The Ghoul: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

There’s a particular type of psychological horror film that revolves around issues of identity. It’s an especially abstract type of horror, because it’s less about threats to the body and more about threats to our sense of self, and films of this type tend to focus on how precarious and constructed our sense of self really is, as well as how precarious our sense of the world around us is, how fickle perception can be. Films like this are thematic neighbors to crime films about cops who spend so long in deep cover that their sense of who they really are starts to disintegrate. And so today we have The Ghoul, which is a smart, moody intersection of both types of films.

We open with some shots of someone driving, watching road signs for the London M1 pass overhead, which cuts to two police officers, Chris and Jim, investigating the site of a particularly puzzling double murder. A couple were shot in their home, but as near as the forensics can suggest, it appears that even though both of them were shot multiple times in the chest and face, it took some time before they fell and bled out. In other words, both people were shot by a single intruder, and just kept walking. After being hit once, twice, three times, they just kept walking forward, and eventually the intruder fled. It’s not easy to stay upright after getting shot multiple times.

In the course of the investigation, Chris and Jim run across the property manager - a man named Coulson - who only started managing the building shortly after the murder. Something about this seems suspicious to them, and so they toss his apartment looking for clues. It’s the home of someone who seems really unbalanced, with a wall covered with notes and cryptic drawings, names and news articles and random scribblings. Coulson is seeing a psychotherapist named Helen Fisher, and Chris gets the idea - aided and abetted by his forensic psychologist friend Kathleen - to pose as a patient seeking treatment from Fisher to get access to her notes about Coulson’s sessions. If this seems howlingly unethical, if not straight-up illegal (it certainly would be in the U.S. and I can’t imagine the U.K. is much different in this regard), well, it is. Nevertheless, Chris puts together a history suggesting dysthymia and makes an appointment.

He tells Helen that his name is Chris, and that Jim is a friend who does beverage sales, and Kathleen is a girl he fancied in college but never dated. 

To cope with his depression, Chris likes to fantasize that he’s a police officer in deep cover.

The central conflict here would seem to be who Chris really is - is he really a cop who’s gone so far undercover that he’s forgetting who he really is, or is he really a deeply depressed, fragile man who fantasizes that he’s a cop in order to feel better about his life? And that runs the risk of being really clichéd, but it’s not played as obviously as that story often is. Typically in a story like this, there’s a reveal, a gotcha moment where we find out that we thought he was one of these thing all along, but was actually the other. But this film really doesn’t tip its hand much at all, even at the climax it’s not crystal clear who the “real” Chris is, but the further he (and we) go down the rabbit hole, the less it seems to matter. Things start to get very weird for Chris as Fisher introduces him to another therapist, one who eschews traditional therapeutic techniques for ones involving magic and ritual. And suddenly those scribblings on Coulson’s wall start to make a kind of sense. 

This film keeps a lot of balls in the air - who Chris really is, who the other people in his life really are, what’s reality and what’s fantasy, whose viewpoint can be trusted and whose cannot - and it manages it successfully because it treats all of the possibilities with a fair amount of equanimity. It’s isn’t really clear what is delusion and what isn’t. Part of how it accomplishes this is by telling the story in discrete scenes and exchanges broken up by blurry, hazy, repeated motifs, like we’re witnessing fitful lucidity, and so there’s no real emphasis on one narrative over the other for most of its running time. Issues of mental health, of depression and delusion, are treated realistically - it’s not really a violent film at all, but watching the depressed version of Chris can be really uncomfortable because his pain is so plainly evident, and it’s hard to accept that the confident police detective version of Chris might be a fantasy. But because we see the detective version of Chris and the depressed version of Chris with equal weight, without any tricky “clues” that tell us which world is real and which is delusion, the ambiguity is as disorienting as it must be to live his lives. And right alongside this narrative of uncertain, shaky identity, there’s something going on involving these two therapists, and there’s the murder from the beginning of the film. Whoever Chris really is or is not, something happened to those two people.

In addition to avoiding cliché and easy answers, this film works because it’s made with skill at every level. The acting is consistently strong and played to a human scale, largely devoid of histrionics. These are real people, with real human flaws and failings. The editing is elliptical, terse exchanges broken up by lots of shots of London at night, the London of seedy flats and graffiti-scrawled back alleys, lit fitfully by streetlamps, often blurred into washes of color. Music is largely minimal and somber, with a couple of exceptions that feel claustrophobic instead. When the action moves out into the countryside, it feels freeing, a literal and metaphorical breath of fresh air. It feels of a piece with some other English films I’ve written about here - The Canal, Possum, and Kill List, with whom it shares some personnel and stylistic DNA. It’s not as relentlessly grim as Possum or as horrifying as The Canal, in a lot of ways it reminds me of Kill List - a man way out of his depth, only realizing the extent of it when it’s far too late.

Whoever that man might be. To its credit, the film won’t tell us one way or the other throughout. There’s no reversal or reveal here, we’re told everything up front, and so the uncertainty lies with the audience, with what we decide is most likely to be true or not. Shots that at first seem like they’re intended to convey mood or atmosphere help bring things together in the final act, and offhand comments throughout take on greater significance. Nobody is who they seem to be, in ways both small and terrifyingly large - the people we’re most inclined to dismiss may very well be right, and smiling faces can hide a lot. As Sigmund Freud was reputed to have said, even the paranoid has his enemies.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

The Lodge: Those Meddling Kids

There’s a particular type of film - rare, but not unheard-of - that I like to call the “seven-ten split.” See, most films that I watch for this thing of mine exhibit some degree of consistency. They may be good, they may be mediocre, they may be bad, but whatever it is they are, it’s pretty steady across the length of the film or across aspects of production. But every now and then, I’ll get one that does some things (or even most things) very well, but then fucks something up so spectacularly that it casts a pall over the rest of the film. 

Every film is a set of decisions, and though it’s unusual for one or two to mar an otherwise skillful production, The Lodge manages just that. It marries striking visuals and impressive timing to narrative choices that damn near sink the whole thing.

Richard is a divorcee who is trying to get his children Aiden and Mia to warm up to his new girlfriend (and soon-to-be fiancée) Grace. They’re not having any of it, carrying a fair amount of resentment at how their parents’ marriage ended and the role they see Grace as playing in that. Nonetheless, Richard wants the four of them to spend the Christmas holiday at the family lodge, far up in the mountains and far away from town. He’ll bring Grace and the kids up a week or so before Christmas, return to the city for work, and join them for the holiday. He thinks that if they just take the time to get know Grace, they’ll come around.

So it’s the two kids and the soon-to-be-stepmom they hate, all alone in the middle of nowhere. So that’s awkward. It doesn’t get any better when a blizzard comes in, knocking out the power.

And it gets even wore when they wake up one morning to find their phones dead, and the entire lodge emptied of everything. Clothes, food…

...the medicine Grace needs to keep the nightmares away.

Right off the bat, this film is trying to maintain a tricky balancing act- on the one hand, it’s potentially the story of two kids left alone with a possibly unstable woman, isolated up in the mountains. On the other, it’s potentially a story of the supernatural - why is the lodge empty? Why don’t their phones work? Why can’t they get the generator to function? What happened overnight? Either would work just fine, and for that matter, there’s a way to get these two stories to intersect that could be really interesting, but this is where the problems begin. In order to make those two possibilities work, you have to keep the audience guessing, maintaining a certain amount of ambiguity throughout. And once you commit to a particular resolution, it should be one that feels like we could have seen coming or one that makes sense in terms of the film’s internal logic. 

The first big problem this film has is with ambiguity, revealing something about Grace’s past pretty early on in ham-handed and obvious fashion. It would have been handled better indirectly and through judicious use of flashbacks than just sort of plopping it into our laps all of a sudden. It’s up there with the opening credits of Sinister for “don’t show us this part yet, dammit.” She’s not a new girlfriend with a dark secret if you tell us the dark secret before the first act is out, and yet that is exactly what I see here. A lot of the potential tension is burned off because we’re robbed of the opportunity to discover what’s wrong with Grace, and that’s the kind of gradual realization and escalation of stakes that works well in slow-burn psychological horror.

The second big problem is in how it pays off its resolution, which it does in what strikes me as the dumbest, least probable way I could think of. They way I tend to think of this is in terms of the film’ internal logic. Now, the presence of the supernatural violates the internal logic of, say, a drama, but in a horror film you can bend or even break some of the rules of causality or physics or life and death or whatever. I don’t have a problem with that - what I do have a problem with is behavior from human beings in the film that doesn’t make sense in terms of how human beings behave. It’s really tough to talk about this without spoiling a major reveal in the film, but certain characters in this film behave in ways that are really tough to believe people actually would. We’re talking way less likely than the usual “why did they go into that dark room” stuff, because I think that’s lazy and cheap to criticize - people in horror movies don’t know that they’re in horror movies (Scream aside), but this isn’t that. This is so contrived that it yanked me right out of the film, and it ends up being the least dramatically interesting way you could pay off all of the remaining ambiguity of the first two acts. Not only is it highly implausible, it’s also not very interesting and kills the film’s momentum.

It’s incredibly frustrating (like, I went past “disappointed” and headed straight for “angry”) because, early reveal aside, this film starts off really really well and maintains a nice, simmering sense of unease for the first half or so, and I even like how it ends, but goddamn the path it takes to get there is intensely frustrating in how inept and improbable it feels. It feels shipped in from another, far lesser movie. It has excellent visual sense - there are lots of composed shots of icy landscapes and still, ominous interiors and repeated visual motifs, including an interesting one of a dollhouse interior that mimics the interior of the lodge. There are periodic cutaways to it throughout, and it seems like it should be communicating something, or that it is, but the third-act reveal that pissed me off so much just sort of trivializes it, making what could have been mysterious painfully literal. It does a really good job of using crisp, sudden edits to create tension, and holding a sense of stillness in some scenes just long enough to make what comes next genuinely startling. There’s a sequence early on that made me sort of jump without it being a jump scare. The acting is good throughout - restrained, understated, never really resorting to histrionics. In its staging and performance it’s tremendously self-assured, which makes some of the narrative choices all the more baffling.

In some ways I can’t help but compare this film (unfavorably) to Hereditary. I don’t think it plagiarized it or anything, but both deal with deaths in the family, strained relationships filled with resentment, and both use dollhouses as ways to tell the story. And both have a very strong visual sense. But Hereditary knew how to tease out information and then sort of connect all the dots in the end so you could see how everything fit together. This film just sort of tells you shit right up front, and pays it off in the least interesting way possible. It feels like someone started out to make a smart, icy psychological horror film and ended up with an adult episode of Scooby-Doo instead.

IMDB entry

Available from Amazon

Available on Hulu

Lake Mungo: Death Takes Everything, Eventually

There’s a great line from one of my favorite non-horror films, Unforgiven: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he’s got, and everything he’s ever going to have.” It captures, I think, the yawning, gaping emptiness that comes with grief; the inescapable absence. When someone dies, it’s not just them that’s gone, it’s also all of the future days you’re never going to have together, all of the chances you’d have to make amends for things you regretted saying or doing, any chance to watch them change or grow. 

All of those things are gone, and though I think it’s something easily enough appreciated intellectually, it’s hard to really communicate how it feels, that feeling of finality and the regrets that come with it. One of the things, then, that makes Lake Mungo such an accomplishment, apart from being a ghost story told with skill and restraint, is the way it communicates the specific impacts of grief on the people who experience it. There are a lot of emotional notes that horror can hit, but sorrow isn’t one that gets a lot of attention, and this film does it really well.

It’s presented as a documentary, about the tragic drowning of 17-year-old Alice Palmer during a weekend outing with her parents June and Russell, and her younger brother Mathew. One moment she’s swimming with her brother, the next she’s just…gone. It’s some time before divers manage to recover her body, and Russell takes on the difficult job of identifying her. Alice is gone. One day she’s there, the next she’s not, and each of the surviving Palmers deals with it in their own way. Russell throws himself into his work. June starts taking midnight walks and peering into other people’s houses, desperate to step outside of her own life. Mathew takes photographs.

And then they start hearing strange noises in the middle of the night. And Mathew starts noticing figures in his photographs. 

Figures that look like Alice.

There are a number of ways the story could have gone from here, but instead of leaning hard into scares, it leans hard into the grief that the Palmers are feeling and how it affects the way they think. Russell doesn’t know what to believe - after all, he saw Alice’s body. But June wants so much to believe that Alice is still alive that even Russell starts to doubt himself. Mathew sets up cameras all over the house, trying to see what else he can capture. Eventually, June contacts a psychic. It never tips over into histrionics - their coping methods may not be especially healthy, but they don’t abandon all reason. Mostly what you feel is an impairment in their ability to really communicate with each other - they don’t want to upset or hurt each other, so they keep secrets from each other, let things go unsaid. This is a really common human tendency, there’s nothing unbelievable or melodramatic about it.

But there’s a real tension that develops from this - on the one hand, they’re not telling each other everything, and on the other, they’re desperately searching for explanations, for some way to understand why Alice is gone. So they’re keeping some secrets and digging into others. And this leads to some interesting narrative reversals as the film goes on. What we thought was one thing turns out to be another, new information comes to light, and it turns out that Alice was keeping secrets of her own. As a couple of characters put it, she wasn’t just keeping secret - she was even keeping secret the fact that she had secrets. There were things that Alice didn’t tell anyone about, and so you have this wounded family trying to explain this mysterious presence while not telling each other the whole truth, and so, like any good documentary, as the narrative unwinds our expectations are upended as new explanations come to light. We think it’s one thing, then another, only for an important discovery in the third act to make us question everything all over again.

Also, like any good horror film presented as a documentary, the filmmakers handle the narrative conceit deftly by playing it completely straight. It’s really, really easy for horror filmmakers to screw up a documentary or found-footage conceit by tipping their hand too early, by signposting that something scary and bad is going to happen, when that’s not really how really good documentaries work. Real documentaries are narratives too, and often use pretty standard storytelling devices to craft a particular narrative, including sudden, dramatic revelations. You don’t always want to tell your audience too much about what is coming, and horror films that position themselves as documentaries of one sort or another all too often don’t trust in the restraint that requires, and instead do things like open with title cards describing the “horrible, indescribable events of that night” or something like that, or worse, try to inject scary imagery in the middle of it like the documentary itself is haunted or something like that. It’s trying too hard, and usually the film suffers as a result. Here, the filmmakers give us a documentary first - lots of cleanly produced talking-head segments, with consistently solid, naturalistic performances, interspersed with believable archival footage. The news broadcasts look like news broadcasts, the family photographs look like family photographs, the home movies look like home movies. It might not seem like a big deal,, but those sort of mundane, naturalistic things can be some of the toughest to fake if you don’t have a good eye for detail, and since we’re so used to see stuff like that in our everyday lives, any artificiality tends to leap out and ruin our immersion in the story. 

The archival footage does  a lot of hard work here on its own - a big part of this film is the Palmers believing what they do on the base of photographic and video evidence, and this is all based on early-00s technology, so the level of imprecision contained in the visual evidence reflects the shaky subjectivity on which the Palmers rely to shore up their belief that Alice isn’t entirely gone. Photos are blurry and dimly lit, video footage is grainy and distorted, phone-camera footage is pixelated and low-resolution. It all could be what the Palmers think it is, but could just as easily be something else. Even home-movie footage of Alice is often blurry, as if she’s already fading from memory despite her family’s best efforts.

There are also lots of long, moodily-lit insert shots of the house, hallways and empty rooms which work on a couple of different levels. First, they help establish the sort of atmosphere that a documentary about possible supernatural occurrences would want to establish - plenty of good haunted-house films have shots of empty rooms and hallways as part of their arsenal, but here, accompanying those shots with voicer-over instead of spooky music helps them to read less like a haunted-house film than documentarians trying to capture that same feeling. It’s subtle, but important. Second, they reinforce the sense of emptiness and absence that the Palmers are feeling. The house is a little emptier than it should be, and so it also reads like an attempt to convey the sadness and the grief the Palmers are feeling as well. And because the whole thing reads so much like a documentary about the subject matter rather than a piece of fiction dressed as a documentary, it’s easy to get engaged with it, which makes the third-act revelations and conclusion hit that much harder.

And it’s that third act that really brings the film home. We go on this journey with the Palmers as they look for some kind of explanation for the inexplicable, and they do get closure of a sort, but it’s not really neat or clean in any way, and as the final credits roll, we’re denied any neat conclusions as well. It takes some time to pay off, but it does in a way that settles a bone-deep chill on you, one that is equal parts horror and sadness. Some people can move on with their lives, and others will never, ever have that chance, because was taken away from them, along with everything else they were ever going to have. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Darling: A Girl In Trouble

A couple of weeks ago I started my litany of disappointment at the film Temple by pointing out how sometimes a film can look really generic but be really good (which Temple was not), and I find myself sort of coming back to that book/cover relationship when I think about the film Darling, which I had typed into a list I keep of movies to check out and then promptly forgotten about. It’s described as a film about a lonely young woman’s descent into madness, and the thumbnail art is pure 1960s - a black and white illustration of a young woman screaming in front of a hot pink pop-art spiral. It screamed “hey, I was made by someone who has probably watched Repulsion a lot.” And I’m into that, so I thought I’d give it a try. 

Turns out this is one of those times when the film does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s tense and unsettling, strongly reminiscent of Repulsion without being a complete rehash or overly-faithful homage.

There’s a young woman, she’s never named, and she’s apparently just taken over as the caretaker of a very old, historic home in the middle of New York City. An older woman, obviously wealthy, is handing her the keys and telling her not to worry at all about the house’s reputation and how, well, she shouldn’t be telling her this, but the last caretaker apparently threw herself off the upstairs balcony. No, I’m pretty sure you shouldn't be telling her that, but here we are. She’s going to love it, it’s a beautiful old house, please don’t hesitate to call, even just to say hello, et cetera. And so the day passes, and the young woman explores the house, finds her quarters, the bathroom, the kitchen…

…a door at the end of a long hallway that will not open. A crucifix necklace in a drawer, the crucifix inverted. She has terrible dreams that night, her face contorted into silent screams. Visions of throwing herself over the balcony.

It’s not really clear what’s going on with the young woman. The house does feel faintly sinister, and there are stories of rituals, conjurations conducted within the house, and she’s having these terrible nightmares. But a chance encounter with a man on the street also sends her into a fit of panic, and she’s scarred physically as well as mentally. Is it the house? Is it something inside her head? Again, it’s all reminiscent of Repulsion, the story of a woman who, isolated in her apartment following a trauma, slowly goes mad. The young woman seems to be working really hard to keep herself together, and she does venture outside the house, but at night the nightmares always come back, as likely evidence of a malign presence as of her own instability. Her perspective is the only one we have, and it’s definitely possible that we’re not getting the whole story (certainly in the case of the harrowing second act).The film doesn’t really commit to one explanation or the other and stays ambiguous for most of its runtime, trafficking in deep unease whatever the source and letting the viewer draw their own conclusions. 

This is a film that is more felt and experienced than thought about. It’s not an especially complicated story and there’s little to no character work (with the exception of an important revelation) done over the course of the film. It relies almost entirely on tone and atmosphere. But it does a really, really good job of establishing that tone and atmosphere. It’s shot in black and white in a fairly square aspect ratio, and this both gives it a timeless feel and creates a slight sense of claustrophobia. The frame keeps the young woman squarely hemmed in. Between the film stock and how everyone dresses and talks, it’s easy to pin this film at occurring sometime in the early-to-mid 1960s, but it’s not overly precious about this, and the end result is more a film out of time than one attempting to emulate a specific era, much like The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Shots are very well-composed throughout, with the framing doing a lot of work to give even empty spaces a sinister feeling, by putting something right in the middle of the frame, drawing your eye toward it, and then suddenly interrupting those relatively static shots with strobelike bursts of imagery. The end result is unnerving and means that this is not a film for the seizure-prone. 

It also gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposition. The sound design doesn’t really rely on much of a musical score, the most frequent sounds being a ticking clock and ringing phone, with specific songs used to underscore a scene, but that means the music that does occur can be as startling and intrusive as the imagery it accompanies, including frequent use of shrieking strings over static shots of empty rooms or close-ups on placid faces. Long silences punctuated by sudden, sharp sounds. As things begin to escalate, there is the repeated combination and recombination of images, the repetition giving us the feeling that something is coming. We don’t know what, but it isn’t good. There is also the very occasional jump scare, but they’re rarely gratuitous and expertly timed when they do occur. I keep thinking of this film in terms of its rhythm, the way it plays with tension and release. It’s not afraid to cut away quickly, or leave something unseen, but it’s also equally unafraid to linger, maybe even a little longer than you’d think, to create a different kind of tension and discomfort

That all said, like a lot of horror films, it does drop the ball a little in the home stretch. Through most of the film it does a really good job of leaving things to our imagination or suggesting things indirectly, it does get a little too trite and overly expository toward the very end. For that matter, “young woman goes mad as a response to trauma,” which is certainly one of the possible narratives here, feels maybe a little offensive to modern sensibilities, but at the very least is sort of a cliché at best by this point. It’s obvious. It’s been done before. I’m not sure this film really transcended cliché on that front, but it doesn’t detract from the rest of the film, which uses style and atmosphere to great effect. It’s made in a dated style, both in terms of how it’s filmed and what kind of story it is. That said, it’s still a very well-crafted experience for the most part, and if you can look past the casual sexism of the premise, there’s a lot to like.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Savageland: The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

I was part of an exchange recently where someone dismissed a particular film as not being “real” horror, because in their estimation it “wasn’t scary” and was “too political.” Now, there are a couple of things wrong with this line of argument. First, it presumes that something can be objectively scary, when any response a viewer has to a creative work is to one degree or another subjective. We have the reactions we do to art based on our own memories, experiences, feelings, and values. Those are unique to us, and so what one person dismisses as silly might frighten another. We can talk about the degree to which a film succeeds at conveying what it’s trying to convey or make arguments for different interpretations based on the text (else what have I been doing for the last several years), but the idea that a creative work can be objectively anything is sort of a non-starter. 

And for that matter, the idea that horror film isn’t or can’t be political is risible. Some of our biggest fears are political or have political expression. And horror films are a produce of a given time, place, and culture, and all of those carry with them their own politics, their own values. But that said, it’s certainly possible for a film to try and be topical and fumble the ball. There’s always the danger of being too didactic or using an issue as trivial window dressing for otherwise conventional horror clichés. But people watch horror movie and people have their own politics, so treating horror film as some objective artifact that is pure of either of these things is just ridiculous to me.

Oh, right, the movie. I bring this all up because Savageland is very much a topical horror film. It’s a somewhat uneven, but generally effective story about the banality of evil - evil is usually not the product of capital-E Evil, but rather it is what happens when people fail to do the right thing, fail to have courage or compassion or integrity. Evil comes from weakness and frailty and ignorance.

It’s the story of the small town of Sangre de Cristo, Arizona. It’s a very small town - fewer than 100 inhabitants - and its population is mostly if not entirely Mexican immigrants. Most of the folks who live in Sangre de Cristo work as farm laborers or domestic help for white families in nearby Hinzman. The white population of Hinzman doesn’t give Sangre de Cristo much thought - it’s referred to as “SDC” by folks who couldn’t be bothered to learn enough Spanish to pronounce it correctly, and “Savageland” by others. All those folks know is that’s where their gardeners and maids come from, and past that they don’t care.

Until one horrible night where, starting at sundown, everyone in town was massacred. Out of 57 people, only a few bodies were even identifiable as bodies. Smears of blood trailed out into the desert and just stopped. Scraps of bloodstained clothes, mangled body parts, what few bodies remained were badly mutilated and covered with bite marks. Well, almost everyone was massacred. A lone survivor, Francisco Salazar, stumbles out onto the road, covered in blood, and is picked up by a passing truck driver. He’s taken to the hospital in Hinzman, raving and babbling. 

Naturally, Salazar - a soft-spoken, reclusive Mexican immigrant - is immediately arrested and charged with singlehandedly murdering an entire town. Case closed, a terrible tragedy but justice will be served, what else do you expect from those people, you know the story. 

But Salazar’s a photographer. And he took pictures of everything he saw.

The film is structured like a crime documentary, cutting between archival footage and talking-head interviews and infographics, somewhat similarly to Lake Mungo (which I’ve just realized I’ve never written up and holy shit that is an oversight) but instead of being about the way grief and loss affects us and how secrets complicate all of that, it’s about the ways that bigotry, ignorance, and the complacency of privilege cost far too many lives. So it’s not a found-footage film, but as something being presented as documentary, it’s subject to some of the same concerns with verisimilitude. And it largely handles those well, apart from insisting on using a distressed-typewriter typeface for all of its captions and intertitles, which makes the whole thing feel a little cheesy. Likewise, the narrative starts off a little shaky, essentially re-telling us the same information two or three times in about the first fifteen minutes. That said, once it gets past the redundant table-setting, it settles into a stronger groove as it recounts the events of that night, using Salazar’s photographs and the locations they were taken as a map, represented by an actual infographic map of the town, which gives the story a strong sense of place and movement as well as feeling like something you’d see in an actual documentary. 

The acting, like the pacing, is a little erratic as well. The performances are mostly solid but sometimes veer toward the wooden or the histrionic (a sequence about a family of missionaries feels especially artificial), and it’s a little distracting at times, but not a deal-breaker. What helps make up for some of the weaknesses in the acting is the art direction and the editing. It’s largely shot in what I take to be an actual ghost town, and as is often the case, it helps tell the story well. You just can’t fake that kind of decay, it never looks right. The photographs that Salazar took are impressionistic, black and white, just blurry and distorted enough that what you can see is especially effective - feral, blood-smeared faces emerging from shadows, slouched, misshapen forms backlit by the setting sun or by firelight. Something really bad happened here, something hard to imagine in its scope and impossible to explain (and to its credit, the film makes absolutely no effort to explain or mythologize or backstory what happened). Live footage of locations in town are intercut with crime scene photos from the same places that are largely riots of blood and hard-to-identify body parts. The photos don’t linger, which again helps, so we’re left with an impression of terrible violence committed by something (or things rather) monstrous, before we can notice the artificiality of the effects. There’s a good sense of restraint at work here, and though it’s probably a function of the budget, it never comes across that way.

The narrative is a clear one - maybe a little too clear, to the point of being on the nose at times. Sangre de Cristo was a very small town full of Mexican immigrants -some documented, some not. Hinzman is full of the kind of white folks who are possessed of the confidence and self-assurance that only proceeds from unearned privilege, from never having to really fight for something and assuming everything is there for their benefit. With only a couple of exceptions, neither of them local, all of the white people in this film are sure that Salazar was solely responsible, and everyone else - Mexican locals and a Black reporter - are sure that he wasn’t. The idea that this isn’t about culpability as much as it is prejudice and complacency isn’t even subtext, it’s just text. It gets a little ham-handed in places, but only a little, and is largely articulated with restraint through narrative, rather than having someone just straight-up tell us it’s happening. 

And it’s woven tightly into the story, unlike a film like Undocumented, which takes the plight of Mexican immigrants and the kind of “patriot” yahoos who “patrol” the border unsolicited hoping for a chance to kill someone and uses it as a flimsy pretext for your basic torture-porn setup. The story here is about those sentiments and attitudes and all of the different ways, small and large, that they cause harm and cost lives. And also to its credit, the people who don’t believe Salazar did it don’t necessarily make the right call either - both sides are faced with the incomprehensible, but that doesn’t mean that the folks who are on the right side of history are somehow automatically granted clear and perfect understanding. All humanity is subject to frailty, not just the folks who believe things we disagree with. 

The ending falls a little flat, pulling back from the full consequences of what’s happened, but only a little. It looks like this is the first feature-length effort from the filmmakers, and though I do see room for improvement, they aren’t off to a bad start. The terrible things have already happened here, what we’re watching is the aftermath, and the way that the people with all of the social capital, all of the power to avoid something worse happening, are content to blame it all on one poor man and call it a day. Their lack of compassion and desire to be inconvenienced as little as possible, the ending seems to say, is going to cost a lot more lives before this is all over.

Fuck, if that’s not topical, I don’t know what is.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Temple: The Sum Of Its Parts Manages To Be Less Than The Actual Parts

(Note: This one gets a little spoilery toward the end.)

Sometimes, if I’m trying to figure out what I want to watch next and I don’t have anything specific on my radar, I’ll flip through various and sundry streaming services and sometimes pick something I know absolutely nothing about, based on its description and maybe the thumbnail art. No, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you also don’t have time to read the first two chapters of every book in the store, so the cover helps narrow things down. And what I’m coming to realize is just how unhelpful those heuristics can be. Something can look really generic and end up being surprisingly good. Conversely, something can also look really promising (or at least worth considering) and end up being dreck when you watch it. 

Temple is very much an example of the latter. It’s a dull, pointless exercise in cliché, as generic as they come. I mean, one of the production companies involved is called “Genre Project” and boy howdy, if that’s not a red flag I don’t know what is.

The film opens with a perfunctory flashback to two police officers investigating a temple and…something bad happened there? There’s blood on the floor? Whoops, too late, flashback’s over. It’s a good thing we had it, though, because how would I know that something bad happened at the temple? Certainly not because I’m watching a horror movie called “Temple.” Cut to credits full of ominous music, interspersed with lots of newspaper articles about how something bad happened at a temple. Now we’re in the present where, for some reason, someone identified as “Professor Ryo” is at what seems to be a hospital, interviewing someone who is badly injured, has trouble speaking, and is confined to a wheelchair with some kind of plastic shielding around it because…well, spoilers, we never find out. Ryo wants to know what happened five days ago, so…cue another flashback to five days ago. 

So five days ago, Kate, her boyfriend James, and her childhood friend Chris take a trip to Japan. We are introduced to Kate via self-shot camcorder footage. She turns the camcorder on herself (or shoots herself in the mirror) and explains who she is and where she’s going and why. It’s not clear at all who this footage is intended for, it’s just an unnecessary fillip thrown in without any real narrative rationale. Kate’s a religious studies major, apparently, and is writing her…thesis, I guess?...on the transition of historical events into myth in Shinto traditions. At no point during the film does Kate evince any knowledge of Shinto. She doesn’t even speak Japanese, hence bringing along her childhood friend Chris, whom she has not seen in years, but has conveniently showed back up in her life and who conveniently speaks Japanese. In any other movie, these would be red flags that Chris had evil ulterior motives, but here? Nah. There’s no reason for him to be a long-lost friend except maybe to make Kate’s boyfriend James act all pissy and dude-brood all the time. 

So here’s one of the big problems with this film - none of the protagonists are actual people. James is a slick alpha-male philandering douchebag (the kind of guy who slicks his hair back and paws his girlfriend possessively in the presence of other men), Chris is faintly (and sometimes not-so-faintly) creepy and not much else, and Kate is a complete cipher, utterly opaque. None of them have anything approaching inner lives, and collectively they have all the personality of a high-end vodka commercial. They aren’t necessarily so loathsome that you root for their deaths as much as it’s just really hard to care what happens to them one way or another. 

The film jumps back and forth between the three of them in flashback and Ryo interviewing the mysterious wheelchair-bound figure in the present. And this brings us to the next big problem with the film. The pacing is terrible - fully a third of the movie is Kate, James, and Chris just sort of wandering around Tokyo, as if once they arrived they’d forgotten why they made the trip in the first place, so they just go shopping and clubbing instead. What little forward momentum we do get is the product of naked contrivance instead of character and consequence. While they’re out wandering around Tokyo, our trio stumbles on a little antiquities shop. Here, Kate finds a book about Japanese folk tales, but when the shop proprietor sees the book, she not only refuses to sell it to Kate, she also kicks them out and closes the store for the day. Which seems awfully hamfisted to me, if you’re trying to tell us “oooooh spoooooky!” But how else are we going to get our protagonists out of Tokyo? So…Chris just goes back to the shop later at night and whaddaya know? The shop is mysteriously open and the book is sitting right there! Problem solved! Chris walks into a small bar where the bartender just happens to recognize the temple depicted in the book of folk tales, and there’s a salaryman there who just happens to be from the village near the temple! They both tell him it’s a really bad place and that he shouldn’t go there! He gets directions anyway! It’s like the filmmakers kept painting themselves into corners instead of figuring out a different way to tell the story.  The narrative cuts back and forth between the interview and the protagonists eventually making their way to the titular temple, and it’s not distracting by itself, but both sides of the story seem so aimless - Ryo asks questions and is evasive, Kate, James and Chris kind of wander around, lather, rinse, repeat. Instead of wandering around Tokyo, they wander around the woods instead.

It’s equally all over the place in terms of what’s going on once things do get rolling. There are…evil spirits and a monk who supposedly murdered a bunch of children, and maybe the temple itself is evil, but once they finally get there (and get stuck overnight when Chris gets hurt because of course), suddenly it’s all just generic monsters and creepy ghost children (all shot in deep shadow so you can’t really tell what’s going on at all) and everyone ends up in a bad way all at once, and then in the present the mysterious patient (whose identity is never revealed conclusively) leaps up and attacks the interpreter and…that’s it. No closure, no revelations (except that a little boy was a ghost the whole time but…you kind of know that’s coming when he just shows up miles and miles and miles away from where he first shows up), no nothing. Just sort of a big pile of “BOO!” and then credits. It’s about an hour and ten minutes of wandering around aimlessly and everything happens in the last 20 minutes, almost like someone reminded the filmmakers that they were making a horror movie.

It feels like one of those movies where the filmmakers had a bunch of ideas or setpieces (none of which case are especially novel) and just sort of slapped them together. It’s a bunch of parts connected by the thinnest of rationales, there’s no mood, no atmosphere, everything feels artificial, and maybe the best thing I can say for it is that it doesn’t look cheap. Which just means a budget larger than a shoestring was wasted on this.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Available on Amazon

Gok-seong: Acts Of Faith

One of the perennial linchpins of horror is belief. Things happen in horror movies that aren’t supposed to happen in the real world, and so it’s not unusual for horror movies to employ a narrative device where the protagonists try to convince someone that a threat is real, only to be dismissed for lack of evidence or because what they’re saying is preposterous. It adds tension, sometimes more subtly, more often less so. But either way, what it does is disrupt belief. The world does not contain monsters, the doubters (most often adults or authority figures) say, and then the monster says otherwise, usually in violence. Faith is important, and those who suffer crises of faith, at least in horror films, are generally not long for this world. Sometimes you have to discard reason and evidence and just trust what someone is saying. You have to take a leap of faith.

Gok-seong (The Wailing) does a lot of things right - maybe not everything, but a lot of things - and one of the things it does right is interrogate faith. What do you believe, and why? Do you believe your own eyes? What others tell you? What you are taught? What are the consequences of faith?

Jong-goo is a policeman in the sleepy little South Korean village of Gok-seong, and as the film opens, you kind of feel sorry for him. Pudgy, hangdog Jong-goo, living in a small house with his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law, reduced to assignations with his wife in the back seat of their car, and a career on the force that is probably best described as “bumbling.” As the film opens, he’s late to yet another crime scene. And it’s an unusually bad one for Gok-seong, the brutal double murder of a married couple. A total stranger just walked into their house and stabbed them to death, and then waited outside in a daze. The senselessness and violence are bad enough, but Jong-goo immediately notices some odd things about the scene. Why is the killer just waiting there? What’s that weird rash he’s got? Why are there stalks of withered flowers tied above the doorway? Nobody listens to him, of course. Why pay attention to Jong-goo?

Meanwhile, old men are spotted in the woods feasting on the carcasses of wildlife. Nobody believes the person who saw that either - he was drunk and had fallen down a steep hill. And then another mysterious death - a woman attempts to murder her husband and burns their house down. She’s got a strange rash, as well. People start to talk - it must be that old Japanese man who just moved to town. Lives deep in the valley outside the village, keeps to himself.

Who else could it be?

The first fourth or so of the film plays out almost like a semi-comic police procedural. Jong-goo and his partner aren’t especially diligent cops, and they spook easily. They’re as likely to swallow whole whatever weird speculation or knee-jerk superstitions their buddies offer up as they are to go out and actually investigate stuff, and all the while the bodies keep coming, each case as inexplicable as the one before. And then things take a turn as the mysterious malady strikes a little too close to home, and although it puts a fire under Jong-goo to find out exactly what’s going on, there’s also something a little unsettling about how quickly and casually he abandons proper police procedure (not to mention civil liberties) to find out exactly what’s going on, and it starts to become very clear that he’s messing with things way, WAY above his spiritual pay grade. It’s an odd tonal shift - not quite jarring, but as it moves from the first to second act, there’s a definite shedding of the slacker of the film’s beginning in favor of someone more driven, if not any better at his job. The comedy falls away, like the moment where you realize someone’s gone from kidding to deadly serious. 

And it’s here, once shit gets real, that the film becomes really occupied with ideas of faith. Jong-goo consults Catholic priests and shamen alike to figure out what’s going on, and everyone’s got a different explanation, but the ones that keep rising to the fore converge on that mysterious old Japanese man who lives out in the middle of nowhere. Likewise, as viewers we’re encourage to develop our own ideas about what’s going on as well, Belief is as much a part of watching films as it is being a character in one. We know what we see on the screen, we’ve heard the testimony from the people Jong-goo interviews, and we’re savvy moviegoers, so we know when we’re being manipulated. We can spot little details, bring up narrative conventions we’ve seen in the past, stay one step ahead of the story. And it’s really tempting to do that with this film, as it unfolds over a spacious (maybe a little too spacious) two and a half hours. If it shifts into gear about 45 minutes in, it really revs up at about the halfway point, with an intense, kinetic sequence involving rituals intended to banish spirits, and here’s where we really sort of start to see what’s going on - there are multiple faiths here, multiple perspectives, multiple possibilities, and seeing them all intersect suggests that maybe we shouldn’t be so smug in our predictions. Nothing is ever as simple and cut-and-dried as it looks, and the whole truth is rarely apparent until it’s all too late.

It’s a really striking film - gorgeously shot and lit, alternating between breathtaking mountain and forest vistas and gray, rain-soaked rural squalor. It draws from police procedurals, ghost stories, zombie films, and films about demonic possession while maintaining a consistent internal logic, pulling Jong-goo further and further away from rational explanation and maybe leaving him a little adrift at the same time. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he’s way out of his depth, but he doesn’t have much of a choice. Even a late-film sequence where he puts an ad-hoc posse together resurrects a little of the comic vibe of the beginning (which is a little off-putting at first, because this film works much better when it doesn’t feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo), only to abandon it as things go terribly, terribly off the rails. 

Nobody really knows what’s going on, and they’re grasping for any explanation. Once they’ve found one that fits the facts they have, they act. Likewise, as the audience, versed as we are in the conventions of certain types of film, we observe different perspectives and draw our conclusions. But it’s not what we think, and this is embodied neatly by a climactic confrontation with the evil at the heart of the village’s misery. It talks of doubt, and the certainty of faith, and how that faith can blind us. It’s not just talking to the character, it’s talking to us as well. Because most people will be pretty certain they know what’s going on by the time the film gets to that point. But Jong-goo thought he knew what was going on as well, his colleagues thought they knew what was going on. Everyone, including us, thought we knew what was going on. But none of us did. It’s a somewhat uneven ride getting there, but it lands solidly in the horror of discovery and makes us work for it on the way there.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon