When you think about it, the death of a loved one fuels a lot of horror. Parents, children, spouses, all used as the catalyst for something much worse, whether it’s psychological or supernatural. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, I think it’s because the death is used as sort of a shorthand for “and then this person lost their marbles.” Or, sometimes, “and then the loved one came back, except now they’re evil.” These are shallow, reductive takes, not interested in actually looking at how grief actually plays out. And grief is messy, ugly, complicated, in and of itself. I think it deserves better than being relegated to a one-size-fits-all plot device.
And I don’t know that From Black completely undoes that relegation, but it definitely helps. It’s a taut, understated look at the lengths grief takes us to that may not avoid some of the usual stops, but goes past them as well.
It opens on a 911 call. Someone’s in danger, there’s someone in the house. They have to hide. This cuts to a house, standing silent with crime scene tape flapping in the breeze. A police officer is walking through it, taking in everything she sees. A line of salt across a hallway, smudged. A chalk circle full of symbols, a pile of bloody bones in the middle. A couch covered in blood. Something very bad happened here.
Back at the station, the officer sits down with the woman who made the 911 call. She’s shell-shocked, spattered with blood and wrapped in a blanket. Her name is Cora, and she has a story to tell. She hasn’t always been the best mother to her son Noah. She’s spent a lot of time on hard drugs, in unhealthy relationships. And one day, as she lay on a couch in a filthy trailer home, deep on the nod, Noah walked out the door and just vanished. And she didn’t even realize it until it was too late. That’s the sort of thing that gets some people to rethink their life choices, and Cora cleaned herself up, moved back into her mother’s old house, and started going to a support group for bereaved parents. But the guilt and the shame are still there. When she finally speaks up in group, it’s like a flood coming out of her. All of the things she wishes she’d done differently and how tired she was of empty platitudes. How so often other people’s sympathy seemed more about them than about her. After the meeting, she’s approached by the group leader, who tells her that there’s a way to fix it, to undo all of it, to get Noah back.
There is a ritual.
As I said above, the story of someone who goes to any lengths to get their loved one back is not an especially novel one, but that’s not the point - this film does, I think, a better job than most at highlighting the anger, the rage, the resentment that attends especially difficult losses, like the loss of a child. When well-meaning people say things like “we’re in this together” not only does it not help, it actually makes it worse, and it’s not all that often that I see horror films get that emotional balance right. It’s maybe more common in drama, but in horror the tendency is to just dip it in histrionics and call it good. And one of the best things about this movie is how Cora isn’t suffering in noble silence. She’s furious and she’s sorrowful and she doesn’t trust anyone because she’s been at the receiving end of so many empty promises and silent judgment. She’s very wounded, and it comes across vividly and gives the movie some depth it could easily have missed.
I’ve seen this film get comparisons to
A Dark Song, which is also an excellent film, but I really think the similarities don’t go any deeper than both films being about a woman who undergoes a difficult, dangerous magical ritual with the hopes of repairing the loss of a child. Everything outside of that is different. This is much closer to a conventional horror film than
A Dark Song was. It bounces back and forth in time between the present and the events that Cora is recounting, as the police try to make sense of what they’ve found and make sense of what they’re telling her. And it works well in that regard - the returns to the present are like little spaces to breathe and moments to move the investigative pieces forward, and bit by bit the pieces come together over the course of the film. It’s deliberate, but not slow, and understated, except when it isn’t to sharp effect.
Likewise, the writing is mostly very good - sometimes it verges on speeches, but pulls up short of feeling artificial or contrived, and the performances are solid (Cora’s ex-boyfriend is one of the most believably loathsome I’ve seen since
Bug). Everything is pitched to a human scale, and it does a very good job of showing instead of telling throughout. A lot gets revealed in little things narratively, asides and small gestures and background details, and it relies a lot on suggestion, on leaving things unseen, punctuated with moments that are lyrical, startling, or both. It’s also a film that’s content to let things happen in the background without calling our attention to it, and that’s a big one for me. It’s a film that respects the audience’s intelligence without being clever or precious about it. The details of the ritual, while maybe not as textbook as those of
A Dark Song, don’t feel hokey or lurid, and the last act of the movie is a slow and steady ramping up to the point where Cora realizes exactly what the cost of her decision is going to be. The imagery is largely effective, and though the creature effects don’t really hang around long enough to start looking cheap, they come close. Though, I have to say, I’m ready to call a moratorium on drone shots of roads and landscapes, it’s starting to get out of hand.
No film is perfect, but honestly my complaints here are pretty small. There’s maybe one really obvious plot device (you pretty much know one character’s eventual fate as soon as they get some real screen time) but it doesn’t really hurt the story, and the score is maybe a little too much, all rattles and thumps and ominous synthesizer and scraping, squeaking strings. It doesn’t really let up, and a number of scenes could use a little more silence and room to breathe, but when it’s appropriate it contributes well to the tension and unease.
Grief really is something endured - it’s there all the time whether you want it to be or not, and even if it lightens over time it never really goes away and just like Cora spends most of the movie trying to convince the people around her that what happened was real, it can be extremely difficult to get people who aren’t sharing your burden to understand that it is a burden. And the people, like Cora, who bear that burden, aren’t perfect by any stretch. They make mistakes, they lose their temper, they fall apart. The film ends on a nicely inconclusive note that avoids the obvious and keeps things up in the air enough to leave a feeling of slight unease as the credits roll. That’s the thing about grief - it’s never really, truly resolved.
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