Sweetheart: Going Off-Course

(Sorry to drop two spoilery posts in a row, but I’m going to have a hard time talking about this film if I don’t reveal some events in the second half of the film. If it’s one you’re interested in watching, go watch it and then come back here.)

It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing this that I realized I’m covering films about someone stranded on an island with something bad two weeks in a row. And, unfortunately, I’m pretty disappointed with the results two weeks in a row as well. That said, I don’t think it’s anything inherent in the premise. The problems with The Isle were systemic and consistent throughout the film, and in the case of Sweetheart, I think it’s more a matter of an initially promising film that takes a hard turn. It starts off as a brisk, understated story of survival, veering into something else at the halfway point - something much more conventional and much less interesting.

The film opens cold, no title or anything, on a young woman named Jenn washed up on a tropical shore. There’s some wreckage scattered about, and it’s clear there’s been a shipwreck. Once she recovers her wits she discovers someone else, badly injured by a chunk of coral jutting out of his side. It’s apparent she knows him, calling him “Brad,” freaking out at his condition and crying out for help. She tries to remove the coral and staunch the bleeding, but Brad dies of his injuries. Traumatized, Jenn sets to work figuring out how she’s going to survive, looking for fresh water, a source of food, and a way to make a fire. She moves inland in her search, and finds the remains of an old campsite - a backpack hanging from a tree, an old cooler, and a tent long-buried under vegetation. It’s clear this stuff has been here a long time, and there’s no sign of anyone else on the island. This campsite was abandoned suddenly, a long time ago.

Eventually, Jenn comes to grips with the realization that she can’t just leave Brad’s body to rot on the beach. Fighting nausea and horror at her situation, she digs a grave on the beach and buries him. She scavenges matches and some other stuff from the abandoned campsite and eats a small shark that had washed up on the beach…a shark marked by deep furrows and gouges.

At night, there are strange growling and chittering noises coming from the jungle. Something big and heavy walking around. And in the morning, Brad’s grave is empty, the body pulled out and dragged…somewhere.

Soon after, the body of someone else from the boat - a young man named Zack - washes up on shore, badly mangled and torn in half.

The film begins on a fairly strong note, and for its first half, it’s taut, terse, and efficient. It’s just Jenn on the island, figuring out how to survive, which increasingly involves trying to avoid whatever creature is roaming the island at night. There’s minimal dialogue (almost none after the first ten minutes or so), no music to speak of, and scenes transition crisply between one point in time and another, cutting between them sharply in a way that communicates Jenn’s predicament. When the monster comes at night, it’s all inference and suggestion through sound design, and clues left behind during the day, marks of its passing. We only glimpse it once, from very far away. So we know it’s there, but it isn’t overplayed. It’s a film that feels like it’s going to be about a battle of wits and strength between a determined young woman and some strange predator.

Had it continued in this vein for the entire film, it would have been reasonably good, albeit with some plausibility issues (I kept thinking to myself “how is she managing to stay so clean, and where did these other changes of clothes come from?”), but on balance it’s engaging enough at the start that those things didn’t really distract too much.

But then the situation changes and what was a minimalist story of one person’s attempt to stay alive against both a hostile environment and some kind of predator devolves into a soap opera. At about the halfway mark, after Jenn manages to figure out how to stay safe at night (with some close calls), a raft washes up on the beach. Inside are Mia (who was apparently Brad’s girlfriend) and Lucas (who is apparently Jenn’s boyfriend). They’ve both managed to survive for a few days on the open water. At first, they’re happy to see Jenn and relieved to be off the water, but when Jenn becomes insistent that they leave as soon as possible, Lucas and Mia…well, they just turn shitty. They’re whiny and passive and don’t believe Jenn’s account about the creature stalking the island, going from zero to paternalizing in the blink of an eye. They’re deeply unpleasant, and Lucas confronts Jenn in a really nasty fashion, talking about how she makes it so hard for people to believe her and how the only reason she was even on this trip is because he pays her way in everything. He tells her she has no prospects, no future, and nobody else who really cares about her. It’s hard to tell if it was intended to reveal that Jenn was stuck in an abusive relationship, or if it was just a ham-fisted way to cast doubt on the things we’ve seen from Jenn’s perspective. 

The performances aren’t great, the dialogue isn’t great either (this was a much better film when people weren’t talking), and because Jenn’s black and both Lucan and Mia are white, we’re basically watching white people tell a black woman that she’s a pathological liar who can’t take care of herself, and that nothing she says happened to her was true. In the moment it feels really gross. Maybe it was intentional, allegorical of the experience of Black America, bur it isn’t at all clear if that was the intention. It feels more like a really unsubtle attempt to cast doubt on what we’ve seen so far, to suggest that maybe this is all in Jenn’s head, and it doesn’t really work.

What was a story about one woman’s survival ends up turning into a half-baked psychological thriller that throws Jenn under the bus without ever really fully committing to the shift - there are hints and feints at something more going on, (mostly in how Zack managed to get separated from Mia and Lucas, which they’re evasive about) but they’re never explored and it’s hard to tell how much of it is just down to really artificial performances. And then, in the final act, it pivots yet again into what is basically a slasher film’s climax, Final Girl badassery and all, only with a guy in a monster suit instead of a masked killer. Indeed, a monster that was only hinted at and suggested for the majority of the film get puts front and center for the conclusion, and like most monster effects, the longer it’s on screen the less believable it becomes. And at the same time the film stops being about Jenn on her own and starts being about how maybe she imagined it all because she’s such a terrible person, the music that had barely been in the first half of the film becomes much more prominent in the second half of the film, ominous, pulsing synthesizers which work fine, but further highlight the ways in which the film has become something much more predictable.

There was something more promising here - the beginning of the film depicts the creature as an almost supernatural force, dragging its food into a mysterious black hole in the ocean floor, with one woman against the elements and this thing trying to kill her, all told as much through inference and detail as anything else. If the filmmakers had stuck to this conceit, I don’t know that it would have been a masterpiece or anything, but it would have been better than I expected going in. But as it is, that wasn’t enough, and trying to stuff a clumsy attempt at psychological horror and an action-packed climax in as well feels either like a lack of focus (I do not understand how this film required three writers) or something like artistic cowardice. It’s a film about a shipwreck that went off-course and sank.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

The Isle: Sometimes, Burying The Lede Is Better

 (Technically I’m probably spoiling this film a little, but it’s nothing that you won’t have figured out before the opening credits.)

The longer I do this, the more I’m starting to see a pattern to the more mediocre films I end up writing about. It used to be the case that a crummy, generic horror film would have production values to match - cheap sets, cheaper special effects, unremarkable cinematography. But as digital video has gotten better, as editing software has gotten better, as drone cameras get more affordable, it’s become easier to put together a film that, if nothing else, looks really good. But what I’m finding is that in some ways this is laying bare a film’s shortcomings in other areas. I mean, there are still movies that look incredibly cheap and flat-out suck, but increasingly, production values aren’t a guarantee one way or another, and aren’t always enough to paper over flaws.

The Isle is a really striking example of this at work. It looks really good, but once you get past the scenery and an evocative score, it’s a bit of a narratively underwhelming mess that never really comes together.

The year is 1847, and three sailors are stranded in a rowboat off the coast of Scotland. They are Oliver Gosling (midshipman), Joe Bickley (able seaman), and Cailean Ferris (seaman). They’re arguing about their predicament and Gosling’s apparent inability to read a chart. Their ship sank after running into some rocks in a bank of heavy mist, and they might be the only survivors. They’re lost and they don’t really have any supplies, so their days are numbered. And then Cailean spies some land.

The three sailors have apparently discovered an island that lies somewhere off the western coast of Scotland, and it’s inhabited by four people - Fingal Macleod and his daughter Korrigan, and Douglas Innis and his niece Lanthe. More people used to live there, but these four are the only ones that remain. Fingal seems helpful enough, getting them warmed up and fed, but when asked where everyone else is, he’s evasive. When the sailors ask about the schedule for supply boats to the island, Fingal gives them a non-answer. When the sailors talk about setting a fire on the shore in case there are other survivors from the wreck, Fingal says he’ll set up a fire right away, and for them just to rest and not worry about it. But he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to do so.

Elsewhere, Lanthe and Korrigan confer in whispers about how the sailors could help them.

It’s an absolutely lovely film to look at - the island has a somber beauty, rugged and raw and windswept, soundtracked by ethereal singing and mournful strings to good effect. The sea is vast and churning, shrouded in mist. Sunlight breaks through overcast skies, rays of light split by tall, thin trees, and interiors are desaturated to the point of almost being monochromatic, save for bright orange splashes of candlelight that act almost like spot color. But that only goes so far, and outside of that, there are a lot of problems. The brief is that these three sailors have landed on an island where Something Not Right happened, and might still be happening. Douglas isn’t happy to see them, tells them not to bother exploring the island because it’s a “dead isle,” its inhabitants long fled to greener pastures. But that’s not all there is to it - the seas and woods alike are shrouded in mist, and there’s a strange, unearthly whispering and singing carried by the wind. The sailors are told not to stray too far in the night. The island isn’t safe during the night. It’s set up as a mystery as the three sailors try to discover what happened on the island before it’s too late, but the mystery is spoiled almost immediately by a quote before the opening credits about the song of the siren that basically gives the game away before the film’s really even started. It’s not much of a mystery when you know it’s a film about an island and sirens before the first scene. It’s like opening Fight Club with a quote about dissociative identity disorder.

Not only are the broad strokes made obvious early, the moment-to-moment story also doesn’t really cohere. Fingal and Douglas are obviously hiding something and know more than they let on, and Lanthe and Korrigan seem to be trying to plan something under their noses, but even well into the third act it’s still not clear what this particular dynamic means. Douglas and Fingal exchange knowing glances, Lanthe and Korrigan scheme (and sometimes Korrigan goes kind of nuts, and occasionally Lanthe acts weird and her eyes go kind of milky white, both for no apparent reason), alternately helpful and hostile to Oliver, Joe and Cailean. Oliver finds a journal that is meant to shed light on events, but its entries are oblique enough that we don’t really know what any of it means (well, except for how ships keep sinking, because we already know a siren is involved somehow thanks to the opening quote). Sometimes Oliver suffers nightmares that are supposed to be creepy or haunting, but are mostly just confusing. Being evasive and cryptic isn’t necessarily the problem, but usually, evasive and cryptic starts to make more sense as the film goes on. The other shoe usually drops at a point where it impacts the plot in a meaningful way. But here, nothing comes together in a narratively meaningful way until the back half of the third act, which is primarily a series of extended flashbacks interspersed with Fingal and Douglas basically saying “okay, here’s what happened,” making the film’s narrative arc a lot of running around in circles, punctuated with an exposition dump. Which is probably the least artful way it could have been handled.

And that’s probably the best way to describe the film’s shortcomings - it is artfully shot and scored, but is otherwise artless. The acting is fine, the relationship between Oliver, Joe, and Cailean being believable for their differences in station without feeling cartoonish. But the characters suffer from being saddled with awkward dialogue - at one point, a sailor in 1847 says “this place is really weird!” and it lands with a thud. I generally prefer the dialogue in a period piece to err on the side of being less mannered or affected, but there are points here where it’s downright anachronistic. Likewise, they suffer from being saddled with improbable choices. The sailors exhibit a striking lack of judgment when the plot requires that they do so, and then they return to acting sensibly when the plot requires that as well, and the difference is glaring. At one point, Joe suggests that he and Cailean split up (which is under the circumstances a terrible idea), and then when they do and something bad happens, Joe…says it was Cailean’s idea, for reasons that are never made clear. Everyone (well, almost everyone, more on that in a bit) falls into this limbo where they aren’t caricatures, but their words and actions make it hard to buy them as actual people too.

Outside of the acting, there are some really odd directorial choices at work as well. There’s a repeated motif of characters just suddenly appearing behind other characters out of nowhere, startling them. But it’s never scary, nor does it seem intended to be. The first time it happens it’s faintly comic, and every subsequent time it becomes increasingly sillier and more distracting. Which feels very much at odds with the story as it’s being presented. Likewise, there’s a ghostly presence that figures into events, but it’s never really framed in a way that feels ghostly or strange at all. Their place in the frame evokes not so much a feeling that this people are haunted as much as there’s just someone else in the scene who wasn’t supposed to be. And finally, at the very end of the film when the aforementioned exposition dump pulls everything together, the ultimate revelation - a story of a horrible accident, something that could have been avoided were it not for the pride of fragile men - paints the antagonist not as the tragic figure the story suggested it should have been, but instead as something cartoonishly evil in the most generic way possible.

It could have been a story about sorrow and regret and the cost of grief, the cost paid with every day that you live with it. But it wasn’t. It was about an hour and a half of stuff that didn’t really track or make sense, concluded with a bunch of story all at once that made it at best a generic ghost story. The idea isn’t bad, the location is excellent, but the execution is clumsy, mechanical, and lacking emotional weight. All on top of kind of giving the whole thing away before the title.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Rosemary’s Baby: Hysteria

As recently as the late 1800s, “hysteria” was a diagnosis applied (solely) to women who acted “surly and dissatisfied without cause” by doctors who were exclusively male. It was believed to be caused by wombs that had become detached from the abdominal wall. This should tell you something about male doctors’ ignorance about female anatomy up to and including this point, not to mention their blindness as to why women in that time period might be surly and dissatisfied at all. From a modern perspective, it’s pretty obvious, and it’s not like the tendency to pathologize women’s’ experience has died out or anything, but it’s a stark example that lives on in the gendered stereotype of women as frail, irrational, and overly emotional.

But as it turns out, this isn’t a history blog, it’s a blog about scary movies. And if there’s one through-line to Rosemary’s Baby, it’s that of hysteria. I’m always a little reluctant to take on the classics - there’s that fear that something you loved when you were younger isn’t going to hold up, or that something you’re just now coming to is going to have lost some of its power with the intervening years, that its myth will have eclipsed the film itself. I can safely say that this is one of the classics for a reason - it’s a careful exercise in paranoia that etches mid-century gender norms and attitudes toward motherhood in acid. I saw this film for the first time thirty years ago and loved it then. Revisiting it today, much to my relief, it still holds up really well.

Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse are a young, upwardly mobile couple in 1966’s New York City. Guy’s an actor - not famous, not yet, but he’s done a couple of well-received plays and a bunch of television and radio advertising work, which you get the sense is what actually pays the bills. If so, it’s paying the bills handsomely, because they’re able to consider moving into a bigger, nicer apartment at the Bramford, a sprawling, rambling, venerated apartment building on Central Park West, which I’m pretty sure has never, ever been cheap. But these things are relative, and you get the sense that the place at the Bramford has some things going for it - it sounds like it’s rent-controlled, the previous occupant passed away recently, and the Bramford has a bit of a sordid history - tenants who died in spectacular ways, tenants with checkered pasts, tenants with unsavory practices. Maybe it doesn’t command the kind of cachet other buildings do.

Whatever the reason, it’s within their budget, and it’s huge and gorgeous, in a great location. The tour is a little awkward because the place is still furnished with the late occupants’ possessions - the person giving the tour hastily points out that she died in the hospital, not at home - and some things seem a little eccentric. Like the large piece of furniture blocking a functional closet. Nevertheless, they sign the lease and move in, repainting and refurnishing. They soon realize that their apartment - originally part of a much, much larger space - abuts onto that of Minnie and Roman Castavet, friends of the previous occupant. The adjoining wall is maybe a bit thin, and they can hear conversations through the wall.

Conversations, strange music, and chanting.

It’s tough to summarize this film as neatly as a lot of the stuff that I write about, because it’s all about the accumulation of small details and what at first seem to be unrelated events and occurrences that, as the film goes on, start to take a larger and more sinister shape. What I’ve just written above is merely the absolute beginning and doesn’t even start to set the table for what follows. As they begin to settle in at the Bramford, little cracks in the happy façade begin to show: Guy reveals himself to be more than a little self-centered, disregarding Rosemary’s mounting unhappiness and feeling of isolation in the face of his constant absence, and the Castavets start becoming more and more part of their everyday life. Guy seems to really like them, and doesn’t take Rosemary’s discomfort seriously. Minnie especially is a particular type of older woman specific to New York City - pushy, nosy, and motherly by turns, and deeply eccentric. Nevertheless, Guy makes up with her long enough for them to start contemplating starting a family, and that’s…where things start getting weird. The circumstances aren’t good - Guy basically rapes Rosemary while she’s unconscious in a nightmarish reverie (something he dismisses very casually, certainly emblematic of mid-century sexism), and it’s a difficult pregnancy. One in which Minnie Castavet is immediately very involved.

Once Rosemary gets pregnant, she is immediately surrounded by a entourage of men all equally dismissive of her concerns, all insistent that they know what’s best, no matter what her own body tells her, with Minnie also there every day, equally as insistent over dictating the course of her day-to-day care. It’s at this point, about an hour in, that the film shifts from being about the Woodhouse’s attempts to settle in, framed by odd incidental details and asides, and starts to be more about the struggle for Rosemary’s agency. She’s isolated from her friends, told what’s best for her, kept inside, all part of the characterization of women as weak and incapable of thinking for themselves, and of pregnant women especially as fragile and in need of constant attention and care. What starts off as solicitous becomes oppressive when you aren’t given any choice or any say in the matter, and this is sharpened by what appears to be Rosemary’s gradual deterioration. She looks absolutely awful, and she’s losing weight instead of gaining it. This is the point where it starts to become a horror film on a couple of different levels.

Rosemary is subject to an especially suffocating brand of paternalism, and as much as that’s what the zeitgeist was in the mid-60s, just before the social upheaval that would give us the women’s liberation movement, the second major civil rights movement and the gay rights movement alongside rising opposition to the war in the Vietnam, here it feels more like what’s driving the feeling of paranoia, rather than being an artifact of the times. I’d argue that this film was actually interrogating these sexist assumptions (or perhaps just satirizing them, since it wouldn’t be the only time the author behind the source novel did so). Either way, it’s depicted as being as much a part of the horror as the other things going on the background and in the margins. Almost as if to say the two are one and the same, The time in which it’s set makes itself known in other, quainter ways - this is a New York City of pay phones and doing research from encyclopedias and answering services, and the dialogue has the slightly mannered quality typical of films made during the time, but it’s not actively distracting, and in some ways I think it lends what it’s doing more weight. It is a film very much of its time saying that women are not listened to, and mothers aren’t treated as people as much as they are fragile, breakable vessels who can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them. No man who means well by Rosemary in this film (and there aren’t many) lasts very long at all.

And on top of all of this, it’s a hell of an exercise in paranoia and uneasiness. It doesn’t tip its hand soon at all, content instead to build things up in small ways that reward careful attention and observation. This is a film that is absolutely about the little details, and with a couple of exceptions does an excellent job of letting the audience make the connections for themselves, so it’s not especially played like Rosemary is losing her mind, even though that’s how almost everyone is treating her. The result is a persistent feeling of claustrophobic helplessness, helped along by a series of surreal dream sequences that sometimes intrude upon Rosemary’s reality, feeling both like actual dream sequences and like there’s something important there to be grasped, if only we knew what it was. It’s a story told in long, unbroken takes (often with little bits of business going on in the background) and sudden transitions from one place and time to another, which feels ever so slightly dislocating. The score could almost be called sardonic, made up of waltzes and lullabies and the occasional up-tempo jazz number when things really start to go south. And they eventually do. In the end, it’s all brought together in one horrible realization, what the dreams and nightmares meant, what all of the unfortunate coincidences meant, all of the overbearing advice, all of the half-heard conversations, it was all converging on a single, terrible realization. I talk a lot about the horror of revelation and how much I like it when it’s done well, And here, it’s absolutely done well.

But that’s also sort of the hell of it about this film - it is a sterling example of how to put a whole lot of little pieces, little details, little moments out there, just enough for you to get a sense of what’s happened, but only if you know how to put it together But that also means that this is kind of film you can only see once, in a sense. When you go to watch it again, it’s a different experience - still an enjoyable one, as I’ve discovered, watching all the moving parts slot together elegantly - but it’s never going to be like it was the first time. You’re expecting it now.

But this is really a small complaint about an absolutely excellent film. If you’ve seen and enjoyed Hereditary and somehow aren’t familiar with this film, correct that immediately. No slight to Ari Aster, he’s an excellent director and Hereditary is an excellent film in its own right. It’s not plagiarism or even homage, really - it treads different thematic ground from Rosemary’s Baby, but I would venture to say that without Rosemary’s Baby, there probably wouldn’t be a Hereditary. If that at all piques your interest, get on that shit now. I will say that in both movies, women are not listened to or taken seriously to terrible consequence. At one time, hell, even today, both Annie Graham and Rosemary Woodhouse would be dismissed as “hysterical.” And that is one way - as the awful histories of this film’s director and people like Harvey Weinstein can attest - that evil enters the world and flourishes.
 
IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon 

Luz: A Woman Walks Into A Bar

It’s not often at all that I watch a film for this thing and can honestly say that I’ve never seen something like it before. I think this is because more often than not, horror film follows a lot of cinematic conventions and traditions. This isn’t a bad thing by any means, and there’s a lot of room for variety within cinematic tradition, even if it’s just taking an established style and pushing it to hallucinogenic extremes. And when horror films push boundaries, they’re generally the boundaries of comfort, rather than the boundaries of cinematic narrative. Which, again, is fine. But every now and then it’s nice to stumble across something that just goes in some other direction entirely from what you’d expect.

And Luz is definitely one of those cases. It’s spare, cryptic, and striking, as much art film as horror film.

We open on what appears to be a lobby or reception area. There’s wood paneling, fluorescent lights, someone sat behind a desk, a couple of vending machines. A young woman walks in, stands there for a minute or two, then walks over to the vending machine and buys a drink. She drinks it, in what is otherwise total silence. Then she walks up to the person behind the desk, and just yells “is this what you wanted to do with your life?”

Elsewhere, another woman strikes up a conversation with a man at a bar. She’s just gotten into town, and she’s looking for someone. It’s been a strange day - her cab driver bailed out of the cab while it was still moving. The man is a psychotherapist, and the woman tells him his services will be needed soon. She’s flirting with him, they’re having multiple drinks together, he’s ignoring his pager as it keeps going off.

And then she drags him into the bathroom for what he expects is going to be an assignation, and she reaches for his face as if to kiss him…

…and light pours from her mouth. When he comes to, she’s gone.

The young woman in the waiting room is Luz, the woman in the bar is Nora, the doctor is Dr. Rossini, and the movie is about how these three people come together. Luz is at a police station after diving out of her moving cab with a passenger in the back. Nora was the passenger, and Dr. Rossini - along with a police officer and a technician, are going to use hypnotic regression to determine why Luz did what she did, and who Nora and Luz are to each other. As it turns out, they’ve known each other since they were in school together as kids, and something happened between them then. Something involving a séance, from which they walked away changed.

The film doesn’t really have a linear story to speak of - there’s Luz, Nora, whatever happened between them when they were at school together, and how that’s come back to haunt them both. It’s a story told through flashbacks and recollection, but very little is actually spelled out at any point. It’s a story told as much (if nor more) visuals than through exposition - the dialogue is minimal - so you get the shape of it without really getting any details or clear sense as to what “really” happened (or is happening), and after a certain point, what’s “really” happening is really beside the point. It’s cryptic, but not obtuse. There are repeated visual motifs and dialogue that create a sense of dreamlike circularity, as if the things we’re seeing and hearing are very important, even if we don’t know exactly why or how.

This is reinforced by a highly impressionistic approach to the narrative. This film uses sound and space in unusual ways (the hypnotic regression sequence that’s especially inventive) that sacrifices a sense of realism for something closer to experimental minimalist theater. Most of it takes place in a single room, but the past walks in and walks around the room as if it’s the present, flashbacks occur through cuts away to past events, but just as often also through the layering of asynchronous sound over reenactment in a way that makes it an abstract representation of past events played out in the present, and characters exchange places and roles, sometimes through the actual donning of the others’ clothes, in a way that manages to be simultaneously symbolic and extremely literal. There’s a sense of distance or remove throughout, with lots of long shots of people placed in the middle of large, anonymous, blandly institutional spaces contrasted with close-ups to punctuate important moments. Color and lighting shift to move between the mundane and the dreamlike, alongside the highly unconventional staging, and the single room functions as a stage of sorts upon which the events play out. This is underpinned by an effective use of music, mostly droning synthesizers and strings, that punctuates the action without becoming overbearing.

So what we basically have is a highly novel take on a demonic possession story. I’ve written here before about the intersection of love and possession, and though this film couldn’t be more different from Ahi Va El Diablo stylistically and narratively, it treads some of the same thematic ground in a way that is as cerebral as that film was visceral Nothing about the film is really realistic in any sense of the word, it’s more of a tone poem than anything else, but it has some really striking moments and doesn’t so much build tension as lull you with a sense of amiable strangeness before reversing hard into something more menacing in the third act. But it’s not weirdness for its own sake - there’s an internal logic here, the unfolding of memory and revelation playing out in ways that forsake traditional narrative for almost pure feeling, and it works well enough that by the end you have the feeling that something very bad has happened, even in something as simple as a person walking through a door. The way even the simplest gestures are fraught with horrible meaning in dreams.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Magnus Archives: Let Me Tell You A Story

I’ve been feeling a little aimless around horror movies for the last couple of weeks, with nothing really jumping out at me right now, so I thought instead I’d take this opportunity to talk about another horror podcast I’ve been enjoying lately. Like the last couple I wrote about here, The Magnus Archives takes advantage of the audio-verite aspects of podcasting to good effect, producing a series of concise stories in a number of styles, with some careful overarching development happening over the course of the series.

The opening conceit is that we’re listening to archived recordings of statements made to the Magnus Institute, an organization for paranormal study located in London. You get the impression that the Institute is an old, somewhat fusty institution, not taken especially seriously and treated with a certain amount of distaste by younger, bolder ghost hunters. They’ve been around for a long time, and they do things the old-fashioned way, using old cassette recorders and antiquated filing systems to catalog the statements they’ve collected over the decades from people who have had encounters with the supernatural. When the series begins, we’re introduced to newly-hired archivist Jonathan Sims, who has been brought in to replace the late Gertrude Robinson, whose approach to cataloguing was haphazard at best. Jonathan is none too pleased with the task that’s been left to him, nor is he especially impressed by his coworker Martin Blackwood, who seems to be a bit hapless. Nevertheless, Jonathan sets to making audio recordings of older written statements, supplementing them with follow-up investigation where feasible, digitizing and uploading the results. At first, it’s just a matter of sorting through the archives (which don’t appear to be in anything resembling order, chronological or otherwise) and recording as he goes, occasionally stopping to include new statements as they come in. Getting the archives organized is a monumental task, and Jonathan’s frustration is palpable in every entry, along with a sense that he’s not much of a believer in the supernatural, a certain dismissiveness present as he offers his input on each statement.

But then, the further he gets into his task, the more he starts to notice things - the same names start cropping up across entries, different statements attest to similar phenomena…

…one particular entry strikes far, far too close to home.

There are five seasons to this show, and I’m most of the way through the first one, which consists of 40 separate entries. A quick glance at the other seasons (I’m trying to remain unspoiled) suggests similar lengths for seasons 2-4, and season 5 looks to be considerably longer. Each story is relatively brief - 20 to 30 minutes on average - and in the beginning it’s just Jonathan reading someone’s written statement, so it feels a bit like we’re listening to someone telling ghost stories. The result is concise (none of the stories really overstay their welcome, though some work better than others), sort of snack-sized bits of horror. The style varies as well, ranging from tales of the supernatural (“Angler Fish,” “Do Not Open,” “The Piper”), to cosmic horror (“Alone,” “Dreamer,” “Growing Dark”), monster stories (“Vampire Killer,” “First Hunt”), body horror (“The Man Upstairs,” “Taken Ill,” “Colony”) and even demonic possession (“Confession,” “Desecrated Host”). Plenty of stories defy easy genre categorization as well, and when they work (and they mostly do), they do the work of the best horror short stories - they get in there, lodge under your skin, and then finish, leaving you with as many questions as answers.

And if that’s all the show was, that’d be enough. But something I’ve noticed over the course of the first season is an expansion of the show on a couple of levels. First, as the season progresses, more voices get added to the cast. At first, it’s just Jonathan, alone in his office, committing these statements to audio. But then we start to get asides (in the form of interruptions) from his colleague Martin, an account from assistant archivist Sasha James, and then…unwelcome guests, intruding on the proceedings. It gives you the sense that a larger world is opening up around this beleaguered archivist, and in the second form of expansion, that larger world is probably not especially friendly. Certain names keep coming up in relation to supernatural occurrences - a long-dead antique book dealer with a taste for especially malevolent work, a mother and son duo who seem intent on tracking down said dealer’s books, a shipping company that specializes in unusual objects, among others. And when Martin and Sasha have their own face-to-face encounter with the protagonist of one of the stories, it brings danger to the Institute’s literal front door, in what’s looking to be a climactic showdown at the end of the first season. 

I’m a little skeptical about turning collections of discrete stories into an overarching narrative, because - as it did in The Lovecraft Investigations - it threatens to undermine the horror of each individual story and turn the whole enterprise into something else, like an action/adventure story with supernatural trappings. Horror works well, in my opinion, when it leans into the unexplained, and overarching narratives tend to explain things. But, at least right now, it seems to be working pretty well here. Part of this is because you get the sense it was built into the stories from the start, rather than being retrofitted onto the stories afterward. And it’s used sparingly, and very gradually over the course of the season, so it feels surprising when a recurring character pops up, creating a slight sense of paranoia, of things moving under the surface of the world that Jonathan is only beginning to discover. And, at least as of where I am right now, there’s no attempts to shoehorn everything discussed over the course of the season into some kind of unifying mythos, which I appreciate. It’s still something to be careful about, though, as one of the least effective entries of the season seems to pretty much exist to establish an antagonist for the last third of the season, rather than function as a stand-alone story. I get the sense that there is a larger continuity being established here that’s going to span all five seasons, but as long as it’s employed judiciously and doesn’t take over what makes the podcast good, I’m more curious than anything as to how it is going to play out.

There are a couple of weak points - that the accounts are (with a few exceptions) Jonathan reading written statements out loud means that they can threaten to feel a little samey (especially a problem for me since I tend to listen to three or four episodes at a go) in way that they wouldn’t if it were a more traditional interview format, and the voice acting is a touch stagey in a way that you wouldn’t expect from someone recording an account for posterity. It’s noticeable, but once the stories really get going you don’t really notice it. Or maybe the character of Jonathan Sims is just that pompous. It’s certainly a possibility. But regardless, if you’re looking for concise, creepy, unsettling horror, this is definitely worth a listen.

Show homepage