Howard's Mill: Unsolved Mysteries

True crime is kind of the place where documentary edges its way onto horror’s turf. Horror as a genre certainly doesn’t have any hesitation about using serial killers as monsters (something I find kind of insulting and disrespectful), and conversely true crime documentaries as often as not cast actual events as something like a horror film. Sometimes they’re good, but most of the time they’re sensationalistic without being especially insightful, there to serve up the lurid details.

And with the advent of podcasts and streaming video, true crime as entertainment has proliferated. What once would have been a book requiring months, if not years of research and writing and editing can now be turned into a podcast that has the advantage of being able to update with new information and juicy details quickly. Likewise, relatively low-budget documentaries that wouldn’t have even had a shelf life on video now nestle comfortably on streaming services, and Internet communities full of amateur sleuths intent on finding what detectives couldn’t provide fuel for the fire. I’ve watched or listened to a few. Enough to recognize a style, if not be impressed.

Which brings me to Howard’s Mill, a well-crafted mockumentary that absolutely nails the feeling of a modern-day true-crime documentary, but in doing so sacrifices some of the horror that it’s trying to convey.

It’s November of 2017, and two film students - Kaiser and Charlie - have come to rural Springfield, Tennessee to make a documentary about an unsolved missing-persons case. Emily Nixon was out with Dwight, her husband, doing some metal-detecting on an abandoned patch of farmland called Howard’s Mill, when she mysteriously vanished. One minute she’s talking to Dwight, the next she’s walking over a rise, and then the next she’s gone. Needless to say, the police are looking at Dwight as their prime suspect. He’s the most logical choice, but the police are stymied by a complete absence of evidence. When jealous husbands murder their wives, there’s a trail of evidence. Here, there’s nothing.

Soon enough, Kaiser and Charlie begin both documenting and assisting in Dwight’s efforts to find his wife. Part of this means looking around Howard’s Mill - a triangular patch of what used to be tobacco farmland, with a big pond and an abandoned farmhouse. And in their efforts to figure out what might have happened, Dwight comes across news accounts of another case from 2007, where a little girl named Sarah Edwards vanished almost right in front of her parents’ eyes as she walked just over a hill, on that same tract of land.

This has happened before. As it turns out, Springfield has an unusually high number of active missing-person cases.

The story is very much in the vein of any number of true-crime documentaries available on any number of streaming services. We begin with the case, and the suspect, and then as is often the case, the story begins to unfold as the film goes on, with surprising revelations and twists and reversals, new information coming to light, secrets that people were keeping. And one of the film’s biggest strengths is that it paces its central mystery well, beginning with a single missing-person case and gradually moving outward to other unexplained events, creating a rabbit hole that encompasses not only the stock elements of any true-crime story, but also details that hint at something far stranger without really beating you over the head with it. It’s there to be noticed, and becomes more prominent as the film goes on, but it feels plausible - the filmmakers don’t immediately jump to a supernatural explanation, it gradually reveals itself as more and more things that don’t fit become known.

And it’s a convincing depiction. As an example of a modern true-crime documentary, this film commits completely to the bit. The camerawork contains moody montages, lots of infographics, talking-head interviews, archival footage, repeated dramatic zooms on spooky-looking locations, and dramatic drone shots overlooking small-town America. It’s got saccharine power ballads in memory of the missing, the interviews have the requisite number of gotcha questions, the story is peppered with sudden, dramatic reveals that add new wrinkles to the story just when you think you’ve got it all figure out, it all rings true. The performances are largely realistic, with people who act like people, for better or worse. None of them are saints, nor are any of them villains. They’re flawed, complicated people stuck in a bewildering set of circumstances, and the dialogue is rarely stagey or contrived. Maybe a little expository here and there, but nothing to take you out of the story. The setting feels real - it looks like it was shot on location, and the archival materials - photographs, phone camera footage, surveillance video - all look like actual sources, which goes a long way toward supporting the conceit and preserving immersion in the story. It's not as easy to fuck up a mockumentary as it is a found-footage film, but the details can still give it away when it's clear what we’re looking at are props or pro-shot footage doctored to look like something else. It's clear a lot of attention to detail went into this, in the presentation and the narrative.

And the narrative is where a lot of the interest actually lies as well - it's a pretty well-crafted mystery all told. It begins with one mysterious disappearance and the husband who is suspect #1, trying to find his wife and clear his name, that expands into something that gets increasingly harder and harder to explain the more we learn about this plot of land and the lives of the people in this town. It does a good job of keeping you guessing, as it holds maybe two or three possibilities up all at the same time and does a good job of not committing to one of them too early. It really could be a couple of different things until the third act, when some details just totally defy a rational explanation. It also does a good job of leaving some details unexplained - in life, narratives are rarely tidy and the unanswered question do linger in ways that are more unsettling than like plot holes. I do think it fizzles a bit in terms of the final explanation, though. On the one hand it makes sense that it'd end in messy, open-ended fashion, with what appeared to actually be happening not a conclusion anyone would have come to, but it feels like the film is missing a big sting or revelation to tie it all together or to throw things even further into question in the end. There are a couple of spooky moments, but it never really rises to the level of being especially scary or making the kind of emotional impact it could have. It doesn’t end with a gasp so much as it does with a golf clap.

It's an enjoyable ride to take for the majority of its run time, but it doesn't have quite the wallop of something like Lake Mungo, or the thematic underpinning of something like Savageland, or the relentless eeriness of Noroi, all films with which I think this compares favorably. It's maybe not quite as good as any of those, and there's a post-credit sequence that's a little too contrived and on-the-nose, is superfluous given what we’ve seen, but it's developed well and doesn't really make any major mistakes. And, like The Lovecraft Investigations, it makes me wonder what else you could do with the “true crime story that becomes something horribly other” narrative that might have more teeth to it.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi