Rent-A-Pal: Parasocial

A big part of being human is a need for community and belonging. Friendship, romantic relationships, family ties (however you define family), it’s all essential to our happiness and well-being. It’s not a life-or-death thing like food or air or water, but a life without connection is a really hard one. And I think it’s something we don’t really realize the importance of until it’s missing - the inchoate discomfort that attended two years of interacting with pretty much everybody via a screen attests to that, I think. And horror examines this really well sometimes - in films I’ve written about recently, like Saint Maud, Censor, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To and May, you have protagonists whose isolation from the people around them and their struggle to connect has a serious impact on their mental health, and as often as not their attempts to reach out have terrible consequences. It may not be the flashiest of our fears, but it’s a powerful one.

And Rent-A-Pal, despite a premise that could have easily gone in a very silly direction, ends up being a creepy, restrained story of the psychological costs of loneliness and lack of connection. It’s a thoughtful, sensitive film, ultimately marred by some puzzling narrative choices.

It’s Denver, Colorado during the 1980s, and we’re introduced to David while he’s watching a videotape of a series of women, sitting in front of a plain backdrop, describing themselves and what they’re looking for in a relationship. It’s part of a video dating service that he’s signed up for. See, David’s in kind of a tough spot in his life right now - he lives at home with his mother Lucille, who is suffering from advanced dementia and needs constant supervision. His father’s been dead for some years, so David is all she has left. They get by okay on her Social Security, but it doesn’t leave him a whole lot of time to socialize. If he leaves the house for more than an hour or so, he needs to take her to the local senior citizen’s center, and that costs money.

But David has needs like anyone else. He gets lonely. And, as is so often the case, folks who are lonely and having trouble making connections on their own turn to services to help match them with people. And it’s the 1980s, at a point when VCRs have become common, commercially available technology and video cameras aren’t far behind. So video is revolutionizing what might have once been called the “lonely hearts” industry. David watches the interviews, makes notes in a little form that came with the tape. He uses one of his valuable hours out of the house to go to the video dating service, hopeful that he’s matched with someone this time. It’s been about six weeks without a single bite. No such luck this time either, though the receptionist is as optimistic and encouraging as any sales person would be.

As he’s just about to leave, he notices a tape in a large bargain-bin of miscellaneous videotapes. It’s called “Rent-A-Pal,” and it’s basically advertised as a virtual friend. Think something like a more interactive version of a recording of a Yule log. It’s a recording of someone named Andy. He’s smiling, attentive, sitting in a chair facing you. You can tell him your embarrassing stories, confess your deepest hopes and fears, and Andy will never, ever judge you.

Andy will always be there for you.

And this is what David is reduced to at this point, and what the film explores is the steadily mounting cost of his loneliness and the way a prerecorded friend may not be the healthiest solution to his predicament. The film is set, importantly, in a period when the idea of virtual connection was in its infancy. It’s not the modern day, with pervasive social media and instant communication across multiple channels. It’s analog, not digital, and the film makes much of the thump and clunk of VCRs, the way gears and capstans whir, spooling out tape, the way CRT television signals become noise, then red, green, and blue abstraction, the ratcheting of old credit card impression devices. There are lonely people in the world, trying to make connections, but the technology is as clumsy and fumbling as the people who have recourse to it to relieve their sense of isolation. It’s less conversation and more sort of hurling your attempt at connection out into the void and waiting days or weeks to hear back. It’s a conversation played back on a screen, the same way every time. You could talk to the screen, but it doesn’t actually hear you. Technology in this film is something tactile, big and clunky and ungainly without being self-conscious about it, and it describes a world where the potential for connection through technology is not nonexistent, but certainly very primitive.

And it’s a very believable world. The film does a very good job (for the most part) of painting relatable, sympathetic characters who are doing the best they can with what they have. David is fundamentally decent, trying to do right by his mother while still able to acknowledge the costs to his own life. He knows what he’s missing out on, but he isn’t going to abandon his mother. Lucille, almost totally helpless, is his entire life. She has her good days and bad days, but as David observes, they’re starting to tip more toward the bad more often. He’s all she has left, so his only real connection is with someone completely dependent on him and who as often as not isn’t even really aware of who he is or where she is. He’s 40, he lives in his mother’s basement, and any opportunity to get away for more than an hour or so costs some of the money he has to keep strictly budgeted. His comforts are few - a bottle of whiskey, a box of candy bars, some grainy old 8mm stag films when he’s sure Lucille is asleep. He spends a lot of time in front of the television.

And it would have been easy to make Lucille a caricature, a harridan abusing her henpecked son, but she isn’t. It’s clear that she’s aware on some level that she’s losing her faculties and it makes her angry and sad. She insists on trying to feed herself and breaks down when she can’t. She just wants to go for a walk and can’t. She’s in a lot of pain, and she keeps mistaking David for her late husband. Sometimes he corrects her, sometimes he plays along. Sometimes she gets angry with him, sometimes there’s real affection. It’s a demanding job, David’s not a healthcare professional and he’s doing the best he can, whether that’s enough or not. There’s resignation there, resentment, but he keeps it under wraps. For her sake. Of course, this also makes it difficult for him to really have a life or pursue relationships, and from the outside looking in, a bland, soft, middle-aged man who still lives with his mother isn’t anyone’s idea of a catch. There’s an especially painful sequence at the video dating service where you see David in all his depth and decency, but his interview segment runs too long, and what it shortens down to reduces him to something pathetic. The cards are stacked against him and you get the sense that he knows it, and it’s starting to get to him.

So you have real, sympathetic people located in a drab, workday vision of 80s suburbia. It’s a restrained, low-key setting, and the idea of a videotaped “friend” who becomes increasingly sinister could have been really jarring. It could easily be played for camp or cheated into something else, like a Freddy Krueger who springs from the television set, but the film largely plays fair with the idea just as it does with the flesh and blood characters. Andy is blandly friendly (at least to start), and the film gets a lot of mileage out of using the same footage repeatedly (since it’s a tape, committed to a specific routine)  in changing contexts to turn what was at first a little awkward into something more menacing. Early on, there’s a nice push and pull between moments where David’s interactions with Andy fall into the rhythms of an actual conversation with another person, and moments where the artificiality is laid bare, where it becomes plainly evident that Andy’s responses are canned, scripted, and will always be the same no matter how many times you rewind the tape. It’s nicely illustrative of the limitations of virtual relationships, of parasocial contact, without being too didactic about it. And as the film goes on, something starts peering through the cracks in Andy’s amiable façade - little hints at troublesome things in his past, then emotional cruelty, then obsessive, emotionally abusive behavior. It’s never clear how much of this is actually the tape and how much of it is David’s disintegrating mental state, and the film doesn’t seem especially interested in committing to one interpretation over the other, but it also never tips too far into unbelievability, so it doesn’t especially matter. There are hints and feints at Andy creeping into David’s personality and waking life, and David’s perception of the world becoming increasingly skewed. It’s underplayed enough that it isn’t over-obvious, but also maybe a little too underplayed at points. There are a couple of moments that aren’t as shocking as I think they’re meant to be because they’re so blink-and-you-miss-it.

But the biggest problem far and away with the film is its pacing and narrative flow. This is basically the story of a desperately lonely man and how his desperate, last-ditch approximation of human contact ends up going terribly awry. That’s not a new story (nor does it need to be), but it’s typically one with a specific progression, and the sequence of events here gets muddled. The first half or so of the film works very well and takes its time to build up a sense of wrongness gradually, alongside a sensitive depiction of David’s life. It’s easy to root for him, to hope that maybe just this once the horror film won’t turn into a horror film. But then at about the halfway mark, there’s a sequence - an extended montage - that you’d expect to come in the third act of the film, when the protagonist’s attempts to reach out have all been rebuffed and the final downward spiral begins. But here, it happens and then…things start to look up for David, and continue to do so. The end result is that when the bottom does drop out, it doesn’t feel earned - David’s responses don’t feel authentic or natural because they aren’t coming as the culmination of one disappointment and rejection after another. That moment happens, but then things turn around, but then it ends as if things never turned around for him. As long as the focus is on obsolete technology, it feels like a film where one of the reels got shown out of order, or a DVD where two or more chapters got played in the wrong sequence, and so the second half of the film is a more confused affair than the first and doesn’t stick the landing nearly so well as a result. I think it ends well, and in a way that makes sense for the kind of film it is, but it doesn’t feel like the logical conclusion to what we’d just seen beforehand. It should be a tragedy, where for someone like David, any rejection is world-shattering and likely to send him over the brink, but instead it’s sort of baffling - as if everything good that had happened to him didn’t matter because he was committed to his downward spiral ahead of time, and it doesn’t feel like self-sabotage or self-destructive behavior, it doesn’t emerge organically.

But on yet another hand, it’s very well-shot and edited. The director got their start as a cinematographer and editor (this is their directorial debut) and it absolutely shows. This film gets the 1980s right without being too showy about it - the interiors of David’s home are slightly dim, lit by lamps and flickering television light like any modest home of the time would be, modest period appliances and furnishings and a basement living space that combines bedroom, living room, and hastily retrofitted bathroom with a drop ceiling and exposed pipes to create an environment exactly as sad as it needs to be. The video dating service is as brightly colored and plastic as you’d expect, all primary colors, bold geometric designs, and glossily enthusiastic customer service people. There’s a wonderful moment at a skating rink that’s shot as equal parts pastel reverie and suburban Edward Hopper, and in his lowest moments, David’s world is stark and fragmented, nighttime becoming dawn in an instant, all jump cuts and harsh, unflattering light, his moments with Andy crashing down into reality in the worst possible ways. The film is full of closeups on old technology, the first glimpses into technological isolation all clunky and mechanical and covered in artificial wood grain and video signals range from clear to glitchy and noisy, eventually breaking down into pure light and color, all meaning lost. In some ways, it reminds me of how One Hour Photo mixed image and reality, though it never really commits to the conceit to the extent that film did. But its visual sense is excellent, evocative lighting and shot angles, expressive editing - the story’s beautifully told, it’s just the way it orders things that lets it down.

The performances are all solid, pitched at a relatable, human level, the dialogue is largely naturalistic, and until the very end, even Andy is a restrained menace, his wide-eyed friendliness maybe just a little too wide-eyed and the little hints that all is not right coming subtly at first and then less so. Unfortunately, apart from the confusing sequence of events, some of this subtlety is lost in the very end, things become a little too artificial, and the end drags out maybe a little too long. Which is too bad, because there’s a lot here to like, but it’s one of those cases where the shortcomings stand out even more as a result. Much like David, there’s a lot of good here, but the way the video is cut, it doesn’t come through.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

The Neon Demon: Welcome To The Jungle

I’ve never really understood the fashion industry. I mean, I understand the need for clothing and I understand the concept of style, and I guess I can understand the idea of clothing as art, emphasizing form over function. I get it in the abstract, but the values and the priorities and the worldview that seem to attend it are utterly alien to me. If I were to be ungenerous, I’d say that it’s very superficial in its values and priorities and worldview, that it’s only concerned with appearance, and with some kind of idealization of form. Maybe there’s more to it than that, but the glimpses I’ve gotten certainly point to it being a world that is ultimately shallow and cruel. 

And this is what makes The Neon Demon such a tough film to wrestle with. On the one hand, it perfectly captures a world that is vain and empty and soulless, all surface and nothing else. And in that sense, it works very well. But the same things that make it such a vivid portrait of callous superficiality are also kind of its undoing. 

The film opens on a young woman, reclined on a chaise. She’s made up, stylishly dressed, wearing fancy jewelry. There’s something sleek and glossy about her, and there’s something sleek and glossy about the blood that runs from a slashed throat into pools on the floor. As she stares up at nothing, a camera clicks.

Cut to this same young woman at a dressing table, wiping off the fake blood. Her name is Jessie, and she’s just recently arrived in Los Angeles from small-town Georgia, looking to make it big as a model. Her prospects are limited, but she recognizes that she can make a living off her looks. Ruby, a makeup artist on the shoot, helps her clean herself off. Jessie wants to shop the photos from the shoot around to different agencies, but she’s acutely aware that she’s a novice at all of this. Ruby tells her not to worry, that “that deer-in-the-headlights look is exactly what they want.”

Jessie is all of sixteen years old.

On one level, it’s the story of the small-town girl who’s come to the big bad city to become a star, and that’s a story with its own stock characters and narrative. You’ve got the ingenue, the young man who believes in her and is the first one forgotten when she makes it big, the one woman looking out for the ingenue, the catty, jealous rivals and the predatory industry ready to chew her up and spit her out like so many before her. All are present and accounted for here. Well, I say on one level, but that’s kind of the only level there is here, because this is a relentlessly superficial, artificial film. Which isn’t necessarily a criticism – it’s a story about a world that is all surface, told in ways that are themselves all surface. Dialogue is sparse and typically delivered in almost robotic fashion, nobody in this film has an inner life, and everyone - the young man who believes in her included - has their own agenda. It’s the story of a girl - not even a young woman, a girl, not even done with high school - thrown into this environment and what’s going to happen to her, told through the hard sheen of the fashion industry. There are two worlds here - the glossy, stylish, designed-within-an-inch-of-its-life world of fashion, and the dingy, sordid world outside of that. There’s no in-between, no suburbs, no grocery stores or schools. Just shoots in glamorous locations, parties, and the shitty, run-down motel in Pasadena where Jessie is staying, fresh off the bus. Again, this isn’t a slice of life, and it all points back to a vision of Los Angeles as a dangerous jungle, reinforced in ways literal to the point of surrealism, where everyone is either a predator or prey. There’s an especially telling conversation about the names of lipstick shades (like I said, it’s a superficial film) that ends with Ruby asking Jessie “are you food…or are you sex?” And that’s the text - Jessie is a commodity, something to be consumed or used, nothing more than her body, nothing more than her flesh.

And as a film about surface, it excels - the segments in the “real world” are shot as drab, full of chiaroscuro and lens flare and the sickly glow of fluorescent lights. The world of fashion is sleek, modern, minimalist, sometimes awash in pinks and purples and blues and reds and neon, sometimes a completely white void, sometimes an empty black space studded with dressing-table lights and photography flashes. Runway shows are reveries, parties are luridly monochrome and strobe-lit (there are points in this film which would not be good for the seizure-prone), photoshoots are merciless exposure under burning lights, cameras clicking and flashing with an insistence that’s intrusive. It’s full of striking visuals, soundtracked with a score of lush, bright synthesizer, which does offset the enervated feeling you get from the dialogue and performance somewhat, so the end result is a film that’s wonderful to look at and listen to, with not a whole lot going on underneath.

Which, again, is exactly right for the subject matter - it embodies that empty superficiality perfectly, but that same emptiness, combined with a nearly two-hour running time, also makes the film an almost numbing experience at times. And this works against the horror of the world it portrays. As I said, this is in its broad strokes very much the standard story of a small-town girl who tries to make it big at a terrible price, but it’s that story told at the pitch of a horror film. Under the immaculate surface there is envy and desperation and raw hunger - hunger for more beauty, more youth, hunger for a party that never ends, and it’s rendered literal in ways that are, as individual moments, absolutely arresting, but don’t ever really gather much dramatic momentum. It’s catty small talk, and then it’s atrocity, and then it’s catty small talk again. There’s not much in the way of traditional story structure, and where the first act sets up a sense of quiet menace, this naïve little girl all on her own surrounded by wolves, the second act, which largely seems to be about her rise and transformation from small-town girl into next big thing and the monstrosities that come with that, feels more aimless and unfocused, so the feeling of menace, while not lost entirely, does drop away when it should be intensifying. The result is that the third act, striking for a relative absence of dialogue and reliance on individual images that almost turns it into an extended series of tableaux, doesn’t land with he impact that it could. There are still moments to make you gasp, but like so much that came before, they sort of exist in suspension, in isolation from each other. And the absence of any emotional heft or investment takes a toll here, where things that should be shocking become just another image (however horrifying) in an extended series of images. 

There are moments here which even in mere depiction have a lot to say about the idolization of image, the costs it exerts, and the ways - often strange and ugly - people do whatever they can to get close to beauty, but the languid pace and superficiality with which they’re presented make it hard for them to really hit home.  If it’s a film about the emptiness and ultimate horror behind the idea that beauty isn’t everything, but rather the only thing, and how it consumes and warps the ones who chase it, it does such a good job of submerging us in that world that its numb callousness ends up rubbing off on us.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon 

Terrore Nello Spazio: Time And Space

In my ongoing attempt to become more literate in Italian horror, I’m trying to familiarize myself with the classics at the very least. I’ve watched Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Deep Red (though now that I know what I saw was a version butchered for American release I may have to revisit the latter) and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on the general style - colorful, visually striking, and a total lack of subtlety seem to be constants - but I am aware I still have a long way to go. I decided that my next step was to start checking out the work of Mario Bava. There were a few different movies I could have gone with, but I decided to use this as an opportunity to check out Terrore Nello Spazio (Planet Of The Vampires), a film that’s piqued my interest for a long time, ever since seeing a still from it in Michael Weldon’s highly influential (to me at least) book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

What I got was something that’s certainly interesting as a curiosity and affirms certain expectations that I’ve developed about Italian horror, but unfortunately it hasn’t really stood the test of time in many ways. I think a lot of this is down to it being a film that is both science fiction and horror, and things that make a lot of science fiction films from the 50s and 60s quaint (if not unintentionally comic) to the modern eye are working against it here.

We open on the crews of two deep-space exploration ships - the Argos and the Galliot - as they approach the planet Aura. They’ve been brought there by a distress signal emanating from the planet. It’s shrouded in fog, which is going to make landing difficult, but before they can really plan a trajectory, some force grabs the ships and yanks them down into the atmosphere. We follow the crew of the Argos as this is happening, and most of the crew blacks out from the gravitational force of the descent. Upon landing, the crew immediately turn on either other, violently assaulting each other, apparently insensate to their surroundings.

And then the attacks end as quickly as they begin, and nobody remembers what just happened.

If how I’ve written it makes it sound kind of abrupt, well, that’s because it is. The whole thing begins with the mixture of idle banter, exposition, and technobabble common to science fiction of the period, and then all of a sudden the ships are getting pulled toward the planet and then equally as suddenly everyone is attacking each other. Not a lot of build-up, it just all happens out of the blue and ends just as quickly. What follows is largely the story of Mark (Mark Markary, which is certainly a name), captain of the Argos, and some of his crew. They bury their dead and set out to find out what happened to the Galliot and why any of this happened in the first place. The ship sustained damage during the descent, so until the repairs are finished, they aren’t going anywhere.

One thing this film definitely has going for it is visual flair. It doesn’t look dramatically different from science fiction of the time, but it’s a very well-executed example of the style. The spacesuits the crew wear look more like fetish wear than anything else, and Aura is shot with the hallmark Italian tendency toward vivid, riotous color, all skies of purple, green, blue and red, shrouded in fog and covered in strange rock formations that look less like papier-mache than you might expect. The set construction for the ships themselves is remarkably good - there’s the requisite consoles and banks of computer-looking things made up mostly of blinking lights, but everything has a weight and substance to it, a solidity often missing from similar sets elsewhere in the genre. You’d never mistake it for a more contemporary film, but nor does it look as cheesy and low-budget as science fiction films of the period usually do. The effects work is also surprisingly good - optical effects aren’t treatments of the film stock (or if they are, they’re really, really well-executed ones), and much of the world is built using miniatures and matte paintings whose artificiality is well-hidden. It looks as much like actual ships on an actual alien planet as you could reasonably get in the mid-1960s.

Unfortunately, the same can’t really be said of the narrative. The dialogue suffers both from the stilted quality you get with any film dubbed from one language into another, and on top of that you have generous dollops of the meaningless technobabble you get with most science fiction films from this period. For example, the distress signal’s location is at “15 degrees felcar coaxial alfa vacuum,” they will begin landing procedures in “60 fractions of megon,” and Mark orders them to “synchronize the meteor rejector on the electromagnetic control device.” This goes a long way toward undercutting any mood or atmosphere that might develop, since even once you get past the dated visuals, as well-executed as they are, there’s still what’s actually being said, which is quaintly corny and in the modern day more likely to inspire chuckles than anything else. More than once while watching this, I thought that the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 could have a field day with this, the way they did with This Island Earth, for a lot of the same reasons. Part of any good horror film is emotional investment in and engagement with the film, and trying to keep a straight face through dialogue that’s stilted not just by the weird rhythms that come from Italian-to-English dubbing, but hilariously surreal attempts at scientific or technological language was just not possible. The needle went from “earnest” to “ironic” so fast it cracked the gauge. Characterization is pretty flat, pretty much everyone has three settings: Grimly resolute, frightened, and bemused. It doesn’t need to be a character piece, but nobody has much personality of any sort. It’s generally not a good sign when you have to review a plot summary to remember who was where at any given point.

Another big problem with the narrative is pacing – the film has a tendency to meander, and just when it feels like things are about to ramp up, they…don’t. As soon as the crew lands on the planet, they immediately go berserk and attack each other - no build-up, no subtlety, no nothing. It just happens and then they sit around for a bit wondering why they did. The first act is largely table-setting, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, and it does wrap up with a sequence that suggests that something more sinister is coming, but then it pretty much goes back to a lot of wandering and speculating for most of the second act. There’s one sequence in particular, where Mark and his crewmate Sanya wander off and discover something (a setpiece that would be echoed to much greater effect in Alien about twelve years later) that just brings what little action and momentum the film had up that point to a screeching halt. Just completely dead in its tracks. The revelation it’s intended to provide could have been managed in about half the time, and it doesn’t really slot into the overall story. It just sort of happens and then doesn’t really matter much after that. The film never really gathers steam, instead getting things that occur in isolation without much of a sense of story beyond “crew lands on alien planet, weird things happen, they wonder why they’re happening, and then other weird things happen.” There are some individual scenes which are striking and there are a couple of good startling moments, but they all exist in isolation from each other and don’t really cohere or create a sense that events are headed to any kind of conclusion. Things do pick up a bit late in the film, but it’s sort of too little, too late, consisting mostly of clumsy action sequences.

The whole thing ends on a note that’s both predictable and more than a little confusing given what we’ve seen and heard up to that point, as if someone thought of the ending without having read the rest of the script first. To its credit, I can see DNA here for films like Alien and Event Horison, but 57 years later it all just seems kind of enervated and silly. Horror and science fiction are a tough combination at the best of times, and science fiction dates faster than almost any other kind of genre film. Putting the three together is always going to be a tough sell, and I suspect I’m going to have to look elsewhere to see what Bava’s strengths really are.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

X (2022): As You Are Now, So I Once Was, As I Am Now, So You Will Be

Boy. I am just on a heater right now - the last four films I've watched have run the gamut from surprisingly good to downright excellent, and anytime that happens I just start thinking that my luck is going to run out and the next thing I watch is going to be a disappointment. It’s a fallacy, sure, but if you watch enough mediocre-to-crummy horror movies, you start to forget that there are also a lot of really good horror films out there as well, and X is no exception. It’s a love letter to horror film that is creepy, tense, and much smarter than you expect, as well as a striking, almost confrontational examination of aging and loss and desire.

It's Houston, Texas in 1979, and the film opens on a long, slow shot of a farmhouse baking under the noonday sun. The camera sits on this farmhouse for an uncomfortably long time. Eventually, a police car pulls up, and a sheriff and his deputy get out. We get closer to the farmhouse, and we see it’s a scene of carnage. There’s a body lying in the road with a bloodstained sheet covering it. There’s another huge swath of dried blood leading out of the gaping front door. There’s a hatchet buried in the porch next to the door. There are more bodies, and the deputy needs for the sheriff to see something that’s in the basement, something we don’t see but which obviously horrifies the two of them.

Cut to 24 hours earlier,  and a young woman sitting in front of a dressing room mirror, snorting cocaine and reassuring herself that she’s a “goddamn sex symbol.” She’s Maxine, and she’s part of one of three couples who are headed out of town for the weekend to shoot what might euphemistically be referred to as an “adult film” at a rural location. It’s Maxine, her boyfriend Wayne, who is producing the whole thing, Bobbie-Lynne and Jackson, who are - along with Maxine - the talent. Then there’s RJ, a cameraman who aspires to turn pornography into art, and his girlfriend Lorraine, who’s running sound and seems pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Wayne’s found an elderly couple named Howard and Pearl. They have a guest house on their farm, and bills that need to get paid. Wayne’s paid them cold, hard cash for the use of it without bothering to tell them that it’s going to be used to film a movie called “Farmer’s Daughter.” Howard’s a dour fellow, spends his days sitting in front of the television watching the same evangelist preach the same sermon about kidnappers and sex fiends who live among us over and over again. And he’s adamant that Pearl not be disturbed by any goings-on. Pearl isn’t well.

Meanwhile, a figure’s watching everything from an upstairs window.

Given the setting (1970s Texas) and the premise (a bunch of young people shooting a pornographic film  on some potentially unstable farmer’s land), it’s easy to think that it’s going to be a retro grindhouse pastiche. It’s all there – sex, violence, dubious clothing and hair choices.  But it isn’t that, exactly. It takes a premise absolutely at home in 70s grindhouse horror and neatly subverts a lot of the expectations you’d bring to that type of film. To start, it’s a lot less gonzo than you’d expect. The pacing is extremely deliberate, almost meditative, for most of its running time. In lesser hands this would make it drag, but here the effect is more one of discomfort and building tension. The opening shot sets the tone – long, slow shots that don’t cut away when you expect them to, like a person who holds your gaze a little longer than you’d like. It’s not afraid to spend time on conversations between the characters without much else happening. There’s a dreaminess to it that is the antithesis of the 70s grindhouse picture. And just as it is often a slow, dreamy film, it is also often a quiet film. The score is minimal, consisting of some near-ambient ethereal singing and music from the period, but there are long…again, uncomfortably long…stretches with no score at all, and the silence brings its own discomfort.

It’s also very aware of itself as a film, and I don’t mean that it’s self-aware or self-referential in the way something like Scream is. It’s a film that isn’t afraid to use all kinds of different cinematic techniques to tell its story, whether they’re things you’d expect to see in a 70s horror film or not. It uses period-appropriate techniques like screen wipes and split-screen to very good effect, but it’s also not afraid to use long aerial shots, cross-cutting and matching action to draw connections between characters and provide ironic counterpoint. It’s not a funny film, per se, but it is a cinematically witty film. Events and dialogue are echoed across different contexts in ways that reinforce the larger themes and create small but important revelations late in the film. It’s even got an honest-to-goodness Chekhov’s gun that pays off at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. Very little is wasted in this film narratively, and on that level the whole thing ticks along like a very well-made watch. And all of this is also in service to something that feels like a love letter to horror film in general - there are cheeky little allusions to Psycho, Jaws, The Shining, and found-footage horror films, and it’s a film that’s in conversation with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to such an extent that I could (and will) write an entire post just on that. The end result feels like something that’s talking to those films without attempting to slavishly copy them. It’s as much a film about film as it is a horror film, and the degree to which it engages both viscerally and intellectually without sacrificing one for the other is impressive.

Alongside very smart filmmaking uncharacteristic of the form is a fairly strong thematic concern with aging and the grief that comes with age - grieving the loss of what you once had, grieving the loss of what was never to be – as well as how age intersects with needs and desires. You have the horny teenagers obligate to the style, sure, but they’re aware that their youth and vitality is finite, and they want to celebrate it while they still have it. As Bobbie-Lynne puts it at one point, “one day we’ll be too old to fuck,” and this is seen as a reason to enjoy it while they have it. They relish living life on their own terms and seem perfectly comfortable with themselves. And that line can seem like a throwaway line intended to establish them as young, libidinous and uninhibited, but as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that it’s central to the conceit. It’s the pin that gets pulled from the grenade, as Howard and Pearl, who’ve seen two wars, now spend their days sitting in front of a TV blaring religious programming, their own vibrant youth relegated to dusty photographs on dustier walls.

And so you have the uptight older couple who most certainly would disapprove of what’s going on in the guest house on their property, and there’s the hellfire and damnation angle, but it’s not really about God. It’s not about where we go after we die, whether to heaven or hell. It’s about what we don’t have here on Earth anymore. It’s not puritanism, it’s resentment. Howard and Pearl were once young too, and they have an acute sense of what they’ve lost with age. It’s a sentiment even echoed among the protagonists, as when Wayne tries to counsel a riled RJ by saying in effect, “I’m 42 now, but I remember being 23.” Age creates divides, the field between the farmhouse and the guest house might as well be an ocean. But here’s the thing: Just because you stop being young, it doesn’t mean you stop wanting to be desired. It doesn’t mean you don’t want to be wanted anymore. It might be going a little far to say that the antagonists are sympathetic, but they’re not wholly unsympathetic either, and there are moments where the film confronts this in ways that again in lesser hands would be mere grotesquerie, but here are instead almost startlingly vulnerable. It’s a horror film, yes, but it’s also achingly sad.

And on top of all of that - the narrative precision, the genre subversion and affection, the examination of the human experience - it’s a damn solid horror film. The slow, deliberate pacing works as well as it does because things start getting creepy early on, very much in the “no, don’t turn around” school of slow-burn menace to start, with unexpected figures in the frame creating moments that are startling without being jump-scares and drawn-out sequences that are fake-outs as often as not. Then it’s around the halfway point when the other shoe drops, and here it shifts to something closer to the grindhouse horror tradition from which it emerged, as the story of the bloody aftermath from the film’s opening ultimately gets told. But even here its palette is broader than usual. Some moments owes more to the theatrical, operatic violence of giallo films than to early slasher movies and in others, death comes startlingly fast without lingering, climaxing on a note as pulpy and gruesome as anyone who came to this expecting The Boogie Nights Massacre could want, ending on a note that cleverly addresses the themes of aging and film alike .

This is a film with a very good understanding of horror film’s history and a willingness to borrow from its breadth to tell what could have been a very predictable story in some delightfully unpredictable, thoughtful ways. It’s that rare film that engages the head, heart and gut all at once, and I’m deeply impressed by how well it works on each of those levels. Throughout the film, RJ insists that pornography can also be art, and it’s hard not to see that as a commentary on how horror film is treated - you come to this film thinking you’re going to get something raw and grimy and down and dirty, and you end up getting art.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
 

Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara: Child Of The Waters

In my ongoing effort to improve my cineliteracy by catching up on or revisiting important or significant horror films, it occurred to me that I could stand to spend more time poking around Japanese horror, specifically Japanese horror from the late 90s and early 2000s, This was when films like Ringu and Ju-On and Audition were grabbing people’s notice outside of Japan as part of a wave of what ended up getting referred to as “J-horror.” It’s easy to forget now that creepy, long-haired girl ghosts are firmly cemented as part of horror film cliche, that there’s a cultural context for that imagery, and that some of those original films were scary as fuck in their own right. It was also this attention to Japanese horror film that piqued my interest in what horror films looked like outside of the U.S. (where most of what was getting made was boring) and contributed to me starting to write this thing. So I have those films in part to thank for my hobby.

But back to the cultural context bit. Horror is often rooted in culture, in specific cultural anxieties and symbology. The word mizuko, in Japanese, refers to a baby who dies before or during birth, and originally meant any dead baby. It translates literally as "child of the waters,” and this was very much on my mind as I was watching Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara (Dark Water), a spooky, atmospheric film about the trauma of parental neglect and the sacrifices parents make to keep their children safe.

We open on a shot of a little girl sitting inside, staring out into the rain. She’s at school, and it’s clear that all the other children have gone, long since picked up by their parents. She’s still there, waiting for a mother or father who hasn’t come yet. Cut to that same girl, now a grown woman, sitting inside, staring out into the rain. She’s Yoshimi Matsubara, and she’s in the middle of a nasty divorce and custody battle for her daughter, Ikuko. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband is, as is too often the case, playing dirty, bringing up the psychiatric help she received years before as evidence that she’s an unfit mother. But her attorney is confident that she’ll get custody. Ikuko is very young, just about to turn six, and that favors the mother.

But Yoshimi still has a lot of work ahead - she needs to find employment and a place for her and Ikuko to live, which is tough. She gets word of what sounds like a really good deal - a spacious apartment, more than enough for her and her daughter, going practically for a song. The agent seems really, really eager to close the deal and doesn’t seem to be getting too many takers. The building’s old, kind of run-down, but the price is right and it looks like it’ll be easy enough for her to get it. And soon enough, she and Ikuko are moving in.

And it isn’t too long after that Yoshimi starts to notice the water stain on the ceiling. The one coming from an unoccupied apartment upstairs.

Water’s there in the title, and water is all over this film. Much of the first act takes place, both in flashback and the present day, in torrential rain, and even sunny days are often the ones that immediately follow the storm, sunlight reflecting from the puddles that are everywhere. There are dream sequences, shot with Dutch angles, through an almost amber cast that makes everything look waterlogged. It also serves as a consistent visual shorthand for a presence that begins menacing the protagonists - water stains on the ceiling that spread like bruises, water spilling out from places it shouldn't. It works well because water's largely innocuous, yes, but it's also patient, implacable. Given enough time, water rusts through metal, even wears away stone. It’s common, even essential to life, but also potentially overwhelming, maybe even sinister. So the film creates a visual vocabulary early on and uses it consistently, using little things as a sign that something is wrong - apart from the water, there's a red school bag and a yellow raincoat that keep cropping up, and the pops of color they bring to a film whose cinematography otherwise largely leans toward the drab, help these signs to stand out without being obtrusive. This allows a lot of things to happen in the background without being too showy and signal danger without feeling contrived. 

If you set a mood early and use imagery in systematic ways to tell the story, creating context, you can do a lot with a little, and this film does. The characters are all pretty well sketched-in using small moments and details that tell us much of what we need to know without just spelling it out for us. Yoshimi is doing the best she can and genuinely loves Ikuko, and Ikuko loves her back, but she’s afraid of being the absent mother she had, she doesn’t want to repeat that and hurt Ikuko the way she was hurt as a child. But it’s hard making a go of it on your own and demonstrating your self-sufficiency. There are people who want to help her - refreshingly, her own attorney doesn’t seem to be a weasel and doesn’t appear to have any ulterior motives, and she lands the job she needs despite having to bail on the interview early so Ikuko wouldn’t go through what she did as a child. Her ex-husband seems like a selfish, vindictive asshole, but not cartoonishly so, and again, it’s accomplished through small gestures and inferences. There are some moments that land maybe a little too obviously, mostly in the re-presentation of information we got earlier, in sort of a “remember this?” way, but it’s not distracting. It’s a film confident enough in its characterization that it trusts we’ll be able to keep up.

It's also paced quite well - it doesn't rush, and it's closer to two hours than not, but it doesn't really drag. It establishes who the players are economically, creates an increasingly untenable situation on a couple of fronts, and lets the process of discovery play out naturally. This means that when the climax comes - late, halfway through the third act, it's a sharp escalation, but not one that feels unearned or out of place, and it stays grounded enough in the vocabulary employed by the rest of the film that the "oh, shit" moments land really well. It’s a film that relies on mystery without actually being a mystery, if that makes sense - it presents a lot of things that seem odd or out of place without being over the top, so at first it’s not quite clear what everything means, but as it goes on it gradually puts the pieces together so that by the halfway point in the film you have a pretty good idea what’s going on, and the rest is just letting it spool out in a way where we can see the danger coming but know there’s nothing to do about it.

On top of being a well-crafted ghost story, there's also a strong backbeat to this film about parental abandonment, and the costs of parenting. It starts right away with our introduction first to young Yoshimi and then grown Yoshimi in matching shots. She's still that sad little girl in some ways, and it's clear that she doesn't want to be that kind of mother to Ikuko, doesn't want to pass that trauma on. Not all children are as lucky, and that's a big part of the film as well, and without getting spoilery is absolutely central to the horror of this film. The idea of the mizuko is an important one here. The damage done to children by neglect sometimes lingers, having effects long afterward. And at the intersection of these two things we have the sacrifices that parents make for their children, the ones they know the child can't understand and must to some degree be protected from. This strongly informs the climax of the film and a coda to the end that is equally touching and unnerving. It isn't blatant, there's no neon sign over it, it's just woven throughout the film, as embedded in the narrative as water is.

My problems with this film are largely minor - there are some unnecessary music stings, especially noticeable in a film that is otherwise largely fairly understated, and some of the effects are a little dated at this point, though not nearly enough to ruin anything. My biggest gripe is probably with the custody battle subplot. It's not overplayed in and of itself, but it presses the "Yoshimi starts acting crazy because of the supernatural goings-on and she's going to lose her kid because of it" button really hard, and I think this film would have worked just as well in the aftermath of a divorce, rather than during it. Yoshimi goes from zero to hysterical in a pretty cliched fashion, and it doesn't help the story all that much. It's just her and Ikuko, and I think that's enough to carry it, and that's where it does its best work anyway. But I don't think any of it ruins the film. It's a thoughtful, substantive ghost story that manages to be eerie, tense, and moving by turns, and I'm here for that.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Tubi