Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi: Rinse, Repeat

As someone still in the process of familiarizing myself with classic Italian horror, one conclusion to which I’ve come so far is that although much of Dario Argento’s work is easy to appreciate (and certainly creates a template others have followed), Lucio Fulci’s work is, to me, more interesting. It’s less sophisticated - actually, in some ways it’s downright primitive - but that gives it a sort of gonzo verve that I don’t really get from Argento’s films. Even Suspiria, which is admittedly pretty bonkers, takes a bit to really spool up. But from the very beginning of The Beyond, it felt like “strap in, this is gonna go places.” And it did. There’s something I like about a film that’s just willing to go berserk, I like the feeling of having no idea what’s coming next.

And so I have to say, I was looking forward to Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi (City Of The Living Dead, also screened in the United States as Gates Of Hell), the first in Fulci’s “living dead” trilogy, of which The Beyond was the second film. I was looking forward to it, but it ended up being kind of disappointing. It’s as gonzo as I expected, but it’s also oddly meandering, which makes for an overall frustrating viewing experience.

This film gets right down to business. Plain, stark opening titles over a tracking shot through a cemetery. A priest wanders through the cemetery, as if lost in thought. The location is Dunwich, Massachusetts, where as we will learn later “all those witches were burned.” Elsewhere, in New York, a group of people are holding a séance with a psychic named Mary Woodhouse - a séance that starts to go awry when Mary has visions of the priest we just saw hanging himself. Cut back to the priest, who has in fact just hung himself. Mary screams and falls to the ground, convulsing. Then she dies. Perhaps it’s a slow news day, because a reporter named Peter Bell notices all the commotion outside the brownstone where Mary died, and figured there was a story there - especially after the police are really evasive about what happened.

So Peter sneaks into the hospital, trying to figure out what happened to Mary, when she sort of just…wakes up again? Maybe she got better? It’s never really explained. The important thing is that this priest committing suicide in a cemetery in a town where witch trials were once held ends up being some kind of supernatural hat trick, opening one of the gates to Hell. Now the ghost of this priest is wandering around and the dead are coming back to life. This is less than ideal, and Mary, along with Peter, sets off to find the cemetery where this priest hung himself, because if they don’t close the gate by All Saints Day (the day before Halloween), the dead will flood out of their graves and overrun the planet.

That’s pretty much it, and the rest of the film alternates between Mary and Peter trying to find where this cemetery is based on her visions and everything going really, really badly in Dunwich in assorted ways to assorted people. So, to start, it has a lot of the same hallmarks as the film that would follow it. It’s got the same wooden acting (almost nobody in the film seems especially fazed by anything that happens, at least, not until it starts getting really gross) and dialogue so awkward and clumsy that it’s almost surreal. The approach to storytelling isn’t so much storytelling as it is just things happening without much rhyme or reason. About the best way to describe it is that it’s crude. But, like The Beyond, this is one of its virtues as well. The limitations mean that some things end up being communicated via interesting shot composition or elements just blinking in and out of existence, and the extensive effects work is simultaneously cheap, novel, and tactile. This is a very…gooey…movie, and there were a couple of points where my feelings were exactly balanced between “well, I’ve never seen that before” and “oh god, my lunch is really restless at this moment.” It’s pretty inventive on that front, and I have to say, having to rely on simple optical and practical effects make it visceral, both figuratively and literally. This is what I like about Fulci’s films - they are very much experiences and they’re far enough out of my comfort zone that I never know where they’re going to go, even if I’m kind of queasy as I take the ride.

But those are the strengths. The weaknesses are, unfortunately, just as compelling. I don’t know that I can call this an ensemble film so much as it is a film with a bunch of characters in a few separate locations, but the end result is something less like a single movie and more like a collection of side stories without a single actual story to hold it all together. This gives the whole thing a meandering feel, where it just sort of moves from one set of characters and locations to another without much in the way of urgency or singular driving action. Sure, Peter and Mary are theoretically the main protagonists, but they don’t get any more or less screen time than any other group, so it just sort of feels like they’re over here, doing some stuff. There’s also Sandra and her therapist Gerry, Gerry’s suspiciously young girlfriend Emily, then Emily’s younger brother John-John (yes, “John-John”), Bob, who appears to be the town pervert, a couple of lovebirds who come to a nasty end, some dudes in a bar, and a man in whose garage Bob takes refuge, and his teenage daughter. The film bounces back and forth between all of these groups, and a lot of the film is similar action playing out in each group - characters are confused, something spooky happens, something disgusting happens right afterward, and somebody generally dies - so it feels repetitive as well as highly mechanical. Open scene, establish people, introduce creepiness, introduce gore, lather, rinse repeat.

The result is a movie that’s only an hour and a half long, but feels like two and a half hours, and on top of that, the end is a baffling mess- the film doesn’t so much end as it does just…stop. It’s not so much anticlimactic as it is nonsensical. I’m glad I watched The Beyond first, because I suspect if I’d started here, I wouldn’t have gone any further with Fulci’s filmography. At least I know he managed to pull it together (relatively speaking) for his next film.

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The Deep House: Keen Insight Into The Obvious

Imagination is a powerful thing, and there’s a school of thought that says that nothing you put up on a screen can be as frightening as what the audience imagines is happening. Suggestion’s a powerful tool, understatement is a powerful tool, inference is a powerful tool. On the other hand, it’s possible to hint and tease too much and never pay things off. In the words of Stephen King, “sometimes you have to put on the mask and go ooga-booga.” And scary movies can live or die on this. You can set up a ton of atmosphere and dread through suggestion and then the instant you reveal whatever it is, its shortcomings undo all the goodwill you’ve built up. Monster movies are especially vulnerable to this, since it’s so hard to do a good, convincing monster. But for that matter, a movie like Skinamarink, in all of its opacity and unwillingness to really go ooga-booga, plays a dangerous game. I think it succeeded, but it’s certainly a polarizing film and I think that’s part of the reason why. It relies almost entirely on inference.

The Deep House definitely has the opposite problem. It’s a haunted-house story with a mostly-effective new spin on things, but a lot of what it does well is undone by an irritating inability to trust its audience.

We open on blocky, low-res camera footage of two people hiking through a forest toward a large abandoned building somewhere in Ukraine. They’re Ben and Tina, a couple of urban explorers who run a YouTube channel where they document all of the abandoned places they visit. They met in grad school, Ben’s from England, and Tina’s the daughter of French immigrants who landed in Illinois. The YouTube channel was Ben’s idea. On the one hand, it’s because he likes the idea of getting out there and seeing the histories of forgotten places for himself, instead of through the dry expanse of academia. But on the other, he really wants to go viral. He wants millions of views. He wants to be Internet famous, whether he admits it to himself or not. Tina doesn’t really share his passion either for urban exploration or Internet fame. She’s come to enjoy the exploration part, but she mostly tolerates it, for his sake. So she gamely traipses through the abandoned ruins of a hospital in Eastern Europe while Ben jump-scares her for clicks.

The hospital ends up being sort of a bust, but they’ve got something big planned - Ben’s gotten a line on a lake in France that’s isolated and out of the way and has the ruins of an entire village on the lake bed. Never mind abandoned hospitals and factories and whatnot. This is something nobody’s ever explored before, totally undiscovered. So they secure a bunch of diving gear, an underwater camera drone, and plane tickets to France. Tina practices holding her breath underwater.

And when they finally get to this little village in France near where the lake is supposed to be, they find instead a thriving tourist spot, lots of families out on the lake swimming, boating, just having a day by the water. Not at all undiscovered. Tina relaxes a little, suggests they just play tourist for a bit, drink some wine, chill out. Ben sulks. This isn’t how you go viral. But he warms to the idea that they’ll just have a nice little vacation…until a local tells him about a remote branch of the lake deep in the woods, off any road or trail.

One with a single, perfectly preserved house at the bottom.

It is not spoiling anything to say that the house is more than it appears to be, after all, we came here for a horror movie. And yes, it’s basically a haunted-house story, but setting everything underwater does add something to what could have been, on dry land, a pretty stock haunted-house story. This kind of story thrives on atmosphere, and setting the whole thing underwater (and it was shot practically, no cheap CG effects here) means there’s a gloom and murk to it that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The light is fitful, and floating, drifting objects help give it a feeling that’s simultaneously otherworldly and kind of oppressive. There’s also a ticking-clock urgency to it, since they’re diving deep. They have a limited amount of air and will need time to decompress on their way back to the surface. Combined with making their way through what ends up being a sprawling, fairly labyrinthine house that only has one way in or out, and there’s a tight simmering tension to the whole thing.

There’s also a definite, though lower-key, tension to the dynamic between the protagonists. Ben’s a bit unlikable, not especially respectful of Tina’s feelings and overly focused on making his channel a hit. It’s not to the point of obsession or unrealistic, he just comes across as shallow and opportunistic enough that he’s kind of a dick and he’ll probably get them in trouble. Tina cares about him, but you get the sense that she puts up with a lot and has for some time. She wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t make it easy. This isn’t dysfunction on the level of Dani and Christian from Midsommar by any means, but there’s a definite tetchiness that comes up. It’s really played out in asides and sidelong looks and in the way she slips back into French when she says something she doesn’t want Ben to be aware of. It’s easy to infer.

But that’s really the biggest problem with this film - it does do inference and environmental storytelling pretty well, but it’s also unwilling to rely on that to carry the story. It cannot let what we see speak for itself. Once they dive and begin exploring the house, the amount they talk to each other strains credulity, given how limited their air supply is. And this is only made worse by the fact that most of what they’re saying is just describing things both we and they can see for themselves. As they’re swimming through especially murky water, Ben will say “the water’s murky here.” Like, no shit. “There’s a door here.” Yes, we can see that. So can you, so can Tina. So can anyone looking at your footage. It’s almost like the filmmakers didn’t think we could understand what was going on right in front of our faces, so they had to have the characters tell us what we were seeing, and for most of the film it’s pretty grating and works very much against its strengths.

And yes, the alternative would be a film largely devoid of dialogue, but I really do think it could have done with more silence. And it’s not like it would have been an entirely silent film. But it feels like that person who just talks incessantly because they’re uncomfortable with silence. And in the final act it gets worse, with a denouement that just spells out exactly what’s happened in this house, and it’s to the story’s detriment. The important parts have already been figured out by an attentive viewer, and the details they fill in don’t really add anything. It gives us just enough to imagine the worst, and then shows it to us anyway, in case we didn’t get it the first time.

It all serves to mar a film with some really good atmosphere, a nice sense of mounting dread as further exploration of the house reveals an increasingly discomfiting history (spelled out nicely through detail and environmental storytelling in ways that don’t require the protagonists to tell us what we’re seeing even though they do anyway), and a suitably bleak ending.  I don’t know what it is about horror that makes so many filmmakers feel like they have to spoon-feed their audience, but fuck it gets tiresome.

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Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da: Fucked Around And Found Out

Last week I expressed a certain amount of disappointment with Cerdita for taking a pretty sharp riff on a specific type of revenge film and ending it in the most obvious and cliched way possible. And now this week I find myself with another type of revenge film that has very, very few surprises to it, start to finish, but executes what it does so well that I honestly don’t mind all that much. And I think the difference lies in restraint, or the lack thereof. Cerdita kept a lot of its violence off-screen, which I think was the right choice for that film, but Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da (I Saw The Devil) puts everything right up front, and there’s something about its relentlessness and unwillingness to look away that takes a pretty by-the-numbers story and gives it a fair amount of heft.

It's a cold, snowy night, and a bus, empty but for its driver, heads down the highway, soon encountering a young woman stranded by the side of the road. She has a flat tire, and so the driver stops to offer her help. She declines, saying she’s already called a tow truck. It doesn’t matter. Things turn ugly, and soon enough she is dragged off to a dismal garage someplace and butchered. The driver dumps her remains into a stream, where they’re discovered the next day in what can only be called a shitshow of a search. She was Joo-yeon, the daughter of the local police chief, and her fiancée, Soo-hyeon, is an agent with the National Intelligence Service.

Sure, there’s going to be an official investigation, but they’re going to have to outrun Soo-hyeon, who only has one thing on his mind.

So this is the setup. Soo-hyeon is a man with a particular set of skills, who has lost someone dear to him and knows some people in the police department. This could easily be something similar to a Korean take on Taken, but it isn’t. First of all, it’s not dour monologuing broken up by explosions, slick and glossy in its mayhem. It’s something grubbier, more raw and tough to watch than that. It depicts Kyung-chul - a school bus driver who satisfies his hatred of women through kidnapping, torture, and murder - as crude and angry, something oafish and not especially clever. And Soo-hyeon doesn’t waste a lot of time on angst. He’s a professional, used to tracking people down and setting his feelings aside until the job is done. And we know this not because he tells us, but because he shows us through his utter calm, his impassive face, all while he’s doing terrible things to the man who murdered his fiancée, things to which he displayed grief and horror before he decided to make it his mission. Because he isn’t just content to track him down and make a big speech and shoot him. No, this is catch-and-release, where Soo-hyeon finds Kyung-chul, takes something away from him, and then lets him go, all to wonder when he’s going to pop up next. Soo-hyeon doesn’t just want Kyung-chul to die, he wants him to suffer.

The result is an excruciatingly violent film, simultaneously graphic and dispassionate. It doesn’t feel gratuitous - as much happens off-camera as on - nor does it feel like the camera is leering at violent spectacle. It hurts to watch what’s happening to people, even the ones we don’t like, because it’s unflinching and there’s visible suffering. Women are constantly, routinely victimized in places and ways that suggest that Kyung-chul isn’t some kind of criminal mastermind, but rather some barely controlled id, heedless of getting caught, so intent is he on satisfying his appetites how and when he wants to. Scenes where he hurts others and ones where he is the one being hurt play out exactly the same, which suggests that violence is violence, no matter the justification or context. There’s more than a whiff of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer around it in that respect - everything around Kyung-chul seems to happen in sort of a shadow world of petty criminals and criminals with bigger, stranger appetites, a world that comes out late at night, where everyone is a predator as bad or worse than him. It feels like the violence he brings into Soo-hyeon’s life is not an aberration, but just what lies out there in the dark, once everyone else has gone home. It’s what lies behind closed doors in remote areas, on the streets, in cabs and buses. It’s been there the whole time, now he’s just aware of it.

It's a long film, and it feels long, though it doesn’t drag much. The length makes itself known in shots that stretch out just a little longer than you expect, pacing that takes its time (until it doesn’t - this is a film where not much happens until all kinds of horrible shit happens all at once). It does feel a little padded in places, but not too much, and in its climax it sews everything up tight, bringing it full circle back to a dark road at night and a lonely ramshackle building out in the middle of nowhere, paying off early details. There are long stretches of silence - music only makes itself known at the height of especially intense moments, otherwise the rest of the film, stylishly shot for the most part, just lets things play out, however long that takes, so even scenes that just require someone to respond to a question develop a certain feeling of tension. It’s a film where we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Subtitles mean a couple of moments come off more humorous than I think was intended, though there is some effective black comedy as well. Settings are generally squalid - garages, abandoned hotels, apartments as filthy as they are tiny, and a lot of the film takes place at night, in the dark. Again, until it doesn’t and everything is laid bare by the light of day. In that sense it reminds me of Se7en, a film that feels more lightless than it actually is, one where having the antagonist show up in broad daylight feels a little obscene.

There’s definitely a formula to revenge films - how far is too far, don’t fight monsters unless you want to become a monster, revenge carries a terrible cost, etc. And this film definitely hews to the formula, though it saves the most on-the-nose stuff for the third act. But it also doesn’t descend completely into cliché. It never really felt to me like Soo-hyeon’s humanity was ever in question, and Kyung-chul wasn’t really redeemable in any way. Repellent, sadistic and utterly unapologetic, it’s difficult even at the film’s worst, when he is brought lowest, to say that maybe this is too much. His humanity is never in doubt, he's just someone for whom only his own life has value and everyone else exists to sate his appetites. And the end, as fitting (and in some ways typical) an end to a revenge film as you could ask for, also highlights the cost Soo-hyeon has paid, as the feelings he’s been burying to focus on the mission finally crash down on him all at once. You get the sense that Kyung-chul learned nothing, and Soo-hyeon learned too much. Either way, they both got involved with something much bigger than they expected. They fucked around and found out.

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Cerdita: What Little Girls Are Made Of

I don’t know why the stereotypical slasher movie is about a bunch of teenagers being chased by some faceless maniac (well, no, I do know why, it’s because those films make a lot of money and they’re not especially hard to produce), when the reality of being a teenager is so often so close to a horror movie anyway. At least, if you’re the wrong kind of teenager. Being trapped in a small community with a bunch of other people who are still in the process of developing empathy but are already practiced at petty (and not-so-petty) cruelty, people who have literally nothing better to do than harass you…I mean, that’s fucking awful. And so this is how we get films as good as Carrie and Let The Right One In and as bad as The Final. Whatever the ostensible supernatural horror , it’s often got nothing on what the people around the protagonist are doing to them on a regular basis.

And this is the ground covered by Cerdita (Piggy) - it’s sort of a coming-of-age story, sort of a fairytale, painted in blood. It’s got a fair amount of promise to start and plays fair with its characters, but I think ultimately it ends up copping out and shying away from really doing something daring with its premise.

It’s summertime in the Extremadura region of Spain, a time for people in villages to get ready for festivals, for local running of the bulls, for lazy days at the village swimming pool. We open on someone making sausage - pouring blood into a stuffing mixture, sharpening knives, chopping up the meat, stuffing it all into casings. It’s the local butcher shop, and the owners’ daughter Sara sits to the side, behind the counter, studying and doing her homework. She’s listening to music on headphones and chewing neurotically on a strand of her own hair. Sara’s mother worries because she doesn’t get enough fresh air, spends all of her time inside, and doesn’t seem to have any friends. Mostly because people call her “pig” and post mocking images of her on social media. Boys chase her down the street, calling her “Miss Bacon.” Even Claudia, the closest thing she has to a friend, joins in. You know what they say. Kids can be so cruel.

And then finally, Sara’s mother gets her to go the village pool to go swimming. The pool is quiet, not bustling like it was earlier in the day, and Sara enjoys swimming in the relative solitude. At least, until a group of girls show up. It’s just them and her, no adults around, and it gets pretty bad, pretty quickly. It ends with them stealing her clothes, her phone, and her towel, leaving her to walk home, humiliated, in nothing but her bathing suit.

But someone else was watching the entire time - someone who was busy dumping the bodies of the pool’s lifeguard and waitress when it all happened.

He’s not happy about how they treated Sara.

Soon enough people - well, specifically teenagers - start to vanish. Nothing like this ever happens here, the biggest tragedy they’ve ever had to deal with was a fire. There are literally two police officers for the entire village, and they're father and son. Everyone’s looking for a culprit, everyone’s looking for some kind of explanation, and the whole time, Sara - who saw something she shouldn’t have on her mortifying trek home - knows something that might help. But she doesn’t say anything. And it’s understandable why she doesn’t - the bullying she withstands is hard to watch, and it’s clear pretty early on that the reason she doesn’t want to ever get out and get fresh air is because she’s a target to pretty much everyone outside of her immediate family. There’s a sense of constant vulnerability, which butts up against her being largely untouched in the middle of the tragedy that’s come to visit this small, sleepy town. Now it’s everyone else’s turn to not feel safe.

Nevertheless, she’s caught on the hooks of a moral dilemma - she knows what’s happened, but when has anyone been on her side? Her peers treat her like shit, the closest thing she has to a friend is absolutely complicit as well. Her mother - a complicated figure - is as quick to berate her as she is to defend her to others, and her father is sympathetic but maybe doesn’t have the spine he needs. Nobody’s listened to her before now, so why bother? It’s a small town, people talk, and soon enough the mysterious disappearances are front and center and Sara’s being pulled in all different directions by a bunch of people who aren’t really concerned with her well-being. She goes from being disregarded at best and abused at worst to really nothing more than a tool in the service of helping other people to feel better. This film isn’t quite a character study, but a lot of it does play out in the dynamics between people, and everyone feels believable, complicated and flawed.

It’s a very visually confident film as well. There’s a lot of imagery at play here - the butcher shop means there’s meat to be chopped up, bones to be sawed through, and Sara is constantly described in terms of meat, of bacon, of something to be consumed. That is her value to others, she exists as flesh on which they feed, at least metaphorically. She’s nothing more than the meat of her body. There are fairytale allusions as well - the Three Little Pigs being the most obvious, but there are also nods to Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, and the idea of what it means to be Prince Charming. These aren’t blatant, they’re just sort of woven into the story, there to be appreciated without being ham-handed, and so there’s a nice contrast between the idealism of fairytales (what life is like for the beautiful people of the village) and the messy, bloody reality of Sara’s existence. The film is bright and hot as befits southwestern Spain, with lots of vivid color through the first two acts, giving way to muddy grays and browns and light barely seeping its way in through filthy windows and plastic tarps as everything comes to a head. It’s a town preparing for a festival, with bad things happening out in the dark. It’s also shot in an almost-square aspect ratio that subtly conveys a feeling of being trapped or confined, emphasizing the pressures that Sara exists under. Everything presses in around her.

This isn’t a movie that jumps out and yells at you - most of the violence is offscreen until the end, it sets its premise up early and then lets it play out mostly in bits of gradual discovery and quiet escalation. Maybe too quiet, really - the second act spins its wheels a little, saving the real tension for the third act. And here is where I feel like it sort of stumbles, as it resolves everything in a way that has been done dozens of times before in similar confrontations. I wish it had come up with something a little less pat and a little less obvious, because it’s a film that’s not afraid to show its teeth elsewhere, and it’s too bad because it was pretty thoughtful getting to that point. There was potential to really say something about the façade of polite society and how it makes excuses for victimizing the marginalized, how people like Sara are only as valuable as they are useful in the moment. I wish it had found the courage to show us the raw, messy stuff of which people are made.

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The Outwaters: Too Much Of A Good Thing

If there’s one thing I’ve never ever said about a found-footage film, it’s that it does too good of a job at what it’s trying to accomplish. There are definitely some good found-footage films out there, but there’s also a lot of hackneyed trash, so I’m just happy when one is actually good, never mind too good at what it’s trying to do. But as it turns out, that’s entirely possible. The Outwaters is a found-footage film that does a lot of things right, but in its pursuit of verisimilitude, it ends up being so realistic that it sacrifices pacing and a strong buildup toward its climax. There’s still a lot to recommend it, but it’s not exactly a slam-dunk.

The film opens tersely, with the audio from a 911 call playing over still images of four people. Something awful is happening in the background, screams and crying all garbled and distorted, snatches of speech coming through almost at random. The four people - Robbie Zagorac, his brother Scott, Michelle August, and Ange Bocuzzi, all went missing in August of 2013. There’s a click, and we’re presented with a title card introducing footage taken from three memory cards, presented in chronological order, discovered in 2017. That’s it, no overheated “this is the only record of the horrible events of that night” or shit like that. Minimal and dispassionate. What we’re going to see is an account of these four people who went missing. That’s it. So we’re off to a good start.

And the footage that opens up the first card is all very slice-of-life - Robbie giving Scott a backpack as a birthday gift and some of the sort of elliptical conversation people who actually know each other share. We can gather that their father is dead, Scott writes short stories, and that Scott has a strained relationship with their mother. There’s little rhyme or reason to it, it’s just snatches of the sort of stuff you record to capture important moments, but bit by bit a picture develops. Scott and Robbie are helping their friend Michelle make a music video. She’s a singer-songwriter in sort of a retro 70s Southern California mode (appropriate, since the three of them live in Los Angeles) and they’re going to go out into the Mojave Desert, camp overnight and shoot for a day or two. Scott and Robbie enlist Ange - I’m not clear if she’s their sister or just a childhood friend, but she flies out from the East Coast to help with hair and makeup and costuming. The trip out into the desert is uneventful, they get good footage, and then Robbie notices something odd - a strange charge in the air, like an oncoming storm. Then there are loud peals of thunder. At night, a strange light in the distance.

And then it all goes wrong.

In terms of what I look for in found-footage horror, this does a lot right - the dialogue and performances are naturalistic in their awkwardness and mundanity. It doesn’t feel contrived, it feels like the kind of stuff you’d find on some random person’s video camera, and it tells a story in the edges without being artificially expository about it. We get a sense of everyone’s relationship to each other without having it spelled out for us. The premise isn’t contrived either - they’re going out into the desert to shoot a music video, hence the camera and sound equipment. None of this “we’re making a documentary about this totally everyday thing for reasons” nonsense. Shots in the first couple of acts are often artful without feeling outside of the ability of a reasonably talented camera operator. My one gripe here would be that the music, although diegetic, often doesn’t seem to be sourced within the scene, but rather dropped into the audio mix in post-production, so it seems more like found-footage with a soundtrack at points than strictly recovered footage. But overall it feels convincing as recovered footage.

And this holds once they get out to the desert and - more importantly  once things start going wrong. Shots aren’t perfect, in fact, most of the second half of the movie consists of Robbie running around in the dark scared (or worse) out of his fucking mind and as a result, plenty of footage is of a camera being held at his side, pointing at nothing in particular or even shooting the landscape upside-down, which adds a nightmare vertiginousness to the proceedings. And the limited subjectivity pays off a lot - out imagination does a lot of the work here, aided by brief glimpses of awful, blood-smeared things in the darkness as everything, including a sense of time and space, starts to break down. Sound design makes good use of space, with far-off wails and immediate booms of thunder and strange cries and feedback. It’s as if we’re caught in a storm that tears reality away like flesh from a face, revealing the bloody nightmares underneath.

The problem, then, is twofold. First, the film’s a little too long at almost two hours. The first half of the film moves at a pretty languid pace, and though it’s less bothersome here, since it’s intended to establish these people, I did start to feel twinges of “get on with it” after a little bit. But it’s really in the second half where it really starts to show, as there’s really only so long you can sustain a constant barrage of (admittedly) horrifying imagery before it starts to become sort of numbing and lose its impact. It threatens to go from “get on with it” to “wrap it up.”

This isn’t helped by the second problem, which is a definite lack of structure. Again, this works perfectly well in the first half, but as it starts to set up the beginnings of the idea that something isn’t right, the second half suddenly slams into high gear out of nowhere and then doesn’t let off the gas until the end. Now from the perspective of verisimilitude this makes total sense -  you find yourself in a waking nightmare, nobody’s going to stop and explain it, shit’s going to get weirder and more horrifying regardless of your ability to comprehend it. But it really does come out of nowhere and goes on long enough that it starts to feel samey, just more horrible shit being stuffed into our eyeballs. In isolation it’s all very well-executed, but there’s so much of it without any sort of narrative arc or much opportunity for us to even infer things that it all starts to feel shapeless. There are some hints early on that something isn’t right, and they’re paid off well in the final act, but they don’t have the space they need to breathe among all the chaos.

I think if they’d spend more of the second half of the film slowly building up the feeling of wrongness and really turned it up for the final act, it would have worked a lot better. As it is, it doesn’t respect neatly packaged narrative and that’s as it should be for the kind of film it is, but it also ends up working against it. I think it goes to show, once again, just how much of a tricky balancing act found-footage films are. Most of the time, you get people who just can’t commit to shooting something that doesn’t look like a conventional film and so what’s supposed to be raw footage shot by amateurs just looks like something made by film students on the (very) cheap. Here, I think we’re sort of dealing with the other end of the continuum - it’s so committed to realism in all of its awkward, messy imperfection that the momentum we need gets sacrificed. But to the extent it works, it really, really works, enough that I’m willing to put up with it being a little too good at what it’s trying to do.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon