Piercing: Everyone Has A Plan

(Sorry about yet another delay - my second vaccination dose packed enough of a kick to make me sleep all weekend)

Conventional wisdom has it that serial killers work up to their first murder through extensive use of fantasy. They imagine what it’s going to be like, they plan and plan and plan, linger over the details, imagine how it’s going to feel, until the day they work up the courage to make the fantasy reality. And then as often as not, the plan falls apart. Intended victims have minds of their own, not as pliant and obedient as in fantasy, and it’s a lot harder to kill someone than you imagine it will be. Bodies are hard to get rid of too. I suspect this is especially a problem for most serial killers, because so much of serial murder seems so often to be about control and dominance, and that’s a lot easier to accomplish in your own imagination, where the props in your fantasy don’t have agency and circumstances always seem to bend exactly to your needs. Reality isn’t like that at all, so all of the planning based on fantasy crumbles. Control is lost. In the words of Mike Tyson - “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Piercing is a stylish, unsettling film about best-laid plans and how they go awry. It largely lands well, though I’m not sure it quite sticks the ending.

The film opens with a man standing over a baby in a red-lit room, icepick in hand. So you know we’re in for some shit. The man is Reed, and the baby is his child. Reed does not stab the child, but you can tell it’s taking some restraint. His wife comes into the room and he hides the icepick behind his back. He’s a family man, but he wants to kill, very badly. He’s preparing to take a trip out of town that his wife thinks is for a business conference, but is in reality his opportunity to book a hotel room, hire a sex worker, and then murder her. He’s thought it all through very carefully. He packs for the trip - clothes, toiletries, rope, chloroform, his icepick, a journal detailing the steps he’ll take to the letter - and kisses his wife and child goodbye.

Once ensconced in his hotel room, he rehearses what’s going to happen - what he has planned to happen, what he has fantasized about happening - before calling the agency. The woman he’d asked for is unavailable, they tell him - would he prefer another woman who could be there right away? It’s already starting to go wrong. But he’s waited too long for this, so he agrees. Cut to Jackie, sleeping on satin sheets, awoken by a voice mail from a pimp with none of the unctuous civility of the person who talked to Reed. He’s got a job for her, and she’d better get there quick, and she should bring all of her toys. So Jackie pulls it together and heads to the hotel.

Jackie has her own ideas about how tonight is going to go.

The majority of this film is centered on Reed and Jackie, and what happens that night, and they are a study in contrasts. Reed is all control and precision, at least on the surface - he’s an architect, he’s meticulously groomed, and he rehearses how the murder is going to go extensively, walking through it step-by-step, what he’s going to say, where he’s going to stand, even down to timing how long it takes. He’s taken notes. He has it all worked out in his head. And what a place his head is - beneath all of the neatness and precision is a roiling mass of murderous impulse revealed in brief glimpses that lie somewhere between nightmare and flashback, painting the picture of someone who was born…wrong, and wants nothing more than to sate his homicidal impulses. But it’s not an especially great disguise - he can keep it in place for his wife, but he’s obviously very uncomfortable with human interaction (which makes sense, because other people are outside of his control), and almost the instant that Jackie - a living, breathing human being, not a passive object of fantasy - walks into the room, his carefully constructed scenario starts to fall apart. He didn’t expect any of this.

Jackie, on the other hand, wears her torment right on the surface - you don’t get the same insight into her that you do into Reed - she is as opaque as Reed is transparent - but there’s a strong self-destructive streak and a lot of pain visible in her face and voice and actions. She is careful and thoughtful in her environment, but she is no stranger to self-harm, and she flirts with oblivion. So there’s an undercurrent of will she/won’t she throughout the movie, shifting in implication as to what that means as the film goes on. It’d be too glib to say that Reed represents order while Jackie represents chaos…it’s more like Reed typifies an approximation of life, the mask of sanity, while Jackie is actual life in all of its messy, complicated, imperfect glory. The film doesn’t over-exposit, doesn’t tell us exactly why these two people are the way they are, not in any conclusive way. We get much more of a look at Reed’s inner world (as nightmarish as it is) than Jackie’s, but overall it just gives you enough to hint at the depths, at how bad this could go, and then plays with the tension between these two people over an economical run time. It’s not exactly a battle of wills, more a battle of desires - who wants what they want at any given moment, and how badly they want it.

So there’s a pretty strong narrative and thematic through-line, but what I think really gets this film over is the strength of its vision. It’s relentlessly non-contemporary - from the credits to the cinematography to the music, it looks and sounds like something from, say, the late 1970s, but not obtrusively so. It’s not self-consciously retro like so many grindhouse “homage” films end up being. From the wardrobe to the set decoration to the lighting and soundtrack, the lurid preoccupation with the intersection of sex, death, and style, it looks and plays like a really nice hi-def restoration of some forgotten giallo - indeed, some of the music is taken directly from other films in that genre, so it’s hardly coincidence. There’s a strong commitment to a specific aesthetic and a striking use of imagery that combines fetish gear with body horror in a way that sort of reminds me of a David Cronenberg take on The Cell, but it’s not overplayed - the imagery tells a story about the inside of Reed’s head and then it’s gone - alongside a tug-of-war between someone who wants to kill but has lost all control of the situation, and someone who may or may not want to die, it’s hard to tell because even in the world outside of Reed’s head there are definitely moments where what’s going on may very well be a hallucination, and there are points where it’s hard to tell whether Jackie is being sincere or following some S&M script that she thinks this is all about. The result is unnerving - Reed isn’t quite sure what’s happening, when or how he lost the plot, and we aren’t really sure what’s happening either because the relationship between reality and homicidal delusion is, throughout, pretty damn shaky, and so there’s no place for anyone to get comfortable..

When Reed and Jackie meet, Reed’s plan goes right out the window within minutes. Jackie is the one in charge here, and it couldn’t be any other way - a plan is just a plan, that’s all, and Reed’s need for control is fundamentally at odds with any unpredictable variable. And realistically speaking, any other human being is an unpredictable variable. He can imagine and fantasize all he wants, but the instant it becomes real, at least some of it will be out of his control, and he loses control quickly. He didn’t account for Jackie. That mostly makes for a pretty strong movie, but the ending feels…abrupt and anticlimactic. I think it hurts it a little, after a first act that is Reed’s building anticipation, a second act that is everything failing to go the way he imagined, and a third where the masks come off. There’s a lot of back-and-forth in this film, a lot of uncertainty, and I think I expected a punctuation mark - maybe a period, maybe an exclamation point, not an ellipsis. I expected to get punched in the face, and I think the film suffers for its absence.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Available on Amazon

Spring: Hybrid Vigor

(Apologies for the missing week - work has been a bear lately, but things are easing up.)

One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of the movies I’ve really liked while writing this thing is that they are often not strictly pure-bred genre films. I mean, I think it’s true that if all you consume is the same type of art you create, you’re going to get boring art. The best musicians listen to styles of music outside their genre, some of the best filmmakers watch a wide variety of films. The best horror movies aren’t just horror movies, they’re also dramas or thrillers or science fiction or crime movies or hell, sometimes even romances. Call it hybrid vigor - making something stronger by diversifying its underlying genetics.

The flip side of that is that every now and then I’ll get a film that’s putatively a horror movie, or a movie that has horror elements, but isn’t really a horror film. Monsters comes to mind, and now, so does Spring. It’s technically a monster movie, I guess, but ultimately it’s really more of a heartfelt, sorrowful meditation on loss and love.

We open on a young man in a modest, dimly lit bedroom. He’s sitting at bedside, talking to a woman lying in bed. She’s pale, quiet, gaunt. Not long for this world. She tells him a joke, he tries to tell her how amazing she and his father were…but then she’s gone. He said his goodbyes, his I-love-yous, and now there will be no more of that.  His name is Evan. He’s the only child of only children, lost his father to a heart attack some months ago, and then his mother got cancer. Now they’re both gone, after he’d left college to come home and take care of his mom. They’re both gone, and he’s bereft.

Evan has had the roughest of all rough days, so he goes down to the bar where he works for some whiskey and consolation. But it’s a bar, and kind of a divey one at that, so there’s a young woman throwing some kind of “I do what I want” fit and her boyfriend decides that Evan’s looking at his woman and wants to do something about it. Evan has just watched his mother die, is still processing the idea that he’s got literally no family left, and now here’s some aggro motherfucker trying to start something. So Evan busts the gold-fronts right out the guy’s face. Of course the cops get involved, the dude is probably gonna press charges. “Run up, get done up” isn’t a viable defense in court, and the bar’s owner can’t have that kind of heat on the business, so he fires Evan even though he wasn’t on the clock. Now he doesn’t have a job, the cops are after him, and the asshole follows him home so now he knows where Evan lives. 

It’s been a really bad fucking day, so Evan spends his inheritance on a trip to Italy. Just fills a backpack with some stuff, buys a ticket, and goes. He has no idea what he’s going to do there, he just knows that it’s away. He falls in with a couple of dudes from the UK that he meets at the hostel where he’s staying, they suggest a trip up the coast. There’s a lot of drinking and them sort of goading Evan into approaching a woman. I mean, what’s a trip abroad without a fling or two? Needless to say, being jet-lagged and wracked with grief is rough on his game. But then there’s this mysterious woman in a red dress. She wants Evan to come home with her. He wants to, but he owes his traveling companion a round, and wants to meet her later. She says no, now or nothing. She doesn’t “date.” But Evan doesn’t forget, and after his traveling companions bail in search of new adventure, Evan sticks around in this little coastal town, finds a room and some work at a nearby olive farm. He keeps an eye out for her.

He keeps an eye out for her, and sure enough, one day he runs across her again. He’s persistent, though not obnoxious. There’s some charm there. When he says she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, you get the sense it isn’t a line. Her name’s Louise. She’s a grad student in biology. She studies genetics, and has conned her way into a grant that allows her to travel all over Italy. Not a bad life at all. They spend a day or so together, visiting a museum, talking, drinking wine, talking, and talking, and then of course they fall into bed. Not a bad day at all…

…until, in the light of the next day, Louise sits up, desiccated and feral, skin smoking where the light hits it. She runs for her bathroom, fills a syringe, injects it, and becomes something living again.

Something human.

So yes, it’s a monster movie, but only in the sense that there’s a monster. Which is not to say that what Louise is isn’t central to the story - it is - but it’s not simple. She’s not a vampire or a werewolf or a zombie or what have you. She’s just…got a different biology from most people, and the film is about what that means for her, for Evan, for the idea of the two of them, for the idea of what life looks like. She’s been alive for a very, very long time, and would like for that to continue. All Evan knows is that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, and what Louise knows is just how painfully short that span of time is, on her timeline.

As monster movies go, this one is deeply human. There’s a sense of melancholy rootlessness to Evan - he’s still in shock and grief, and being the kind of man he is, he doesn’t really have a way to articulate that. He’s not stupid, he just lacks a lot of options for dealing with these kinds of feelings, so he’s pitched himself headlong halfway across the world, no idea of what awaits him, just sort of going on momentum alone. When something feels that awful, you just…run. As fast as you can, as far as you can. This is echoed by the cinematography - the film is suffused with the sort of dreaminess you feel when you’ve been up too long on too little sleep, and everything goes sort of soft around the edges, because that’s pretty much where his head and heart are. The editing and pacing is crisp, with some inventive transitions and juxtapositions that serve to reinforce how much in shock Evan really is. Slow, prowling aerial drone shots of the Italian coast mean you never quite lose the feeling for how far away Evan is from home, though things do start to cohere as the film goes on and Evan sees how else life could be for him, and interstitial shots of nature in all of its weird, microscopically close glory reminds us of how little we really know about how life works. 

And like Louise, the film is very much its own beast. It’s definitely got its horrifying moments (the practical effects are gruesome and largely believable, helped by being employed judiciously and not being lingered on too much), but it isn’t necessarily a horror film. It’s got moments that are very funny, but it’s not a comedy. The dialogue isn’t quite naturalistic, but it’s snappy and not overly affected, and communicates who these people are well. It isn’t necessarily how people actually talk, but it feels honest. It comes from the heart. The film paints a picture of masculinity as a place where you feel things deeply, but don’t always have a way to really articulate them, so they remain repressed, or are expressed imperfectly, in dramatic gestures or bursts of violence. Evan lost everything he had, and so he ran as far away from the scene of the crime as he could, and he found someone beautiful and fascinating, and so with a glimpse of how else live could be lived, he decided to make something out of it. Never mind the medication, the transformations, the deaths, Evan saw something good. There’s a monster, but it’s not a film about triumphing over the monster. It’s a movie about just doing the best you can with the few tools you’ve been given. It’s not always smart or the right choice, but it’s all you have.

It’s a movie about a guy who meets a girl and maybe it’s all moving too fast and she lives a really complicated life, no, even more complicated than that, but the beating heart here is not one of tension or danger or imminent violence, it’s something more soulful than that. It’s the idea of making the most of the time you have, because nothing’s promised, and you never know how things are going to turn out, and wringing everything you can from here and now. There’s a lot of loss in this movie, and no happy ending is promised. These are basically decent people who make mistakes, who act selfishly, who lash out, but we all do. It’s part of being human. It’s a monster movie, but it’s not a pure-bred monster movie. It shares DNA with Before Sunrise, Altered States, and An American Werewolf In London, to name a few. It’s startling and uncomfortable and tense and funny and sad in equal measure. It has hybrid vigor.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon