Honeydew: Very Little Meat And A Whole Lot Of Filler

Horror is, in my opinion, a genre that benefits strongly from the short story. It certainly isn’t impossible to do long-form horror well, but the longer the story the bigger the risk that you’re going to overexplain or bog it down. Short stories get in, set up a situation, and then take it to some fucked-up place, getting out while the shock still lingers. And I notice something similar in film - one of the most common weaknesses of horror films that I’ve observed over the many years I’ve been flinging my opinion out into the void is a tendency to drag in the middle or to whiff the ending, and I think that’s in part because sustaining feelings of tension or dread or unease or whatever for that long is tough. And for my part, I haven’t spent nearly as much time watching short films as I could be. I’m going to try and rectify that, though it’s tough since they rarely appear on streaming services.

But Honeydew is a great example of this exact problem. It starts off pretty strong, but then it drags into an absolute crawl at the end. It’s the poster child for full-length horror films that would have been better off as a short.

It opens on still shots of woodlands, a lone barn, sprawling wheat fields, steam rising from the ground. There’s an old woman grinding seed into flour. There’s a loaf of bread in an oven. A young woman eats, and scratchy religious music plays on an old tape recorder. It’s nicely cryptic. Then there is a funeral, a few mourners gathered around a simple wooden cross. It all creates a burgeoning sense of rural unease. A poacher skins an animal, wanders into a nearby barn, and discovers something he shouldn’t have.

And now we’re watching an informational film about sordico, a fungal infestation of wheat. It’s being watched by a botany student named Rylie, She and her boyfriend Sam are driving through the country, headed for some kind of getaway. And as is often the case, they make a wrong turn. And as is often also the case, they lose cell reception and their GPS stops working. So they camp for the night, only to be woken up by someone who says they’re on his land. He gives them directions to get where they’re going and tells them he’ll be back in awhile to make sure they’re gone. So they pack up and head out again and what do you know, they happen across a farmhouse! Do we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next? Is that farmhouse going to hide a terrible secret?

Yes we do, and of course it will.

I know, I sound dismissive, but I think it’s because the opening of the film showed a bit of restraint - it created a sense of unease without spelling everything out in the first ten minutes, using just isolated images juxtaposed against each other. And it’s mostly good about showing instead of telling. Sam and Rylie have a somewhat strained relationship, but it’s communicated through small things. The farmhouse is home to the old woman we saw earlier making flour. And she’s nice enough, but she’s also pretty strange right off the rip. There’s maybe a little too much silence between the things she says, an oddness. There’s her very strange son who communicates only in grunts, and his face is bandaged for some reason. He really enjoys old Popeye cartoons. We know that there’s something not right here (if only because we know we’re watching a horror movie), but exactly how it’s all going to go down isn’t immediately obvious. Should they stay? Of course not. Do they stay? Of course they do. So, dumb protagonist behavior aside, it’s a strong opening.

But after that, it starts to go downhill.  It’s hurt most by an almost complete lack of tension, because it’s only got one pace – slow. Which, at first, is fine. The evocative opening and the unhurried pace initially give the film time to build some atmosphere, but then it never tightens up or takes off. It just keeps going at that same slow, methodical pace, and so even though the setting’s good and the performances are suitably restrained and everything gradually unfolds into something that gets stranger and stranger, it starts to feel lethargic and aimless. It is never a good sign when I doze off in the middle of a film and let me tell you, that is exactly what I did. It feels like someone took a short film and stretched it out to almost two hours without actually adding anything, and pretty much the entire second act feels like the film is waiting around until it hits a certain running time before it moves on to something like a climax. And when it does reach a climax, it…continues to sort of plod along and then the whole thing just sort of stops. There’s no tension, no stakes, just a bunch of things happening with entirely too much time in between each thing, and then the third act explains what’s going on and the film ends.

And it’s too bad, because I think the filmmakers have some chops. The cinematography is suitably moody – rural vistas, dimly lit basements, shabby country squalor – and the soundtrack is mostly spooky minimalism, all thumps and clatters and wordless chanting. The editing is a standout, it’s almost percussive in a way and makes use of split-screen to mostly good effect.  I really think all the best bits could have been compressed into no more than an hour, and probably less and it would have worked a lot better. It would have gotten in, set up a situation, dropped in the protagonists and snapped the trap shut before they had time to realize what was going on. As it is, there good things about it, there are a number of good moments, but overall the whole thing just feels inert.

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Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

Nothing spices up the prospects of a horror movie like the phrase “based on a true story.” Of course, it’s total bullshit as often as not, but it does give the film a frisson of danger, like maybe this isn’t as safe as our usual serial-killer, ghost, or monster movies. And as often as not, what you get is…a fairly pedestrian serial-killer, ghost, or monster movie. What a lot of these films fail to understand is that the reality is so often so much worse than anything a screenwriter or director could come up with. The horrors that are possible in the real world far outstrip our imaginations.

Chernobyl - a five-part miniseries about the titular disaster - is based on a true story, and it’s very faithful to that story. No ghosts, no monsters, no serial killers. And although very few people would call it horror, make no mistake. It is.

It’s early, early in the morning on April 26th, 1982, The night shift at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in Ukraine, has just come on duty, surprised that they’re going to be running a safety test. The test was scheduled for the day shift, but delays pushed it back well into the evening and then into the night. The night shift hasn’t been trained or prepped on the test procedures, and they have maybe ten minutes to figure it out because the supervising engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, is bound and determined to see it completed and shouts down any reservations. So the completely unprepared night crew - including a reactor control engineer who’d been on the job for all of three months - begins reducing the reactor’s power output for the test. And something goes wrong. The reactor power starts plummeting. Steps are taken to raise the power output, and then the power starts spiking, going higher than it was ever meant to. An engineer presses the emergency shutdown button. And then something explodes. And then something else explodes.

The structure that holds Reactor 4 has been replaced by a column of fire.

If you aren’t familiar with what is still one of the worst nuclear accidents in human history, there are any number of accounts that you can read, but what very few of them can do - and what this miniseries does extremely well - is provide a sense of immediacy. This is not a careful, considered retrospective, told from a safe distance. This is a depiction of the disaster as it unfolded, and it is kaleidoscopic in its dread. In some ways, it almost serves as a survey of horror while still being a factual account of something that actually happened. Dramatic license is taken here and there, but every episode finds a new way to horrify us. It begins with the panic and terror that immediately follow the explosions as workers at the plant gradually discover just how absolutely wrong everything has gone and how absolutely fucked they are. The reactor core is completely exposed and burning, spewing instantly lethal amounts of radiation into the air. It is literally the worst-case scenario and it’s happening. Everything has gone wrong, and unless something happens immediately, millions of people will die, and it’s all on the backs of a handful of engineers who, merely by being on-site, have signed their death warrants. As in your typical slasher movie, people split up to look for survivors and some of them never return.

And then there is body horror, as we’re witness to exactly what radiation sickness looks like at the absolutely massive doses these people have taken. It’s never fast, and it’s always agonizing. And the amount of death is staggering, matched only by the death to come if steps aren’t taken to bring a raging nuclear inferno under control. Every bit of dust carried by the breeze carries death. And as the series moves into the remediation following the accident, we see just how many more people are going to sacrifice themselves just to keep it from getting worse. There’s a sick, clammy dread that comes with knowing that everyone we’re watching is doomed. Whether it’s a week, a few months, or a few years, what they do here today is going to kill all of them. With this comes the realization that the Soviet Union was massively underprepared for an event like this. Firefighters rushed into lethal amounts of radiation thinking they were just dousing an electrical fire. Equipment that could measure radiation levels was either broken, locked away where nobody could access it, or just shorting out because its measuring capacity couldn’t go that high. People acting on bad information and passing that bad information up the chain to do further damage. Officials motivated less by saving lives than saving face, blandly insisting that nothing is wrong. It’s like the cliché of disbelieving law enforcement and parents writ large, your anxiety rising as you realize that there’s something really dangerous out there and nobody’s going to take it seriously.

And then as the investigation and resulting trial begin, we are shown exactly how an obsession with preserving the infallibility of the state, shoddy workmanship, dangerously careless engineers, substandard training and an inability to face the reality that the worst has happened lead to catastrophe. It was no one thing that lead to the reactor’s explosion, it was so many little things, one thing on top of another, one mistake on top of another, one bad judgment on top of another, all leading to this. And then when you think your capacity for horror is exhausted, we see how the state deals with those who would see the truth come to light, crushing them into forgotten people, erasing them and leaving them to die by their own hand in disgrace. The destruction, this miniseries says, is total.

It's bleak, it’s harrowing, and it’s superbly made. Performances are top-notch throughout, careful and down to earth, full of small moments and character arcs as people are changed forever by what they’ve seen. The cinematography juxtaposes gray, drab, overcast cityscapes with sun and trees, finding beauty even in destruction as a bright blue light flares into the sky from the wreckage and radioactive particulates float through the air and land gently, like fairy dust. The soundtrack is ominous electronic hums and pulses and clangs derived from the ambience of a neighboring power plant, and the chattering of dosimeters work as well as any sudden shrieking violin would. Each episode tells a contained story featuring a different aspect of the disaster before ending where it began, with the same question - what is the cost of lies? - before concluding with an epilogue that robs you of any of the distance afforded by fiction. These were real people, and this is a real place.

Horror movies are palatable fictions, moments of terror and dread that we experience vicariously knowing that they are fiction. We vent our fears safely through them. What happened at Chernobyl was at least in part due to a culture of palatable fictions, and the resulting horror is undeniable. Easily one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

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Freaks: The Nature Of Monstrosity

Horror films are, largely, about monstrosity. That could be a literal monster, some kind of thing that should not be, but it can also be some aspect of humanity grown warped and wrong. That could be the mind, the body, or character grossly distorted into something that is unsettling precisely because enough humanity remains for us to connect to it. The more we see ourselves in it, the more disturbed we become. Conversely, there are also the stories where the monsters aren’t the monsters, because either they possess human qualities like empathy and nurturing, or because the humans are real horrible fuckers.

And honestly, I’ve gotten to the point where “man is the real monster” movies feel sort of facile to me. Yes, people are capable of terrible things. I don’t know that that by itself, is an especially profound statement, and most films along those lines that I’ve seen handle it with the subtlety of a brick. After seeing Freaks, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the final word on the subject. And that was a film made in 1932.

It opens on a carnival sideshow, with a barker walking a curious crowd through the exhibits, pausing at one who is apparently especially gruesome. It is said that she was at one time a woman of exceptional beauty, now reduced to some kind of travesty upon whom it is difficult to look. We don’t see her, but one patron faints at the sight of her.

This film is the story of how this freak became what she is today.

Jumping back in time, we’re introduced to Hans and Frieda. They are two dwarves in this carnival’s sideshow, and they’re engaged to be married. But Hans has his eye on Cleopatra, an aerialist of typical size. He insists there’s nothing going on, but he’s clearly smitten. He isn’t shy about lavishing her with gifts, and Cleopatra isn’t shy about accepting them. She’s also not shy about accepting the affections of Hercules, the carnival strongman, when Hans isn’t around. They both eye Hans and Frieda’s people, the freaks of the carnival sideshow, with contempt. The fortune Hans is reputed to have, however, that has their attention.

None of this is subtle. This is your basic 1930s morality play, at its heart intended for the edification and moral uplift of the viewer. But that’s not what makes this film noteworthy, nor where its power lies. The sideshow freaks in this film are all people who were working as sideshow freaks when the film was made. These are people with any number of different deformities - microcephaly, congenital missing limbs, conjoined twins, dwarfism, and more - and it lends the movie an unnerving power because these aren’t effects or makeup or costumes. There’s no distance here, that comforting reassurance that it’s just a movie doesn’t quite land the same. Even to modern sensibilities this is still a pretty confrontational film in that regard, and it sets up a conversation about the nature of monstrosity. In this film, the freaks are a family, caring for and protective of each other. They don’t prey on others, and seem to be content with the same things that anyone would be - a roof over their heads, food in their belly, and warm sunshine on their face. The “normal” people aren’t all villainous - Cleopatra and Hercules actively scheme, some others are insensitive jerks, but many of their fellow carnival workers are friendly and as at ease with the freaks as anyone else. People are monsters, monsters are people.

As I said above, there’s not a lot of nuance here - this film has a moral and it’s going to give it to you - but I think what continues to make it so confrontational, so potentially uncomfortable, is that in watching it, we have to deal with our own feelings about what we’re seeing. The putative monsters are ultimately just people with feelings and hopes and insecurities, who differ from us only in terms of their biology. If we’re uncomfortable with them, that’s on us and not them. The antagonists aren’t exaggerated in their own monstrosity, they’re just your garden-variety cruel, insensitive, avaricious criminals who’d think nothing of bumping someone off for a fortune. But in their callousness, we’re moved to sympathize with the freaks. 

And I think that discomfort is why this film not only ended up being a lasting part of the cinematic canon, but also why its development and release were so turbulent. It pretty much got made in spite of the studio funding it, the director sank into reclusion after its release, and while it was being filmed, the cast had to eat separately from the other cast and crew at the studio because so many people couldn’t bear the sight of them. Actors approached about starring in the film refused because they didn’t want to be in the same room as the freaks. It was originally about thirty minutes longer but a lot of footage was lost when it was cut for being “too graphic.” Maybe it was really graphic, maybe it was just the freaks daring to be people, it’s hard to say. Some of the pushback was likely the mores of the time, but I think some of it was because the “monsters” weren’t actually the monsters - they were portrayed as sympathetic and kind, and I suspect that was more than a lot of people could handle. One of the hardest things to face is your own shortcomings; it’s easier to be disgusted by the flaws of another than to admit to your own.

These people lived lives, fell in love, married, had kids, all while being far enough away from what we consider “normal” that their primary means of support was exhibiting themselves to crowds of gawking onlookers. Were they all angels in real life? No, but none of us are. They were human, and in that regard, we’re left wondering exactly what separates us from monsters.

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Lovely, Dark, And Deep: Nature Abhors A Vacuum

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

- Robert Frost

One of the most common taxonomies of narrative conflict divides it into three: Man against man, man against nature, and man against self. And in my experience writing this thing, man against nature definitely earns its keep. The wilderness is scary – beautiful and utterly impassive, indifferent to the fates of the creatures that inhabit it, including humans. The Blair Witch Project knows it, In The Earth knows it, Yellowbrickroad knows it, even lesser films like Gaia and The Ritual know it. The wilderness is full of things that may very well mean you harm, and it’s easy to lose yourself.

Lovely, Dark, And Deep knows it too. It’s an eerie, deliberately (possibly too deliberately) paced story about the burdens we carry and the mysteries of nature.

We’re introduced to a sprawling expanse of forest known simply as “the backcountry,” and the rangers who patrol it from tiny cabins, on their own for months. It’s the start of the day and everyone’s sounding off by radio to indicate that they’re okay. It passes around to Ranger Varney, and we see him outside his cabin, shouldering a pack, closing up the cabin and ignoring his radio. He’s repeatedly asked to sound off, but he goes about his business. The requests turn to pleas, and Varney tapes a piece of paper over the “The Ranger Is In” sign outside the cabin.

It says “I owe this land a body.”

Sometime later, the backcountry rangers are gathering for the start of a new season. Lennon is a ranger new to the detail, someone who’s worked her way up the ladder to this assignment. It’s what she’s always wanted to do, but the other rangers seem awkward around her. She’s prickly and distant, but she knows how she’s seen by the others. There’s a backstory there and rumors get around. It’s a tough gig working in the backcountry - you’re out in the middle of nowhere, reachable only by helicopter, for months in monastic living conditions. A lot of weird shit happens out there, and people go missing all the time, with only a fraction ever found. As it turns out, one of those people was Lennon’s sister Jenny. It was a long time ago, and Lennon has become a ranger specifically to take this assignment, to patrol the woods where her sister vanished, and do her best to pick up a trail that went cold decades ago. She’s a woman on a mission and she’s used to being seen as crazy or obsessed. And maybe she is, given the distance she’s gone to try and solve her sister’s disappearance. But she’s a competent ranger, if not always good at following orders.

What follows is Lennon moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, dealing with another missing hiker case (people go missing in the wilderness, but an unusual number go missing out here), clashing with her superiors and realizing that there’s something else out there. It’s not an especially histrionic film, performances and dialogue are believable and low-key, the somber reserve of people who have a difficult job to do. Everyone seems believable and even Lennon, in her rash decisions and tendency to disobey orders, comes across as someone deeply driven by guilt and grief, possibly to the point of obsession. But no scenery gets chewed, there aren’t really any jump scares. It’s very quiet and meditative with brief but effective moments that communicate the sinister strangeness underneath the beauty. This film lets things happen in the background (which I’ve always found more unnerving than showing something in my face and yelling BOO!), and it has an excellent sense of wrongness without going overboard. It’s not overexplained, and it doesn’t need to be because the visuals do a lot of the work, cryptic but evocative.

That said, I do think that the deliberate pace is, in this case, a bit of a double-edged sword. I like it when a film has the confidence to slow down and build a mood, and the pace and relative quiet communicate what it’d be like to spend months by yourself in the actual middle of nowhere. But the deliberate pace also means that the film drags at points, spinning its wheels a little. More escalation wouldn’t have been out of place, but the overall effect is that of gradually sinking into a dream, where reality, grief, and something outside of our understanding gradually come together and it works pretty well on that front.

The end does let it down a little as well. It builds to a climax, but that climax could have used more tension instead of continuing the very even, gradual pace of the previous acts, and the ultimate reveal is maybe a little on-the-nose and over-exposited. The film is very good about showing instead of telling everywhere else, so I think they could have carried that a little more into the end, but otherwise it carries some of the same narrative and tonal DNA as Absentia and Censor, however different the settings, resulting in a nicely creepy meditation on grief, guilt, and letting go.

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Splinter: Mostly Killer, No Filler

I have a hard time with monster movies, because suspension of disbelief is really important for me to get into a horror film, and believable monsters (like, creature-monsters) are tough to pull off on the sort of budget most horror movies get. Cheap effects look cheap, and the cheaper they look the harder it is to suspend disbelief. There are, of course, exceptions - The Thing still gets to me today even though the effects work is dated, and the mediocre prequel - which used reasonably good digital effects - seems bloodless by comparison.

Splinter, then, is very much an exception to the rule. It’s not especially rich thematically, but it IS a crisp, tense siege film with some really smart effects work.

We begin in the expanse of Texas, all scrubland, oil wells and long lonely roads. A gas station attendant tries to stave off the boredom by investigating some noises he hears behind the building. What he finds appears to be a dead dog covered in some kind of spiny growth.

Elsewhere, we get introduced to two couples. Seth, a biology grad student, and his girlfriend Polly are planning to do some camping as a romantic getaway. Except Seth is absolutely the stereotypical brainiac and manages to bungle setting up the tent badly enough that it becomes unusable. There’s some bickering before they agree to get back on the road and find a place to sleep for the night. Dennis and Lacey are on the run from…something, it’s not clear, though it’s probably the cops. Lacey doesn’t look too good. She’s fidgety and strung-out. They’re trying to get to Mexico, but their car (well, the car they’re driving) breaks down and Lacey starts to panic. And along come Seth and Polly. One hitchhiking ruse and armed takeover of the car later, Dennis and Lacey and Seth and Polly are Mexico-bound. Lacey’s mad that Seth isn’t the kind of doctor that can write prescriptions, and Seth and Polly are mad that they’ve been hijacked by armed fugitives.

I don’t know what makes characters in horror movies so prone to hitting animals in the middle of the road, but that’s sure enough what happens and when Dennis gets out to inspect the damage, he notices that the roadkill has some weird spiny growth coming out of it. The car’s undamaged, but they need to gas up, so they stop at the next gas station they find. Oddly, it seems unattended.

And then they find the attendant. Well, what’s left of him, covered in that same spiny growth.

And, as it turns out, there’s something outside as well. So our four protagonists end up barricading themselves in the gas station, while god-knows-what roams around outside, It’s a fairly straightforward setup - there’s the tension of the threat outside, and the tension between the four characters. They can’t leave the gas station, they can’t call for help because Dennis doesn’t want the cops involved, and they can’t stay there forever. So, like any good siege movie, the prime mover here is the need to escape without getting killed. It’s a pretty lean film  - the performances are economic, with each character largely defined by a single characteristic. Seth is nerdy and ineffectual (until the third act), Polly is feisty, Dennis is a criminal, and Lacey is dopesick. That’s sort of it. The dialogue is fine, nothing too caricatured, but none of it is especially nuanced either.

But it doesn’t really pull you out of it either, because the filmmakers handle the classic problem of the monster movie well. Monster movies are tough because you have to show the monster eventually, and when you do, it’s going to be pretty difficult to make it plausible unless you’ve got the best effects houses in the business on the job, and they’re generally not doing horror films. So it’s a balancing act – show it enough to make it a threat, but not so much that the seams show. On that front, this film works admirably, with a mix of makeup, practical effects, sound design, quick cuts, blurry close-ups and tight shots working to both create a plausible, unsettling monster and keep the pace quick and sharp. It’s aware of the limitations but also not especially constrained by them, and the actor(s) playing the monster move with a twitching, jerking physicality that really captures a feeling of a host hijacked by an organism. And just as the makeup alone isn’t doing all the work, to make the creature convincing, the camera tells the story as least as much as the performances and script do. There are a lot of tight and close shots, creating a sense of confinement inside the gas station, and the filmmakers know when to linger on a shot and when to cut away quickly. It’s a very bloody film - splashes and streaks and pools of the stuff - but not an especially gory one. The worst violence happens offscreen and reactions tell us what we need to know. There is the gas station, lit by cold, sickly fluorescents and outside, nothing but yawning dark. To its further credit, it makes very little attempt to explain the threat - there’s a nod to some kind of petrochemical research shenanigans, but just a nod. It’s less important to know how it got here than it is to deal with it being here, and I appreciate that.

There are some pacing issues - it doesn’t waste time (it’s not even an hour and a half long), but even so, the first act feels a little slack compared to the third, when everything comes to a head. It feels like once the four protagonists are brought together, there’s too much time spent on them in the car. That could work, if we were being lead to think this was a hostage film and have the horror elements sprung on us in the second act. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go, but we know right off the bat that there’s a monster out there, so when the other shoe drops in the second act, it feels a little like a foregone conclusion. But it’s a pretty minor quibble.

On balance, this is a really good example of a low-budget horror film that not only doesn’t overstep its limits, but actually makes sort of a strength out of them. It uses its single location well, it’s lean and efficient and has some interesting turns, and the threat never feels implausible or silly. It’s a little slight, but I would really like to see what the filmmakers could so with a richer, more expansive story, because this film convinces me they’ve got the chops for it.

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Underwater: As Above, So Below

Two of the most forbidding environments you can make movies about are deep space and the depths of the ocean. They have a few things in common - they’re both dark, they’re both cold, and they’re both extremely hostile to human life. We know for a fact there’s life in the deep ocean (and boy is some of it fucking weird-looking), and life in deep space is a source of constant speculation, explored in films both horror and not. But I don’t think it’s any accident that H.P. Lovecraft drew most of his inspiration for his best known work from both outer space and the deep sea. Places we were not meant to go, containing things we were never meant to meet.

One of the best films about the terrors of space has to be Alien, and I have to say, watching Underwater - a film about the terrors of the deepest ocean - I couldn’t help but be reminded of that film. Which isn’t to say it’s plagiarism, it really isn’t. but it has enough similarities that it’s difficult for it to escape Alien’s shadow. It never quite rises to greatness, but it’s helped along by generally strong performances and direction that doesn’t make any real missteps.

The opening credits set the scene in compact, efficient fashion, using a mix of time-honored news article headlines, architectural specifications, and topographical maps. A mining company has managed to plant a drill at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which plunges over 36,000 feet down from the sea floor at its deepest points. Pitch-black, crushing levels of pressure. The drill is down there, as well as Kepler Base, a facility of 316 crew whose job it is to control and maintain the drill. The opening credits also tell us that the project has been dogged by controversy - accidents and “mysterious sightings.” But accidents happen, and arguably anything at that depth is going to be mysterious.

Cut to the interior of the base. Long, utilitarian hallways, fluorescent lights, work suits hung up on hooks. Night-shift mechanic Norah Price is brushing her teeth when there’s a rumble. Could be nothing, but then again, that far down with only the base’s structure between you and a nasty death by either drowning or implosion, you want to pay attention. It happens again. It feels like an earthquake.

And then it happens again, and Kepler Base begins to come apart at the seams.

From here on out, there’s just one objective - escape to the surface. Along the way, Norah encounters other survivors - including Lucien, the base’s captain - and not a lot of hope. About 70% of the base is compromised, and most of their escape vehicles are either nonfunctional or inaccessible. Lucien proposes that they suit up and walk across the ocean floor to the drill itself, using pipelines as guides, and using the equipment there to head for the surface. Are the suits rated for exposure to those depths for that long? Nope. Will breathable air supplies be an issue? Yep. Do they even know what the hell is going on out there that caused the base to collapse? Nope. Is this their only option apart from dying a horrible death from drowning, oxygen deprivation, or being crushed to death? Yep. Everything and everywhere is blocked by collapsed structure, water’s pouring in, and, well…they don’t appear to be alone in the base.

One of the biggest strengths to this film is that it’s very well paced. It hits the ground running and doesn’t really stop. With maybe one or two exceptions, this is a film about constant forward momentum, and the urgency works very much in its favor. In that sense (among others), it’s less like Alien than it is something like The Descent - a group of people faced with an increasingly hostile environment and only one way out. Alien was a slow burn, and this is about as far from a slow burn as you can get. The first half of the film or so is effectively a disaster movie, one that maintains the tension without sacrificing much in the way of believability or giving into histrionics. These are people who make their livelihood in a base hundreds and hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, and they’re generally competent and good at keeping their heads straight. In an environment like that, panic could easily be fatal, and it’s kind of a breath of fresh air to have protagonists who generally know their shit. This sense of actual people in an actually difficult situation, responding like people actually would is helped quite a bit by a strong cast who manage to infuse their characters with definable personality under conditions that don’t really lend themselves to character studies. There is the one obligatory wisecracker who manages to keep the quips coming no matter how dire their situation and okay, that one felt a little contrived, but he wasn’t actively grating. Interactions aren’t the tetchy naturalism of Alien - these are people who generally support and trust each other and are able to keep their eye on the ball. The setting does stumble a tiny bit (why on earth would emergency airlock releases use a swipe card and touchscreen keyboard?) but not enough to really distract, especially since it’s also when the film’s at its most relentless.

So we begin with a tight, focused disaster story that shifts focus in the second half to something potentially more sinister, and what’s frustrating is that I think it’s here…right at the moment when it has a chance to become something bigger and stranger…this is the moment when it suffers most from its inability to rise above its inspirations. It’s not bad by any means, just…workmanlike. The effects are solid, but not especially striking. The action doesn’t really slow down, but it sort of needs to, a little, so the implications of what we’re seeing can sink in. It’s not bad, and it doesn’t feel calculated, but it also doesn’t really do anything that I haven’t seen before. Barring the quality of the effects work and the performances, it kind of turns into any number of other Alien-but-underwater creature features you might see pop up on TV on any given Saturday afternoon. It hits all its marks, but doesn’t really do anything different or interesting with them.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There are some blink-and-you-miss-it allusions late in the film to something bigger and darker and the ending nicely inverts some things, but the sort of constraints that give the first half of the film so much urgency really limit what can happen in the second half, and when it really needs to open up and get weird, it rushes past that to head for the ending. It sounds like I’m damning this film with faint praise, and maybe I am, but that’s the frustrating thing - it’s not a bad film, really, but it’s most easily compared to a great one, and the contrast, along with an inability to commit to some ideas that would really set it apart, does it no favors.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Gwledd: Conspicuous Consumption

There’s something about the wilderness - there’s an uneasiness to our relationship with it, a wariness. Even people who love the wilderness acknowledge that it is not safe. Like our wariness of the dark, I think it goes back to our earliest days as a species, when things lying in wait in the dark, or the forest, or the long grass, or the lake, could leap out and end us. And just like we light fires against the dark, we build walls to keep the wilderness out. Modernity is not just about ease and comfort, but also about protection. A reassurance that yes, we have tamed the wilderness, and it can no longer hurt us.

Of course, this is a foolish idea, and Gwledd (The Feast) is a sharply and skillfully told story about how we presume mastery over the wilderness at our peril.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is a diesel-powered drill boring into the earth, like something you might use to explore for oil or take core samples. Its operator lurches away from the drill, staggers across the green, green fields, and collapses insensate, blood leaking from under his ear protection.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is also a house, and the entire story takes place here and in the surrounding woods. Inside, a family is getting ready to host guests for dinner. There’s Glenda - a farm girl who married up, upon whose family property the house is built. There is Gwyn, a successful politician and Glenda’s husband, and their two sons, Guto and Gweirydd, both of whom seem profoundly out of place, city boys plucked from their flats and set down in the middle of rolling hills and tall trees. Glenda is nervous - she doesn’t host often and she’s eager to make a good impression. She’s arranged for Lynwen, a young woman who works at the nearby village pub, to come out and assist with food preparation, service and cleanup. But Lynwen wasn’t able to make it, and recommended Cadi, who also works at the pub, in her place. Cadi turns up, oddly quiet, at the gate to their property. No car, no bus, no bicycle. One minute she isn’t there, and the next she is.

As if she appeared from thin air.

So you’ve got an obviously wealthy family with a nice, aggressively modern home out in the middle of the country, and the entire story takes place over the course of a single day. The film begins by sketching in the family, who they are and who they are to each other. There’s an ambivalence to Glenda - she seems proud that she’s erased almost all signs of her rustic upbringing by tearing down the old family home, but made a point of saving old quilts and blankets and one of her mother’s old dresses. The abstract painting in the dining room is a rendition of the property and its boundaries. She has left home, and she has never left home. Gwyn is a gruff, emotionally distant man’s man who likes to sit out in the woods, sip whiskey and shoot rabbits that he then leaves Glenda, the former farm girl, to skin. Guto is a troubled bad boy, floppy hair, electric guitar and neck tattoo, who liked living in London, with its parties and easy access to heroin. Gweirydd, has temporarily dropped out of medical school to train for a triathlon, and right off the bat there’s something dissolute and unwholesome about him.

They could have been a poor little rich family caricature, but they aren’t entirely. There’s a restraint to their depiction that keeps things from getting too histrionic (until it’s right for them to do so). You do get the expected beats for this sort of story, but they aren’t the sum total of these people. Glenda fusses and orders Cadi about, but isn’t above helping to make the food, even joining in with Cadi when she starts singing an old familiar song. Gwyn is very much the potentially corrupt politician, but doesn’t seem especially unlikable or abusive and seems to genuinely see his office as a privilege. He has appetites, yes, but they’re human-scale. Guto and Gweirydd are the resentful children you expect, but they aren’t raging assholes and they have their reasons. Guto is irresponsible and directionless, but he’s sensitive and passionate. Gweirydd  does seems like the kind of rich dilettante who decides he’s going to take a break from med school to be an athlete, but like Guto, he seems wounded by his father’s disapproval and emotional distance. The cliches are there, but everyone seems actual like people underneath those cliches. And Cadi floats through all of this, almost entirely silent.

And in that sense, Cadi sets the tone for the film. It’s not especially dialogue-heavy (several minutes elapse before anyone speaks at all), nor does it have music outside of a few diegetic pieces. It tells its story through silence and its sharp interruption. The film is punctuated across its running time by title cards that move from innocuous (“I want to make a good impression”) to disquieting (“She mustn’t be awakened”) and by scenes and segments that play out quietly until something ends the quiet – a scream, a gunshot, a piercing sound, a shocking act, cutting to the next scene and its relative quiet abruptly, so we don’t have time to fully process what’s just happened. It could threaten to become cliched or repetitive, but it doesn’t. It adds to a feeling of inevitability, like a steady march. 

And it's chilly and austere, all overcast countryside and a home that’s made out of sharp angles, glass, bleached wood and brick with more than a hint of the mid-century modern about it. Shots are artfully composed, themselves all lines and angles and figures placed in relation to the house, or each other, differences in focus and glass between them,  with good use of slow fades and superimposition. It’s a slow burn, but one that lets you know, however subtly, or not that something is wrong right off the bat, and it’s content to build the unease and the surrounding story in the background, through asides and details dropped in gradually. The first two acts are table-setting (in some cases literally) but there’s a constant drip of unease. You know immediately something bad is going to happen, even if the shape of it isn’t immediately apparent. Some things that start little and start early become big and bad by the end, some things are revealed late to good effect, some things you may be able to see coming from early on, but not in a way that gives it all away. This film is exceptionally good at giving you bits of information gradually and allowing you to make the connections yourself.

And when it all comes to a head halfway through the third act, it does so in blood and flame and screams. There’s one bit of what I thought was unnecessary flashback and there’s some brief montage at the end that felt unnecessary and sort of tacked-on, but these are minor quibbles. It’s another excellent addition to the fine British tradition of films about the pagan power of nature and the awful cost of disregarding it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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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.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Bite: Sometimes You CAN Trust Your First Impression

This month, I’m marking spooky season by watching the kinds of films that I normally avoid. First it was a film directed by James Wan, then a slasher film, and now today I’m looking at the kind of movies that I start to watch and then shut off about 10 or 15 minutes in, switching to something else instead. This isn’t a huge category, but it’s definitely happened more than once. And it’s not because the film’s too upsetting or disturbing or gross or whatever, usually it’s because the acting is immediately so bad that I can’t imagine sitting through an hour and a half of it. I try to be open-minded, but there are days when my patience for bullshit wears thin.

And this is exactly where Bite fits in. I was able to get through about 15 minutes of it before I tapped out the first time I watched it, but it’s always nagged at me, like maybe I didn’t give it a chance. So I took another shot at it and was ultimately rewarded with…well, a case of squandered potential.

We start with what looks like home-recorded video footage of Casey and her friends Jill and Kirsten in Costa Rica for Casey’s bachelorette weekend. She’s engaged to Jared, who – Jill and Kirsten keep reminding us – is a catch. He is both attractive and successful. But Casey’s getting cold feet. She’s afraid that she and Jared aren’t on the same page about some important stuff, she doesn’t have the greatest relationship with her mother-in-law, plus all the uncertainty attendant to such a big life change. So there are these moments of doubt and reluctance interleaved between all the sun and sand and drinking. There’s a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking, culminating in Casey vanishing with a very friendly guy they just met for awhile.

Cue the next day and the hangovers, and the regret, and the guilt, and the decision to try and wash it all off by visiting this super-secret lagoon where the water’s so clear “it’s like you’re standing in the sky.” After a long, long walk down the beach and into the jungle, they come to a small body of water (not as clear as advertised) in a secluded cove. Jill and Casey take a dip, and at some point Casey gets bitten by something under the water. Nobody thinks anything of it.

And nobody really thinks anything of the clutches of small, translucent eggs coating the rocks around the water.

So, if it’s not obvious from the title, this is a film about how a bite from a mysterious insect goes horribly wrong and has all kinds of gross, gooey consequences for Casey. As such, it can basically be divided into two halves. The first half focuses on Casey’s anxiety about her upcoming marriage, and as it turns out, there’s a lot to be anxious about. Her future mother-in-law is bitter and puritanical, and doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her precious baby boy. It also doesn’t help that she’s Casey’s landlord and lives in the building. Jared, the precious baby in question, is an absolute mama’s boy who won’t stand up to his mother at all and is more than happy to abstain from sex with Casey until marriage because that’s how mother wants it. The whole reason Jared knows Casey is because they live in the same building, and they live in the same building because that’s how mother wants it. It’s like that. Casey doesn’t want children and Jared really, really does, and they haven't discussed this yet. That is not a small thing at all. That is a page on which you both must be. So there’s all the tension around those things and her guilt at whatever indiscretion happened in Costa Rica, and the wedding is right around the corner and Casey’s been so paralyzed by all this hassle and uncertainty that a lot of planning isn’t locked in yet. And now this weird bug bite she got is turning into a really nasty blistered rash.

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of character study, but it doesn’t really work in that regard. That’s because the dialogue and performances are all stilted and two-dimensional. Everyone has a single defining personality trait and that’s it, and nobody in real life actually talks like the people do in this film. This is what got me to shut it off the first time. There’s only so much freshman creative writing workshop attempts at dialogue you can take before you’re done. And on top of that, most of those single defining personality traits suck. Casey is somewhat sympathetic if only because what’s about to happen to her is wildly out of proportion to her shortcomings, Kirsten seems basically decent, and there’s a kindly neighbor who shows up exactly twice to inquire after her health but everyone else beyond that is terrible. Her future mother-in-law/landlord is gratuitously awful, Jared isn’t paying attention to her or her needs at all (unless there’s something in it for him), and as it turns out, Jill is the stock scheming, manipulative backstabber. That’s sort of it. So the character study doesn’t work because there’s no depth or nuance and the sort of things you should be exploring in a character study go unexplored. Everyone’s basically a cardboard cutout.

That pivots into the second half, where things start to really get gross. And, to its modest credit, I do think that the imagery that comes with insect-related body horror is uniquely disquieting. It’s a very alien angle on life, one that brings with it ideas of infestation and radical transformation. So I think there was a real missed opportunity here to connect Casey’s fears of pregnancy to the specific nature of the body horror involved. Clutches of eggs, queens, drones, hives, cocoons…they could have really dug into some of those ideas and used them to explore the idea that becoming a mother strips you of your identity and even humanity outside of that role. Casey’s on the verge of major life changes and is understandably anxious about them, and she’s trying to hide her regrets and shame and uncertainty from everyone. It could have been really cool if the filmmakers had embodied those feelings as the bizarre metamorphosis she’s undergoing, Casey desperately trying to pretend that everything’s fine while her body is turning into something she doesn’t understand.

They could have done that, but they sure as shit didn’t. Instead we get some sub-Cronenberg’s The Fly antics where one by one, people wander into Casey’s increasingly filthy (and convincingly stomach-churning) apartment and encounter Casey as she descends…well, it’s not really into anything expressly insectile, mostly she just gets really grody-looking. Then they’re dispatched in a variety of gruesome ways that don’t obey any internal logic. Casey’s transformation really just translated into her being able to do whatever the scene requires, whether it makes sense or not. So the second half of the film is mostly just people walking into a meat grinder made up of gooey practical effects, and then the whole thing just sort of ends with a “the end…OR IS IT?” sting (or bite, as the case may be). It doesn’t really escalate so much as it plods inevitably forward, and I’m assuming the filmmakers thought the gore and gross special effects would carry the whole thing, and they really don’t.

A couple of other films came to mind while I was watching this. The director previously made a film called The Drownsman, which I wrote about a long time ago. And that film was an oddity in that it damn near passed the Bechdel test while at the same time showcasing some truly appalling relationships between women who are supposed to be friends. It was, if anything, even more ridiculous than this film. The other, recommended to me by the streaming service after I finished this, was Contracted. I’ve written about Contracted too, and for its shortcomings (any film that has sexual assault as a central plot point is walking through a minefield in my opinion), it did a lot of what this film does and could have done, but better. Like this film, the acting and dialogue in Contracted was stilted and cartoony, but somehow there it was so off-kilter it almost became an aesthetic. And it was a film about a young woman let down by all of the people who were supposed to support her, people who are uniformly selfish and awful, and because of something terrible she goes through a radical physical transformation that almost serves as a metaphor for her experience. It’s not a perfect film at all, but it points to how you can make a movie like this and end up with something worth thinking about beyond “wow…that’s a lot of slime.” Sometimes it’s worth looking past an initially disappointing first impression, but…this is not one of those times.

IMDB entry
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Knock At The Cabin: Apocalypses Great And Small

I get really nervous when horror that I like in other media gets slated for development as a film or series. If it goes right, it adds more really good horror to horror film. But if it goes wrong…it’s like someone playing your favorite song and missing all the notes, or deciding that what it really needs is kazoo and fart noises. You know what it could be, so when it falls short, it’s more disappointing than usual.

So when I found out that the book The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay was getting made into a film, I was happy about it. It packs a wallop, is at moments pretty cinematic even as a book, and avoids a lot of the obvious choices in favor of a relentless ambiguity that leaves you on the hook to the very end and past it. And then I found out it was being directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 

Now, I try to avoid talking too much about the specific directors or actors or writers involved in a film because I want to keep my focus on the finished product, and I think horror fandom focuses way too much on personalities. But Shyamalan’s track record has some pretty wide swings - you’ve got really solid efforts like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but then you’ve got films like The Lady In The Water and The Happening, films that generally appear on those “how did this ever get made?” lists. Like, not just less good or mediocre, but actually inviting scorn and derision. When his films are good they’re very good (I really like The Village, do not @ me or X me or whatever it is now), but…I had to wonder which M. Night Shyamalan would be showing up for this.

Well, Knock At The Cabin (who the fuck thought this title was a good idea?) ends up being sort of a mixed bag, but I suspect the low points have little to do with the director. It’s skillfully made, but it’s brought down by some disappointing choices that feel like things studio executives would demand. 

Wen, who appears to be eight or nine years old, is vacationing at a lakeside cabin with her fathers Eric and Andrew. She’s catching grasshoppers, naming them, and noting their characteristics in a book like a budding scientist. Eric and Andrew are on the back deck, enjoying the view and some wine and snacks. It’s lovely and idyllic. The idyll does not, however, last long. Wen looks up, and there’s a man walking toward her. He’s very big, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt, like the Hulk became a Mormon missionary. He tries to strike up a conversation with Wen, but Wen doesn’t talk to strangers. The very large man says she’s right not to talk to strangers, so he introduces himself. His name is Leonard. Leonard asks about her grasshoppers, helps her catch some.

And up the road come three more people, dressed similarly, with long, sharp, homemade implements. You see, Leonard and his acquaintances Redmond, Adriane, and Sabrina, have a very important job to do, and they’re going to need Wen, Andrew, and Eric’s help.

They’re going to prevent the end of the world.

What follows isn’t really the siege film you might think it’s going to be. Sure, you have the trapped family and what appear to be four fanatics obsessed with the idea of sacrifice, but the bulk of the film is really more about the seven of them than anything else. If it’s a siege film, it’s a siege film in which for most (not all) of it, conversation replaces violence. Leonard and the other three are there to convince Eric, Andrew, and Wen that they need to help them, and they come across less like bloodthirsty zealots and more like four frightened people delivering some very bad news on a tight deadline. What they’re asking is unspeakable, but they seem aware that it’s unspeakable and are almost apologetic but no less urgent for all of that. It’s an interesting tack to take. Needless to say, neither Eric nor Andrew are on board, but they’re two very different people- Eric a quiet, reflective man of religious faith, and Andrew a tough, unbelieving pragmatist. But they aren’t cartoons in the slightest. What’s happening at the cabin is punctuated by flashbacks that sketch out their lives together, from early on in their relationship to adopting Wen. These are two men who love each other and who have been shaped differently by the forces with which they have to contend for that mere fact. Cold, silent visits with family. Polite lies to satisfy authority. Bottles across the back of their heads. Adversity has shaped them differently, and so they respond to this adversity differently as well.

Just in terms of execution, this film is put together extremely well. Shyamalan, for whatever you might think of the stories he tells in his films, has a lot of experience directing, and it shows. The dialogue is a little dialogue-y but not so much as to be distracting, and the performances are consistently strong. They manage the difficult feat of making the antagonists much more sympathetic than a lesser film would have them as being, and everyone comes across as a distinct, believable person with their own feelings and doubts and fears and flaws, and it’s in how they talk, how they carry themselves, the looks on their faces. Cinematically, I can best describe this film as very self-assured. Cinematography and lighting do a lot to keep what is effectively a single location from feeling static and adding tension, and frequent use of close-ups keeps the focus on the people, locating the tension in the turmoil that everyone is experiencing. Shot composition does its fair share to communicate relationships, the editing and (mostly) pacing are crisp, and the whole thing rides on a score of minor-key swells that communicates danger and unease without being shrill. 

From a technical standpoint, it is a very well-made film. And in terms of faithfulness to the source text (which isn’t always my biggest priority, I know what works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen), it’s very good for the first two acts. Like I said at the start, I feel like the book was already pretty cinematic, and apart from the opening scene, which I felt was shorter and more perfunctory than the book, losing a lot of the mounting dread in the process, it captures how I imagined it while reading pretty well. But the third act is, well, mostly a problem, diverging from the original at the expense of what made the source text so good to begin with.

This story, in either case, centers around sacrifice and apocalyptic endings. And in the source text, there’s a very personal apocalypse - a profound loss, and whether or not there’s an actual global apocalypse is left more uncertain. The film shifts the first in service of an obvious, definite answer to the second, and I think the film suffers as a result. The source text doesn’t give us any easy answers, so when the film does, it feels smaller somehow. And it really goes to town in the last act mopping up and eliminating any trace of the ambiguity that was so central to the original story. Not only was it not a cut-and-dried good-versus-evil story, but it was also a story that hinged very much on the tug of war between belief and doubt. And by the end of this film, there isn’t a trace of doubt left, not even about the smallest things, giving us something much safer, more sanitized, in exactly the kind of film that shouldn't feel safe and sanitized. The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off.

This was not indie horror. This was big-studio horror, with a big-name director and at least one name that would bring in box office. I can only imagine that somewhere, some studio suit with a deficiency of spine passed down a note saying that those things had to change because nobody ever went broke assuming audiences were dumb and thin-skinned and couldn’t handle ambiguity or seriously heavy feelings. It’s something that feels unique to the U.S., this idea of horror as being limited to safe thrill rides instead of confrontational art, and no, I’m not angry, just disappointed. No, wait, I am angry.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

She Will: Ashes

It’s got to be one of the most tired cliches in writing about scary movies - using the word “visceral” as a sort of double entendre, referring both to the way a film can grip you on a level other than the intellectual and how lots of horror films are really gory. Get it? Get it? Because there are guts! Annoys the hell out of me. But, that said, I think there’s something to the idea that a film should be visceral, or that at least in horror a visceral element is important. Appreciation is good, but being moved? That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for the films I watch to make me feel things, if not especially comfortable or reassuring things.

And that is, I think, my only real problem with She Will. It’s a gorgeously shot and constructed story of righteous vengeance and reclamation that ends up being, in the final analysis, a little too cerebral.

The film opens with a long shot of what resolves into a view of a lake, a forest, a horizon. Gradually it becomes evident that we’re seeing it inverted, the lake is the sky and the forest the ambiguous dividing line, an abstraction like a warped Rothko painting. There’s a woman on a train watching the lakeside view blur by, and her reverie is interrupted by intrusive flashes of some kind of medical procedure - operating room lights, hovering masked figures, a scalpel slicing into flesh, juxtaposed with the application of lipstick. Red against skin, and a voice-over talks about the importance of masks, wearing masks as a form of self-preservation.

The voice belongs to Veronica Ghent, a retired actress who has just had a double mastectomy and is now traveling to a remote retreat in Scotland to rest and recuperate far from anyone’s prying eyes. She’s accompanied by Desi, her nurse, but doesn’t seem especially happy about it. She doesn’t like being told when to take her pills. She doesn’t like much of anything, it seems. You get the sense that her life has been difficult. She’s imperious, cutting, someone with decades of practice at keeping others at arm’s length. Her current state of vulnerability is deeply unpleasant to her and she doesn’t want anyone’s help or attention. She refers to herself as a “forgotten movie star,” gulps Tramadol and stays as far from the spotlight as possible. She has nightmares, wakes up gasping.

It's a difficult time for her - along with the major surgery, it’s all over the news that the director responsible for her first major role in a universally acclaimed film is about to receive a knighthood. She has memories of that time as intrusive as the surgery. She remembers her younger self, bruised and battered. She was “special” to him. She was 13 years old. And now he’s being celebrated while she’s tried to make herself as invisible as possible, described in the media as “retired” and “controversial.” You know, sort of like how actresses who complain about sexual harassment are labeled “difficult.”

And so she arrives at this resort in rural Scotland, only to discover that it won’t be a solitary retreat after all - those are booked later in the year, right now they’re just booking group retreats, and Veronica recoils with the idea of spending her recuperation among other people, and you sort of don’t blame her - the people at this retreat are largely buffoons, sneering and pretentious, entitled. She wants to leave, but a rainstorm has washed out all the roads and nobody can get a signal on their cell phones. So they’ll have to make the best of it. Veronica and Desi are given a cabin far away from everyone else, and it’s maybe a little more rustic than she’d like, but it keeps her distant. It’s right on the edge of the forest, and this part of Scotland is known for its restorative properties.

You see, so many women were burned here as witches that their ashes have changed the composition of the soil. And Veronica finds herself sleepwalking out into the forest. Clinging to the earth.

The shape of this film becomes apparent pretty quickly. This is a place where women have been subject to men’s whims for a very long time, and so Veronica’s loss and grief and long-festering trauma, the blithe indifference of the other guests, they’re just one more in a long history of similar stories, of a land that has in its bones the oppression of women, the subjugation of women to the needs of men. It’s just under the surface in more ways than one - the women who are guests at the resort are clueless at best and smugly complacent at worst, not wanting to see the boat rocked because then they’ll lose what meager scraps of privilege they’ve been afforded. But the women who work there have a sort of weary awareness about them - they’ve seen a lot, and not just the difficulties of riding herd on city folk out in the countryside. Veronica being here in this place awakens something in her, or maybe something here begins to speak through her, use her as a conduit or vessel. Centuries of women needing to be heard. Needing justice.

One of this film’s biggest strengths - and it’s a big one - is the coherence of its vision. It’s absolutely beautifully shot, full of exteriors where the sky looms, low and pregnant with rain, and the grass and mud so tactile as to be almost sensuous, contrasted with the bright, sharp angles of a city, the coldness of concrete and marble. The nights are full of shadows inside and out, the days are somber if not gloomy, and a night in the only nearby pub renders the mundane almost magical, painting one character into a study in gold and silver…at least before it all goes wrong in ugly, squalid, and utterly inevitable fashion. Motifs are repeated and juxtaposed and recombined in such a way that communicates exactly what’s happening without needing a lot of exposition, often verging on the hallucinatory, and indeed the line between reality and reverie isn’t ever really all that firmly drawn. There’s blood, there’s lipstick, there’s earth and fire and the memory of a young girl and of hundreds of women before her, all playing out in Veronica’s mind like a broadcast from centuries of trauma. It’s a story of renewal, cleansing, one that reappropriates fire as way to purify instead of eradicate, and we watch Veronica blossom as she channels what has happened here before to redress what is happening now, and continues to happen over and over again. The imagery is an easily comprehended vocabulary, not especially cryptic, and it means we intuit the story as much as we watch it.

So it's a very beautiful movie, one with a clear point of view, but it’s also a cold one - there’s a detachment, a restraint to a lot of it. The moment Veronica meets the other guests is rendered as claustrophobic and oppressive as any cocktail hour could ever be, but after that it really does maintain a certain distance on everything, which robs it of some of the visceral impact that I think would really let it sing. I appreciate the irony of this criticism in the face of the sexist assumption that women are “too emotional,” but as much as this film engages intellectually and points to the pain Veronica and so many others have suffered, it doesn’t really bring the viewer into that. There’s no crescendo to the film, no pitch of howling rage or fury. It ticks along , thoughtful and measured. But it seems to me that the centuries of pain and oppression and cruel indifference that it astutely and acidly etches for the audience demands something that burns hotter than that. Fire isn’t polite and restrained, it’s hot and eats everything in its path, leaving only ashes, and I think the film could have used more of that.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Antlers: Sometimes The Monsters Are Real

 “We pray for the children…

… who never get dessert,

who watch their parents watch them die,

who have no safe blanket to drag behind,

who can’t find any bread to steal,

who don’t have any rooms to clean up,

whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,

whose monsters are real.”

                         - Ina J. Hughes, Prayer For The Children

Scary movies are often intended as allegories, addressing real-life monstrosities through mythical monsters. From something as intimate as grief to as sweeping as war, fictional monsters let us safely explore things that might hit a little too close to home otherwise. Of course, it seems like in the last few years the commingling of real and fictional monsters has become the province of “elevated horror” or “post-horror,” or “what people who’ve been looking down their noses at horror all this time came up with when they ran across films well-made enough that they couldn’t dismiss them out of hand.”

Okay, that got away from me. And it’s certainly not the first time I’ve effused about good films that examine real and fictional horrors in parallel. The point is that Antlers is another film in that tradition, a grim and somber story about natural and supernatural monstrosity. It stumbles at the finish line somewhat, but for most of its running time it’s pretty compelling.

Not that you’d know it from the opening title card, a bit about how mankind has pillaged the earth and awoken a malevolent spirit. It’s ham-fisted and totally unnecessary. But once we’re past that, there’s a little boy, playing in what appears to be the wreckage of an abandoned work site. He’s passing the time while his father takes care of some business, and soon enough makes his way back to the pickup truck. His dad cautions him about wandering off alone and tells him they’re almost finished. And so dad heads back into what turns out to be an abandoned mine, he and his brother wearing respirators as they clear out beakers, blowtorches, empty cold medicine boxes, all the hallmarks of bathtub chemistry of a certain type. But then there’s a noise, coming from further down the tunnel. It sounds like some kind of wild animal. We don’t get to see what it is, but it gets at them, badly.

We cut to the boy still waiting in the truck. And waiting, and waiting.

This film is basically the story of Cispus Falls, Oregon, a small town in the perpetually overcast Pacific Northwest. It’s a town the color of a bruise, a town where the mining company packed up and left, taking all the jobs with them, leaving the people to fend for themselves. It’s a place where it seems like almost everyone does everything with a sense of weary resignation and doesn’t aspire to much more than getting by. Julia Meadows is a recent arrival, teaching at the one school in town. She grew up here, had a really hard life here, ran and didn’t look back. Except now some unspecified setbacks in California have brought her right back. She’s living with her brother - the town’s sheriff - and it seems to be a fraught, cautious relationship. They spend a lot of time tiptoeing around what happened when they were kids. Until they don’t. Julia’s frustrated that she can’t get the kids to engage with her - she knows their situation, and it’s the knowing that frustrates her. She knows how badly they need some ray of light. There’s one kid who especially concerns here - Lucas. Keeps showing up in the same clothes, has trouble focusing, gets bullied a lot. He draws really unsettling picture of monsters in the dark.

He's the kid from the truck in the beginning.

So it’s the story of land poisoned by mining and a dying town poisoned by despair. Both give birth to horrible things. Cispus Falls is a bleak place - drug labs in abandoned mining tunnels, another eviction or foreclosure every week, all the things that go on behind closed doors, parents who homeschool their children so they can mule drugs or so the teachers don’t smell the meth on their clothes from their parents. Malnutrition, poverty, abuse of every type, a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness. It’s a town with a lot of pain, and that pain’s been taken out on its children, as it was taken out on their parents, as it was taken out on their grandparents, and so on. It’s a place that was broken long ago. There’s no shortage of real monsters here. And sometimes our real-world monstrosities coalesce into otherworldly ones, as if the earth itself came alive to protest our abuses. In that respect, the town is well-realized as a character in and of itself. Even the sunny days here feel drained of anything good. 

This is complemented by a largely understated approach to the narrative - wordless looks and terse flashbacks do a lot of storytelling here, and though the gaps aren’t hard to fill in, it’s a film that mostly trusts its audience. I say mostly, because there is the occasional bit of exposition-y dialogue (and some bigger problems around this toward the end), but for the most part it’s a story told carefully and deliberately, a bit at a time, without a lot of histrionics or hysterics. This restraint extends to a score that is mostly ambient, just there enough to color the scene, and a palette primarily consisting of muddy grays and browns, with the occasional cold fluorescent light of a corner market, and a lot of desaturation in the color. There’s occasional sunshine, but not for very long, and the even more occasional breathtaking panorama of forest or mountains to break up the sad squalor of this town the mining company forgot. It’s inhabited by characters who are largely believable, though some of them get developed more than others, and though none of them feel like sketches, some people do feel like they’re in and out of the story a little more quickly than is ideal. Even if the dialogue is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, the relationships and dynamics between people feel real.

This pervasive foreboding is helped along by thoughtful pacing as well. The first two acts are mostly subdued table-setting with just enough peeks into what’s happening to build a sense of dread without giving the entire game away at first. Something bad is going on here but it isn’t immediately clear what, and not everything is exactly what it seems to be. There’s some explicit violence, but more often we’re just witness to its aftermath, the horrible wreckage of what were once human bodies, depicted dispassionately. Quick images and little details build things up leading into the third act, where all the monsters become real - and here, the effects work (always the toughest proposition for a film like this) holds up quite well. That said, the move toward more action means that some of the atmosphere is lost. Although it never stops being evocative visually, with rainy days exchanged for foggy moonlit nights and mine interiors lit only by stark red flares, it does lose some of the mood so carefully built up in favor or something more disappointingly obvious. 

And this shift toward the more obvious is why I don’t think it quite sticks the landing either, with a climax that’s a little too obvious and an “the end…or is it?” ending that feels entirely unnecessary, given how strongly this film relies on ideas of generational trauma and the nature and consequences of abuse. The obviousness of the opening title card about what mankind has done to the earth infects the ending as well. So not a slam dunk, but there’s a lot to recommend it nonetheless.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon