Isolation: Against Nature

Sometimes, the premise of a film is not especially promising. I can’t count the number of films I’ve passed over because they’re about a family whose darkest secret has come back to haunt them, or about a house or hospital or whatever hiding an ancient evil, or about a mysterious force terrorizing someone. You get the idea.

I’m probably a little pickier than I should be, if I’m being completely fair. There really are only so many ways you can describe any kind of film (I mean, the blurb for Hereditary is “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences,” which doesn’t even begin to capture the scope of that film) and I’d rather it be too vague than give too much away any day. But when you don’t know anything else about the film, it’s tough, because generic descriptions make it easy to assume that the film itself is generic. And when you run across enough that are just as generic as their description makes them sound, that doesn’t help.

But then, every now and then, I’ll run across one that grabs me, Not necessarily because it’s compelling - those do happen, though they’re few and far between - but because it seems just improbable or odd enough to pique my curiosity. And I gotta say, Isolation was absolutely one of those. It’d been on my radar for some time, and the premise, on paper, sounds deeply silly. But in practice it isn’t. It’s a somber, tense monster movie that works better than you'd think

After an opening credits sequence that reminds me of old Nigel Kneale films (this is a good thing), we’re introduced to Dan and Orla. Dan owns a cattle farm in rural Ireland, and Orla is a veterinarian who’s come out to look at one of his cows. The cow is pregnant, and there’s something special about her - she’s being kept separate from the rest of the herd, in her own pen. We don’t get a lot of details right away, but apparently Dan, whose farm is in the red financially, took some money from a scientist named John, who works for Bovine Genetics Technology, to let John test a new genetic procedure on some of his stock, and Orla’s been contracted by the same company to do the check-ups. There’s tension there, and some history between them. But Orla is a professional, so she gloves up and lubes up to check on the calf. Everything seems normal...

...until something bites her hand. Calves don’t do that. Especially not unborn calves.

The broad strokes, then, are pretty clear. John is working on some kind of genetic modification that will make cows more fertile at a younger age, and allow their calves to grow faster. Dan’s cow is a test subject, her calf a product of this modification, and Orla discovers pretty quickly that there is something...extremely wrong with the calf. And while this is all going on, Dan has to deal with a Traveller couple who are parked up on the road just outside his property. John doesn’t want them there because of security issues, and Dan doesn’t especially want them there either, but the couple - Jamie and Mary - seem desperate, cornered. They’re hiding from something or someone and don’t want to budge. And then that night, the cow goes into labor. Dan can’t reach Orla because his phone service got shut off. So he recruits Jamie to help him deliver the calf himself. And in the process, Dan gets bitten as well. 

Like I said, there’s something very, very wrong with the calf.

When the brief for a film is "mutant cow terrorizes people on a remote Irish farm," you expect it to be silly, played for camp and laughs, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't go into it thinking "okay, how is this gonna work," but honestly? It worked better than I thought it would. A lot of this comes down first to the setting - there's a gap between the romanticized and realistic depictions of farms in film, and this is very much a real, working farm, gray and muddy and rain-sodden, corrugated metal sheds and rusting chutes and pens. Everything is overcast and gloomy, which sets the tone right from the start, and the setting helps ground the premise as well. It's a working farm, and so there's nothing romantic or sentimental about the livestock, just animals in their pens, lots of rain, mud, and shit. This contributes to the larger sense of biological horror as well - just the process of delivering a calf is already pretty hard to watch, all winches and ropes and fluids and steam, so perversions of it have their own horror while still feeling of a piece with the setting. The biological modification of animals through hormones and selective breeding is already all too common in the livestock industry, so really this isn't that much of a step away from real life, even if the results are even more horrific than usual. .

