Perempuan Tanah Jahanam: Expect The Unexpected, But Not In A Good Way

I’m not usually a huge fan of particularly well-worn premises, mostly because the potential for surprise, in my experience, is pretty low. Is it a little reductive to say “if you’ve seen one ‘The Possession Of…’ movie, you’ve seen them all?” Yeah, probably. But at the same time, flip through any number of horror films on your streaming site of choice and see how often the same blurbs turn up. People who move into a new house and discover something is very wrong. People who move into an OLD house and discover that something is very wrong. People in difficult situations forced to reckon with their personal demons or dark secret. People vacationing at a cabin and discovering that they’re being stalked by a mysterious presence…you get the idea. There are few entirely original ideas under the sun.

But that’s also okay, because a story is more than what’s being told, it’s also HOW it’s being told. And when you tell an old story well, the results can be really exciting.

So, I guess this is where my problems with Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (Impetigore, literal translation “Hell Woman”) come in. The story itself is nothing new, but how it’s told does it no favors at all. The film starts strong and has some great visuals, but ultimately falls apart into something sluggish and repetitive, squandering a lot of the potential in the story it could tell.

It opens up on a toll plaza, late at night. Two booth operators, Maya and Dini, exchange casual chatter, gossip, the usual ways of whiling away a long shift at a dull job. Maya’s complaining about one particular creepy regular customer when, lo and behold, here he comes again. And yeah, he just kind of spends the entire transaction staring at Maya. He tells her he’s from a small village called Harjosari, and oddly keeps calling her “Rahayu.” Eventually, another car comes up behind him and honks for him to get a move on. Maya breathes a sigh of relief until she sees that he’s just parked by the side of the road on the other side of the plaza. And he’s walking toward her. And he has a machete.

Maya tries to run, but he catches up to her, and his look is oddly pleading. He says that he just wants what’s happening to his family to stop, that they don’t want what her parents gave them. Before he can kill her, he’s shot dead by the police.

Maya and Dini take this as a cue to quit their jobs as toll booth operators and start the clothing business they’ve always talked about. Only that doesn’t go so well, peddling cheap designer knockoffs in the market stalls of Jakarta is a rough way to make a living, and they’re falling behind on rent. Maya gets an idea. See, she never knew her parents, and all she has to remember them by is a single photo that her aunt has. It shows a young Maya standing with her mother and father in front of a huge, palatial house in Harjosari.

But the name on the back of the photo isn’t “Maya,” it’s ”Rahayu.”

So, against all good instinct, Maya and Dini take off for Harjosari, a small village way out in the sticks. A village that most people don’t want to talk about or take them to. But Maya’s sure that as the daughter of the homeowners, she could sell her family’s house for the kind of money that could bail her and Dini out of debt. It’s a small, poor village, and there aren’t any children around, and her parents’ house stands long-abandoned. You think you know how it’s going to go from here - woman returns to the family home and the dark secret that it holds - but it’s not really a haunted-house story, which is too bad, because it could have been a really good haunted-house story. The visuals are evocative (making especially good use of light and shadow, with traditional Javanese shadow puppetry as a recurring motif), and there’s plenty of atmosphere, lots of foggy forests and suitably dark, shadowy, cobwebbed interiors in the family home. Something bad happened here, and nobody wants to talk about it. There’s a real unease there.

But after a suitably creepy start, the film decides that the real center of the story isn’t this creepy abandoned house and the mysteries of Maya’s childhood after all. Instead, it puts all of its energy into the story of a remote village suffering under a curse, which wouldn’t be a bad storyline either (especially since it seems to be tied to Maya’s parents somehow) except it ends up taking over the whole movie. The house is only used for a handful of scenes and there’s little in the way of investigation. Worse, the basic outlines of the story the film presents are easy to figure out pretty early in, so there are very few twists or shocking revelations that actually land. For any reasonably attentive viewer, they’re going to have the broad outlines figured out in about ten minutes, and the rest is just the film catching up to where the audience already is. Almost everything plays out exactly like you’d expect it to, and most of the second act consists of reiterating what we’ve already figured out - there’s a curse, Maya’s family is involved somehow, and it affects the children born in the village - so the middle of the film drags pretty badly. Since a lot of it is just going over the same narrative ground again and again, there’s no reason for the film to be nearly two hours long. 

Then, as if that weren’t enough, in the third act we get an extended flashback that adds some new information (I guess it’s a twist, but I’d think a twist would be something that meaningfully changes the story, and I don’t think this does) that you wouldn’t really be able to puzzle out yourself, a climax that is pretty much exactly what you think it’s going to be, and then it ends on what could be a nice nod to another, better movie, but then insists on tacking a totally unnecessary “one year later” tag on the end. In some ways, it’s more of a melodrama (albeit a bloody one - throats keep getting cut in this film) than horror, strictly speaking. Ultimately what are supposed to be the shocking revelations feel more like kind of a supernatural soap opera than anything else, and when I stopped to think about them, they actually made everything make less sense. But not in a creepily ambiguous way, in a “hold on…what?” way.

Which sucks, because it’s got a look and locations that cry out for something that’s primarily about evil spirits and how the old ways persist even into today, but nah, let’s belabor this whole curse thing for about an hour in case the audience missed that there was a curse. Because there’s totally a curse. Yes, you figured thar out early in the second act, but we’re going to keep telling you anyway. The result feels like something that defies your expectations in all the wrong ways.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Asvins: Foregone Conclusions

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I’ll put on a movie to write about and within the first few minutes get the sense that it’s going to be a turkey and probably not worth my time. Usually, I’ll just stop films like this and watch something else instead. Asvins does not get off to a strong start at all, in any way, shape or form, but this time I decided I’d try to stick with one of those films instead of dismissing it immediately and seeing how it went. As it turns out, I was not at all rewarded for my efforts. It’s an incoherent mess that somehow manages to be both obtuse and obvious at the same time

Varun and his brother Arjun are vloggers who’ve decided to explore an especially creepy mansion in a remote part of England as a way to capitalize on the trend in dark tourism (visiting places where tragedies happened) and to hopefully raise their profile, go viral, all of the usual content-creator things. They’ve brought along their younger brother Rahul, who’s just found out he’s going to Germany to study audio engineering, Arjun’s wife Ritu, and Varun’s girlfriend Grace. They’re headed for an old abandoned estate that’s only accessible during low tide. It used to belong to Aarthi Rajagopal, a renowned archaeologist.

One night, 15 people were murdered there, and Aarthi apparently tortured herself to death. So it’s got a history.

So the premise is five people going into a huge abandoned building with a dark past to record what they find there, and sure enough, what they find there is very bad. This is the same basic premise as about 85% of all other found-footage horror films. But, to its credit, it ends up being about something beyond the initial premise, which is good because the initial premise is sort of run through in the first fifteen minutes, and the film is just shy of two hours long. And this is really the first of the film’s big problems - it plays like someone took the narrative beats, cut them up, threw them in the air and arranged them as they landed. It takes a surprisingly long time for the film to actually get started as it is. There’s a title card along the lines of the events depicted being fictional and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental. Also, no animals were harmed. Then there are multiple cards thanking multiple people, presumably for collectively funding the film. Then there are the credits for multiple production and distribution companies. And then there’s a long animated sequence in which we learn some folklore, one which both manages to give away anything that was going to be a surprise and at the same time isn’t strictly necessary since the story will be belabored extensively over the entire second half of the film. It’s very easy to come away from all of this feeling like you already know how the movie is going to go, and yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes. Then we jump into events in the current day, with what plays out like the climax of a found-footage 101 film, people running around a deserted location screaming and getting picked off by a series of jump scares.

And that’s all before the opening title. Then we bounce back to the events that lead up to those moments, in which everything (mansion belonging to an archaeologist, 15 people found murdered there, the archaeologist killed herself) is explained even though it had already been explained during the opening sequence. So we get a fairly generic found-footage film as about the first half of the movie, but one that starts at the end. And then the second half of the film sort of serves to show what was going on before, during, and after the first half, but not in a way that is necessarily easy to follow.

But all of that is okay, because we will be reminded constantly of what’s happening. This is a film that apparently assumes we have the attention span of a goldfish because we get almost all of the necessary information fed to us repeatedly through dialogue, through conveniently discovered recordings the archaeologist made in which she repeats everything we’ve already learned as well as a bunch of important points literally being written on notes tacked to a wall, which are then cut to multiple times. You know most of how the first act is going to go in the first five or ten minutes, and even have a general idea of how the rest of the film is going to go by the time you’re ten minutes into the second half and the rest is just sitting there and letting what is basically a foregone conclusion spool out. And at almost two hours long, it gets pretty tedious.

So what is happening and how we get to the end are pretty easy to figure out well in advance, but how it gets there still doesn’t follow much of a clear through-line. The film is divided up into chapters, all with titles having to do with two deaths, two lives, two worlds, two minds, and combinations thereof. Twins and two different worlds play into the story, but there’s all this stuff about people having two minds, one is stronger than the other but one of them is also a demon, I think? It doesn’t add much to the story, and on top of that, the second half of the film is littered with portentous voiceover about darkness and light and minds and worlds and demons too and none of it is especially illuminating  The action shifts in ways that I think are supposed to represent different worlds, but it isn’t clear which one is which or what’s actually happening at any given point. Is someone real or a ghost? Are they really them or a shapeshifting demon? Is this the real world or the spirit world? Is this the past or the future? For most of the film, it’s anybody’s guess and though things get a little more coherent toward the end, it’s not enough, as we get into curses and demons and people being bound together and because a demon’s controlling someone you can control the demon through the person you’re controlling, all for an ending that ends up being cliched and confusing in equal parts.

The performances don’t help any - I won’t ding the dialogue, as clumsy as it is, because that could very well be down to translation. But most of the performances are from the Scooby-Doo school of acting, all yelping and screaming and making extraneous noises in ways that don’t so much suggest emotion as bad attempts to perform emotion, lots of mugging  and melodrama at odds with the pitch of the scene otherwise. There are maybe three genuinely creepy moments in the whole thing, and that’s not nearly enough to save it.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Infinity Pool: Sex And Dying In High Society

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” 

            - F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy:”

“My mouth is drinking from your pool of tears

I saw your heartbeat in the radium screen

What does a body mean?” 

            - Swans, “Where Does A Body End?”

Horror films share a lot of ground with fables, in the sense that they can provide some kind of lesson through vivid, sensational imagery. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the ostensible edification in the slasher-film clichés of the wanton, reckless teenagers who get bumped off and the virginal Final Girl who ends up being the lone survivor.  But that’s not especially subtle. Far better, I think, are the moments when horror holds up a warped mirror to everyday life in a way that lays the monstrosity bare without passing too much overt judgment. Sort of like a modern version of Bosch’s satirical paintings. There’s a point, but it’s made through grotesque depiction, not blatant didacticism.

And in that respect, Infinity Pool is an excellent addition to this tradition. It’s a surreal fable about identity, morality, and the potential of wealth and privilege to distort both.

The film opens in disorienting fashion, the camera wheeling and careening through tranquil island landscapes, tumbling end over end before settling on a couple sitting at breakfast in what appears to be a resort. Everything is white and spotless, and the host is explaining that today marks the beginning of an important native festival, one celebrated before the beginning of the rainy season. He is flanked by the wait staff, all decked out in immaculate white suits and native masks that could generously be described as monstrous. It feels like there are nightmares standing right there in the middle of what otherwise looks like sleekly professional hospitality and nobody’s batting an eye. 

The couple don’t look especially happy - there’s something of a malaise to them, that particular exhaustion that you feel in places that relentlessly exhort you to enjoy yourself. They’re James and Em Foster, vacationing at a resort on the island of La Tolqa in an effort to help James get his creative juices flowing again. He’s an author with one book and six years of writer’s block to his name. Em is his wife, and the daughter of his publisher, which seems to provide one explanation as to how he got published in the first place. His book didn’t really sell or garner much in the way of critical attention, and so now here he is, a mediocre author who married rich and who is acutely aware of both of those things. But soon enough, they meet Gabi and Alban Bauer, another couple staying at the resort. Alban’s a mostly-retired architect and Gabi is an actress. More to the point, Gabi read James’ book, and apparently loved it. She invites James and Em to dinner, and the two couples seem to hit it off. They have many drinks together, and Alban manages to bribe a resort employee to lend them his car and let them out of the resort, which is strictly forbidden. Well, one thing leads to another and James, the only one sober enough to drive back, gets careless on a dark back road, striking and killing a local farmer. Law enforcement finds out, and as it turns out, part of why people are prevented from leaving the resort is because La Tolqan culture is extremely strict, and most things -including this - are punishable by death.

But, the police officer tells them, they do have a special service for tourists. For a large sum of money, they will create a double of the accused, a perfect physical copy with all of their memories, to stand in for them at the execution. The law is satisfied without a paying guest having to die.

Alban and Gabi are very familiar with the procedure.

James agrees to go through with having a double made, and from there it’s a delirious, hellish plunge down the rabbit hole of identity and consciousness - if there’s more than one of you, which is actually you? Physically identical, with all the same memories and experiences, can you ever be sure of which one is the “real” you and which one is the double? And if the only thing standing between you and making another you to pay for your crimes is money, what happens when you have far more than enough money? The process becomes recreation, as well as license to never take responsibility for your actions, not when you can make another you to bear all the punishment like some kind of sin-eater, or like the poor young men who were hired by wealthy families to take their son’s place in military drafts. And it’s not just a body, it’s a body with memories and consciousness, something functionally identical to a human being purpose-built to die. Whose life is it? Is it any less the double’s? What differentiates James from his double? The distinctions begin to blur.

And from this ability to pay on demand for someone else to die in your place emerges an examination of the idea of vacation as license to suspend morality, the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” writ large. In some ways, it’s a more highbrow take on Hostel’s examination of spring break culture and the way economies are built around the satisfaction of appetites, with a more existential bent to it. It’s bad enough when tourists from the U.S. travel abroad and expect their laws and freedoms to come with them, but here we have tourists in a cloistered environment designed to serve them deciding that nobody's laws apply to them. And like any colonial tourism situation, corrupt law enforcement benefits at the expense of the populace. After awhile, depravity becomes another pastime, as sequences of delirious violence and hallucinatory sex cut immediately to next-day mundanity, as if this is all just normal vacation behavior. Leave a trail of ruined property, bodies and psyches and leave someone else - or, rather, another you - to deal with the bill, and go back to your normal, polite lives. It’s easy if you don’t have a soul. At the end of the day, wealth is the best medicine: It anesthetizes you to suffering, and immunizes you from consequences.

The whole thing is told with an impeccable visual sense. The resort is full of bright, saturated colors (as are a number of hallucinatory sequences, suggesting that neither are real life) and everything is polished to gleaming, while the world outside of the resort is drab stone, wood, rust and poverty. The native language looks more like ideograms than anything else, and the absence of the Latin alphabet, along with the bizarre masks in the beginning, emphasize a sense of the local culture as utterly alien, as though we’re seeing them through the eyes of the tourists. There are two worlds here, divided by high fences topped with razor wire and guarded gates. By the end of the film, it seems like it’s as much to protect the natives from the tourists as the reverse. There’s almost no music, just enough to emphasize tense moments, and the performances are slightly chilly, the dialogue tending toward speeches, but it works because it underscores how unnatural all of this is. And the technology used to create the doubles is sort of grungy and low-tech, lots of technicians taking measurements, sharp electrical arcs and thick red paste in a tile room that looks like a shower. There’s nothing futuristic about it, it has the grubby functionality of any decently maintained industrial machinery.

Director Brandon Cronenberg’s films have been, right from jump, explorations of identity, body, and power structures told as unapologetically violent fables, and this is no different. But with each film it feels like he’s growing more and more into his own - he’s never plagiarized his father’s work, it’s always been his own spin on similar ideas, but between this and Possessor, his own distinct vision really seems to be taking shape and I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Enys Men: Lost At Sea

I don’t know that I’d call myself a sucker for cryptic, enigmatic horror films, but if I were put under oath, I couldn’t really deny it either. I think this goes back to my contention that horror is, at the end of the day, not about thrills and chills and gore and jump-out-of-your-seat moments exclusively, like some (many) professional critics seem to think. There’s a whole palette of emotions that could be said to fall under the umbrella of horror, and to me, that’s the important bit: How does it make you feel? And you don’t need to be literal to evoke a feeling. Sometimes, watching something play out that sits just at the edge of comprehension, that may not make logical sense but fills you with unease…that’s the territory of nightmares, and what are horror movies if not our nightmares?

So yeah, I don’t think a film has to make strict “sense” to work. Cryptic, enigmatic, oblique, tone-poem movies can work and work well, but also risk falling apart into incoherence, and that’s unfortunately what I think happens to Enys Men. There’s a lot going for it, but it never really comes together and the result is something that is ultimately more confusing than haunting.

There isn’t really a story so much as there is a series of events and possibly recollections. There’s a woman (credited only as “The Volunteer”) who lives on the remote island of Enys Men, where her sole regular duty appears to be observing a small patch of flowers, noting soil temperature and the condition of the flowers on a daily basis and recording the results in a logbook. The records go back quite some time. She gets up, checks the flowers, checks an abandoned mineshaft by dropping a rock down into it and noting how long it takes to hit bottom, then she goes inside and makes her breakfast. It’s a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and the crumbling stone ruins of what appears to have been a small mining village. She lives in the one intact structure on the island, a cottage that’s almost overtaken by the greenery creeping up its sides, as if the island is reclaiming any memory of human occupation. She has running water, but electricity is provided by a generator and rationed out for lights and some broadcast music in the evening. Her only contact with the mainland is a dodgy two-way radio and a supply boat that comes by on a regular basis. There’s a standing stone in her front yard, a monument to some long-ago tragedy.

Otherwise, she’s alone all the time, just her and all of the ghosts of this island.

Not to be too reductive, but it being a story of someone who’s ostensibly going mad from loneliness, told in largely disconnected static moments, results in something that is sort of like The Lighthouse as told through the lens of Skinamarink. It looks like something from a bygone era - scratchy, grainy film and a saturated color palette that nonetheless consists mostly of mossy greens, grays and browns, with striking patches of color - the sea, the sky, the woman’s bright blue eyes and brighter red coat, a bright red generator contrasted against a gray stone wall. The sense of isolation is effectively conveyed by the film being very quiet. There’s very little music  - the score is mostly ambience with some string and horn swells at especially fraught moments and there’s some diegetic music from her little radio, tinny and faint. There’s almost no dialogue as well (it’s about 10 minutes in before you even hear a voice), so you get these long stretches of silence punctuated by the rattle of a generator, the squawk and buzz of the radio. They aren’t jump scares per se, but the sudden cuts to them do have a startling, unnerving effect. This is probably the most effective thing about the film - the way it alternates long takes with sudden cuts keeps you off-balance. The camera spends as much time off of the woman as on, maybe more, which makes the island itself as much of a character as she is.

The quiet is unnerving, and so is the apparent monotony of the woman’s existence, described through repeated motifs of her daily routine which start to give way to what could be flashbacks or visions, and the way they combine and recombine starts to make everything stranger as the film goes on, in a fashion reminiscent of I Am A Ghost, another story of a woman all alone in an isolated location. What is at first innocuous becomes, over repetition, sinister, and for the first act at least, there’s a real eeriness to it all. But after the first act it starts to fizzle out, and I think it doesn’t work as well as it could for a couple of reasons. First, the pacing is very, very slow. This isn’t always a problem (in Skinamarink, for example, it works toward the dreamlike mood and a sense of constant tension), but here it serves to bog down the film in the second act, and any tension built up during the first dissipates. It starts to feel very repetitive, but not in a way where the repetition communicates anything. A film moving slowly isn’t a problem, but it does need to move. There’s less of a sense of disintegration or escalation than there needs to be as the film goes on. And this ties into the second problem, and that’s that ultimately it’s very difficult to make sense of what’s actually happening. There are what appear to be elements of the supernatural and even some body horror which have some kind of logic to them, but as everything moves away from routine and toward something more fragmentary and irrational, it seems less like the supernatural or a deteriorating mental state and more just a bunch of scenes that sort of relate to each other without committing to a particular through-line. The brief is mostly “person living in relative isolation starts to lose it,” or maybe “is she losing it or is she really being haunted” but the end result is mostly confusing - how much is memory and how much is losing grip on reality isn’t clear, and though there are some moments in isolation that are eerie and unsettling, the whole never really gels like it should and it just sort of ends without pointing toward any particular understanding. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re just going for pure mood, but there’s enough underlying story here that some kind of revelation is expected, and not enough structure for us to really grasp it. 

It's a shame, because the editing, cinematography and sound design are all really good - the aesthetics are there and very distinct, which is important for a visual medium. It definitely has a vision, which goes a long way with me, but the execution is messy enough that it feels like a missed opportunity.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

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

Resurrection: The Mother And Child Reunion

"No, I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away"

                    -“Mother And Child Reunion,” Paul Simon

There’s this old joke…

Q: Why did the Vietnam veteran cross the road?
A: You wouldn’t know! You weren’t there!

And as much as it might lean into the cliché of veterans of that war being especially vocal about how their plight was not really understood, there’s also truth to it. If you did not directly experience a trauma, there’s no way you can understand what it was like. It is something than can only be understood through the experience itself. And so from the outside, a lot of what trauma survivors do might not make a lot of sense. This extends to abuse as well, often a source of trauma. “Why didn’t you just leave?” is the question asked by someone who wasn’t there.

And it’s this truth that lies at the heart of Resurrection, which is a harrowing story of abuse, trauma, guilt, and the way none of it ever really goes away.

It opens on a conversation between two people. We only see one of them in the shot, and she’s relating to the other the way she is being treated by her partner, who devalues and belittles her on a regular basis. The voice of the person off-camera is calm, measured, asking her questions about how these things make her feel, contextualizing these behaviors, As she responds, her face cycles through uncertainty, shame, confusion, and anger. At first, you think this is our protagonist, and she’s at therapy.

But that’s not the case - the voice off-screen belongs to our protagonist. Her name is Margaret Ballion, and she isn’t a therapist, she works at a biotech company, and she’s talking to her co-worker Gwyn, who is beginning to realize that her relationship isn’t a healthy one. Margaret, as we learn following through her day, is efficient, motivated, and highly independent. She’s presenting data at work, she’s going for a run, she’s waking up her teenage daughter Abbie, she’s having sex with a married coworker. She loves her daughter, she runs, she’s insightful about abuse, and she keeps other close relationships at arm’s length. It’s not a life for everyone, but Margaret seems to thrive in it.

At least, she does until she spots a familiar face at a conference. His name is David, and she hasn’t seen him in a very, very long time. And that’s when the memories start. And the nightmares.

What this film does best is beautifully capture the feeling when someone reencounters their abuser and how all of the growth, all of the change, all of the progress just melts away and you’re back to being that small, helpless thing again. Margaret already seems like she’s keeping everyone (except her daughter) distant. So you sort of know that she’s been through some shit before you actually know any particulars. In some ways, she’s not that different from the protagonist to Matriarch, albeit finding much more adaptive ways to cope. There’s that sense of running, and running is part of her life. And when she reencounters David, all of that crisp efficiency in work, in sex, in life, it all starts to crumble almost immediately. Is the life she’s built for herself over the last couple of decades really that fragile, or was David just that awful? It’s kind of both, really. The spiral is quick and painful to watch, in no small part because Margaret immediately locks down and tries to deal with it all by herself. A lot of this is about control - abusers exert it, and their survivors spend years, maybe the rest of their life trying to reclaim it. For all of her good insight and advice to Gwyn, Margaret’s a classic example of someone who can’t see for themselves what they see for others and the results are tragic.

The setting and visuals are an important part of how the story gets told. It takes place mostly in modern structures, lots of glass, concrete, everything sleek and polished, with one example standing out as an exception, a place seedier and uglier amidst everything else. In that moment, it feels like you’re visiting the monster in its den. The score is dominated by urgent strings, suggesting something pulling tight enough to snap and the pull of a treacherous undercurrent. But even more important than the sights and sounds are the performances, which are uniformly strong - the opening scene, where Gwyn’s experience is written all over her face, sets the tone. David’s sadism is starkly apparent without an ounce of scenery-chewing. This is a man who knows the control he has, how complete it is, and how easily he can reassert it. He knows exactly where Margaret’s soft spots are, and he uses that leverage quietly, but directly and mercilessly. Abbie is a believable teenage girl, someone who has lived with a mother who’s maybe a touch too protective, but not so much that she can’t speak her mind. Margaret, who seems so self-possessed and self-assured at the beginning, disintegrates over the course of the film without it ever tipping over into melodrama. The wideness in her eyes, the nervousness in her voice, even something as simple as messy hair registers as something meaningful, and the first act ends with Margaret finally revealing everything in a monologue about her time with David. It’s a long unbroken shot that goes on and on and on and on, and at the end of it, a light has gone out in her eyes. You almost need to come up for air once it’s over.

It’s not an especially violent film (until it is, and then whoo boy), a lot is suggested or happens offscreen, and that’s for the good. It reinforces the idea that once you’re in someone’s head like David is, you don’t have to shout or beat someone to get them to do what you want. Just get them where they’re vulnerable, and you’ve got them forever. There’s research into classical conditioning that suggests that old responses aren’t ever totally extinguished, that they can reassert themselves, and that’s very much what happens here. All it takes is for that one person to reenter someone’s life, and they’re right back where they were. Everything Margaret’s built begins to disintegrate, and since we spend the whole film with her, it becomes sort of difficult to know how much of this we should trust. Not in a schlocky way, the film plays pretty fair and there are little blink-and-you-miss-it bits of ambiguity that the film doesn’t bother to resolve. Which is good, a little uncertainty helps films like these, and it never really lands on one side or another. Like, if you wanted to read this as a story of mistaken identity leading someone to spiral into delusion, you could. Or you could take it as face value, the film isn’t telling you what to think. Like last week’s film and so many before that, the idea that a mother will do anything for her child is not a new one or one that always goes happy places.

There is the fairly obvious idea that if Margaret had just come clean about her past when shit started going down, then none of this would have happened. And yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t take into consideration the shame, the need to take of it yourself, the need to prove that you aren’t that person anymore, that fear that nobody will believe you, all of which are pretty common consequences to abuse. It doesn’t go the obvious route for a conclusion, though I didn’t find the end quite as “bonkers” or “batshit insane” as some others did. To me, it seemed like a logical conclusion to what came before, given how David treated Margaret. Nor did I see the ending as “unrealistically happy” like another critic did. These are all the kinds of responses you would expect from someone who has never been subjected to what Margaret had to live with. You wouldn’t know - you weren’t there.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

From Black: Grief Endured

When you think about it, the death of a loved one fuels a lot of horror. Parents, children, spouses, all used as the catalyst for something much worse, whether it’s psychological or supernatural. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, I think it’s because the death is used as sort of a shorthand for “and then this person lost their marbles.” Or, sometimes, “and then the loved one came back, except now they’re evil.” These are shallow, reductive takes, not interested in actually looking at how grief actually plays out. And grief is messy, ugly, complicated, in and of itself. I think it deserves better than being relegated to a one-size-fits-all plot device.

And I don’t know that From Black completely undoes that relegation, but it definitely helps. It’s a taut, understated look at the lengths grief takes us to that may not avoid some of the usual stops, but goes past them as well.

It opens on a 911 call. Someone’s in danger, there’s someone in the house. They have to hide. This cuts to a house, standing silent with crime scene tape flapping in the breeze. A police officer is walking through it, taking in everything she sees. A line of salt across a hallway, smudged. A chalk circle full of symbols, a pile of bloody bones in the middle. A couch covered in blood. Something very bad happened here.

Back at the station, the officer sits down with the woman who made the 911 call. She’s shell-shocked, spattered with blood and wrapped in a blanket. Her name is Cora, and she has a story to tell. She hasn’t always been the best mother to her son Noah. She’s spent a lot of time on hard drugs, in unhealthy relationships. And one day, as she lay on a couch in a filthy trailer home, deep on the nod, Noah walked out the door and just vanished. And she didn’t even realize it until it was too late. That’s the sort of thing that gets some people to rethink their life choices, and Cora cleaned herself up, moved back into her mother’s old house, and started going to a support group for bereaved parents. But the guilt and the shame are still there. When she finally speaks up in group, it’s like a flood coming out of her. All of the things she wishes she’d done differently and how tired she was of empty platitudes. How so often other people’s sympathy seemed more about them than about her. After the meeting, she’s approached by the group leader, who tells her that there’s a way to fix it, to undo all of it, to get Noah back.

There is a ritual.

As I said above, the story of someone who goes to any lengths to get their loved one back is not an especially novel one, but that’s not the point - this film does, I think, a better job than most at highlighting the anger, the rage, the resentment that attends especially difficult losses, like the loss of a child. When well-meaning people say things like “we’re in this together” not only does it not help, it actually makes it worse, and it’s not all that often that I see horror films get that emotional balance right. It’s maybe more common in drama, but in horror the tendency is to just dip it in histrionics and call it good. And one of the best things about this movie is how Cora isn’t suffering in noble silence. She’s furious and she’s sorrowful and she doesn’t trust anyone because she’s been at the receiving end of so many empty promises and silent judgment. She’s very wounded, and it comes across vividly and gives the movie some depth it could easily have missed.

I’ve seen this film get comparisons to A Dark Song, which is also an excellent film, but I really think the similarities don’t go any deeper than both films being about a woman who undergoes a difficult, dangerous magical ritual with the hopes of repairing the loss of a child. Everything outside of that is different. This is much closer to a conventional horror film than A Dark Song was. It bounces back and forth in time between the present and the events that Cora is recounting, as the police try to make sense of what they’ve found and make sense of what they’re telling her. And it works well in that regard - the returns to the present are like little spaces to breathe and moments to move the investigative pieces forward, and bit by bit the pieces come together over the course of the film. It’s deliberate, but not slow, and understated, except when it isn’t to sharp effect.

Likewise, the writing is mostly very good - sometimes it verges on speeches, but pulls up short of feeling artificial or contrived, and the performances are solid (Cora’s ex-boyfriend is one of the most believably loathsome I’ve seen since Bug). Everything is pitched to a human scale, and it does a very good job of showing instead of telling throughout. A lot gets revealed in little things narratively, asides and small gestures and background details, and it relies a lot on suggestion, on leaving things unseen, punctuated with moments that are lyrical, startling, or both. It’s also a film that’s content to let things happen in the background without calling our attention to it, and that’s a big one for me. It’s a film that respects the audience’s intelligence without being clever or precious about it. The details of the ritual, while maybe not as textbook as those of A Dark Song, don’t feel hokey or lurid, and the last act of the movie is a slow and steady ramping up to the point where Cora realizes exactly what the cost of her decision is going to be. The imagery is largely effective, and though the creature effects don’t really hang around long enough to start looking cheap, they come close. Though, I have to say, I’m ready to call a moratorium on drone shots of roads and landscapes, it’s starting to get out of hand. 

No film is perfect, but honestly my complaints here are pretty small. There’s maybe one really obvious plot device (you pretty much know one character’s eventual fate as soon as they get some real screen time) but it doesn’t really hurt the story, and the score is maybe a little too much, all rattles and thumps and ominous synthesizer and scraping, squeaking strings. It doesn’t really let up, and a number of scenes could use a little more silence and room to breathe, but when it’s appropriate it contributes well to the tension and unease. 

Grief really is something endured - it’s there all the time whether you want it to be or not, and even if it lightens over time it never really goes away and just like Cora spends most of the movie trying to convince the people around her that what happened was real, it can be extremely difficult to get people who aren’t sharing your burden to understand that it is a burden. And the people, like Cora, who bear that burden, aren’t perfect by any stretch. They make mistakes, they lose their temper, they fall apart. The film ends on a nicely inconclusive note that avoids the obvious and keeps things up in the air enough to leave a feeling of slight unease as the credits roll. That’s the thing about grief - it’s never really, truly resolved.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon