She says it’s been awhile since anyone’s been up here…

…and then she calls Jackie “Megan.”

It’s not difficult to figure out what the basic hook is going to be: Jackie has been keeping secrets from Julie, and we expect that over the course of the film the deception will slowly unravel, as Julie discovers more and more about Jackie’s past, and what happened up here at the lake, all those years ago. That’s a time-honored story, and a slow build of unease leading to some horrible revelation could be really scary. I mean, in some ways that’s the basic story of Honeymoon, which builds to a chilling conclusion based on gradually increasing dread. There are a few ways you could subvert it as well - you could lead the audience to believe it’s one type of secret when it’s actually another, you could lead the audience to believe one person’s hiding something really bad when it’s actually another, you could even lead the audience to think that there’s something wrong with one of them when actually two people are in cahoots. It doesn’t even need to be an especially complicated story, since the real work is in finding out what happened and how bad it really gets. In finding out who this person you thought you knew really is. 

What this film chooses to do instead is forsake the slow, ominous buildup (apart from a few bits here and there) and just drop the other shoe at the end of the first act. That’s audacious, I’ll give it that - I wasn’t especially impressed with the film at the opening, but I didn’t see that coming, and it did give me pause. I didn’t expect it, and I like it when a film does the unexpected, at least on principle. The problem, then, is what it does with all of the time remaining in the film. 

By revealing the twist early, the filmmakers defy convention to a degree, but it leaves them with the problem of how to make the other hour or so interesting. As it turns out, they just aren’t up to the task. Now, instead of a gradually escalating sense of unease and paranoia leading up to a shocking revelation, we get a sudden, shocking revelation (that still feels a little underbaked - we’ve just gotten to know these people and now this is happening) followed by a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse that grows increasingly ludicrous the longer it continues, making everything feel less and less believable and more and more padded for the sake of the running time. 

Part of this is down to characterization. There are a lot of ways you can play someone whose dark secret has been revealed, and the longer they’re onscreen with the protagonists, the more and more the antagonist becomes a cackling villain from a Lifetime Network movie about how the person I loved wasn’t who I thought they were. There’s monologuing (so much monologuing) and even a point where the antagonist shines a flashlight under her face, I guess for the benefit of the audience? It just seems silly. And as the antagonist monologues and makes choices that make no sense outside of the need to fill time, the protagonists engage in tearful rounds of “why are you doing this?” instead of fighting for their lives. Nobody behaves in ways that make actual human sense after the first thirty minutes, and it’s obvious that that’s because if they did, the film would be less than an hour long.

It’s hard to overlook bad pacing, but no film is perfect, and generally flaws in one area can be compensated for by strengths in another. Do other things really well, and the things you do badly can be overlooked. But again, there’s not a lot here to distract us. The writing tends toward the wooden throughout - there aren’t a lot of exposition dumps for a (nice) change, but the dialogue still doesn’t sound like how people actually talk to each other, putting it at odds with the largely naturalistic setting, a problem exacerbated by how much of it there ends up being as the movie goes on. Like, the longer everyone talks, the less natural any of it sounds. The score’s a little too intrusive too - there’s no reason for almost every scene to be punctuated by minor-key piano or ominous synthesizer swells, it doesn’t add anything in terms of mood and is even a little distracting at points. There’s no reason for a jeep ride through the country before anything bad has happened to sound scary. That’s a technique that can be used to good effect when employed sparingly to create a sense of unease, but here it’s just like the soundtrack got stuck on “creepy” and nobody could figure out how to shut it off. It’s a good-looking movie, I’ll give it that, leaning heavily into gorgeous shots of the Canadian wilderness and not getting overly fussy, and whatever else is wrong with this film, there are some interesting editorial and directorial choices scattered throughout - uses of light and sudden cuts to suggest disorientation, some nice shot juxtapositions toward the end, it’s just too bad that it’s all in service of a story that beggars belief. 

If the filmmakers had made, say, the first half of the film a character study with little details that seem off scattered throughout, just enough to pique our attention without being too ham-handed, and then hit us with the reveal and escalated tension from there, there might have been something to this. As it is, it peaks far too early, runs out of steam way too quickly, and limps to its ending. Pretty much every cliché gets tagged along the way, and even after what feels like an eternity of increasingly contrived dilemmas leading up to a pretty stock ending…there’s still half an hour left. That means that things go from the contrived to the ridiculous, and after an hour or so of characters being underdeveloped and improbable twists and false endings, even more exposition has to be crammed in in the form of flashbacks to make the ending they DO come up with make any sense at all, except for yet another last-minute twist so unbelievable as to be almost comical. Of all of the reactions the filmmakers were aiming for, I don’t think any of them were me throwing my arms up and yelling “REALLY?” in the privacy of my own home. 

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Final Prayer: The Discernment Of Spirits

The story of St. Ignatius Loyola begins with him bedridden by fever, during which time a vision of an angel appears to him, telling him not to worry. What distinguished Loyola (and subsequently the Jesuit order he founded) was his response. He was not glad of the angel, but instead asked how he could know the angel was really an angel, and not a vision sent by the Devil to tempt him? Thus, the Jesuit order has as one of its primary precepts the “discernment of spirits,” a tendency to skepticism and intellectual rigor not always found in Christianity. 

Final Prayer (a/k/a The Borderlands) is a reasonably smart, tense, found-footage (of a sort) film that doesn’t overplay its hand, and thought it never quite reaches the heights of terror it could, it comes pretty close. It’s also very much a movie about the gradients of belief, and how it does or does not intersect with religious faith.

We begin with what appears to be some kind of archival footage from Portugal, of law enforcement raiding a church, pulling bricks away from the wall behind the altar to reveal what’s hidden there. It appears to be audiovisual equipment - speakers ,wires, etc. It’s all frantic and chaotic, interrupted by someone taking a call - a bunch of people have disappeared, someone else is in intensive care. It’s over before we can really make sense of it. Cut to what seems to be an entirely different movie, and a man named Gray cataloging a bunch of audiovisual equipment and rigging a cottage up with cameras. Gray has been hired by the Vatican to provide technical support to two of its official representatives - Deacon and Mark - who are headed to a very small village in rural England to investigate a miracle reported by the village’s priest, Father Crellick. 

As investigators of miracles for the Vatican, Deacon and Mark are in a profession that requires them to apply scientific rigor to matters of faith. There’s money in miracles - increases in church attendance, tourist business - and faked miracles undermine faith and the legitimacy of the church. So their job is investigating miracles, to try and debunk them to weed out the fake ones, then pass their reports up the chain. Gray is basically just the A/V guy, a gun for hire. Deacon arrives first, a dour Scotsman who greets the news that the cottage is wired for video and that he’ll have to wear a head cam all the time (official policy since “the incident in Belem”) with distaste. Mark is in charge, but he’s running late. Deacon greets the news that Mark is the lead on this investigation with even more distaste. There’s a history there. They’re all bunked up together in a small two-bedroom cottage for the duration. Mark gets the master bedroom, Deacon and Gray have to bunk together. Nobody’s happy about it.

The church is very small, and very, very old. Father Crellick seems nervous, but he has a videotape to show the investigators. It was shot during a christening, and as Father Crellick begins to baptize the child, the child begins to cry, then wail, then scream. And then there are strange creaking and shuddering noises. The cross falls from the altar. The footage goes staticky, as if something is emanating a powerful magnetic field, and Crellick greets something off-camera rapturously as “Our Father.”  

It’s a very old church.

The film itself is as careful and measured as the protagonists, the majority of its run time occupied by a meticulous investigation of the church and its archival documents. Deacon and Mark are here to find a mundane explanation for an apparent miracle. And really, that’s how science works. There’s an adversarial edge to it. It’s not intended personally (usually - there’s always the potential for ego to get in the way), but rather as a way to ensure that the work is as strong as it can be, the evidence as strong as it can be, so that the claims are as defensible as possible. You pick as many holes in the research as you can to show the researchers where they need to strengthen their argument. And that’s what Deacon and Mark do - they meet claims of mystery with adversarial empiricism. If the Vatican is going to declare something a miracle, they’ll want to be as sure as possible that it isn’t otherwise. So there’s an interesting contrast between the natural and supernatural right at the front here, but it isn’t overplayed. For the protagonists, it’s not a crisis of faith as in a film like The Exorcist, it’s just the job.

The three protagonists provide a study in contrasts as well - Deacon is equal parts a skeptic and man of faith. He sincerely believes in the mission, because he is a true believer in God, and he’s a skeptic because he reveres God and has seen plenty of bad fakes. Mark, it turns out, is a high-ranking church official, an officious little prick who has forgotten his faith, so caught up in the worldly affairs of the church (he was late because he was attending a fundraiser in Boston) that he vocally expresses his frustration that the church refuses to move past “medieval superstition.” He is skeptical to the exclusion of faith, more interested in bureaucratic procedure and fitting rules to the world than admitting the possibility of mysteries. Gray possesses neither faith nor skepticism - he’s not religious (he believes in “you know…stuff”), but he’s also the most gullible of the three, the one most likely to overlook mundane explanations once weird shit starts happening. Father Crellick completes the picture as a man entirely of faith without an ounce of skepticism. He’s seen a miracle, he’s sure of it. What else could it be?

The film works well as a slow burn - at first they’re just investigating a church, going through procedure, looking for the usual signs of fakery, then the strange noises start, then the strange events, Father Crellick starts off squirrelly and heads for downright erratic, and then the stuff they can’t explain starts happening. It kicks off late, in the third act, but once it does it picks up momentum quickly. It doesn’t quite reach the gonzo heights I was expecting or hoping for, but it also never overreaches in what it shows and doesn’t show, and so the result is solidly unsettling.

On the other hand, the found-footage conceit feels like a bit of an odd fit here. It isn’t handled badky at all, there’s narrative plausibility (even since the incident in Belem, everything and everyone gets recorded at all times, like the spiritual equivalent of body cams) and the filmmakers don’t overplay it with a goofy title card, but the conceit breaks in a couple of places. It’s not presented as recovered footage per se, and so avoids some of the bigger ways that conceit tends to strain credulity, but they commit to the perspective strongly enough that it’s a little jarring on the couple of occasions when they don’t. The acting is solid - everyone mostly seems like real people, if not especially well fleshed-out. There’s a bit of backstory related to the opening that gets developed throughout and shines some light on Deacon, but that’s about it. Gray and Mark are both kind of abrasive at first, but once they get down to the brass tacks of the investigation, everyone demonstrates a quiet competence that leavens the more obnoxious moments. Mark does start to verge on caricature by the end, but by that point the tension is high enough that the film’s momentum sort of carries you past it. The cinematography isn’t especially flashy, since we’re mostly looking at captured footage from headcams and static cameras installed in their lodgings and the church, but it employs camera noise and interference along with spare, careful sound design to good effect. 

The film too, on a structural level, explores the tension between the supernatural and the natural. As the film goes on, mysterious things start to happen - strange noises in the middle of the night, the crying and wailing of a child in the church when it’s supposed to be empty, an especially unpleasant omen involving a burning lamb - creating a sense of foreboding and unease. It’s easy to believe that there’s something supernatural going on (it is, after all, a horror film), only for each weird little incident to be explained as something mundane. There are all sorts of little moments that you expect to turn into scary moments, but don’t - part of this feels like it’s feeding tension and denying release, but it’s also sort of saying that sometimes your expectations are wrong. Sometimes it really IS just a small, quiet cottage in the middle of the night. 

It’s like the film itself is doing the protagonists’ job. There’s a plausible explanation for everything that happens to them…up to a point. And it is at that point the cracks begin to show, in the third act, when the rational explanations run out and each person’s approach to belief leads them into the dark and the horrible, utterly inexplicable thing that waits there. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” They wanted to know if the events Father Crellick witnessed were the doing of something beyond our understanding, and they found out. They discerned the spirits, and it cost lives. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Books Of Blood: Hastily Stitched Together

Anytime I write about something, I try to make a point of focusing on the film and not really talking too much about who wrote it, who starred in it, or who directed it. This is partially because I want to focus on the film as the final product, and partially because I think that sometimes the horror genre (at least in the U.S.) tends a little bit too much toward personalities. Sometimes otherwise-respected writers or directors turn out real stinkers, and reverence for the personality eclipses the quality of the work. Or franchises (ugh) get a pass for being more of the same based on the strength of the personalities (directors or actors especially) involved. Plus, films aren’t made by one person, they’re a collective effort. Basically, my thing is: Regardless of who made it, how did it turn out?

But this time, I kind of have to, because when I looked up Books Of Blood in anticipation that I would write it up, I was struck immediately by two things: First, that it was, as the title indicated, putatively based on the anthology of the same name by author Clive Barker, and that made me say “yay!” to myself. Second, that it was directed by Brannon Braga, whose most recent work has been on shows and films in the Star Trek franchise and more recently, science fiction comedy The Orville. And that made me say “uh-oh” to myself. There is little in his work as a writer or director to indicate much experience with horror, or at least the kind of horror found in Barker’s work at its best.

See, here’s the thing - the great thing about Barker’s writing, whether it’s more straight-up horror (e.g., The Midnight Meat Train, The Hellbound Heart) or dark fantasy (The Great And Secret Show, Imajica), is that it imagines that just below the mundane skin of everyday existence lies a hidden, secret world of great mystery, and some folks are unfortunate enough to discover this in the least likely of places. And in the instances where it makes itself known, the effect is more often one of terror than wonder. His stories also often treat the human body with the kind of detached objectification that you usually go to early David Cronenberg for, and at its best, it’s really unsettling, intense stuff. It’s hard for me to trust that someone who’s spent most of their career on franchise television is really going to go off and turn in something that does justice to the source material. That it’s a Hulu Original, well, Monsterland aside, that’s not encouraging either. 

But that’s not to say that people can’t surprise us. Every now and then someone known for a particular style of television or film will surprise with something out of left field, and Monsterland (at least the first episode) suggests that everything Hulu commissions doesn’t have to be disappointingly mediocre. So I wanted to give this a fair shot.

I gave it a fair shot, and sure enough, very little of what makes the source material so special makes it into this movie. In fact, it’s even worse than I anticipated. It’s a little too corny to be taken seriously, but too gory to really be camp. Even worse, it’s a mess. Apparently this was supposed to be an anthology series, but the decision was made just to throw three stories together and package it as an anthology film instead, and the result reads like one of those term papers that was written in an hour or two the night before. 

The film begins with someone closing up a used bookstore for the night. He seems nervous, vigilant. Being alone in a somewhat-spooky old bookstore makes that a reasonable response, but it’s not ghosts he’s worried about, as we discover when he’s confronted by a thug come to collect on a payment. The guy doesn’t have it, but tells the thug where he can find a one-of-a-kind book worth millions. A book called…you guessed it…the Book of Blood. (DUN-dun-DUUUNNNNNN!) He gives the thug an address, and the thug kills him for his trouble. Which seems like bad business to me, since the dead can’t pay, ever, but away the nameless thug and his accomplice go, to a neighborhood they describe as “cursed.” The accomplice is nervous, but away they drive. And then we come to the first entry…

Jenna

Jenna is a young woman who lives with her wealthy mother and…father? Stepfather? Dude seems kind of young to be her dad…in a sleek, modern house on a beach in the middle of nowhere. Jenna’s a morbid young woman, constantly drawing ghoulish, monstrous faces in her sketchbook, and she isn’t happy about anything. She looks out at the waves crashing against the beach, and sees drowning and freezing to death in “that hellish water.” Her mother’s mad, and at first it isn’t clear why, but as it transpires, she moved everyone out to this remote house for Jenna’s benefit. Jenna suffers from misophonia, which is typically characterized by aversion to specific sounds, but for the purposes of this film seems to include sounds of almost any sort, short of conversation. Jenna dropped out of college because of some unspecified “incident,” and then she went to live on “the farm,” which seems to have been some kind of treatment facility. Jenna sketches and wears noise-cancelling headphones a lot. 

And then, after dinner, Jenna overhears her parents talking (because apparently misophonia also gives you super-hearing in this film) and realizes her mother is pissed off that she’s blown off college and just sits around and mopes. Like any good parent, she decides she’s just going to ship her back to “the farm.” So Jenna grabs a bunch of cash out of a stash in her parent’s closet and hightails it for L.A.. Except that someone seems to be following her, so she jumps off the bus early and lands at a charming little B&B in a small town. Is that a lot? It’s kind of a lot, and that’s just the first 15 minutes or so of a segment that takes up most of the movie. The B&B is run by a charming older couple, who say that they like to think of everyone who stays there as family.

No, that’s not ominous at all.

By this point, the problems are already starting to show. Most notable is the clumsy, artificial dialogue. It’s true not just in this segment, but throughout the film - everything is an expository speech, nobody talks like actual human beings. We’re talking, like Criminal Minds or Law & Order: SVU levels of “nobody talks that way.” It’s most effective at killing any attempt at atmosphere that might develop. It does have help in that department, though - the pacing is completely squirrelly as well. This segment feints at being a couple of different stories before it settles on a through-line, and takes way too long to get there. What’s the deal with all the weird shit she sketches? What was “the incident?” When did her misophonia develop? All of these are sort of teased as meaning something - and they do, we just don’t get resolution on them in the actual segment about her, and they aren’t what’s driving her story. Then there’s mysterious figure following her, and then she gets to the B&B and there’s lots of weird stuff around the edges, some odd nightmare imagery, and so then it seems like maybe it’s about paranoia and an impending psychological breakdown. 

But…nope. To its credit, the real story is an interesting idea, and definitely feels like the kind of thing Barker would come up with (no, this isn’t actually one of the stories from the source text, it was written specifically for this), but it’s lost in all of the haphazard plot points before and after. And then, just when it feels like it should be coming to a close, it just keeps going and going, ending on a non-sequitur that robs it of any power whatsoever. Jenna’s misophonia never comes off more as than unnecessary contrivance, there’s no real mood to speak of (because everything feels so artificial), and so the stranger turns it takes feel more confusing than anything else. The whole thing sort of feels like a bunch of stuff being thrown at the wall to see what sticks, and none of it does. 

Miles

We open with a video recording of a man, standing nude in the middle of a white room. The lights shut off, and the darkness is immediately filled with a cacophony of shrieks, growls, and wails. When the lights come up, the man is curled up on the floor, the walls around hum now filled with writing - chaotic, overlapping scrawls in what appears to be blood. This is the kind of moment I expect from a Clive Barker story, and for the record, this is the only material taken directly from the source text…and it’s the narrative bookend of the anthology, so there’s not a whole story to work with. But it’s a striking image with which to open the segment. The man is Simon, and he is a speaker for the dead. This is how the dead speak through him. Mary is a professor in…well, her field is never specified, but she’s apparently made a career as someone who debunks psychic phenomena using science. A tried-and-true skeptic, who lost her son Miles to leukemia and has grieved ever since. Simon, of course, offers to perform a “convocation” on her terms to prove that his abilities are real, and that he can put her in touch with Miles. 

And so this is the story of how Mary comes to know Simon and learn about his abilities, and how their relationship changes over time. It’s a much more cohesive story than the first segment, and has some genuinely creepy and unsettling moments, but ends up being let down again by the dialogue (again, all tell, no show - Simon introduces himself by breaking into Mary’s office and going through a whole monologue about who she is and who he is and it’s like…fuck, we know) and by a disappointingly conventional turn and resolution that makes the whole thing feel like an episode of Tales From The Crypt, and like I said up front, this isn’t campy, at least not intentionally, so the end of what is an noticeably shorter segment compared to Jenna just has all of the air let out of it. Like the first story, there’s a germ of a good idea and some good imagery, but even though it’s much tighter and more economical about how it gets to the point, the narrative itself ends up being so pedestrian that it brings the whole thing down.

Bennett

So this isn’t so much a third story as it is the leftovers from the introduction and the other two stories. The titular Bennett turns out to be the thug from the opening, and he and his accomplice Steve are on their way to collect the book, from the address provided to them by the bookseller before he died. Without spoiling anything, I can say that it’s a neighborhood and a house we’ve seen before already, so we sort of know what Bennett is going to find. There’s really not much story here at all - Bennett and Steve arrive someplace that feels like equal parts urban blight and haunted forest (which to be fair is a very Barker kind of vibe), there are some jump scares and a messy death for reasons never made clear, and then Bennett’s journey very conveniently takes him through places we’ve seen before. It ends up feeling very, very much like they tried to pass off what was supposed to be the bookend to the opening as its own story, since there’s no real plot or development of who Bennett is and why he does what he does. He’s an unsympathetic character meant to meet a nasty end in the service of some moral, but just when it feels like his story should be wrapped up and thus the film ended, the perspective shifts from Bennett back to Jenna, and we learn what the incident at school was, and Jenna comes to some kind of reckoning. It does end up someplace I wasn’t expecting and there is some power to it, but it’s not nearly as effective as it could have been. Again, this is because the segment, like much of the film, is a disjointed mess, very obviously cobbled together from parts. It’s the second false ending of the film, the shift back to Jenna doesn’t really make sense because the film didn’t begin with her, and it reveals her to be a far less sympathetic character than she already was. I think the end would have packed more of a punch if we’d cared about her, but as it stands it sort of comes off like “you know what? Good.” There’s not a lot of horror there, and the film doesn’t so much end as lurch to a halt.

I don’t like to judge films by anything other than the end product if I can help it. But everything about this feels exactly like someone with little to no experience directing horror attempting to take what could be salvaged out of a failed anthology and present it as a marketable product, and if nothing about that sentence sounds great, well, there you go.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Monsterland, Episode 1 - Port Fourchon, Louisiana: Who Do You Want To Be?

It’s becoming more and more common for streaming services to commission exclusive series of different types - I mean, shit, that’s like 80% of Netflix’s model at this point, and that’s not really anything new. HBO got their start re-running movies before they moved to prestige series programming, so it’s no surprise to see streaming services follow in their footsteps. 

For example, Hulu has a horror series called Into The Dark, 90-minute horror takes on different holidays. I’ve written about a couple of those films here. Neither of them were very good. So seeing that they’d commissioned a series called Monsterland, based more or less on the book North American Lake-Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud, I was a bit skeptical. Especially since Hulu already adapted his short story “The Visible Filth” as a film called Wounds, which also…wasn’t very good. Straight-up, Hulu does not have a good track record for original horror. 

So I was skeptical, but Monsterland had gotten some good press and some good word-of-mouth, so I thought I’d check out the first episode, Port Fourchon, Louisiana. And it’s…pretty damn good. It’s a relentlessly bleak story about monsters and monstrous behavior that avoids some easy clichés and aims its punches directly at the gut. It’s weird - the user reviews on IMDB (not exactly the acme of criticism, to be fair) seem to consistently pan this for not “really” being horror. It is. It’s just not as simple and literal as what some folks expect.

We open on a man, about as nondescript as they come, up to his waist in water. He’s strangling a teenage girl to death. Once she is dead, he drags her body from the water and pulls out a knife. He goes to work on her face, but we don’t really see what he’s doing. Once he is finished, he puts her clothes (among other things) into a box. He puts the box into the back of his car. There are a lot of boxes in the back of his car. Each of them bears a name.

And then we meet Toni. She’s trying to bathe her daughter, Jack. Jack is screaming, punching, kicking, biting, anything not to be bathed. Jack seems almost feral, and Toni is reduced to hosing her down in the kiddie pool in their backyard. There is weary resignation there. The absence of hope.

Toni looks young - too young to be on her own with a kid, but so she is. They live in a ramshackle little house in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. She’s a waitress at diner as squalid and forlorn as her house, as the look on her face, as her life, as the whole damn town. She’s arguing with the utility company about an overdue payment while Jack screams at the top of her lungs. Child care is tough to find when your kid has a nasty habit of going after other kids with scissors. But she manages to wrangle another week of it. The lady watching Jack says she can’t keep watching her, but for today it’s taken care of.

And so she goes into work, and she’s got a customer. His name is Alex. He’s the man from the beginning, the one who drowned the girl.

What follows is a story that manages to combine the crushing burden of The Babadook with the sort of life-in-the-margins story that Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer did so well. The pressure on Toni is tremendous - Jack’s prone to fits of violence that make her impossible to leave alone and about as impossible to trust to anyone else for long, and she’s barely holding it together waiting tables in a rundown diner in a go-nowhere small town, Jack’s dad isn’t really in the picture because he has a really hard time controlling his temper and his fists. She’s young, but grown up in a hurry by the responsibilities she has. Like Amelia in The Babadook, her child swallows up all of Toni’s life and there’s no room left for her to relax or enjoy any sort of connection. The cost of this is sketched in elegantly in a heartbreaking display of vulnerability and desperation for connection that has you dreading what comes next. And like in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (which I really should write up at some point), Toni lives a life filled with desperation - not enough money, not enough time, no margin for error, where any one thing going wrong could send her falling through the cracks, another casualty of a society that doesn’t care for its own. Her every moment is about survival - hers and Jack’s. 

And so here comes Alex, who pays for his cheeseburger with a $100 bill. He wants some conversation. No, really - that’s all. Just some conversation. He asks Toni if she could be anyone else in the world, who would she be? And this leads Toni to consider some of the pivotal moments in her life, the ones that led her here today. There are flashbacks, reveries to moments when things could have been different - a childhood bike ride, her future stretching out before her, moments of almost-normalcy ending in horrible violence, an attempt at a home abortion. The story moves along at a decent clip - we don’t really get to know Toni all that well, but we get everything we need to know. A sense of who she was, what choices led her here, and how she struggles with all of that now.  

And this is part of the elegance of this episode. It’s as much about people and the very real horrors they face as it is the more traditional kinds of monsters. This is that kind of horror that I really, really like - the kind that intertwines the real horrors of life with supernatural horror. You think it’s going to be one kind of story, but a late turn in the proceedings reveals it’s another. There’s a tension for most of it - we know what Alex is (well, we think we do) and so for most of its hour runtime, it feels like we’re watching the inevitable drawn out. Like, we saw the opening, we know how this ends, but we don’t. It could just as easily be a snuff film of Toni’s last days, and Alex is definitely a monster, but he isn’t exactly the monster he appears to be - and Toni discovers what he meant when he asked “if you could be anyone other than you, who would you be?” Toni really, really wants to be somewhere else, someone else, wants to shed her life and start over. The need for it makes her scream with its insistence. Who does she want to be?

Like any good short story, this is a story told economically, in terse exchanges, interludes, vignettes, and the environment. The cinematography is washed-out and overcast, painting a picture devoid of any real hope. There is very little joy in Toni’s world. The best she can hope for is fleeting moments of something just slightly better than relief, and when she dares hope, it’s dashed by Jack’s screaming. It’s a story told in drowned rats, rose-colored memories, nights without light, beatings, moments when everything could change, but doesn’t, and terrible choices, when confronted by a creature that sheds lives as easily as we do our work clothes.

Toni wonders what could have been, how things could have been different, if only. And her encounter with something not quite human changes her. I wish I could say it changed her for the better, but then this wouldn’t really be horror, would it?

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu