Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

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The Ninth Configuration: You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Work Here, But It Helps

One of the most common ways that horror comments on the human condition is by locating real tragedies and concerns in the language and imagery of horror. Literal monsters stand in for metaphorical ones. This is not an especially earth-shattering observation, I know. Mostly I bring it up because every now and then I’ll run into a film that borrows a lot of the language and imagery of horror to tell a story about the human condition. Which sounds like I’m just saying the same thing, but it’s sort of taking the trappings and conventions of horror films, gestures universally associated with horror, and locating something that isn’t horror at all within them. The film Monsters comes to mind, basically the story of two people getting to know each other as they journey across a stretch of Mexico made hazardous by the intrusion of extraterrestrial life. The monsters from outer space are just part of the environment, not at all the point. It’s sort of an eversion of the horror film.

All of that, because I think that best describes The Ninth Configuration. It’s a film with a horror setting, a premise ripe with horror potential, written and directed by the author who brought us The Exorcist, an absolute classic of the genre. But for all of that, it’s less horror and more drama about what it takes to cope with horrors.

It’s another gray, overcast day in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. A guard stands a lonely watch in a poncho, manning a checkpoint at the entrance to a large, foreboding, gothic-looking castle up the road. He admits an official vehicle, and goes back to standing there. The car winds up the road and into the courtyard of the castle, where a number of men run around in a mixture of costumes and pajamas. It’s a lot of hectic activity and one or two officers fruitlessly attempting to contain it. It looks like a madhouse, because…well, it is. One of a series of hidden, secret installations set up by the military to study soldiers who’ve come back from Vietnam suffering psychotic breaks. So far, every therapeutic approach they’ve tried hasn’t really worked, and so the Army has sent one of their top psychiatrists, Col. Hudson Kane, to take over supervising treatment.

Kane has some…unconventional…ideas about treatment.

For most of its running time, this film feels like an example of postwar absurdism in the vein of Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow, operating from the idea that war and the institutions that wage war are themselves absurd, themselves insane, and so are in no position to judge those driven insane by waging war. As a matter of fact, madness seems to be the only sane response. It’s an idea that’s probably at its most mainstream in the television series adapted from the novel and film M.A.S.H., a long-running institution on television from the early 1970s to early 1980s. And the patients here are very much in the antic, borderline-comic vein of that show. Nammack thinks he’s a superhero, Fromme thinks he’s a doctor (and not actually a doctor, as Kane discovers to his dismay), Reno is working on adaptations of Shakespeare performed by dogs, Fairbanks has multiple personalities, Bennish thinks he’s from Venus, and Cutshaw - an astronaut who decompensated as he was preparing to go to the moon - doesn’t seem to be delusional, just very angry and reluctant to be serious about anything or engage anyone honestly. 

They are depicted as clearly delusional and/or unstable. But at the same time, the purportedly sane ones don’t fare much better. Fell, the acting psychiatrist, seems to be treating the whole situation as absurdly as the patients do, though it seems clear in his case that it’s out of a resignation to the insanity of the entire war, and Kane’s intense calm and unflappability, as the film goes on, seems to be hiding even deeper cracks. Perhaps the only thing worse that someone who’s lost it is someone who’s lost it and desperately trying to hide it. And it’s definitely laid out like a horror movie. It’s a gothic-looking castle in the foggy mountains of the Pacific Northwest, housing a bunch of deranged veterans, playing out their delusions to the bemusement of the regular military staff and the weary patience of the doctors. There’s very much this idea that the inmates are running the asylum, and so when Kane proposes to try something different, to indulge them, to let them act out their fantasies without the staff intervening, this is where the film takes a turn, as you’d expect. But it’s not the turn you think. 

There’s an obvious way for this film to go, what it seems like it’s leading up to, and a lot of that is in the horror-movie trappings, the repeated shots of the castle in the nighttime, rain pounding down on gargoyles and hooded statuary, as if a mad scientist is about to create horrid, unnatural life, ironically juxtaposed with jaunty music. Conversations are as often as not conducted in voiceover, accompanied by shots of empty rooms, statues and wall decorations. A picture of Bela Lugosi as Dracula serves as a silent comment on the accommodations, and scenes inside Kane’s office look out on the rest of the castle, the space outside his doorway a hive of chaos. There’s a mixture of sinister and frenetic that seems to promise something bloody and awful, but in the third act there’s a revelation, one that reframes the film as one about whether or not salvation is possible. Honestly, it works. The tensest scene in the whole film is an extended (painful, hard-to-watch) moment outside of the hospital where you’re waiting for violence to break out, at this point it’s almost inevitable, but hoping it won’t, because in some way there are souls in the balance here. Not in any supernatural sense, just in the sense of someone desperately needing to be shown that people can act selflessly and what it’s going to cost to do just that.

The film is quite literally like a long, dark night of the soul, and when the sun finally comes out and the curtain is raised on what we’ve just seen, it feels like something has lifted, like sins have been forgiven, as they have historically been forgiven. It’s comic, it’s tragic, it’s uncomfortable, it’s like very, very few other films I’ve ever seen.

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The Pond: Stagnant

I sort of feel like trailers are a necessary evil for this thing of mine. I like going into films as blind as possible, but if I’m curious about something or am just casting about for more films to consider, trailers (and trailer compilations on YouTube if I’m being totally honest) can give me a quick thumbnail sketch, not just in the trailer itself, but how it’s put together. If the trailer indulges in the stylistic cliches of the moment, the film probably will too. If it doesn’t, if it shows me something promising, then cool. Now I’ve got another movie to check out.

Usually it serves me pretty well, but I gotta say, I feel like I got suckered this time. When you watch the trailer for The Pond, it’s promising - you think it’s gonna be some out-there folk/cosmic horror shit, but no, it’s just a pointlessly cryptic slog that feels like someone watched shows like Katla and Zone Blanche and thought it’d get over on quirk alone. It does not.

That said, it’s got a pretty striking opening shot. It’s an aerial view of a body lying in the middle of a field. The shot is held for a bit, before the body…just gets up and walks away. It’s a little odd, a little sinister. But that doesn’t last long. We cut to a man sitting in a small, modest trailer, typing out things on a laptop. He doesn’t even have a name, he’s credited as “The Professor.” And he’s definitely the stock academic – salt-and-pepper beard, rustic sweater, sleeping with a former student, the whole deal. He’s living on a remote island in a rural part of Eastern Europe, studying…something? It’s never clear, he’s just looking at a bunch of maps of incidence rates of things like death from disease, obesity rates, paths of hurricanes and deaths by accidents, and they’re all connectable by Fibonacci spirals. Then he types out some quasi-profound stuff like “SOCIETY PRODUCES FEAR” and he looks up some stuff about how we can only see a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum…so there could be things out there we cannot see! Spooky! When one shot shows him consulting a website called “The Daily Science,” it is…not reassuring. He was apparently suspended from his position at…a university, I guess?...because he has some weird ideas about impending apocalypse. At least, I think that’s the deal. Nothing is made very clear, which is in and of itself not always a bad thing, but this film has a bad habit of dropping all kinds of stuff into our lap with little to no context or opportunity to figure things out for ourselves. There’s little telling, and no showing. Just a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to add up to something and never really does.

So he’s out here with his former student and his daughter by his late wife, in some kind of academic exile. He’s convinced that there’s something terrible coming and he’s on the verge of grasping it, and so he’s out here in the sticks, in a trailer camp on the edge of a large pond (hence the title, though the importance of the pond is never made clear) in a small community of people whose chief defining characteristic is that they’re all kind of weird. There’s another guy that the professor plays chess with, and they have conversations that I think are supposed to be mysterious and inscrutable but just come off as the musings of a college freshman who just discovered weed, there are two obnoxious little girls who keep pestering the professor to let his daughter play with them, there’s a woodsman with an anger management problem, and a boatman who ferries people across the pond. He doesn’t speak at all, he just sort of sits slumped and unresponsive in the boat with a strange piece of headgear that looks sort of like pillows that you just keep strapped to your head. It’s all reminiscent of that whole strain of television that sort of sprung out of Twin Peaks, the rural community where strange things are happening, except in my experience those shows have actual characters with lives and relationships. Here, less so. It’ s just a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere being gratuitously weird. Every now and then the professor’s daughter will talk about a monster that she sees in her nightmares, and every now and then someone in an effectively creepy mask made out of branches will sort of show up in the background. Nobody really comments on it.

So the narrative falls flat, and so does the execution. This film was written and performed by people for whom English is not a first language, and though I won’t fault anyone for that by itself, I think the decision to have English be the film’s spoken language was a mistake. The dialogue is clumsy and stilted, as are the performances. People don’t say things so much as they recite them, and it’s all slightly off – not the worst translation I’ve ever heard (still looking at you, Seytan), but…just awkward enough to inhabit some kind of linguistic uncanny valley. It's sort of off-putting, and again, this by itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it doesn’t feel intentionally off-putting. Everything is delivered so flatly, with so little emotion that it’s almost parodic, a comedic approximation of Scandinavian art films where people stand stiffly and say things that you get are supposed to be profound but just seem like nonsense. I don’t know that the filmmakers were going for profundity so much as surrealism, but they didn’t hit that either. Mostly it’s just obtuse, and there’s no payoff, no revelation of some kind of purpose behind the strangeness. What horrifying truths I think we’re supposed to glean all show up in the last ten minutes, and because our ability to invest in these characters is minimal, and the stakes never really made apparent, they feel less like horrifying truths and more like “oh, okay.”

And absolutely none of this is helped by the film’s pacing – well, I say “pacing,” but there’s one pace: Slow. Things just sort of happen at the rate of a drip, People say things, they move from one place to another, occasionally something odd or unsettling pops up in the background before moving on to the next thing, without notice or comment. It’s a bad sign that I was only about a third of the way through it before I was moved to check to see how much longer I had. It’s not slow enough to create a feeling or mood, it’s just a metronomic plod with no rising tension, no moments of action, just one thing after another. It’s clumsy, frustratingly slow, and…drab. Gray, overcast, colorless, and that’s a legitimate choice, but when everything else about the film is equally colorless, the overall feeling is…well, again, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it oppressive, it just sort of lands at dull. At 90 minutes, it’s a trudge. Flat people delivering clumsy lines in a gray setting. The number of even slightly unsettling moments can be counted on one hand, and they pass as unremarkably as any other moment in this film.

Slow, strange, cryptic, bleak, all of these are valid choices, I think. But cryptic only works if the audience can, by the time the film is over, make some connections for themselves. There doesn’t have to be one correct interpretation (miss me with all of the videos “explaining” the endings of movies) or anything, just the opportunity to derive some meaning from it. And slow, strange, and bleak only work if they evoke a mood, if they make the audience feel things. Nothing about this film inspires feelings beyond impatience and frustration. The trailer promises something upon which the actual film can’t even begin to deliver.

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Seytan: We Have The Exorcist At Home

The Exorcist is one of the most well-regarded horror films ever made. It’s a classic, surprisingly forward and transgressive for its time. It’s scared the shit out of a lot of people. And like any successful horror film, it’s also spawned sequels, prequels, reboots, re-imaginings, almost all of which pale considerably next to the original. You don’t make something monumental without seeing it crudely duplicated over and over, every successive attempt missing the point more and more.

And I think the peak (or maybe nadir) of this has to be Seytan (Satan), a hilariously shameless Turkish rip-off of The Exorcist, its crudeness startling and comic in equal measure. I cannot call this a good film, but it’s definitely a ride.

It opens on an archeological dig in the Middle East, and a somber, bearded man combing through the unearthed artifacts. He finds a small, sinister-looking idol, stares at it meaningfully for a few minutes, before walking up to a larger idol to compare them. The larger idol, well…it looks like a papier-mâché attempt at Godzilla. This kind of ends up setting the tone for the movie in general.

Meanwhile, back in Turkey, Ayten is a well-to-do woman who lives in a large house with servants and her daughter, Gul. Her husband appears to be very absent, not even bothering to show up for Gul’s upcoming birthday. But Gul seems happy enough, a pretty regular kid who has an imaginary friend to keep her company and  a Ouija board to play with. Ayten’s got her hands a bit full, though – she has to plan Gul’s birthday party, figure out how to get Gul to warm up to her new gentleman friend Ekrem, and deal with that loud rustling and banging coming from the attic at all hours.

It sounds like a bunch of rats up there. 

Okay, so, when I say this is a rip-off of The Exorcist, we are talking damn near shot-for-shot, right down to a musical motif that sounds like Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” to a legally actionable extent. If you aren’t familiar with The Exorcist, just know that there are literally dozens of you out there. It’s basically the ur-demonic possession movie, the one that sets the standard and creates the vocabulary, for better or worse, for all of the ones that come after it. If you are familiar with The Exorcist, this is all going to seem very familiar. It opens in the desert at an archeological dig, moves to the home of a wealthy woman in the city and her daughter’s mysterious illness, the whole deal. Almost all of the beats are the exact same. Some adjustments are made for the replacement of Catholicism with Islam, but it’s all pretty vague on that front, sort of generically religious instead. The priests are replaced with an imam (the bearded man from the opening) and Ekrem’s friend Tugrul, who is an expert on exorcism and demonic possession as a cultural construction of mental illness. Tugrul has all of Father Karras’ guilt, having just put his mother in an insane asylum because he can’t care for her anymore. The crucifix that features in one of the most transgressive scenes in the original has been replaced by what looks like a letter opening with a devil’s head on it, but when I say it’s all the same beats, I mean it – the progression of Gul’s symptoms are the same, she undergoes the same grueling medical treatments, all the supernatural manifestations line up the same way.

But at the same time, it’s approximated so crudely that it comes out the other side as something much more bizarre and unintentionally comic. It's contemporary to the original (circa 1974), and was clearly made on the cheap even for its time, and the version I watched is not at all remastered or cleaned up or restored. It’s grainy, blown-out, there are moments where the quality of stock they’re using changes visibly so a few minutes have this bluish cast out of absolutely nowhere. They aren’t quite Manos: The Hands Of Fate-level production values, but they’re definitely close. This is especially evident in a burnt-in subtitled translation that had to have been done by the first person they could find with any grasp of English, for how inept it is. I’m used to translations missing the mark here and there, but this is egregious to the point that they sort of go on their own journey parallel to the film. They start off reading like they got run through a translation program a few times, and then you start to see editing marks intended to denote misspellings or unclear phrasing, left in the subtitles. But then it gets better, moving onto snarky asides about the dialogue and an honest-to-God parenthetical note to look something up on Google later. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, proofed these before superimposing them over the video file and this has to be the first time I’ve seen subtitles also serve as a Greek chorus on the quality of the movie and appear to turn self-aware. And that’s the unintentionally comic stuff. There’s also an actual punched-in-the-balls gag, complete with pained mugging, just sort of dropped into the middle of a scene. It’s like putting a pratfall, complete with slide whistle, into the middle of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

And yet, as comic as it is, the crudeness also gives it a fever-dream intensity that does serve as an interesting contrast with the original’s slow burn. This is a film that loves a sudden cut and a fast zoom, and quick cuts back and forth between close-ups. It likes to hold shots a little longer than you’d think (which makes Gul’s electroshock therapy especially disquieting, a genuinely unsettling moment in the middle of all the goofiness) and pretty much all of the shots are static. So that simultaneous urgency and stiffness, along with the surreally broken dialogue and low-budget effects best described as “chunky,” gives it a certain nightmarish edge as well.

It has none of the feeling of mounting dread that the original does, and there’s not a single ounce of subtlety or nuance to be found. It’s got pretty much all of the story beats of the original with little to no narrative connective tissue, just scene, cut, scene, cut, scene, cut, scene all the way to the end. But its weird primitive energy makes you feel like you’re not entirely sure what you’re seeing. It’s one of those films that feels like maybe you actually watched it late one night, or half-hallucinated it as you drifted in and out of sleep. Or like the cinematic equivalent of Ghana’s singular movie posters, something that bears some resemblance to the original film, while diverging in ways that careen off into the far reaches of sanity.

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The Strangers: Knock Knock

Having just come off of a month when I made a point of watching nothing but the kind of stuff I usually avoid, I think that for the most part, the take-away is that I avoid those kinds of film for a reason. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t learn anything, but very little changed my mind. It didn’t feel like a bummer or anything, but I came out the other side looking forward to sinking my teeth-eyes into stuff that seemed promising.

And so I decided to start with The Strangers. I know this came out awhile ago, but this isn’t my first shot at it - I’ve started it a couple of times in the past and each time I’ve had to shut it off. Not because it’s bad, but because it creeped me out so much that both times I ended up saying “nope, not today.” I finally made it all the way through, and yep, it’s an absolute masterclass in tension and threat, with an impeccable sense of restraint.

The films opens with a title card and narration explaining that it’s based on true events. Is it? Maybe, maybe not, but if nothing else it reminds me of the opening to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that stark title card and somber voiceover promising something grim. And it definitely starts grim. We get the interior of a house, petals scattered on a bed, more petals scattered around the kind of box that contains an engagement ring, a record running into its end groove on the turntable, over and over. Glass on the floor. A shotgun sitting out, along with an axe. Blood on the wall. This is the aftermath of something terrible, discovered by two young missionaries who end up making a panicky 911 call instead.

The night before, James and Kristen are coming back from a wedding, arriving at the house we’ve just seen. It’s all set up for something romantic, petals everywhere and a bottle of champagne with two glasses out, but as we see them, Kristen has dried tears on her face and James is extremely quiet. There’s an awkwardness between them. Nothing is really said out loud, but it’s easy enough to figure out. James asked her the kind of question that accompanies flowers and champagne, and he didn’t get the answer he was expecting. So here they are, left to make the drive back to a home decorated for a celebration that will never happen. So what we have at this point is essentially a drama about a moment in their relationship that has just turned into something else. Take out the opening title card and scene and this could just as easily be a straightforward drama, and I really like that about it. I like horror movies that are dramas until they aren’t, that are about actual people with feelings and lives. There’s a sad tentativeness to them, a lot of feelings all happening at once. James is calling his best friend to come get him as soon as he sobers up, to ride back with him, to spare Kristen an extremely awkward road trip. He’ll sleep on the couch. Kristen takes a bath and cries. The pain they’re both experiencing is evident.

And then there’s a knock on the door.

What this relationship drama turns into is a siege film, but one that is almost excruciatingly patient. Most siege films are loud, intense, mile-a-minute once they get started, but this film is very minimal and careful in its approach. It’s all about little moments, blink-and-you-miss-it moments, sudden, sharp moments that stab into an uneasy quiet. Really important beats as often as not happen silently in the background, where figures gradually emerge from the shadows, or are suddenly there under a single streetlight, and then gone again. It’s bad when you can see them because you know they’re there, but it’s even worse when you can't see them because you don’t know where they’ve gone and that is worse. The tension is constant, and there’s never really a moment where the masked figures menacing James and Kristen aren’t in control of the situation. It’s very cat-and-mouse, in the classic sense of a cat toying with its prey until it’s exhausted, only then finishing it off.

This sense of restraint carries through to the performances, much to the film’s benefit. Dialogue is sparse and to the point, but you still get a sense of who these people are because the actors do a very good job of playing actual people, complicated and vulnerable. Kristen and James begin the film navigating a lot of different feelings, it’s clear from the performance that Kristen loves him and doesn’t like that she’s hurt him, but isn’t ready for marriage yet. She doesn’t want to leave him but doesn’t know what comes next, either. James is feeling crushed, rejected, humiliated, all of the intended romantic gestures for what was supposed to be a special night surrounding him, shouting out his failure. It makes everything that follows even worse, in the sense that they’re already so devastated, and we’re entering their story on a tragedy. And then when everything pops off, when it becomes about life and death, Kristen responds by focusing on staying alive and James responds by trying to be the big strong protector, trying to be her knight in shining armor. But in doing so, he’s dismissive of Kristen, telling her she couldn’t have seen what she saw. He’s sort of in denial but also hellbent on taking charge, and so maybe we can see why she wasn’t ready to marry him just yet. It’s not really his fault, he’s a pretty traditionally masculine guy who’s just been dealt a serious blow to his self-image and he’s trying to recover, to reassert himself. He isn’t a coward or a bully, but it’s pretty clear pretty quick how inadequate his response is going to be in the current situation. And none of this is spelled out in neon, it’s all little asides and how they carry themselves. We get a sense of who they are as people just by watching them, which is what you want.

The same care that goes into pacing and performance is also evident in the cinematography. It uses a lot of hand-held camerawork, which serves to make everything feels more intimate at the start and then more urgent the further in we get, it’s not found-footage but there’s an immediacy to it as a result. There are also shots that are very still, very specifically composed to draw our attention in a specific direction, to great effect. Most of the film takes place very late at night, so the streets are empty and everything is quiet. Everyone’s asleep, and the house is deep in the country so the nearest neighbor is nowhere close. The isolation is palpable. And the house itself is very much a home, lots of cozy wood paneling and well-worn furniture, a place on the wall where James and his brother’s heights have been recorded over the years. James’ intentions mean there’s a lot of warm light from candles, and because it’s late at night, there are lots of shadows and isolated light sources. The assailants are all wearing white masks, so, like Michael Myers before them, they sort of fade in and out of the shadows, their stark, ghostly faces sometimes just hanging in the darkness.

There’s a refreshing lack of explanation here, a refusal to give us any kind of concrete answers or explanations for what we’ve just witnessed. Even when the assailants finally remove their masks, we never see their faces. There is no grand, elaborate reason for all of this, no monologuing. It just is, and the sun rises and we come back to where we began, knowing everything that happened the night before. It’s simple and horrible and stark and plain. It’s horror, and it’s exactly what I needed after a month of things missing the mark in one way or another.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon