Matriarch: A Mother’s Sacrifice

Motherhood is supposed to be this sacred, supremely benevolent thing. It’s warmth, nurturance, love, fertility, growth, a thing to be celebrated and valorized. Motherhood is supposed to be sacred, but all too often it isn’t. Motherhood can also be greedy and selfish and narcissistic, manipulative and self-serving. And there’s something profane about that, a massive violation of trust and care. It’s no wonder that motherhood distorted and disfigured comes up so much in horror. It’s one of those things that literally and metaphorically hits us where we live. Some things are supposed to be safe. Some places are supposed to be safe, and some people are supposed to be safe.

And when they aren’t, you get a film like Matriarch, a powerful, supremely uneasy tale of motherhood turned poisonous and sour.

Laura is an advertising executive in London, and we meet her as she’s getting ready for work. She’s coring the rotten section out of a peach and slicing up the rest into her cereal. She eats her breakfast and then promptly goes into the bathroom, shoving her fingers down her throat to vomit it all back up. She chases this with a few swigs of vodka and some snorts from a bottle of nasal spray. She gets into the office a little late, apologizes to her boss, she still has a cold. The same cold, her boss observes, that she’s had for a few months now. But Laura’s got it together. There’s a big pitch meeting coming up and Laura’s ready. Or, at least, she will be. It’s a quick study - she’s obviously running from something - the bulimia, the alcoholism, relentlessly driving herself forward. She’s brittle, pulled tight against her skin. There’s a desperation to her, brought into stark detail that night when she invites an old flame over and the cocaine comes out. It’s an all-nighter, with Laura still doing lines alone as the sun comes up. She’s trying to outrun herself, but ends up clutching at her chest and keeling over on her bathroom floor instead. As everything fades, she has a vision of a hand reaching out of an expanse of dark water…

…and she wakes back up. She should be dead, she knows that, but she isn’t. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her, how she didn’t die, or why dark, brackish fluid is seeping out of her. She needs answers, and that means going someplace she never thought she’d revisit, and seeing someone she’d sworn she would never see again. She’s going home to the small village where she was raised, and she’s going to see her mother. The reunion is polite, and her mother is the picture of health, looking to be in her late forties or early fifties.

But her mother is eighty years old.

This is a film that hits the ground running, in terms of its style and narrative. It takes place in a world that is drab throughout, a place drained of color and icily remote. The big city is all cold fluorescents and sleek, modern design, and the village has its own foreboding, a collection of old buildings and sheep paddocks, clusters of houses sunken into a maze of hedgerows taller than a person and a black, black marsh on the outside of town. It’s very much in the fine English tradition of villages with old, old secrets, observed in details that are modest, but sharp. It’s a place that is ugly and warped without being cartoonish about it. And when it’s not the inner emotional violence of Laura’s life away from home or the weirdness of the village itself, above and beyond all of that it’s Celia, Laura’s mother. Her toxic, manipulative mother, all of Laura’s anger and self-loathing explained by Celia’s immediate descent into a litany of denial and minimization and guilt trips and passive aggressive jabs. Her mood turns on a dime from mock-concern to wheedling to self-absorption to an inability (or refusal) to remember the past as Laura remembers it. Their dialogue is full of repressed anger that’s starting to spill through the seams, old resentments, old regrets, the cathartic venom of people finally saying things they’ve always wanted to say, soundtracked by woozy, discordant ambience. And it’s not just Celia, it’s the villagers as well, so bitter at Laura’s return but so interested in keeping her there. There’s never really a quiet moment in the film,  and since it’s very clear very early on that there’s something Not Right about this place, it’s a film threaded through with unease and discomfort.

And all of that is before Laura really starts to dig into what’s happening to her and what seems to be happening in the village. There are secrets, of course, and they run deep, old, and dark, culminating in a revelation that blasphemes the sanctities of religion and motherhood through vivid imagery and body horror. A bargain has been made, and the cost is coming due again. Motherhood is supposed to be about helping a child to grow and flourish, but for narcissists like Celia, it’s entirely about them instead and how they can use motherhood, capture it, feed upon it. It’s a story told in earthily visceral fashion.  

That said, the biggest problem with the film is that although a lot of the dialogue works, there are points where it does become stagey and affected. Conversations sometimes end up on the verge of becoming monologues, and some of the performances are broader than they should be. This threatens to overwhelm the film when things really start to heat up in the final act, but it rights itself in the end for something that’s equal parts horrifying and emotionally exhausting. It might not be quite as intense in its emotional violence as Hereditary or as carefully staged (few films are, though), but for as wrung out as I was by the end of this, it’s the closest touchpoint I can find. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi: The Devil You Don't Know

There are a number of things I feel like are overdone or just bad for scary movies in general. I think there’s sort of a glut of demonic possession movies, for example. And I’ve gone on the record at length, repeatedly, about how people need to stop making found-footage movies for awhile. And as a rule, I really, really dislike sequels and loathe the idea of “franchises.”

And so, by all rights, I should absolutely hate Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi (Dabbe: The Possession). It’s a found-footage movie about demonic possession and it’s the fourth in a series of six movies. But damned if it isn’t pretty good. Between this and the films of Can Evrenol, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been sleeping on Turkish horror all this time. It’s definitely got some flaws, but I think it manages to overcome the majority of them through sheer energy. It’s an intense film that puts a novel (to Western eyes) spin on some well-worn ideas.

That said, the beginning isn’t especially auspicious. We’re treated to a bunch of newspaper headlines about something terrible that happened in the village of Kibledere back in 1986. There’s a voiceover of a phone conversation between two people - one who’s trying to get at the truth of what happened, and another, a doctor who was there and really doesn’t want to share what he knows. It winds up with the doctor telling this other person to speak to a colleague of his who visited the village recently - Dr. Ebru Keraduman. Then there’s a barrage of horrific images that slam right into the title. It’s…not subtle. At all.

But we cut to Ebru as she’s testing out her camera. She’s a psychiatrist who’s taken an interest in claims of possession and the techniques employed by the people who claim to be able to exorcise evil spirits. So she’s come to watch one such exorcism and interview the person doing it, Faruk Akat. In a small room, a group of women and Faruk gather around another older woman, who alternates between wailing, frenetic cursing and threats to reveal everyone’s dirty secrets, and puking up gross-looking things into a kiddie pool in the middle of the circle. This goes on for some time, Faruk places strips of paper with writing on them into the pool, there’s a great roar and the possessed woman horks up something that looks like a teratoma. Faruk pronounces her cured.

Ebru is, needless to say, skeptical. She interviews Faruk, asking him what the specific mechanisms are behind exorcism, asking how this is anything distinct from more modern diagnoses of mental illness, challenging his narrative in the way you’d expect from a science-versus-mysticism sort of story, though maybe not as obnoxiously as she could. Still, he thinks he can prove what he does is real, and she puts the onus on him by stipulating that she choose his next client - someone he doesn’t know, so that collusion is more difficult. So they travel to visit relatives of Ebru’s - her aunt Refika and Refika’s daughter Kübra. They live in a small village not far from the abandoned ruins of Kibledere. Kübra hasn’t been feeling well lately.

At her engagement celebration, Kübra stabbed her fiancé to death. A voice told her to do it.

In some ways, this film embraces a number of cliches - the opening title sequence is something we’ve seen variations on a dozen times before, and you’ve got the skeptical scientist insisting on rational explanations for everything and the exorcist who insists that there’s more to heaven and earth than her philosophy. The possessed talk in creepy, raspy, unnaturally low voices and know stuff they shouldn’t be able to know. There are narrative turns that you’ll see coming if only because you know how these kinds of stories are structured. But it also avoids a number of cliches simply by being made outside of the West. The forces possessing these people are djinns, not demons, and it’s more than a cosmetic difference. Humanity’s relationship to them as a class of spirits is more complex than the Christian idea of demons, so it isn’t strictly a story of evil infiltrating a family. And Faruk is Muslim, so there’s a distinct absence of holy water, crosses and the Roman Ritual. This is, of course, not exotic at all in Turkey, but it’s new to me, and it gives me a different perspective on old ideas.

And even though the bones of the story are themselves nothing especially novel, they’re handled well and there’s a nice third-act twist that benefits from misdirection leading up to it. The imagery used to tell the story departs from cliché in a number of ways - there are some of the things you’d expect, but a lot of things you don’t see very often, some unnerving, some downright gross, but enough to keep you on your toes. It’s a story about spirits and curses and witchcraft and family secrets, giving it more to work with than the standard possession movie. Some moments may not land exactly right and might seem a little silly, but just as many contribute to a sense of dread, of the protagonists getting in over their head.

The story is told as a found-footage narrative, primarily from Ebru’s point of view, though the camera gets passed around a little, and there are some multi-camera setups for things she’s documenting. And like any other found-footage film, there’s a push and pull between plausibility (cameras being set up for interviews to capture different angles, the camera not always being pointed where it should because someone’s running for their life) and violation of that plausibility. There’s the occasional shot from an angle that can’t be accounted for, incidental music in places even though this is camcorder footage, unlikely close-ups, stuff like that, but for once it doesn’t really bother me because the story’s good enough and it has enough momentum and energy to keep me watching and not be so distracted by failures of verisimilitude.

And that momentum and energy is another thing I think it has going for it. It was obviously made on a low budget, but it isn’t necessarily cheap-looking, and the effects are mostly very simple. Sometimes they’re simple to the point of being a little clumsy or obvious, but it’s in a way that gives the film the same nervy, kinetic energy that The Evil Dead had. There’s an intensity and vigor to moments that sort of propel you past any shortcomings and keep the tension level high. It’s also got the same propensity for letting things happen while nobody’s in the room and use of camera distortion to indicate an evil presence that Final Prayer had, and the camerawork is believably jittery and close, which puts me in mind of [REC]. To my mind, this is some good company in which to be. It does dread and anxiety and creepy settings and normal settings with creepy things happening in them very well. And it’s…a histrionic film, there’s a lot of yelling, but it doesn’t come off as grating or contrived, and the relationships between people feel pretty believable. Even Ebru and Faruk, though they have very different takes on what’s happening around them, are mostly collegial, reasonable adults. And the whole thing rises to a shrill scream at the climax, ending on as dark and bleak a note as you could ask for. It’s a ride.

It does have its problems - the English subtitles are somewhat clumsily translated, which is part of what makes the title sequence less effective than it could be, and it ends up making one fairly important moment unintentionally comic. I was dismayed by the distasteful use of actual photos of children with birth defects to depict victims of a curse, and the ending, for all of its “oh shit oh shit” energy, does take a little long to get where it’s going. And that absolute gut-punch of an ending is somewhat undercut by a fairly unnecessary epilogue that pulls back a little on what we see. But all things considered, it’s a surprisingly strong effort for something that, to my mind, had so much going against it from the start.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Hellraiser (2022): The Flesh Failures

This is going to be a tough one for me to talk about. On the one hand, the original Hellraiser was an extremely formative film for me. Sitting in a free midnight screening in a mostly-empty theater, watching it play out on a big screen in the dark, it was the first time I think I ever watched any sort of film and got the feeling that all bets were off, that anything could happen. It almost felt…unsafe, and that stuck with me. It wouldn’t be the last time a film made me feel that way, but it was definitely the first. And a few years back, I waded into the nine extant films in the Hellraiser franchise (ugh), and barring some special effects that haven’t aged well, it still holds up surprisingly well.

But on the other hand, there’s the other eight films, and what I discovered re-watching the first four for the first time in years and watching numbers 5 through 9 for the first time is that not only would subsequent films fail to replicate what made the original so special, they’d decline in general quality really fucking fast. It was another example (alongside Nightmare On Elm Street) of the studio deciding to just start cranking out sequels while the property was still hot, without any regard for what made the original good or interesting. In the case of these films, the nadir was a slapdash stab at found-footage that was made - start to finish - in three weeks, purely to keep the studio’s license for the IP from lapsing. It was literally a film that wasn’t made to be viewed. It’s hard for me to think of a more cynical and calculated thing, and this is considering that every film in the series after the fourth was an unrelated screenplay that was retrofitted into a Hellraiser movie to varying degrees of success. They didn’t even bother to write them. Another one came out in 2018 to equally poor reception, but I was done.

So, Hellraiser (2022) simultaneously does and doesn’t have a lot to live up to. It has the shadow of the original hanging over it, but on the other hand the remaining films set the bar pretty low. And so my experience watching this film was a confusing one for me. It’s hard for me to tell how much I like it, or if I just appreciate it. And no, it’s not the revelatory experience the first one was for me. It doesn’t really do anything unexpected, and it does have problems, mostly in the third act. But it also does a lot of stuff right, and so it’s safe to say that even with its flaws, it’s miles better than any of the films that followed the original,

It opens on a gray day in Belgrade. There’s a man sitting on a bench with a satchel, and a woman approaches him. The whole thing feels like something out of a spy movie, in a good way. They’re there to make an exchange. She gives him a large sum of money, and he gives her a wooden box containing something that we don’t get to see. Cut to a large mansion in the Berkshires. There’s some kind of party going on, it’s all very stylish in a perfume commercial sort of way, and reminds me of nothing so much as a 1990s take on wealth and decadence. A fit young man sits nervously at the bar, and the woman from Belgrade sits next to him. She suggests that she can introduce him to the owner of the mansion and he jumps at the chance. The young man is Joey, and he’s being introduced to wealthy art collector Roland Voight. He’s ushered into a large room filled with small sculptures and art objects, and one of them is a small wooden puzzle box of intricate design. At Voight’s encouragement, Joey starts trying to solve the puzzle, and with a few twists and turns, it snaps into a new configuration, one that causes a blade to pierce Joey’s hand. Voight is unsurprised by this. The room starts spinning for Joey. Storm clouds gather, and then…something is in the room with them. Something with chains and hooks. Something to which Voight appeals. Something that takes Joey away.

Six years later, we meet Riley while she’s having noisy sex with her boyfriend Trevor…as it turns out, while her brother Matt, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate Nora are in the other room making dinner. It’s a quick study - Riley’s a few months out of rehab, and given that she met Trevor in rehab, she’s kind of a mess. The dynamic between all of them is established pretty economically through how things are said as much as what is said - it’s a little exposition-heavy to start, but it rights itself. Riley’s underemployed, and is trying to figure out something better so she can get out of Matt’s apartment. Trevor starts to suggest something, but hesitates because she’s “trying to be good.” But when pushed, he reveals that at his job he made a lot of deliveries of “billionaire shit” to a warehouse out on the edges of the city, and after one last one, the orders just…stopped, and the warehouse seems to have been abandoned. But maybe there’s still some billionaire shit inside, and he remembers the keycode.

So they break into this warehouse and discover a single shipping container. Cutting the lock reveals a safe. Smashing the dial off the safe reveals a wooden case.

A wooden case with a familiar-looking puzzle box inside.

The film gets off to a wobbly start - the very beginning is a nice inversion of the grubby backroom deal that opens the original film, but then it cuts to the wealthy decadence thing that seems more like something out of one of the sequels. and the beats feel pretty predictable. But then when it shifts into the more intimate story of Riley and her brother, things start to feel more grounded. We settle into this difficult relationship and the people touched by it to one degree or another, and it feels pretty natural. And throughout, Riley’s at the center of all of it, as her decisions spiral outward to suck more and more of the people who care about her into something they can’t begin to explain, something full of blood and pain.

And so this is another way it’s in conversation with the original film. The original was very much about desire, and the price we’re willing to pay to satisfy our desires. And here there’s a definite narrative about needs and weaknesses and compulsions and hungers that runs through the whole film, along with the cost they exert on the individual and everyone around them. Riley has a self-destructive streak a mile wide, one that doesn’t manifest in melodramatic ways, as much as in consistently making the wrong decision, whatever form that takes. Whatever the safe, healthy thing to do is, she runs as far from that as she can. And Matt, time and time again, runs codependently after her, as compelled to try and fix her or rescue her as she is to destroy herself. So where the story of the decadent eager to seek newer and more exotic sensations drove the original film, here it’s more about someone on the ragged end of that, someone who’s become a prisoner to the things they sought. But the point is the same throughout - these needs…all of them… have a cost. And I’ll give the film credit for driving the action with human frailty to the degree that it does.

Elsewhere, it acknowledges the original film in tasteful, restrained ways - there are a number of visual and musical allusions throughout, more like it’s using the vocabulary of the first film than repeating scenes or anything obvious like that. It feels as much like an updating of what the first film did (and none of the subsequent films bothered to do) as anything else, nothing so blatant as stunt casting or fanservice, and what little bits of worldbuilding there are don’t distract from the story too much. There’s always the danger of spending more time on the mythology than the story or the people, and that doesn’t really happen here. If anything, it explores some of the ideas from the second film from a slightly different angle, in ways that are sometimes more successful, and in others less so, but never to the corny, sub-Freddy Kreuger depths of that film’s final act. In a lot of ways, it feels like what a sequel to the original film would have been with a bigger budget and a focus on making a good film instead of trying to crank something out as quickly as possible. To be fair, Hellraiser 2 had a really good second act, but that’s about it.

But as well-made as it is, it does feel like it’s missing something for me, and I can’t tell how much of it is how the film is made and how much of it is me bringing my own history to it. It has a couple of good, tense moments in the third act and a twist I didn’t see coming, but I’ve seen variations on this story, I know how the world of this film works and it never really stretches that or does much to upend it. It’s respectful to the original, and that’s good, but perhaps too respectful. I’m never really surprised or shown anything new, and though I suspect that someone who’s never seen the original film could be startled by this - it’s still got a vision unlike anything else in horror - it also doesn’t capture the grimy fervor of the original, that sense that you’re in the hands of someone who isn’t playing safe with their ideas. It gets very violent in places, though not often, so there’s still a punch to it when it happens and as much is accomplished through restraint as graphic depiction. But it’s all…maybe a little too clean, a little too polite, missing that sense of connection to hunger and desire that the original film has. It’s colder, more cerebral in ways, where the original had a kinky, transgressive heat to it. I do appreciate that the antagonists are as aloof as they originally were, and the updated designs work well in some places, less well in others. But the sense of menace is largely restored.

And there are narrative issues as well. The pacing lags at times, and the ending drags out a little too much, trying to tie up too many pieces all at once, slowing things down and reducing the tension, and the way it all resolves feels a little stock to me. There’s a coda that seems maybe a little obvious and sequel-baity, though it’s well-done for all of that. It’s certainly better than any of the increasingly misbegotten sequels that followed the original, and in its subject matter I feel like it’s a better take on what Hellraiser 2 was trying to do than what that film accomplished, but it’s not the original. You can only make a film like that once.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Inunaki Mura: Secrets And Lies

How many horror movies have you seen that revolve around a secret? Whether it’s a “terrible secret” or “dark secret” or some other variation, people have them, houses have them, entire towns have them, and the horror generally lies in the revelation of that secret, the truth of what happened oh so long ago. As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that that’s also not that unusual a premise for drama too, but shhhh, we don’t talk about that. The point is, it’s something that comes up a lot.

Like lots of ghost stories and stories about cursed places, Inunaki Mura (Howling Village) is very much about secrets, especially secrets kept intergenerationally. And it could have been a pretty good ghost story, but ultimately it tries to do too much and suffers from pacing issues, especially in the third act.

Akina and her boyfriend Yuma are out in the country in the middle of the night, testing an urban legend. They’ve heard that there’s one particular old tunnel, known as the “Howling Tunnel,” and every night at 2am, the pay phone next to the tunnel entrance rings, and when it does, the tunnel opens up as a pathway to a mysterious, forgotten village. And so here they are, at this payphone in front of this tunnel at two in the morning, recording themselves, and they’re just about to give up and go home when the pay phone suddenly rings. Akina answers it, and we don’t hear what she hears, but she says “we’ll be there right away” and then runs off, Yuma desperately trying to keep up.

They run down the length of this old, dark tunnel and come out into the woods. They find a sign lying on the ground. A sign that reads “the Constitution of Japan does not apply beyond this point.” There’s a village, deserted and falling into ruin.

Well, not entirely deserted.

Akina and Yuma make it out alive (barely), and Akina isn’t really the same afterward. Elsewhere, Yuma’s older sister Kaneda, a psychologist at a hospital, is working with a little boy whose parents have brough him in because he’s exhibiting some unusual behavior. Like talking to people who aren’t there. Except Kaneda can see them. And they can see her. So we’ve got a village that doesn’t show up on any map but appears mysteriously under the right circumstances, and ghosts sort of walking around in the waking world. This being a Japanese horror film, stories about lost and vengeful spirits fit right into a larger tradition, but unlike films like Ringu or Dark Water, it never really develops the same sense of brooding atmosphere those films have. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its moments - it absolutely does, making up for the lack of atmosphere with inventive visual approaches to flashbacks and some genuinely startling moments. But these strengths are undercut, first by the film’s pacing. The story hits the ground running, which isn’t a problem by itself, but it only lets moments breathe intermittently, sometimes falling into a tendency to barrage us with spooky moments or melodrama, so nothing really has a chance to take hold, and there’s little sense of events building either. And it’s not so consistent as to feel unrelenting or oppressive, so it doesn’t really generate tension that way either. There are moments in and of themselves that work very well, that are unnerving in ways that avoid cliche, but they just sort of exist as discrete moments placed next to each other, rather than as a cohesive experience.

The other big problem is a few too many ingredients in the stew. At the core of this film is a really good idea about a mythical village that doesn’t appear on any map and can only be reached through a specific abandoned tunnel in the middle of the night. And behind this village is a story, a really upsetting and horrifying story, one that drives a lot of the better moments and which could have easily carried the film by itself. But then there’s also a psychic doctor who can see dead people and on top of that there’s some kind of curse associated with the village (one which appears to have a pretty distasteful origin) that’s starting to affect people and all of it together just ends up being too much. The curse especially dominates the third act, crowding out the more interesting stuff about the village’s history, and since it’s something that’s sort of introduced in the middle of the film, it feels like the whole story just takes a hard left turn into a different, less interesting story. On top of that, the third act, when things should be coming to a head, just drags and drags until the film sort limps to a close with another instance of “the end…OR IS IT?” that lands with a thud. It's like the film sort of forgot what it was about as it was concluding, or that it realized it had this whole other storyline with which it hadn’t done much up to this point.

Like in the other Japanese horror films I mentioned above, water is an important signifier of death and the afterlife here, as well as the futility of trying to hide the sins of the past, because they always stay with you and will rise to the surface eventually. There’s a terrible secret about this village, one that residents of the area would rather forget, alongside other, smaller secrets - doctors who falsify autopsy reports to hide a family’s disgrace, fathers who lie about their children’s parentage to save the mother’s feelings, all of these ways that tragedies past and present are covered up for the sake of appearances. If the film had been content to keep this more metaphorical and centered on the story of the village, it would I think have been a much stronger offering. As it is, it becomes entirely too literal in some ways that end up making the whole thing kind of a confusing mess in the final analysis.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon