God Told Me To: Deus Ex Machina

A deus ex machina is a plot device in which an improbable or unlikely occurrence resolves a difficult plot point, and is literally translated “god from the machine.” Usually it’s considered a bad thing, a lazy way of resolving a part of a story, the sort of thing that happens when someone writes themselves into a corner. And I’m sympathetic to that - the best stories to me are the ones where you don’t see the resolution coming but in retrospect was in front of you the entire time. You know, the polar opposite of High Tension.

God Told Me To manages to take the idea of the deus ex machina in a couple of different directions. It’s a down-the-rabbit-hole movie that in its increasing weirdness provides an improbable explanation for a series of events. But it also deals with the idea of god in relation to the machine that is the social structure and power dynamics of modern society.

It opens on a bustling day in 1970s New York City. People are going about their business, crowding the sidewalks and hailing cabs and all of the other things a shitload of people in a sprawling city do. And then a shot rings out. Someone falls. And then another shot, and another person hit. And another, and another. People scatter, panicked, and the police are called in. Eventually they locate the sniper, perched on top of a water tower, and Detective Peter Nicholas climbs the water tower against everyone else’s orders to try and reason with the shooter. All Nicholas manages to get out of him is that “God told me to,” before the sniper jumps to his death.

This is tragic, of course, but it’s also the big city. Mentally unstable people lashing out violently aren’t really anything new in that respect. But then Peter is called to the scene of another crime - a series of mass stabbings at a supermarket. And then a police officer opens fire on the crowd at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. And then a man murders his wife and children, sitting placidly waiting for the police to arrive. They all say the same thing…

“God told me to.”

Needless to say, Peter immediately becomes obsessed with figuring out exactly what is happening. One delusional person acting out violently? That’s one thing, but when people from different walks of life all get up one day and start killing on the behest of what appears to be God, that’s something else entirely. And Peter Nicholas is a religious man - a devout Catholic in a place and time where faith doesn’t have the heft that it might once have. For him, this isn’t just about the mystery of what is driving apparently random people to kill, it’s also about the mystery of faith, about God’s will, and what it means when God doesn’t just let good people die, but seems to be taking a more proactive role in the process. Peter is tormented by this, and there are already signs that he’s got some baggage that he needs to work on. He was an orphan, raised in a Catholic boys’ home, and although he is separated from his wife (who is as secular as he is religious) and seeing another woman, he can’t bring himself to divorce her. There’s more guilt and regret between them than enmity, and well…the church frowns on divorce.

And this is the machine - the institutions of power upon which the city is built. New York City in the 1970s is a place beset by multiple ills – the immediate fallout from the social upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s, institutional corruption, a failing infrastructure and a restless population. Cynicism abounds as people mock Peter for his faith, and urban decay and crime both thrive as well. It’s a city in turmoil, and the Catholic church is an extremely powerful part of the city’s power structure, and the realization that maybe people like the archbishop and the mayor and other wealthy citizens know more about this than they’re letting on emerges gradually over the course of the film. For Nicholas it’s a journey toward discovery and understanding, and it’s safe to say he’s not discovering anything good. The rot runs deeper than he could ever know.

It's definitely a film of its time - there are some attitudes that are unfortunate by modern standards, but it holds up surprisingly well in a number of ways. The filmmakers had almost no budget and shot guerilla-style, so the whole thing has a raw immediacy to it. This also means minimal effects work and a reliance on colored lighting and quick cuts to get the point across, but this adds to the feeling of urgency rather than seeming cheap. There are some moments of body horror where the effects they do use are work well, and it all takes the film to some pretty unexpected places.

It’s not often that a low-budget horror film also traffics in big ideas, but this one is a film about an unseen force spurring people to kill while also being about faith in the face of its absence from society as a whole, institutions that serve only themselves (everyone in this film acknowledges the church’s power but very few are believers). It’s simultaneously a fable about the corrupting influence of power, and a down-the-rabbit-hole investigative film and the sort of it-could-be-anybody exercise in paranoia of predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and successors like Fallen. I was pleasantly surprised at how much there was to unpack.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon