Nocebo: Worlds Collide

Usually when you think about two worlds overlapping or colliding or coming together in a horror film, it’s our world and the spirit world, or our world and some alien hell dimension, or maybe the present and the past. But every now and then you’ll get one about two different cultures or socioeconomic strata, though those are usually the province of drama, which is what cultured people watch instead of horror. Yes, that is a chip on my shoulder.

And Nocebo (and maybe The Feast, now that I think about it) fits neatly into this last category while still being very much a horror movie. It’s a nuanced, unsettling story about the convergence of two very different worlds, that unfortunately tips its hand a little too early.

Christine is a hard-working, go-getting designer of high-end children’s clothing, and we meet her as she’s trying to get her daughter Roberta off to school,  and negotiating who’ll be picking her up with her husband Felix before heading to a runway show for her newest line. Things are going smoothly, the presentation appears to be impressing all the right people, and then from backstage she gets a phone call relaying some vague, unspecified bad news. Her response is “I can’t process this right now,” and then she appears to hallucinate a sick, mangy dog, encrusted with ticks. Or maybe it isn’t a hallucination, because when we rejoin her and her family some months later, she seems to be very ill. Respiratory problems, fatigue, memory lapses, joint pain. She’s trying to get back up on the horse, shop around a new line, but she’s in rough shape. Whatever happened to her, it’s clearly taking a toll, and then there’s a knock at the door. It’s a petite Filipina woman named Diana. She says that she’s here as Christine’s home health aide.

Christine doesn’t remember hiring a home health aide.

Nevertheless, Christine hand-waves it as problems with her memory, treating it like someone might treat receiving something from Amazon that they’d forgotten they ordered. And that’s the basic backbone of the film - there’s a definite class element here. Felix and Christine and Roberta are a prosperous (and not especially sympathetic) English family with a lovely house and thoroughly first-world lives. Felix is a marketing strategist, Christine designs high-end children’s clothing, and Roberta’s on the abrasive side of precocious. By contrast, Diana is from a very small village in the south end of the Philippines. And as Diana settles into their home, Christine and her family treat Diana with exactly the sort of dismissiveness and condescension that you’d expect from prosperous Westerners. When Diana cooks dinner for them, Felix calls it “surprisingly good.” So yeah, they see Diana as a curiosity and a servant, nothing more. And when Diana offers to help Christine with her ailment, using traditional shamanic healing practices, Christine thinks it an amusing diversion…until it starts to work. Christine starts to feel better and Felix immediately assumes that either Diana is a charlatan taking advantage of them, or that his wife is mentally unstable, or maybe both.

All of this is punctuated with flashbacks to Diana’s life back home, which sets up a nice rhythm of narrative contrasts between the cloudy damp of England, all modern architecture and design, and the humid, make-work housing of the rural Philippines. The modern and the primitive, a contrast that is extended to the differences between Christine’s medicine, bottles and bottles of pills and a CPAP, and Diana’s practices. These are not just people from two different worlds, they’re people who also see the world in two entirely different ways, and the film neatly avoids pigeonholing what Diana is doing as mumbo-jumbo, whatever Felix’s reaction is to the contrary. The same Christine who is initially resistant to Diana’s treatments and who puts her faith in modern medicine also has a pair of “lucky” shoes and a little mantra she recites to bring herself success in pitch meetings, so there’s the suggestion that maybe Christine and her family aren’t super self-aware, but that’s definitely part and parcel of the characterization. Why would they need to be? Everything’s here for them.

That said, it’s not really cartoonish (for the most part). There’s a shifting dynamic between Felix, Christine, Roberta and Diana that adds some nuance to it, and at no point do any of them seem wholly bad or wholly good. Diana is obviously sharper and more perceptive than Christine and Felix give her credit for, Christine’s chronic illness has left her hanging by a thread, Roberta just wants kids at school to stop picking on her, and Felix isn’t so much a villainous caricature as yet another wealthy white man who can’t imagine a world where he isn’t right about everything. All of this works to the film’s benefit.

But none of that would necessarily point to horror. The horror is really more in how the story is told. It's a slightly cold, distant film, with a faint but pervasive strangeness that makes even (or especially) scenes of children walking the runway or dancing for a commercial feel sinister, and mundane moments are punctuated by startling juxtapositions where worlds overlap or one intrudes upon the other, their impact heightened by the underpinning of constant unease. As the film progresses and we start to put together the reason Diana is there and who she is in relation to Christine, it becomes clear that there is going to be some kind of reckoning, and the film’s denouement stitches them together in sacrifice. Unfortunately, I also think attentive viewers will end up seeing the whole thing coming from pretty early on, as the first act calls our attention to some details that point directly at what was probably meant to be a revelation for much later. And then, when we do get the revelation, it’s played with less nuance than the rest of the film, turning one character into something a little more two-dimensional, or at least pandering to a particular stereotype in a way that rings a bit false when the way they’ve been depicted up to that point would have been just as effective and just as condemnatory. Unfortunately, knowing where it’s going robs the film of a lot of the mystery and ambiguity that would have been central to its effectiveness up to the moment all the pieces get put together.  

Which is a shame, because it’s a well-considered, thoughtful film apart from that. In some ways, it’s a movie about what makes us sick, and what can heal us in turn. The term “nocebo” is related to the term “placebo,” but instead of positive effects being attributed to an inert substance, it’s negative effects instead. Whether it’s medicine or poison, it’s not the substance, it’s not the technology, it’s not the ritual, it’s you. It was in you all along.

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