So the setting is suitably grim, and on top of that, everything is played completely straight - there are no nods and winks to the audience about the absurdity of the premise or anything. Something very bad has happened here and these five people are going to have to deal with the consequences, and that's the most important part. It all takes place over maybe two days or so, just five people basically caught in the middle of a crisis, the implications of which necessitate quick action, before something starts to spread. This seriousness extends to how the story is told as well. The characters are sketched in enough to be believable as people, though John does start to verge on mad-scientist caricature toward the end - it's not exactly that, he's acting both from desperation and a sense of what the stakes are, but it feels a little abrupt. But you get a sense of who these people are to each other and what’s going on without too much unnecessary exposition. The dialogue is mostly believable, maybe a little exposition-y at the top of the third act, when everything starts to escalate, but all in all, the setting and the sense of restraint help sell what could have been a deeply goofy premise. It’s paced well, setting the table economically and then developing the premise gradually so that by the time we have a sense of just how wrong everything has gone, it's time for shit to get real in the third act, which is when the tension really starts building and this farm at night, all industrial equipment and moisture and fitful lighting, isn't all that different from the guts of the Nostromo. I’m not saying this film is as good as Alien - few are - but it’s definitely cut from the same cloth, and that’s entirely to its credit.

It does have some problems - there's a disease subplot that only comes up fitfully, and we could have used maybe just a little more background on the nature of John's research. Not a whole lot more, I'd rather a film under-explain than over-explain any day, but some stuff is hinted at maybe a little too obliquely and a little more detail would have added some punch. As with any monster movie, there's always the problem of how well the creature effects are going to hold up, and though these largely do and the filmmakers are mostly judicious in their deployment, there are a couple of moments, especially toward the end, when things get dodgy, though never for very long. And to be fair, that was a problem in Alien as well. Finally there's a story beat in the second act that, for me, pretty much telegraphed the ending, but though it does end on the note I thought it would, it’s handled with the same sense of restraint and winds everything up on a nicely inconclusive note, so it's not too huge a deal.

It's easy to forget how much of a story relies on how it’s told. A premise that sounds terrifying on paper can be risible in its execution, and something that looks goofy on paper can actually work after all. This is a film that locates monstrosity close to home, ties it into an existing context of callousness and life as commodity and takes it all seriously. It may not be an unqualified success, but it’s better than I expected, and I’ll take that any day.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To: Blood Ties

Vampires are typically presented as (ugh) romantic figures, as per the Twilight films, Interview With The Vampire, and varying takes on Dracula. Doomed to see everyone they love wither and die, and oh, how tragic that makes their existence. Of course, this overlooks the fact that their own immortality comes at the cost of innocent lives, so it all feels a little disingenuous and icky to ennoble them. It’s certainly not the only way vampires ever get depicted, but it’s a narrative that has a lot of traction, and is part of why I don’t like many vampire movies.

One vampire movie I do like, as it turns out, is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To. It’s the absolute antithesis of the romantic vampire movie, and more importantly, a bleak, sorrowful story of what it means to care for someone who will never be able to take care of themselves.

The film opens on a truck driving down a winding road at dusk, but the shot doesn’t last long before cutting to a man with a shopping cart, walking by an overpass. He’s rooting through dumpsters, finding stuff to keep. The truck we saw earlier pulls up next to him. We don’t hear what the driver says, but it immediately cuts to the man riding in the truck, telling the driver what he won’t do. You get the sense he’s had to draw these lines with ostensible Samaritans before. The driver says it’s not like that, he just wants to help him. They pull up in front of an old house, and the man says “I thought you said this was a shelter.” The driver says that it is, and the man says it looks like a house. The driver says it used to be...

...and then he hits the man in the back of the head with a baseball bat. He drags the man inside, cuts his throat and drains the blood into a container. 

This is how we’re introduced to Dwight, his sister Jessie, and their brother Thomas. They live on their own in a house in a somewhat shabby suburb of Salt Lake City. Thomas is frail and sickly. He sleeps during the day, and Jessie homeschools him at night, and he survives on human blood. When he doesn’t get enough, he gets really sick. So Dwight and Jessie take care of him, and that includes making sure he gets enough blood to stay alive. When the film opens, it’s clear that they've been doing this for a long time - probably too long. There's a sense of routine, and an equal sense of weariness. Dwight and Jessie's entire lives revolve around caring for Thomas, they scrape out a living between Jessie's job waiting tables and whatever Dwight can scrounge off of the people they kill and what he can make selling their clothes and possessions at a thrift store. Dwight's only moments for human connection come from his visits to a sex worker, delimited by time and money. And Thomas is limited to listening to the kids playing outside during the day, imagining what it would be like if he could be their friend.

Sometimes you get more bestial or feral depictions of vampires, as in Nosferatu or 30 Days Of Night, but this is the first time I can recall seeing vampirism depicted as first and foremost a debilitating illness. It's completely and utterly unromantic. It's hard to get a handle on who they are as people outside of this, but that feels less because they aren't thought-out as characters (they are, and we know who they are through their actions and reactions, looks, the way they carry themselves) as much as it is because this life has left very little of them remaining. Dwight is crumbling under the strain of the things he has to do to keep his brother alive, it’s worn Jessie down to something hard, cold, and ruthless. And Thomas is desperately lonely and largely blameless, so tired of being sick and not being able to lead a normal life. They've been doing this for a long time, they're worn down to the bone, and it's rapidly becoming harder and harder to sustain. The film does an excellent job of not over-explaining. There's no mythos here, no backstory, we don't know how long they've been like this (though Thomas appears to be in at least his adolescence if not older, so quite awhile), no idea how Thomas ended up this way. It is what it is, and this is what they have to deal with, and it's breaking them.

Everything about this film communicates the despair with which our protagonists live. It's set in drab locations that mostly feel like they're being lit by old incandescent lighting, everything dingy and yellowish, exteriors are largely gloomy and overcast, and enough of the film takes place inside, in their home, that you lose a sense of night and day as any regular cycle. It's a quiet film, the score limited to low-key, ambient music or diegetic songs (mostly in they keys of mournful, wistful, and longing) at key moments. Much of the film goes without a score entirely, and the dialogue is sparse, the tired utterances of people who have spent far too much of their lives in close quarters with each other, and the sort of desultory conversations and exchanges we have with people we don't know very well. The oppressive isolation felt by the protagonists is even expressed in an almost-square aspect ratio, so the screen presses in on everyone as much as their circumstances do. There is violence, as often off-screen as on, and it's always ugly, messy, the clumsy fumbling that real violence looks like.

The film does manage the tricky act of keeping the protagonists somewhat sympathetic despite the nature of their existence. They do horrible things, but their humanity is never in doubt. You can see all of the different ways having to live like this has affected each of them. Nobody seems to rejoice in their existence, they're all tired of living this way and the toll it's taken is evident in what they say, how they say it. There’s weariness, resentment, the sense that they know what they’ve had to give up. Even Jessie, the most predatory of the three, seems more the result of a life of grim resolve than someone who takes any kind of pleasure in what she does. It’s as much a family drama as anything else, which makes the third act, something horrifying born from a simple attempt at human connection, hard to watch not just in its violence, but also how heartbreaking it is. Everyone's starting to crack in their own way, and that's really what the center of the film is - the way that caring for anyone who cannot take care of themselves exerts a toll on the caregivers. The last time I saw this idea outlined so vividly in a horror film, it was The Babadook, which is pretty good company in which to find yourself.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon
 

May: Under Glass

In any genre of film, you’re going to have classics - films that are platonic examples of the style, something like a canon. Sometimes you know which films these are because they’re held up time and time again as classics. Others, though, maybe don’t get the official recognition but are so widely and enthusiastically discussed that you get the tacit sense that this is one of those films as well. Even if they don’t have the gold frame around them, they’re very much part of the curriculum.

Over the years of writing this thing, I’ve tried to apply myself to the curriculum. I’m constantly working at becoming more literate in horror film, and that means catching up on classics, revisiting old favorites with a critical eye, and checking out films that everyone seems to know and talk about even if they aren’t part of the recognized canon. And May is definitely one of those films - I definitely feel remiss for not having watched it sooner. It doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as The Exorcist or Night Of The Living Dead, but it gets mentioned a lot in discussions of horror film and it shows up on a lot of favorites lists.

Having finally seen it, I can see why. It’s an offbeat, stylized story about the costs of loneliness, and although it’s very much of its time and hasn’t aged as well as it could have in some ways, it’s still very smart, well-made, and it still has a lot of power.

It opens with a zippy title sequence more at home in a light comedy about the world of fashion than a horror film - stitches making their way across cloth, outlining the credits, before smash-cutting to a shot of a woman standing in front of a mirror, clutching her bleeding eye and screaming. It's brief, like a nightmare finding its way into a different movie, and it works.

That horrific image is gone as quickly as it comes, and we’re introduced to May Canady as a little girl. She’s got a lazy eye and a polished, glossy mother for whom imperfection is unacceptable. May is going to have to wear an eyepatch, and her mother wants her to cover it with her hair because nobody will want to be her friend otherwise. And her mother seems to be right. We get a brief sequence of May’s birthday - it’s just her, her parents, and a cake. Her mother gives her a present - the first doll her mother ever made. The doll’s name is Suzie. Suzie is very fragile, so she has to be kept behind glass. Suzie can’t be touched or held, and she is May’s first friend.

We next see May as an adult, shy and plain, gawky. She works as a veterinary assistant, and in her spare time she likes to sew. She makes her own blouses and dresses and lives on her own in a small apartment full of dolls. She still has Suzie, and as near as we can tell, Suzie is still her only friend.

May talks to Suzie, and responds like Suzie is talking to her.

This film is very much a product of its time period. It takes place in the kind of relentlessly quirky, just-off-center-from-everyday-life world emblematic of a certain style of film made from the mid-90s to early 00s. Films like Pulp Fiction, Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, and Donnie Darko, set in worlds that take what was then a modern setting and salt it with anachronistic costumes or settings more reminiscent of the late 1950s, early 1960s and affected dialogue and characterization that don't really try for naturalism at all. The characters aren't really fully fleshed-out people (her coworker Polly is especially caricatured, but it's a film full of caricature) but that feels of a piece with the heightened world of the film, and it doesn't interfere with the really important moments. It's an approach that you don't really see again until 2012's Excision, a film that, in retrospect, owes more than a bit of a debt to this film. The quirkiness does dilute some of the film’s power, but never completely overwhelms it, largely down to strong central performances, a careful portrayal of the protagonist, and solid, consistent direction.

We find May at the beginning of an infatuation with Adam, a young man who works at the body shop across the street from her job. She’s clearly smitten, and it’s equally clear that she has no real understanding of how to go about making a connection. May is obviously awkward and very lonely, desperate for human companionship after a childhood where her only friend was a doll - a doll too precious to be taken out of its glass case, which is wonderfully emblematic of the alienation May suffers and serves as a sort of visual barometer of her condition throughout the film. The story begins as one about her attempts to connect with Adam, and where her attempts take her. Were it not for the brief flash-forward at the beginning (and the worrying way she describes the whole thing to her coworkers), for most of this movie's run time you could be forgiven for thinking that it's an indie romance about a late bloomer's attempts to find love and free herself from the shackles of her own insecurities. There's definitely an "ugly duckling becomes a swan" vibe here.

And it’s actually that vibe, that particular narrative, that is really the source of the film's tension and discomfort for most of it. May is so awkward, so vulnerable, so starved of human connection that even when you can see that she's not especially stable, she's still more sympathetic that not, and even while you know things are going to break bad eventually (even were it not for the flash-forward, the signs are all there), every fumbling encounter, every rejection, every instance of being used or betrayed, it all hurts to watch. I found myself looking away at things that weren't violent at all, just because I was able to empathize enough with May that I knew how hurt she'd be. It’s hurt somewhat (especially in the final act) by the cartoonish setting and characters, which threaten to trivialize the horror of her descent, but for every goofy, extremely 90s moment, there’s another one of honesty and sincerity where it really matters, and May herself never descends into caricature.

And it also helps, despite all of the affectation, that this is a smartly directed film. It’s crisply shot and edited, and makes good use of montage and repeated visual symbolism. The reduction of living things into their parts is a recurrent theme, played out most in terms of the dolls with which May decorates her bedroom, but in other ways as well, and her childhood doll is a constant presence, understated but always there, her only friend one that cannot speak and that she cannot even touch. A side story about a day care center for blind children speaks to the importance of being seen for May, who has spent most of her life believing herself unattractive and being overlooked, but it’s far from being played for sentimentality. The score is minimal, confined mostly to periodic pop songs, both contemporary and classic, which in some ways encapsulates May's experience - The Breeders’ "Do You Love Me Now" being an excellent example here of a sweetly-sung song about love that gradually reveals a hardness, corroding into feedback. When May finally snaps, the violence is rarely lingered upon, at least the physical violence.- the emotional violence is really the centerpiece here. It's a film that is brightly colored and sunny and chirpy right up to the point that it isn't, when that all falls away to reveal the pain of one lonely young woman and where it sends her. You know it's not going to end well, but May is sympathetic enough that you at least hope, against all logic, that you're wrong and it's going to be a happy ending.

But it isn’t. Like Excision, like Saint Maud, like The Eyes Of My Mother, this is a story of an unstable woman's spiral into something much worse, and watching that spiral begin is painful and hard. May finally feels emboldened enough to take risks, to step out into the world, to reach out, and she pays for it. None of it is unusually cruel, it's the base insensitivity of which human beings are far too capable, and at least in Adam’s case is as much a sensible response to May’s behavior as anything else. But to someone like May, it is absolutely the worst thing that can happen, and her transformation is basically watching all of what's good fall away. I think the climax loses some of the power and impact it could have had because the offbeat setting renders a lot of it cartoonish when it could stand to be deadly serious, and May retains just enough sympathy that it feels more like revenge than anything else, but it’s redeemed by a final sequence that is powerfully honest and emotionally raw, casting everything that came before as a tragedy. When you put glass between a person and their only friend, it’s going to shatter eventually.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Sorgoi Prakov: The Atrocity Exhibition

So last week I had a skillfully executed mockumentary that never reached the level of intensity that it could have, and I guess by way of contrast, this week I ended up watching a found-footage film that makes a number of mistakes and probably ends up being a little too intense for its own good. I swear I didn’t plan it that way.

Well, that might be a little too glib of a comparison to make - Sorgoi Prakov isn’t exactly found-footage (well, at least it’s framed in a way that beggars belief on that front), but it’s definitely a first-person perspective on one man’s spiral toward rock bottom and whatever lies beyond that. It has its moments though, even if it suffers from poor narrative and pacing choices.

We open cold on what purports to be footage that is labeled property of French law enforcement. It’s footage of a filthy, near-feral man (who for some reason has a video camera strapped to his head) assaulting a family in their home. This cuts to a title card explaining that this is the footage shot by one Sorgoi Prakov, documenting his “descent into darkness.” I really hate it when found-footage films do this. Don’t tell us up front that something bad is going to happen, just let the damn story play out in a way that we aren’t braced to expect. And if that wasn’t annoying enough, that title card is followed by opening credits that are intended to be those of the fictional producers of a documentary titled “My European Dream.” And then if that wasn’t enough, that title card morphs into a scary version (skulls and all) with the title “My European Nightmare.” It’s a jarring combination of artifice and verisimilitude, and it does nothing to help the movie.

With that particular grab-bag of filmic cliches out of the way, we are introduced to Sorgoi Prakov. He’s from a small (fictional) Eastern European country, where he works as a cameraman for the state television service. He’s come to Paris as the starting point for a journey that will see him visiting every capital in Western Europe (on a route shaped like a giant heart), as he documents his travels in search of the “European Dream.” Hence the title. It is strictly a one-man operation - he has two small video cameras, one directional microphone, and a laptop for editing and uploading his video to a streaming video site. One camera and the mic are mounted on a rig that he wears on his head, the camera on one side of his head and the microphone on the other. He has the other camera attached to a Steadicam rig that he also wears, so he can capture footage of what he sees as well as footage of him seeing it. It’s almost tempting to call it a parody of the ridiculous lengths some found-footage films go to in order to try and rationalize having footage that is too neat and tidy to come from a hand-held camera, but here it works to make Sorgoi stand out like a sore thumb. He looks more than a little ridiculous as he walks the streets of Paris, occasionally conducting man-on-the-street interviews.

So we have someone from a small Eastern European country come to the big city to make a documentary. We have seen this before, and though it would be reductive to call this “Borat if it were a horror film,” there is definitely a bit of that flavor to it. Sorgoi is presented very much as a naif, a fool, a man entirely out of his depth in Paris. He's come here to make a documentary about the "European dream," but it becomes apparent very quickly that he doesn't have much of a plan. Mostly he makes attempts to visit tourist destinations and gets waylaid almost immediately by the more predatory side of Paris' nightlife. Like any big city, it's going to eat up people who aren't looking out for themselves.

And that's exactly what happens. Sorgoi gets too drunk, gets too high, and loses his credit card. His producers aren't returning his calls. And so after maybe two days in Paris, he’s already down to the cash in his wallet.

Like I said, he didn’t have much of a plan.

From there, it's just a matter of time before the money runs out and his circumstances become increasingly and inexorably more desperate. He's a long way from home, doesn't know the language, doesn't know the culture, doesn't know the city, he's utterly at the mercy of others and it's in this that the film is at its most effective. There are multiple points where it's clear to the viewer that things are about to go very badly, while Sorgoi himself seems blithely unaware. He’s an obvious foreigner roaming the streets of Paris with a bunch of electronics strapped to him like some kind of performance artist or clown. His situation is precarious to begin with, and every new setback, every bad decision, every time circumstances don't break his way, it gets even worse. There's a steadily mounting dread there, a question of how much worse it's going to get before it's all over.

The answer is much, much worse. Sorgoi is a largely sympathetic (if not pathetic) figure at first, and his footage rapidly devolves into a series of victimizations, self-destructive behavior, and evidence of his declining fortunes and increasing debasement. And for the first half or so of the film, it works really well - we’re watching an apparently well-intentioned (if not especially well-prepared) man on a slide toward rock bottom. After a couple of attempted muggings and one delirious night out, full of too much vodka and too many pills, Sorgoi’s composure begins to falter as he realizes how quickly he’s running out of options. It’s hard to watch because it’s a situation that isn’t entirely outside of what we can imagine. There are no monsters here, just a man stranded far from home with no way to get back and nowhere to sleep. His attempts to put a brave face on all of it just makes it that much harder, though he isn’t by any means perfect - he’s maybe a bit of a pig, and he does stupid, foolish things when he’s drunk, which becomes more and more frequent the worse things become. I don’t know that you can say anyone deserves what’s happening to him, but you can also see why it’s happening to him.

And then, at what seems to be the tipping point, when you think he's hit absolute rock bottom, there is the suggestion (deftly underplayed, I think) that maybe he wasn't that stable to begin with. That maybe his trip to Paris wasn't for the purposes of an officially sanctioned documentary. And what follows is someone who plunges completely into the abyss, someone who finds rock bottom and keeps digging. In some ways it's communicated effectively, with the footage we're watching become increasingly more fragmented, as a reflection of his rapidly disintegrating mental state, ultimately breaking down into frequent blackouts, electronic buzzing, and a signal so glitchy that it dissolves into noise. In that sense it's effective, but the back half of the movie exchanges a slow, desperate decline for a constant barrage of grotesquery that eventually becomes numbing. Individual sequences are striking in isolation, but there's just so much of it and it gets so horrible, and Sorgoi is so visibly losing what humanity he has left that it's harder to care than it is in the beginning, when, despite his naivete and ineptitude and occasional boorishness, he was still recognizable as a person caught in increasingly worsening circumstances. His transformation into something more feral feels believable in relation to who he was before, it isn't jarring, but the way it plays out threatens to turn the character into a more generically monstrous figure. We're just sort of left to watch things get worse and worse and worse, and it’s so relentless and there’s so little breathing room, so few reminders of Sorgoi’s humanity, that it's hard to feel much about it one way or the other.

It's not that there’s much wrong with the way it develops, and fortunately for every deeply unpleasant thing we're forced to watch, there are two even more unpleasant things left to suggestion, but there’s just so much of it that it kind of loses any meaning. There isn't enough connection between the Sorgoi we knew and what he's become, either, so apart from watching the obvious physical and mental decline of this character, we're left with kind of a generic maniac, and though what that maniac gets up to is extremely upsetting, there isn't the horror we'd feel at what this man has become, because there's nothing left of him at the end.

And maybe that's kind of the point, but as it is, it just sort of becomes a series of atrocities that go on and on until they stop. So yeah, it’s sort of like Borat, but Borat by way of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. And if that seems like kind of a queasy combination, well...yep.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon