No One Will Save You: Taken Away

There’s a podcast that is, as near as I can tell, about films that are so bad they end up transcending their own badness. It’s called “How Did This Get Made?” and although I’ve never listened to it, that phrase got me to thinking. See, I’ve seen some real stinkers over the years I’ve been writing this thing, but I’ve never really asked myself how those really garbage films got made. I know how they got made. There’s a mindset out there that horror movies don’t need to actually be good, they just need to deliver scares and gore and maybe some titillation. So somebody puts up the money, the assumption being it’ll be a pretty safe bet to turn at least a modest profit. This can describe exercises in ineptitude and in slick mediocrity alike.

And it’s not like the people responsible are really to blame for this - if a casual look at box office numbers and the state of criticism in the enthusiast press is any indication, a lot of the people spending money on horror films aren’t exactly picky. Maybe scares and gore and titillation is all some people are looking for. Hell, the notion of a horror film that’s actually thoughtful and intelligent and made with some level of artistry is so alien to some critics that they’ve invented the term “post-horror” or “elevated horror” to describe it. And…no. It’s not elevated, you’ve just set the bar that fucking low because you’re a condescending jackass. How do those films get made? They have commercial potential. That’s it.

And this is why I find myself asking how No One Will Save You got made. It is by no means inept or mediocre. But in its premise and narrative and execution, it’s very hard to sum up neatly, and it’s certainly surprisingly non-commercial for something distributed by 20th Century. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before, and that’s not something I say very often.

It opens on a lovely old farmhouse set back in the woods on a beautiful, sunny day. A young woman named Brynn lives there, and she’s up and about, sewing cute sundresses, packaging them with ribbon and thank-you cards to mail off presumably to paying customers. It’s easy to imagine that she has a successful Etsy store. The house is sunny and full of charm, and in her basement workspace, she’s got a whole miniature town laid out across a long table. A picture-book village being kept by a picture-book young woman, shot in picture-book colors and lighting. You half-expect animated birds to land on her shoulders before she bursts into song. She grabs the packages she needs to mail and drives into town. The town is Mill River, and it’s as lovely and charming and bright and sunny as her house and the world that encompasses them both.

But all is not well here. As Brynn drives through town, heads turn to stare, lips curl in disgust. She waves at someone, and the wave goes unreturned. She tosses the packages in the mailbox, shunned. From there, a visit to her mother’s grave, and then home to write a letter to her friend Maude. She notices an odd circular patch of dead grass on her lawn, and gives it extra water.

And then, that night, when all is dark - that real country dark, just you and the stars - Brynn notices that her door is open. The door is open, and she hears footsteps. Footsteps and low, inhuman chattering.

This is the kind of film that might get tagged as “high concept.” It’s ultimately an alien-invasion film very much in the mold of something like Signs or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (with which it shares a basic visual vocabulary, all tall, skinny grey aliens and floods of light so dense they’re almost solid), but as the film goes on it gets gnarlier than Close Encounters ever did, and all of this is surrounded by the mystery of how Brynn ended up with the life she did, young and alone in this big old house, a pariah to the local community. And, on top of all of that, it’s doing this with an almost total absence of dialogue. Apart from a diegetic piece of music with sung lyrics, there are a total of five words spoken throughout the entire film, and two of those are repeated, so it’s only three distinct words. It could be very easy for this to devolve into a gimmick, but it doesn’t - there are a lot of things almost said, faint murmuring in the background too indistinct to make out, so the end result feels more like an entire film of the awkward silences that come when the person you’re talking about enters the room. The tentativeness before saying the thing that’s hard to say. It’s not that people don’t talk, they just don’t talk to Brynn. And since Brynn is the only person on screen for large swaths of the movie, it creates a palpable sense of isolation. The film’s title feels like it’s directed at her.

And this is on top of the faint but persistent strangeness of the film’s tone. It really does feel like it takes place in some kind of idealized all-American small town, but almost as soon as that impression is established, it becomes clear that something’s off - the way nobody talks to or even smiles at Brynn, all of the miniature houses arranged as if she’s building her own perfect little town, in her letters she alludes to something she regrets. From the start, there’s a sense that something’s off here. There’s a mystery to unfold, and then when night falls, it all turns into a siege film.

And the siege film works pretty well. It’s a mix of cat-and-mouse and fraught confrontation, and the beats are all pretty familiar but executed crisply and with restraint and a good sense of rhythm. The aliens start off as your garden-variety greys, strange but not especially threatening. But as the film goes on they become increasingly more inhuman, their features becoming more exaggerated, their manner more savage. They chase Brynn, roaring, clambering and skittering like spiders. There starts to be some suggestion that maybe they’ve already infiltrated the town, leading to a bit of body horror to round things off. Between the wordlessness (compensated for by a score that knows exactly when to sting),and a lot of the action taking place in a big house late at night, there’s a good, solid hum of tension to it that never really crescendos but never flags either, ticking along like a slightly too-loud metronome. You can’t really ever quite relax, right up to a climax that eschews edge-of-the-seat thrills, leaning more into revelations about how Brynn’s life ended up like this, before dropping an ending into your lap that somehow manages to recapitulate the film’s sunny opening in a way that is now, with context, chilling.

It makes sense that a film about an alien invasion is going to deal with the idea of people being taken away, but there’s a lot of different ways you can be taken away - alien abduction, sure, but also nostalgia, wishes for a better time, and worse. Some are taken from us too soon. Somehow this film manages to do justice to all of them. It’s both intensely familiar in its feel and simultaneously like nothing else, and I’m sure a lot of people aren’t going to know what to do with it. That’s their problem. There’s a lot to like in a film that harnesses nostalgic ideas about Americana and classic alien-invasion imagery and uses them to tell a surprisingly tense story about the escapism and denial of nostalgia. I’d rather watch that that the umpteenth iteration on Saw any day. I don't know how this got made, but yeah, more risky stuff like this, please.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

Busanhaeng: The Hero’s Journey

I’m sort of tired of zombie films in general. The idea of a zombie apocalypse has been so overdone that it’s hard for me to see how you can mine any real dread out of the concept. As often as not, the ones that aren’t outright goofy or excuses for rivers of gore boil down to Mankind Is The Real Monster, which okay, sure, but after awhile there’s not a whole lot that’s new or interesting that you can do with that. I get that you sort of have to focus more on humanity because zombies, at their most effective, are effective because they are ciphers - a human form with all the humanity drained away - and that kind of blankness is unnerving when handled well, but maybe doesn’t make for the most engaging movie all by itself.

So the default is how the existence of zombies affects the living, and it’s very easy for that to turn into all of the ways that humanity can be bad. I’m not saying that isn’t a legitimate thing to explore (it’s a big part of horror, really) but…I dunno. It’s so easy for it to turn into relentless miserabilism. And that’s dull in its own way.

And this is a big part of why it took me so long to get around to watching Busanhaeng (Train To Busan). No matter how much praise I heard, all I could think was “ugh, another zombie movie.” But I’m really glad I came around. It’s an intense, kinetic story about survival and the things we sacrifice for it. And yeah, that’s what a lot of zombie movies end up being about, but what this film does right is ground the story in sympathetic characters whose plight makes the point in ways that feel personal, rather than setting up a grim situation and preaching.

It’s just another day in South Korea, as a truck driver encounters a roadblock where his truck is inspected and disinfected before he can continue on. There’s been some kind of leak at the biotech research facility nearby and they’re here making sure nothing spreads. Just another hassle trying to get his cargo to its destination, and no sooner does he get through the roadblock than dammit, he hits a deer. Terrific. Now he’s going to have to clean off the front of the truck and he’s already late and so, grumbling, he drives off.

And then the deer stands back up.

Meanwhile, back in the big city, fund manager Seok-woo is having his own hassles. Some recent news reports about mysterious mass animal deaths have him concerned about one of the companies in which his fund holds stock, and he tells his assistant to sell it all off. This is a big deal and stakeholders aren’t going to be happy, and neither are his bosses. But it’s his call to make and his static to deal with. On top of that. he’s divorced from his wife, and they share custody of their daughter, Soo-an. And she wants to spend her birthday with her mother instead of him, and she’s prepared to take the train all the way to Busan to see her, all by herself. She’s all of eight or nine years old. Seok-woo really can’t take the time off work - this decision, however sure of it he is, is going to mean a lot of reports and a lot of meetings on top of all of the reports and meetings he already has just because he works in finance. But he loves her, and he’s acutely aware that even though he has to spend so much time at work to provide her with a good life, it means that he’s not actually around to watch her live it. And she feels it too. So he finds the time to take the train with her from Seoul to Busan, where she will stay with her mother. They board and get seated, and Seok-woo, unable to stop following the news, sees reports of outbreaks of violence all over the south.

Outbreaks of violence, and some mysterious illness.

So in short, we have a train full of people hurtling through a country that is rapidly falling apart due to what is, pretty obviously, a zombie outbreak. Communications are patchy, people can’t get through to their loved ones, and the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And like so many disaster movies, this becomes how everyone’s true character gets revealed, who these people are in a crisis. There’s nobility and selfishness, cooperation and craven opportunism, the best and worst humanity has to offer. Bur it’s not a turgid exercise in moralizing, it’s a crisp, knife-sharp exercise in relentless tension and momentum. Because it’s mostly set on a train, there’s a lot happening in a very enclosed space, one strictly demarcated by doors between cars, which focuses most of the action on a moment-to-moment, foot-by-foot struggle for survival. This alternates with interludes in larger, open public spaces, which allow for grander moments highlighting the scope of what’s happening. And part of why both work so well is that this film takes the same approach to zombies as films like [REC], 28 Days Later, and World War Z  - they’re like an insensate force of nature, falling and spilling over each other in waves and piles, a flood and encroaching plant species and predator all at once. Transformations are marked by slightly over-cranked camera work, which makes them feel even more frenetic, lurching and hissing and hurtling forward with headlong momentum. Everything and everyone in this film is in motion.

And it doesn’t spend too much time on the zombies themselves - encounters are mostly quick and nasty, with just as much of the tension coming from gradual, understated reveals of a nation falling into chaos. The way the news footage on the train goes from isolated instants of violence to mass panic, all played out with equanimity on little screens, pulling into a station only to find it utterly deserted, save for smears of blood and abandoned riot equipment, far-off cities that have erupted in flames. It’s either at a remove or hideously immediate, with not a lot in-between, and it’s very effective in that regard. We’re not in the middle of the cities as they collapse, we’re coming along in the aftermath. It’s a story told equally in small, understated reveals and claustrophobic, oppressive action sequences, and there’s not a lot of room to breathe. The pressure is sharp and constant, as much about how these people relate to each other and the decisions that they make as the insensate corpses flailing toward them. There’s definitely an element of “who will survive, and what will be left of them?’ to it -  everyone’s put to the test, and not everyone passes. There’s not a ton of depth to the characters, but they’re distinct and relatable, and at the center of it is Seok-woo, torn between the ruthless calculation that serves him so well at work, and kind, sensitive Soo-an. Who is he going to be in this situation? It’s a story about the people on this train.

That said, there is a pretty clear through-line here about social class, and one that definitely hits different in a post-COVID-19 world. You’ve got the people in coach and the people in first class, and while everyone else is following directions, hurriedly moving from one place to another, hoping to remain safe, men in suits with smartphones are arranging private escape routes, leveraging insider information, making exceptions of themselves and sacrificing anyone and everyone for their own self-preservation. I was immediately reminded of a photo I saw on Instagram during lockdown of some tech bro who’d amassed cases and cases and cases of toilet paper, showing off his hoard like it was something to be proud of. Neckties act important symbols of class and resulting inequality, at one point literally being used to bind doors shut to keep people out. It’s not an especially subtle allegory, but no less effective for it.

And this is what I think makes it such a strong film - it’s not just spectacle, not just gooey gore effects and wallowing in violence, and it’s not just another “humans bad” reduction either. There are elements of that, but it’s clearly grounded in human frailty, weakness, cowardice and venality. There are clear heroes and clear villains, but also a lot of people who fall somewhere between those two poles, in the messy, complicated place between, and so it’s a journey of growth (or lack thereof) as much as anything else. And on top of that, it’s supremely tense, harrowing, and full of striking visual moments. It’s also a journey of escape, of flight away from a danger that is everywhere and the increasing impossibility of safety. Brains (braaaaiiiiiiiiiiins) and brawn alike.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Tubi 

Pengabdi Setan (2017): The Family Skeletons

Never let it be said that I’m stubborn about the movies I watch. I’m stubborn about plenty of other things, but not that. Awhile back I watched an old Indonesian horror film called Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) and yeah it was crude, kind of clumsy and downright goofy in spots, but it had a real energy to it, a wild-eyed earnestness that got it over the rough spots. Good shit. Well, it came to my attention that someone did a remake of it in 2017, and before I checked that out, I watched one of the director’s later films, Impetigore, which I wrote about last week. I was…disappointed. It was visually impressive but the story was repetitive, sort of obvious, and it didn’t take long to squander any goodwill the impressive opening garnered. And that took the remake of Satan’s Slave off my to-watch list.

But here’s the thing - I have a few friends whose tastes in film I trust, and one of them had really good things to say about the remake and…even more unusual…even better things to say about its sequel. So I’ve got a remake…made by someone whose other work didn’t do it for me…that also includes a sequel. That’s kind of a hat trick of Things That Make Me Not Want To Watch Movies.

But, I gotta say, this particular person doesn’t miss often in my estimation, and as it turns out, the 2017 remake of Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is actually pretty damn good.

It’s 1981, and out in the Indonesian countryside, there’s a family going through a tough time. Bahri and his wife Mawarni live with Bahri’s mother, and with their four children - Rini, Tony, Bondi, and Ian. Mawarni used to make a good living as a pop singer, but three years ago she was struck by a mysterious illness that’s left her bedridden, frail, and barely able to speak. Money’s extremely tight because the royalty checks from Mawarni’s albums are drying up, and the medical bills do not pay themselves. There’s a lot to do - make sure the younger kids are fed and off to school, look after Bahri’s mother, and attend to Mawarni’s  needs, listening for the bell that she rings when she needs something.

And when, after a particularly restless night, Mawarni finally passes away, it’s very sad, but it’s also a form of closure. The waiting’s over, and now the grief can begin. Bahri leaves for the city, to arrange for new sources of income. This leaves Rini, the oldest, in charge of the house. And that’s when it all starts - Bondi starts acting strangely, figures walking through the graveyard that backs up to the family house…

…and, in the middle of the night, the sound of a bell.

I don’t unilaterally dislike remakes - I do think they can be lazy attempts to capitalize on nostalgia, and ones that are shot-for-shot identical seem pointless to me. But this ends up working as an interesting riff on the original - one that keeps the same basic structure, but remixes it enough that it isn’t entirely predictable. Roles are shuffled around, events are recontextualized, and the result is very different from the original without being unrecognizable or even unfamiliar. It’s basically the same story told through two different zeitgeists, and that makes all the difference. The original was broad and intense, with all the subtlety of an emergency siren. It was a story about how you have to say your prayers or the monsters will come, damn near close to a morality tale. It was almost an after-school special with ghosts and zombies. This is a much less didactic film, one that makes the circumstances of this family’s misfortune less cut and dried, and religion doesn’t necessarily save the day this time around. There’s also a bigger focus on the relationship between all of the different family members, and though it’s not the master class on dysfunction and secret-keeping that Hereditary is, there’s definitely some overlap along those lines. A mother dies, and what she took with her to the grave is going to come back to haunt everyone. It’s the story of a family sticking together in the face of adversity, at the mercy of forces that have been aligning against them out there in the dark.

It’s also a much more subtle film. It does a really good line in spooky, creepy, classic ghost-story ambience, and though the beats are nothing especially novel, they’re executed well and don’t rely on quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG! jump scares. This is a film with lots of shrouded figures in windows and doorways, shots where there’s nothing in the room until there is, and even when it’s pretty clear how it’s going to go down, it uses that familiarity to create the anticipation that the inevitable payoff needs to get under our skin . Most of the film takes place in the family home, which is old, run-down, kind of grungy, with lots of corners and long hallways and not a lot of light. It manages to be sprawling and claustrophobic at the same time, and since a lot of it takes place at night, in the dark, there really isn’t a point when it feels like a safe place to be. The use of sound is also really important here - small things like the ringing of a bell, knocking on doors, old Indonesian pop music, all of it heralds something bad, and I like how much atmosphere and tension the film gets out of relatively minimal gestures like that. It’s not really a gory film (with one relatively brief but vivid exception), and the effects work is significantly better than the original. That’s not a high bar to clear by any means, but it means the sharpest moments hit like they should. It doesn’t have the raw, gonzo energy of the original and I do miss that, but the overall result is a much consistently better film, one that does a nice job of maintaining a steady simmer of tension throughout.

I do have a couple of complaints, though. The translation is a little lacking, as is so often the case, but the feeling still shines through. It’s also a much more involved story than the original, expanding the family and the people around them, and though I appreciate the moments of revelation, I think some of them were maybe a little rushed and didn’t have quite the impact they needed. This was most notable at the very end, which provided a nice twist and nod to the original, but the execution felt a little abrupt, so something that should have landed like a bombshell instead sort of blew past the viewer in a rush to set up the sequel. But, I have to say, based on how well this worked, I’m actually sort of curious about the sequel, and I never say that. I get the sense that family secrets aren’t that easily outrun.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Perempuan Tanah Jahanam: Expect The Unexpected, But Not In A Good Way

I’m not usually a huge fan of particularly well-worn premises, mostly because the potential for surprise, in my experience, is pretty low. Is it a little reductive to say “if you’ve seen one ‘The Possession Of…’ movie, you’ve seen them all?” Yeah, probably. But at the same time, flip through any number of horror films on your streaming site of choice and see how often the same blurbs turn up. People who move into a new house and discover something is very wrong. People who move into an OLD house and discover that something is very wrong. People in difficult situations forced to reckon with their personal demons or dark secret. People vacationing at a cabin and discovering that they’re being stalked by a mysterious presence…you get the idea. There are few entirely original ideas under the sun.

But that’s also okay, because a story is more than what’s being told, it’s also HOW it’s being told. And when you tell an old story well, the results can be really exciting.

So, I guess this is where my problems with Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (Impetigore, literal translation “Hell Woman”) come in. The story itself is nothing new, but how it’s told does it no favors at all. The film starts strong and has some great visuals, but ultimately falls apart into something sluggish and repetitive, squandering a lot of the potential in the story it could tell.

It opens up on a toll plaza, late at night. Two booth operators, Maya and Dini, exchange casual chatter, gossip, the usual ways of whiling away a long shift at a dull job. Maya’s complaining about one particular creepy regular customer when, lo and behold, here he comes again. And yeah, he just kind of spends the entire transaction staring at Maya. He tells her he’s from a small village called Harjosari, and oddly keeps calling her “Rahayu.” Eventually, another car comes up behind him and honks for him to get a move on. Maya breathes a sigh of relief until she sees that he’s just parked by the side of the road on the other side of the plaza. And he’s walking toward her. And he has a machete.

Maya tries to run, but he catches up to her, and his look is oddly pleading. He says that he just wants what’s happening to his family to stop, that they don’t want what her parents gave them. Before he can kill her, he’s shot dead by the police.

Maya and Dini take this as a cue to quit their jobs as toll booth operators and start the clothing business they’ve always talked about. Only that doesn’t go so well, peddling cheap designer knockoffs in the market stalls of Jakarta is a rough way to make a living, and they’re falling behind on rent. Maya gets an idea. See, she never knew her parents, and all she has to remember them by is a single photo that her aunt has. It shows a young Maya standing with her mother and father in front of a huge, palatial house in Harjosari.

But the name on the back of the photo isn’t “Maya,” it’s ”Rahayu.”

So, against all good instinct, Maya and Dini take off for Harjosari, a small village way out in the sticks. A village that most people don’t want to talk about or take them to. But Maya’s sure that as the daughter of the homeowners, she could sell her family’s house for the kind of money that could bail her and Dini out of debt. It’s a small, poor village, and there aren’t any children around, and her parents’ house stands long-abandoned. You think you know how it’s going to go from here - woman returns to the family home and the dark secret that it holds - but it’s not really a haunted-house story, which is too bad, because it could have been a really good haunted-house story. The visuals are evocative (making especially good use of light and shadow, with traditional Javanese shadow puppetry as a recurring motif), and there’s plenty of atmosphere, lots of foggy forests and suitably dark, shadowy, cobwebbed interiors in the family home. Something bad happened here, and nobody wants to talk about it. There’s a real unease there.

But after a suitably creepy start, the film decides that the real center of the story isn’t this creepy abandoned house and the mysteries of Maya’s childhood after all. Instead, it puts all of its energy into the story of a remote village suffering under a curse, which wouldn’t be a bad storyline either (especially since it seems to be tied to Maya’s parents somehow) except it ends up taking over the whole movie. The house is only used for a handful of scenes and there’s little in the way of investigation. Worse, the basic outlines of the story the film presents are easy to figure out pretty early in, so there are very few twists or shocking revelations that actually land. For any reasonably attentive viewer, they’re going to have the broad outlines figured out in about ten minutes, and the rest is just the film catching up to where the audience already is. Almost everything plays out exactly like you’d expect it to, and most of the second act consists of reiterating what we’ve already figured out - there’s a curse, Maya’s family is involved somehow, and it affects the children born in the village - so the middle of the film drags pretty badly. Since a lot of it is just going over the same narrative ground again and again, there’s no reason for the film to be nearly two hours long. 

Then, as if that weren’t enough, in the third act we get an extended flashback that adds some new information (I guess it’s a twist, but I’d think a twist would be something that meaningfully changes the story, and I don’t think this does) that you wouldn’t really be able to puzzle out yourself, a climax that is pretty much exactly what you think it’s going to be, and then it ends on what could be a nice nod to another, better movie, but then insists on tacking a totally unnecessary “one year later” tag on the end. In some ways, it’s more of a melodrama (albeit a bloody one - throats keep getting cut in this film) than horror, strictly speaking. Ultimately what are supposed to be the shocking revelations feel more like kind of a supernatural soap opera than anything else, and when I stopped to think about them, they actually made everything make less sense. But not in a creepily ambiguous way, in a “hold on…what?” way.

Which sucks, because it’s got a look and locations that cry out for something that’s primarily about evil spirits and how the old ways persist even into today, but nah, let’s belabor this whole curse thing for about an hour in case the audience missed that there was a curse. Because there’s totally a curse. Yes, you figured thar out early in the second act, but we’re going to keep telling you anyway. The result feels like something that defies your expectations in all the wrong ways.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon