Perfume: The Scent Of A Woman

I talk a lot about “atmosphere” on this thing. Usually I’m talking about some kind of intersection of mood, tone, and aesthetic that evokes a particular feeling in the viewer. One of the interesting things about Perfume (subtitled The Story Of A Murderer), however, is the degree to which it’s about actual atmosphere, at least to start. It’s a striking and expansive film, but for a film so much concerned with atmosphere, it makes choices in the second act that threaten to undo what is a very strong start.

We open in 18th century France, and there’s a man shackled in irons in a prison cell. A mob outside is calling for blood and the authorities are trying to keep them from storming the prison. Finally, he is dragged to a balcony, where his sentence is read to the mob. He is to be hung upon a cross, his limbs broken with an iron bar, and then left to die. The mob seems satisfied with this, so we begin wondering who he is, and what he did to merit such a horrific end. 

The man is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born some years before to a poor fishmonger in Paris. 18th-century Paris, like many large cities at the time, stank. It stank of livestock and shit and effluent and rot and human grime. And nowhere did it stink more than its market, filled with meat and fish and produce slowly spoiling in the sun. Grenouille’s mother unceremoniously goes into labor in her market stall, and she squats long enough to push him out, cut the umbilical cord and shove him to the side, assuming like all the others (so many others) that he’s stillborn. She’s got fish to sell, she’ll get rid of the body later. 

And then Jean-Baptiste, amid the filth, begins to wail.

Funny thing about infancy - we aren’t born with all of our senses up and running. Before we can see clearly, we can smell. It’s how infants locate their mothers in a room full of people. And Jean-Baptiste has entered the world in a riot of smells, most of them awful, all of them oppressive. His mother shortly meets a bad end, and he is remanded to an orphanage. As he grows, it becomes clear that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has a superhuman sense of smell. All of his other senses seem to work fine, but it is through scent that he most acutely experiences the world. He grows up to work in a tannery, and one day while delivering some hides, he discovers the most intoxicating scent of all - that of a young woman selling plums in the street.

But it fades so quickly upon her death.

There’s a lot of promise in the setting and premise. France before the revolution was a time of supreme decadence and supreme squalor, of silks and brocades and mud and shit, of face powder covering weeping sores. It’s a time when the lives of the poor are cheap, and the wealthy are above laws. And the first act really captures that sense of oppressive, claustrophobic rot and the ruling class that floats above it all, in search of ever more exotic pleasures to sate their jaded palates. It evokes the case of Gilles de Rais about 300 years prior, and the decadent protagonist of J.K. Huysman’s Against Nature, suggesting a story about the uncaring rich using the poor like cattle in the pursuit of pleasure. The Paris of the first act verges on nightmarish, and there’s definitely a horror movie in here somewhere. In the first act you really get a sense of what could be, in that respect. A miasma hangs over Paris, a sense that death and decay are everywhere.

But then the second act takes a surprisingly conventional turn as Grenouille, now apprenticed to a perfumier, heads out into the countryside to study increasingly esoteric techniques of extracting and preserving scent, and I think the film suffers from its departure from the city. There’s less miasma - the fresh air and sunshine of the countryside rob the film of some of that oppressive power and the tone sort of shifts. It’s when the stakes should escalate, when the cost of Grenouille’s obsession should be most acutely felt, but it feels very compressed, as Grenouille somehow manages to pull off a string of fairly complicated murders under the nose of his employers in a fairly small town. It reduces the action to him murdering someone, the body being found, and outrage increasing, then repeat. There's a whole new subplot introduced about a young noblewoman who doesn't want to go through with an arranged marriage and I think it crowds out the parts that should be getting developed a little more gradually, as if now we're watching a movie inside the movie we're already watching. There are still some wonderfully staged scenes and the sense of how class determines the value of a life remains intact, but for me it lacked the oppressiveness of the first act, felt mechanical and beggared believability. It went from being this nightmare to Law & Order: Jane Austen. 

Which is too bad, because it’s a tremendously well-assembled film. It’s beautifully staged and shot, with light (and its absence) playing a strong role - interiors are lit and shot like paintings by the Old Masters, the streets of Paris are uniformly muddy brown and grey with harsh sunlight falling between the buildings, The countryside is all verdant color and warm candlelight, but wherever you are, terrible thing can happen in the shadows. Given that it’s set in France, it’s odd that everyone speaks with some variety of English accent, but the performances are fine if not especially nuanced, with the exception of Grenouille, who is spooky and feral and arrogant and detached by turns. It’s got the kind of budget that makes for a believable period setting, and it has a sense of scale most of the films I write about don’t get to have. Which again, that’s something horror film could use - imagine the story of a huge, overcrowded city, teeming with all kinds of life scrabbling to survive in the margins while royalty so divorced from the concerns of the masses that they might as well be a different species harvest the poor for sport. And imagine that brought to life in a way that feels real. I think it’d be something to see.

The final act recoups somewhat as we return to the beginning of the film, with Grenouille facing his execution. It goes some unexpected places in grand fashion, and the end feels fitting to the rest of the film, but it never really gets back to the cruel, sinister indifference of its beginning. This was never strictly a horror film, and maybe a whole 2 and a half hours of that would have been hard to take, as hard to stomach as breathing 18th century Paris air, but it left me with the impression of what this film could have been, as if I were granted a whiff of something different, only to have it snatched away. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Martyrs (2015): The Courage Of Our Convictions

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with remakes. They reek of creative bankruptcy, of filmmaking at its most mercenary. But it’s also rare that a remake is an absolute strict shot-for-shot duplicate of its original, and sometimes the changes highlight interesting cultural differences or assumptions about their intended audience. I can think of a few instances where I’ve held remakes in the same esteem as the original, or even found them better, but that’s pretty rare -at best, they’re often superfluous, just telling a story that’s already been told and not screwing it up. At worst, they miss the point of what made the original good in the first place.

Martyrs, released in 2008, was one of the few films to come out of the overhyped New French Extremity that was actually good, and it has a lot of what I look for in good horror movies - it doesn’t overexplain, it goes some unexpected places, and there’s a real thematic through-line to it. It’s also one of those rare horror films that I think makes a good case for its graphic violence as part of its narrative. It’s easily one of my favorite horror films. But it’s definitely not for everyone - it’s really intense and unsparing, and the final act is especially uncomfortable. It can be hard to watch. It’s not a commercial prospect.

And that’s what the 2015 remake of Martyrs is. It’s a commercial prospect. Like most remakes, at its best it’s unnecessary, at its worst it undoes much of what made the original so good.

The film opens with a little girl, chained to a chair in an otherwise-empty warehouse. She manages to slip her restraints, carefully creeping out of the building. Once she gets free of the building, she begins to run. She begins to scream.

Her name is Lucie, and she gets placed in an orphanage. She’s uncommunicative, scared, traumatized, and it’s only over time and the gentle persistence of another girl, named Anna, that she starts to come out of her shell. But there’s not much to tell - the authorities’ search of the warehouse turns up nothing, she doesn’t know why she was being kept prisoner. She was beaten, starved. She confides in Anna that she sees monsters. The monsters come in the night and cut her, hurt her.

Flash forward 10 years later, and we’re at a house way out on the fringes of suburbia, where your typical nuclear family - mother, father, older son, younger daughter - are getting their day started. There’s teasing, there’s harassing the son for not completing his chores, there’s the daughter gloating at her brother being in trouble. Pretty standard stuff, really, and then the doorbell rings…

…and there’s Lucie, all grown up, holding a shotgun.

It’s tough to talk much more about what happens, because so much of what made the original good was how it kept you guessing, how the story evolved and your assumptions changed as it went on. Anna promised Lucie when they were young that she’d always be there for her, and that’s an easy promise to make when you’re a kid, because you never think that it means you’ll find yourself driving out into the middle of nowhere, where your friend, covered with years and years of scars, has just done something horrible. This film asks us to reckon with the cost of devotion, the lengths to which it will make us go.

It’s clear immediately that the whole reason this remake exists is to try and tap into a market that doesn’t like subtitles. It’s relocated from France to the U.S., it’s all in English, and the cast is largely actors from the U.S.. It’s not like the original had anything fundamentally French about it, but almost everything about this film establishes it as a particular flavor of reasonably slick, not-especially-challenging mass-market horror film, exactly the stock in trade of Blumhouse, the production company that financed it. The cinematography is surprisingly stylish in places, but everything is sort of softly-lit in a way that places it somewhere between a film and a made-for-TV movie, and some of the outdoor shots betray its budget by looking very much like a soundstage. The music is your stock horror-film ominous ambient sound, but it’s not too intrusive, and the performances are believable where they need to be and the dialogue just hovers on the line between serviceable and stagy. So on first blush this reads very much like any number of slightly-better-than-mediocre horror films turned out by studios and filmmakers expertly calibrated for exactly that - something that will provide entertaining jolts without being too unsettling or uncomfortable. And that was my worst fear going into it - that this would be watered down into something unrecognizable, a glib and formulaic assortment of jumpscares.

But to its credit, for most of its runtime it isn’t that at all. It actually follows the beats of the original pretty closely, and that is very much to its benefit. It doesn’t look away from what Lucie has done, or from the thing that has been tormenting her as long as she can remember. The thing that I think made the original so powerful was that it wasn’t just about violence or pain - it was about suffering, specifically, which is something I think a lot of horror movies made in the U.S. are reluctant to really depict. That’s the point where it stops being entertaining and starts being a little too real for most folks. And this film, much to my surprise, doesn’t really downplay that. The dialogue is maybe a little on-the-nose in places, but I’m willing to chalk that up to me already knowing what’s going to happen going in. It’s also a little stagy, a little expository, but not so much so that it’s a constant distraction, and again it’s something typical to this type of mass-market horror film. They aren’t character studies.

So, to a degree, a lot of this film is superfluous - it isn’t much less graphically violent than the original and it’s surprisingly faithful to the original story, albeit told in a slightly (slightly) less artful fashion. But as slick, moderately stylish mass-market commercial horror goes, it’s better-told than the average. This is in part due to being based on a much stronger story than the average, but I’m willing to give the filmmakers credit for not screwing with a good thing for most of the film.

Emphasis on most. In my write up of the original, I pointed out how horror films made in the U.S. so often have these pat, good versus evil endings. The original doesn’t do that - its ending is bleak and a lot is left ambiguous. Well, this film pretty much undoes all of that in the third act, where it goes full mass-market horror film, removing almost all of the ambiguity and turning what was an emotionally grueling ordeal into your stock Final Girl climax, complete with villainous monologuing (so much monologuing), improbable escape, violent revenge, and “get away from her!” It drags on entirely too long, makes changes from the original that feel nonsensical, and underlines everything three or four times in a way that is, frankly, insulting to the viewer. It’s a climax that exists in a world absolutely devoid of nuance or inference, so utterly conventional and obvious that it pretty much erases all the goodwill that the first two-thirds of the movie earns.

For someone who’s never seen the original, someone expecting the usual, it’s probably going to be a lot heavier and more intense than they were expecting. But it still feels deeply watered-down to me. And it’s not a matter of it being less violent - it isn’t, not really - it’s a matter of how thoroughly it panders to expectations in the end. I’m sure the filmmakers were given a brief to turn this uncomfortable, confrontational foreign film into something palatable for a mass market. And for the most part they rode a line between that palatability and what made the original so good with a lot more skill than I was expecting. For most of its run this remake gives its audience something I don’t think they’d expect, but I guess that makes it all that much more important to ultimately give them what they want. They had an opportunity to really rise above the mediocrity, to give the audience something that would stay with them. But when it really mattered, when it came time to bring it all to a close, they chickened out and played it safe. One of the worst things I think you can say about a film centered on the cost of faith and devotion is that it lacks the courage of its convictions, but well, here we are.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Blair Witch: We Faked It Because It’s Real

 (This one’s probably going to be pretty spoilery for The Blair Witch Project, so if you haven’t seen that and are planning on it - and I would definitely recommend it, it’s really good - maybe hold off until you’ve seen that film.)

Some time back I wrote up one of my favorite horror films, The Blair Witch Project, which was striking (and profitable) enough to essentially kick-start found-footage as a narrative approach to horror film. It was lightning in a bottle - coming at just the right moment in the zeitgeist, using techniques more common to theater than film, and leveraging the still-developing Internet for a publicity campaign that profited from an audience’s credulousness to build up a lot of hype ahead of time. William Castle would have been proud. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film, but it was certainly the highest-profile (and most profitable) one. Did I mention it was profitable? It was profitable. And the thing about profitable horror films is that studios invariably want to capitalize on them to keep the revenue stream going - sequels, prequels, reboots, franchises, whatever. Do it again, it worked the last time.

But here’s the thing - you can’t really capture lightning in a bottle twice, as demonstrated by Blair Witch, a 2016 sequel to The Blair Witch Project. This film attempts to recapitulate the original, but in doing so misses so much of what made the original film good. Instead, it manages to fall victim to all of the found-footage film cliches that emerged following the originals’ success and ends up being an inchoate, formulaic mess.

This film is about James Donahue - the younger brother of the original film’s Heather. He’s never really gotten over his sister’s mysterious disappearance 22 years ago, and he still holds out hope that she’s still alive somewhere. He’s even got Google alerts set up for things to do with her disappearance. Usually they don’t pay off, but then one day he gets an alert for a video uploaded to YouTube, taken from a cassette some people found in the Burkittsville woods. It’s grainy and shaky and degraded, but it appears to have been shot inside of a very old, very abandoned, very familiar house. Someone’s running through hallways, bolting doors behind them, and then there’s a quick glimpse of them in a mirror…and it looks like it could be Heather.

And that’s all it takes - James, his girlfriend Lisa, his best friend Peter, and Peter’s girlfriend Ashley gear up to head into the woods to look for her.

The footage we’re watching, we’re told, was recovered after the fact from DV cassettes and video capture cards found in the forest.

This is actually the second time someone’s taken a grab at the brass ring. The first sequel - Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 - wasn’t really a success either. There was apparently considerable studio interference with its production, and the end result is gimmicky and kind of incoherent. If you told me that it was an original screenplay retrofitted as a Blair Witch movie I’d have no trouble believing it. It did, however, make a couple of smart choices. First, it was shot as a conventional narrative, not as a found-footage film. Second, it didn’t attempt to re-tell the original story, instead being about a bunch of tourists (in a world where the movie The Blair Witch Project exists) who go camping in the Burkittsville woods, lose a bunch of time, and subsequently have to reconstruct what happened by reviewing footage they shot on their own consumer-grade video cameras. Not a bad conceit, really, and I think if it had been a stand-alone film it could have been really good.

(Now that I think about it, a film from the perspective of Heather, Mike, and Josh’s families, still haunted and traumatized by their children’s disappearances decades later, done in the style of a more explicitly supernatural Lake Mungo could be a really interesting sequel. Good luck getting that made, though.)

But those are smart choices. This film by and large does not make smart choices. This film, released 22 years later, attempts to hit many of the same beats as the original and do so in a found-footage format. What this means is that it ends up drawing less from the power of the original film and more from all of the cheap imitators that came after. A lot of the conceits and scenes that worked really well in the original mutated into cliché over time as producer after producer tried to replicate the originals’ magic, missing what made it good in the process.

To start, James and company all decide that they’re going to make a foray into those woods themselves and as it turns out, Lisa and Ashley are film students. Because of course they are. So Lisa’s going to make a documentary about it. And so here we have cliché #1 - there’s no reason this has to be a documentary, but that provides a pretext for the omnipresence of cameras to capture everything. It made sense in the first film because the whole story was “film students go into the woods and don’t come out.” The whole reason there was a film was that these people were in the woods to film things. But subsequent attempts at found-footage films try to take other stories and shoehorn in reasons for the protagonists to be recording everything, whether it makes sense or not. Next on the cliché list is the obligatory tech rundown, including a drone camera and miniature earpiece cameras with built-in GPS. This is another thing I see a lot in mediocre found-footage films - a lot of fuss and detail made over the big arsenal of recording equipment and multiple cameras the protagonists have.

This has never struck me as anything more than a cheat - the original film shot everything using two cameras and one mic and DAT recorder for sound. That’s it. The whole point is that our perspective is imperfect and incomplete, but a lot of films miss that point and instead do everything but find a reason for one of their characters to just happen to be wearing a Steadicam rig. And then on top of that, there’s a segment where they go out clubbing while wearing their earpiece cameras for…reasons? In The Blair Witch Project, there’s a brief segment where the three of them calibrate the cameras while they’re drinking in their motel room, but that seems to have mutated into a need to have a scene in every found-footage film where everyone’s out partying while recording and it almost never makes any sense at all. It consistently misses the point that those elements made sense in the context of the original film, and mistakes them for obligatory gestures.

Another problem with this film (common to found-footage films) is that at no point does it feel like anything but a movie. The first film worked so well - as a horror film and as an example of found-footage film - because it was naturalistic in the extreme. Dialogue was almost entirely (if not entirely) improvised, it was shot on location, the actors were only given a daily outline of what had to happen in the course of the day’s shooting. How they got there was up to them, and their environment was manipulated to make their discomfort and exhaustion real to a degree. The whole thing was closer to improvisational theater than to filmmaking. By contrast, this film was entirely scripted, and it shows. The dialogue isn’t especially wooden or anything, but it definitely sounds like dialogue and not naturally occurring conversation. The emotions don’t feel as real or as raw either, with some exceptions toward the very end, but even then it’s sort of too little, too late. It’s not impossible to write dialogue that sounds like actual conversation and it’s not impossible to get performances that feel extremely naturalistic, but it’s a lot tougher than just writing a script, and I think there’s a certain suspension of disbelief that we employ when we’re watching conventional narrative films where we don’t necessarily expect naturalistic performances and dialogue. There’s a tolerance level for a certain amount of staginess. But if what we’re watching is supposed to be raw footage pulled from an amateur’s camera? Any staginess sticks out like a sore thumb. At no point does the dialogue or the performances feel like anything but a movie.

Arguably, any given film should succeed or fail on its own merits, but not only is this film a sequel to another film and thus inviting comparison on that basis alone, it also goes out of its way to try and replicate beats and moments from the original. The pretext here is that we’re watching footage recovered from a bunch of DV tapes and video capture cards discovered out in the woods, just like in the original (and like the original, this information is communicated in stark white-on-black title cards that aren’t the only instances of homage, but they’re probably the least distracting). And just like in the original, once our protagonists get into the woods everything starts to go wrong. Some of it goes wrong in exactly the same way it did in the first film, which doesn’t really work because we’re expecting it. What’s startling the first time is anticipated the second. Some of it goes wrong in far less interesting ways than the original as well. The filmmakers don’t just stop at having unseen forces menace the protagonists, as the film goes on they also include briefly-glimpsed monsters and body horror, all slathered over with a thick layer of jump scares. A big part of why the original worked so well was because it established a mood first, and took its time doing so. As a result, even the slightest strange thing - mysterious cairns, stick figures hanging from the trees - carried with it a real sense of dread. Here, they’re just sort of set dressing, a way to say “hey, remember this?” and just in case that doesn’t do the trick, every other horror cliché you can think of gets chucked in as well. This is not a film that builds a mood so much as it just keeps turning up the volume louder and louder in an effort to scare us.

That’s yet another way in which it’s in strong contrast to the original. The Blair Witch Project was a relatively quiet film, low-key, with tension simmering gradually over its runtime so it wasn’t really until the last act that things started getting intense. It was relatively quiet visually as well - lots of long, quiet shots, shots held on people’s faces, footage of the forest itself. This is not a visually quiet film - the footage is constantly interrupted by glitches (except when it isn’t, and then it’s often shot from angles and with a steadiness that shouldn’t have been possible with the camera equipment they had, which is awfully convenient), scenes invariably end with a blast of interference, someone yelling at someone else to turn their camera off, or the camera crashing to black. Lots of the footage, especially in the third act, is shot on the run while people are bolting through the woods screaming at the top of their lungs. It ends up being more irritating and distracting than anything else, a barrage of imagery that never really coheres.

There are a couple of things it does do well, to be fair. James and company make contact with Lane and Talia, two sketchy locals who uploaded the footage in the first place, and they ask to join up as our protagonists head into the woods. There’s tension there - you’ve got four city kids who have no business being out in the woods and the two locals who take the legends about the woods very seriously. and it isn’t clear how trustworthy Lane and Talia are. The friction between the two groups works pretty well and adds some ambiguity in places that would have worked in a quieter film. .The most effective element of the film (one borrowed from the original) is the way time seems to slip out of joint the deeper they get into the woods - it’s a relatively minor element in the first film, and there was as likely to be down to increasing disorientation as anything else, but here they really lean into it in ways that work more often than they don’t. In those moments, it reminds me a little of an outdoorsy version of Grave Encounters at its best, though it also shares some climactic issues with that film as well. I think if they’d cut out some of the more blatant callbacks to the original and really made this a film about six people ending up someplace outside of time as we know it, really leaning into the desperation, isolation, and dread that come with that, then it might have worked. As it is, I think it just got included because it was in the first film (along with the cairns, the stick figures, someone who claimed to know where they were when they really didn’t, the abandoned house, all of it) and like everything else they just went bigger and louder and more obvious than the original.

At one point, a character says “we faked it because it’s real,” and I think that kind of sums up the problem. The original worked so well because its production methods emphasized realism to a degree that you don’t often find in film, and this film is very much fake in the sense of being artifice - it’s scripted, it lands on every found-footage film cliché you can think of, it leaves as little to suggestion as possible, and feels engineered from its first minutes. It’s a movie that treads the same ground that The Blair Witch Project did, but manages to forget everything that made that film so good in the first place. If it had been a conventional film narrative, well, I don’t know that it would have been good, but it would have had a fighting chance. As it is, it’s so clearly fake that it inspires nothing but annoyance.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

 

The Dead Center: The Cinematic 7-10 Split, Redux

In the course of writing this thing, I’ve run across a fair number of films that don’t land as well as they could because their ambitions outstrip their budget. So-called “genre” films (as opposed to “serious” films, which usually means “drama,” which is in no way itself a genre, no sir, whoops got carried away there), whether they’re horror or science fiction or fantasy, generally don’t get lavishly funded once you step away from the blockbuster exceptions, and they’re also the ones pushing suspension of disbelief the hardest. So they’ve got to work harder to maintain audience buy-in to their conceit, and do it with fewer resources than your garden-variety drama.

To my mind, then, the most effective low-budget horror films are the ones that don’t try to go too big by relying on effects-heavy setpieces that they can’t afford to pull off convincingly. I’m also sort of biased because I think I’ve established to a tiresome degree by now that I think good horror is more about mood and atmosphere and caring about the characters than gore or showy special effects, and those are things you don’t need a big budget to get. Case in point: The Blair Witch Project cost $60,000 to make, and I’d argue it’s better and scarier than films that cost more than 100 times that.

So, long story short, I’m here for small-budget indie horror because when it’s good, when the people making the film know what they’re doing, its constraints lead it to embody what I consider to be virtues in horror film. The Dead Center is a good example of this - it’s subdued, realistic, and suitably creepy. It’s not without its problems, but it works really well within its limitations.

It’s been a long day for Dr. Daniel Forrester, but you get the sense that every day is a long day for him. He works in an emergency psychiatric care ward, and he cares probably a little too much. He’s the kind of doctor who bends the rules in an effort to make a difference, and he’s just discovered that it’s cost him his admitting privileges - he’s authorizing more extended stays than their budget can sustain, all because he wants to help everyone, damn the cost. And on top of that, they’ve just gotten an odd new referral - a John Doe who just sort of…showed up…in the main hospital, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

It’s also about to be a long day for Dr. Edward Graham. He’s with the medical examiner’s office, and he’s been called to the same hospital to do an examination on an apparent suicide victim…

…except that he can’t, because the body - a John Doe - has disappeared from the morgue.

The basic structure of the movie is one that bounces back and forth between Forrester and Graham, each trying to figure out what happened to their particular John Doe. Forrester tries whatever method he can to help his get his memory back, and Graham drives all over the city tracing the last days of his. The rest of the film is an exercise in convergence, as their two stories come together. By and large, it all feels very real and grounded in a way that a lot of horror films get wrong - the hospital looks and sounds like an actual hospital, the psychiatric ward a constant hum of procedure underpinned by the shouting and crying and screaming of people in acute distress, the staff calmly going about their business, swimming through bedlam. These people really feel like they’re professionals tasked with an extremely difficult job in emergency psychiatric medicine and not the caricatures of doctors and nurses populating film and television, and it goes a long way toward selling everything that happens next.

This extends to the rest of the cast - everyone talks and acts like human beings, there’s very little outright exposition and for that matter, some cliches are nicely subverted. Forrester is very much the wild-card doctor who doesn’t play by the rules, and we see this more in his actions than in speeches, which is nice. But normally that character is played as the hero, as the one who was right all along, but here he pretty much keeps fucking everything up, which is what actually happens when you think you’re above procedure or that what you want outweighs everything else. And the administrator who is tired of his bullshit isn’t a soulless unfeeling functionary, she still has a considerable degree of empathy for him and doesn’t appear to relish what she has to do in response to his antics. She doesn’t seem like the rigid control freak this character usually is, she seems like someone who has to think about the big picture and has responsibilities that Forrester doesn’t. People talk in this film, they don’t make speeches, and the portrayal of the mentally ill strikes me as much more real and human than most films manage. As far as the world and the people in it, there were few false notes, with a couple of exceptions I’ll talk about more in a bit.

This naturalistic tone extends to the horror elements as well. The effects work is minimal, restricted to a little prosthetic and makeup work that highlights the unnaturalness of what’s going on without tipping over into rubber-suit territory, and some quick, almost-subliminal shots and sound work. Combined with a good sense of staging and editing, the film gets a lot of mileage out of very small gestures- flickering lights, open doors, the sound of gasping - that works very well in context to create a sense of dread that escalates as the film goes on. It’s good at giving us just enough to feel uneasy without overexplaining, relying instead on suggestion and picking its more dramatic moments carefully, building things slowly until the shit really hits the fan in the third act. The film is shot using lots of natural lighting, and music is used very sparingly to highlight specific moments. Even more impressive to me is the way other moments are well-served by silence employed to equally dramatic effect, so this isn’t a film with an intrusive soundtrack problem.

It’s got a good sense of scale as well - moving from Forrester and the interiors of the hospital to segments of Graham out and about in the city doing legwork, alongside aerial overhead shots of the city and traffic, serves to locate what’s happening in this one place, this single hospital, in a much larger setting. The film opens with a slow, almost languid overhead shot of an ambulance headed to the hospital, sirens and flashers on, but we’re so high up and far away that it’s mostly silent, only to zoom closer and slam down into the speed and noise and chaos of an ambulance with a dying passenger headed full-tilt for the emergency room. It’s sort of a nice summary of what this film is going to do over the course of its run - it’s going to start with little things, and then over time pull out and away to show you the real stakes. It sneaks up on you in that respect, and the third act gets pretty chilling as a result. The setting is quite different (well, sort of), but it reminds me a lot in tone and scope of a less-gothic Session 9 or a less-Lovecraftian Absentia. It’s not as good as either of those films, though, for a few reasons.

First, the grounding in reality works very much to the film’s benefit, but it also means that the couple of places it does depart from realism stand out pretty sharply by contrast, to the film’s detriment. It’s not really clear why Forrester has to be written as a troubled psychiatrist (and we learn that he’s troubled in a big ol’ chunk of exposition that reeks of “why is this person saying this stuff out loud to this other person like he doesn’t already know all of this?”) whose idealism interferes with his ability to do his job. It doesn’t really add much to the story and all of the same beats could be easily served by someone more professional. It’s sketched in just enough to make it stand out - in a more melodramatic picture, we’d accept someone like him right away because everyone’s sort of a caricature, hut here, where people are very much real people, it sticks out like a sore thumb even though it’s handled pretty realistically. Someone like him would have been fired a long time ago in this world, and the film isn’t entirely about him or his descent into madness, so it ends up being more distracting than anything else. As far as Graham goes, the character is just fine, pretty low-key and professional, but it’s a little hard for me to swallow the idea that a doctor from the medical examiner’s office would be able to just sort of drop everything to go chase down a missing John Doe, get access to crime scenes, and be permitted to interview people without law enforcement present. He feels less like a medical examiner and more like a detective, and that was a little distracting as well. Again, in a movie that didn’t feel so real, this would be pretty easily digested, but here it grabbed my attention immediately.

Second, there are also a couple of stumbles in how the story is laid out. The opening scene is striking, but from a story standpoint might have worked better later in the film, because it reveals an important detail right at the beginning. If  the film had opened on one story or the other, and worked in that scene later into the film, it would have hit harder. It’s another case where a mystery and gradual revelation is replaced with waiting for the characters to catch up to what we already know. and it takes some of the edge off.  And then, after a pretty unsettling third act that makes the stakes much more apparent, the very end of the film lands with a bit of a cliched thud - it’s anticlimactic and kind of obvious in a way that the rest of the film isn’t, and that’s disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any of this undoes the film entirely - its low-key, naturalistic approach really benefits the film once it starts to turn the heat up, and it does a good job of building dread. It’s just a bummer when it works so well in so many ways that the shortcomings really stand out. But none of these things are a function of budget - it wasn’t like it was obvious that this wasn’t a hospital, the practical effects didn’t look cheap, the acting was solid throughout, and it created a sense of dread by getting us to care about people and then creating a vocabulary that would tell us when bad things were about to happen. Those are definite strengths that bear attending to. For its faults, I think there’s a lot to be learned from what this film does right. It’s just too bad that it ends up being a cinematic 7-10 split.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Dark Touch: Won’t Someone Think Of The Children?

It’s a time-honored technique: If you want to really freak people out, bring children into the picture. Put them in danger, put them in pain, or better yet, make them the antagonist. Nothing like a good creepy child to add value to a scary movie. Hell, we don’t even need to be talking about horror films - if you want to whip up some good old-fashioned moral panic, simply suggest that some type of film or music or literature or whatever will be dangerous for our children. The amount of self-righteous, authoritarian nonsense that gets pushed for the sake of “the children” is considerable. And that’s because it works - who wants to be the person who opposes child safety? Nobody, that’s who.

But this week isn’t really about moral panic. It’s about Dark Touch, an unsubtle exercise in formulaic nastiness that pretends to something more and fails.

It opens with sort of a false start - it’s late at night, raining, and a little girl runs out of her family’s house. She’s found outside, taken in by another family, and then her parents come to retrieve her. There’s some tense, oblique conversation, something goes unspoken and then…it’s a few years later? What was the point of that? I know I usually deride flashbacks for neatly underlining that a particular place or person is bad, and no shit, we’re watching a horror film, you don’t need to tell us bad shit is coming, but this…doesn’t even do that. It’s just a scene where a little girl runs out of her house and then gets brought back.

And then we cut to this little girl, a few years older, with her family. Her name is Niamh, and she and her family live in a small town in Ireland, far away from the big city. It’s her, her mother and father, and her infant brother. But it’s also here that the puzzling opening scene starts to make a little more sense. It’s the old story - a prosperous, middle-class family, nice house, cute kids, but when night falls, father goes into Niamh’s bedroom and locks the door. No wonder she runs away. And then, one night, it all goes wrong. Niamh screams at the top of her lungs, and the house rattles, objects shift. By the time it’s all over, Niamh’s parents are dead, crushed beneath heavy furniture, and the police find Niamh hiding in a cupboard. She clutched her brother so tight it suffocated him.

So, traumatized, Niamh is placed in the care of her neighbors, Lucas and Natalie. They have two children of their own and the memory of a daughter lost to cancer. It’s just until they get more permanent accommodations set up. This way she can keep going to school while the police look for the gang of vandals that obviously tore up her family’s house. And it all seems nice enough, initially, until one night when Lucas reaches for his belt in response to an errant child…

…and the house starts to rattle, and objects start to shift.

It is clear almost from jump where this movie is going. It’s weird that it tries to pretend at all to be anything other than what it obviously is, as if it’s as much in denial as the adults that populate the film. This is a story about a traumatized girl who can move things with her mind, set against a backdrop of pervasive child abuse. From the opening scene, this is a film crawling with children - infants, toddlers, pre-teens - in almost every scene. This is a small town with a lot of kids, and it becomes pretty clear that a lot of these kids are getting beaten or molested and that nobody talks about it. And now one of them has supernatural powers. So it’s also pretty clear that this isn’t about survival, it’s about revenge.

So no, there’s no mystery here - not in the soundtrack, which fills most of the space in the film with minor-key piano or buzzing ambience or swells, all intended to communicate that this is very sinister and spooky. It’s not a film that is content to let moments be. Nor is there any mystery in the basic narrative - it’s clear very early on exactly what has happened and who’s responsible no matter how much the characters in the film look the other way. What we’re left with offers no revelation, no actual horror. There’s nothing to discover, it’s very clear pretty early on exactly what’s going to happen, so there’s no tension - it’s just a matter of watching everything play out and wondering how far they’re going to push it. And as the film goes on, everything feels less and less grounded in plausibility (and the contrast between the very ugly reality of child abuse and supernatural powers makes the whole thing feel trivialized) and more and more like an excuse to do shocking things.

The film itself is equally obvious. The cinematography leans heavily into shadowy interiors and dark exteriors with few sources of external light, and the dialogue is extremely stilted and expository throughout. Combined with the intrusive soundtrack, it all has a real movie-of-the-week feel, where absolutely nothing is left to mood or inference that can’t be spelled out in the most obvious way. It does succeed to some degree early on in creating a very oppressive atmosphere by emphasizing abuse’s many forms and making it almost omnipresent, but it doesn’t last - as the movie goes on it becomes less interested in the cost of violence against children or the very real horror associated with it, and more and more interested in a supernatural riff on the “bad seed” film that uses the very serious topic of child abuse as a rationalization for violence, and that feels kind of gross to me.

It’s not that I have a problem with provocative or transgressive filmmaking in horror, far from it. But in my opinion, if you’re going to traffic in subject matter closer to taboos, you need to earn it. You need to treat the characters with a certain amount of respect, treat the topic with the gravity it deserves, and this film just doesn’t. Instead of locating the horror in the experience of victims of abuse, it ultimately uses that abuse merely as justification for everything that comes afterward. The humanity of its protagonists and antagonists alike gets lost along the way, ultimately discarded in favor of empty, escalating atrocity. It feels less like an articulation of trauma, or even of a small community’s complacency in the things going on behind closed doors, and more like an attempt to shock by pivoting all of the violence around children - either as the victims or the perpetrators - without ever really reckoning with (or even tapping into) the impact that either of those things actually has. It’s like I said, if what you’re bringing to the party is a load of bullshit, just bring up “the children” and hell, maybe that will get you over.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon