Rattlesnake: Not So Much A Slow Burn As No Burn

Different types of stories require different types of pacing. If you’re telling the story of someone who gradually finds their normal life turned upside down, you probably want to go with a slow burn, gradually escalating the tension to a late-film reveal. On the other hand, if you’re telling the story of someone put into an impossible situation, in a fight for survival or a race against time, you’re going to want to keep things tense and fast-paced, to communicate a sense of urgency.

Pacing isn’t the biggest problem with Rattlesnake, but it’s definitely right up there. It’s a dull, interminable, and formulaic exercise, almost entirely devoid of tension or surprise.

The movie opens with a woman and her daughter driving down a long, lonely stretch of Texas highway. The woman is Katrina, and apparently she and her daughter Clara are “starting over,” though exactly what that entails is never made clear. They’re playing an alphabetical version of I Spy to pass the time while they drive. Katrina’s also really big on inspirational podcasts, real power of positive thinking-type stuff.  She and Clara have a conversation about a boy at school who was bullying Clara’s friend. Clara says he deserved to get hurt. Katrina admonishes her, saying “nobody deserves to get hurt.” Even if you don’t know what’s coming, it’s a little on the nose. 

And sure enough, their car blows a tire, and when Katrina pulls over to change it, Clara wanders off and gets bitten by the titular rattlesnake. They’re in the middle of nowhere, Katrina can’t get a phone signal, and her daughter is worsening fast. Katrina spies a trailer in the distance, and although it appears deserted at first, a woman emerges from the back and says she’ll take care of Clara. We don’t see what happens, but Clara’s symptoms subside and the woman directs Katrina to the nearest town, telling her “we’ll discuss payment later.” Once they make it to the hospital in tiny little Tulia, TX, doctors determine that she doesn’t have anything worse than heat stroke, and look at Katrina strangely when she insists she was bitten by a snake. And then a well-dressed man walks into the room after the doctor has left, telling Katrina that he’s here to discuss her payment. Katrina reaches for her insurance information. 

“No,” the man says. “Your other payment.”

It’s very simple, the man says. In exchange for Clara’s life, Katrina must take the life of another person, and it must be done before sundown if she doesn’t want Clara’s healing to be undone. Clock’s ticking.

The premise is established early on, and the biggest problem with this is that little is done to develop the story beyond that. It’s pretty simple - Katrina needs to kill someone in this small town before the sun sets or her daughter will die. And there’s not much to it outside of that. So what this means is that Katrina looks for opportunities to take a life, but you know they’re doomed to fail, because at that point the movie will be over and at this point it’s only about fifteen or twenty minutes in.. For a story in which someone needs to die by sundown, there’s surprisingly little feeling of desperation or urgency. The stakes are literally life and death with a running countdown, but the pacing is sluggish, and Katrina never really registers more than what seems to be mild dismay at her situation, so there’s very little sense of momentum or tension. It all feels…leisurely, settling quickly into a rhythm of Katrina looking for an opportunity, then blowing that opportunity, then some mysterious apparition shows up and does something spooky to remind her of her obligation, rinse, repeat. I found myself saying “how much longer until this is over?” only to realize it was just the end of the first act. I’ve seen some formulaic horror films, but this one almost aggressively failed to hold my attention.

It’s not just the pacing either, there’s also an absence of real stakes as well. Katrina looks for an easy, justifiable victim, and the film front-loads her hard as someone who doesn’t believe in hurting other living things (apart from the “nobody deserves to get hurt” exchange at the beginning, there’s an animal-rights  “Friends, Not Food” bumper sticker on the back of her car, and though they don’t tattoo KILLING IS BAD on her forehead, they might as well). This means the entire premise of the film is a setup to see what it takes to get her to sacrifice her values, and it’s pretty shallow in that respect too. Another source of tension should be the act of pushing Katrina to do something contrary to her core values. We should get a sense of what this is costing her, she should look tortured, desperate, sick with the idea of what she has to do, and she never really seems more than a little worried. There’s no real journey there either - she looks for the easiest, most justifiable targets possible, the film hands her a false start or two before settling on a cartoonishly bad person who totally deserves to die, so it never feels like a challenge or a real conflict. It never rises above the level of cliché, and although it didn’t end exactly how I expected it to, it feinted toward that ending before shifting to some seriously contrived bullshit that took almost all responsibility off of her shoulders, so she barely had to compromise her principles at all and got what she wanted. 

Oh sure, the film tries to end on a spooky note, but it mostly lands flat because it’s not clear what the implications are. I’m certainly a big fan of not overexplaining, especially where the supernatural is concerned, but all of this feels a little out of nowhere. Apparently this town is plagued by mysterious random murders that are the result of people getting caught in this bargain but it’s not clear why or how, and the appearance of previous victims as messengers to Katrina would probably be a little spookier if you didn’t come to expect them like clockwork by the second act. So this might be one of those rare case where I’d like a little more than “oooh, a ghost healed her daughter and now she has to kill someone.” 

I think maybe the best way to describe this film is as deeply mechanical. It’s shot and lit like a well-budgeted TV show, and the soundtrack smothers everything in a layer of ominous ambient sounds, pounding drums, shrieking strings, there’s nothing subtle about it - everything is punctuated with musical stings just in case you don’t know it’s scary. It’s one of the films where you can see all of the moving parts, where it feels about as inorganic as possible. Sure, there are some gorgeous shots of what appears to be central Texas, and the scene where Katrina learns the price of her daughter’s rescue is nicely creepy (because at that point it hasn’t been done over and over again), but that’s about it. Otherwise, you have a pretty good idea how the whole thing is going to play out, more or less, before the first act is over and at no point does it ever surprise. It’s a race against time that meanders, with a central conflict that doesn’t cost the protagonist a thing, and is so predictable that you don’t even really need to watch it to know how any given scene is going to play out. It doesn’t really play as a slow burn, because it never even rises to a smolder. It just sits there, inert and obvious, nothing new.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix 

Game Over: Nope, Not Even A Metaphor

Every now and then I try to expand my horizons a little as I write this thing. I know for a fact that I have my wheelhouse (pretty much anything A24 distributes), and I’m very aware of the sort of stuff I don’t like, but I also know that there’s always the possibility that I’ll get stuck in a rut, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past when I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Every now and then I’ll try to break one of my internal “rules” that I use when I’m flipping through movies looking for something to watch, just to see what happens. It occurred to me this last weekend that most of my viewing history lies heavily in North America and the UK, with a smattering of Japanese or Korean horror films. There are exceptions, but not many, so I went looking for something from elsewhere in the world. Broadening your horizons is a good thing.

Game Over, however, is not really a good thing. It’s a ludicrous, confused mishmash of stories that don’t really work together, with some pretty gross sexual politics to boot. I’m going to end up pretty much spoiling this one entirely, because it’s difficult to explain what’s wrong with it without getting into details. And there’s a lot wrong with it.

The film opens with a photo of a woman, with a number scratched into the corner of the photo.  We cut to a shot of this woman outside of her apartment, paying for a food delivery. The point of view is from across the street. Then it’s from just outside her window. Then inside the apartment, as nightvision. Someone is stalking her. And then they’re killing her, beheading her and burning her body.

Cut to a title card that says “One Year Later” and…another story entirely. We’re introduced to Sapna, a video game designer. She’s got a really nice place in Chennai, with a gated entrance, a security guard, and a maid, a woman named Kalamma who frets over her. She works on designing games, she spends a lot of time playing Pac-Man. She’s got a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a pixelated heart with a game controller inside of it. She doesn’t sleep much. She doesn’t like leaving the house, she won’t return her parents’ calls. She really doesn’t like the dark.

And now, on New Year’s Day, she’s starting to suffer mysterious pains in her wrist, right where the tattoo is. Exactly one year after getting it. One year later. 

What does this have to do with the opening? Who can say? At least at first, this appears to be a story about how Sapna is more or less a prisoner in her own home for reasons that aren’t really clear at first, and the mysterious pain that may or may not be related to her tattoo. The first act is mostly just Sapna not wanting to talk to her parents, wondering why her wrist hurts, and going to therapy (where she goes through VR sessions intended to treat her fear of the dark, and strongly resemble a video game), punctuated by flashbacks to the events of a year before. When, as it eventually turns out, Sapna was abducted and sexually assaulted on New Year’s Day, on her way home from getting the tattoo. The anniversary is hitting her hard. 

And this is where one of my biggest problems with the movie comes in. I think it’s possible to use difficult, uncomfortable subject matter in horror and to use it well, but this…this ain’t it. At no point does Sapna’s pain and trauma and all of their consequences register as anything more than a prop, a contrivance to set up the events of the final act. She’s a woman in a country immersed in institutionalized rape culture - to the point that her parents effectively blame her for what happened to her - and it’s lingered on more than is necessary for the story, culminating in a pretty nasty sequence in a café, where Sapna discovers that her assault was recorded and distributed online when two bros at an adjacent table start arguing about whether or not she’s “the girl in the video” and bring up the footage on their smartphones. Sapna is suicidal by this point, but it’s not treated with any respect or gravity at all, it’s just there so an attempt can leave her wheelchair-bound during the climax. It all feels distastefully glib and more than a little prurient.

So there’s that, but then there’s my other big problem with this film - it careens from one narrative to another with little regard for any kind of through-line. If the first act is about establishing why Sapna is like she is, the second act is what seems to be a…ghost story? Apparently (speaking of contrivances), there was a mix-up at the tattoo studio where Sapna got her work done, and she got tattooed with ink containing ashes from…the remains of the woman murdered at the beginning of the movie. Maybe this is why she’s experiencing this mysterious the woman who was murdered at the beginning of the film. That also happened a year ago, and so maybe Sapna is experiencing her mysterious pain…because…ghost? It’s not really clear, we just find out that her name was Amudha, that she got tattooed at the same shop, and her mother came in after her death with the intent of getting a memorial tattoo that contained some of her daughter’s ashes but whoops! There’s a long film-within-a-film sequence as we (via Sapna) watch a tribute video Amudha’s mother put together after her murder celebrating her life and the cancer that she beat back into remission not one, but three times. Amudha got three hearts tattooed on her arm - one for each time her cancer went back into remission. 

And that’s going to be important, because in the third act it all comes together in the weirdest, most artificial way possible as the killer from the opening targets Sapna. Except it isn’t one killer, it’s three - a gang of men in identical masks and jumpsuits who apparently just go around murdering women, maybe because they got tattoos? That’s not really clear either, though Sapna’s parents are weirdly shaming about her having a tattoo, suggesting that it marks her as less virtuous and so maybe she was kind of asking for what happened to her and it’s all just fucking gross so let’s get back to the third act, which, if the first was half-assed psychological horror (it was) and the second was a half-assed ghost story (it was) , then the third act is a half-assed siege film that goes entirely off the rails as the initially metaphorical becomes really literal in just the most baffling way.

See, Sapna’s incessantly playing Pac-Man at the beginning. This is a game in which you are relentlessly pursued, and you’re constantly moving around a maze trying to avoid ghosts. Now, in the actual game, there are four ghosts, but in the version Sapna is shown playing, there are only three. There’s also the iconography of the heart - in video games, hearts can symbolize the amount of life or health a playable avatar has. Okay, with me so far? All of this metaphor become skull-clutchingly literal as the three killers (like the three ghosts in the version of Pac-Man she plays) stalk her through her own house, and now all of a sudden there are three hearts on her wrist, not one, like Amudha had, and so what happens next is that either Sapna and Kalamma gets caught and murdered, and then Sapna wakes up back at the start of the night with one less heart on her wrist just like in a video game. It makes no fucking sense in the context of anything that came before, except maybe in that it makes the first two acts seem even more artificial than they already did. Really, it just seems like an excuse to murder Sapna and Kalamma over and over again, prolonging their suffering in a way that seems downright sadistic. Basically, Sapna wakes back up, knows what to do differently the next time, then takes another shot at it, but each instance involves long, lingering takes on violence against her and Kalamma. 

So why is Sapna, as a character, traumatized? Because the filmmakers need something to make her helpless. When the psychological trauma doesn’t do, she attempts suicide and ends up with both legs badly broken so now she’s in a wheelchair with physical trauma as well, on top of parents who essentially blame her for her own rape. The bit with the ashes is, I guess, meant to either be something inspirational (though it comes off more maudlin than anything) or maybe that’s why she has “multiple lives” now, for…reasons? It really feels like the filmmakers had ideas for three different movies and couldn’t decide which one to make, so they made all of them instead, stitching them together with the thinnest of pretexts and using a genuinely upsetting subject as the springboard for a series of things that needed to happen to make the movie work. It’s shoddy storytelling and disrespectful to people who’ve gone through what they put their characters through. Suffering and trauma used as a prop, trauma from rape no less, in a film that has no idea what story it wants to tell. 

I’m not somebody who watches horror films to be entertained, really - I want to be unsettled, disturbed, moved to feel something I wouldn’t otherwise, and so I don’t have any problem with difficult or “problematic” subject matter. But, for Christ’s sake, make it mean something, and treat it with the respect it deserves. Don’t just treat it like a plot device. I definitely felt something when this film was over, but it was mostly just baffled, and a little mad at what I’d just seen. What a waste.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Reunion: Family Matter

I’m not generally a fan of films that spell everything out, and if you’ve been reading this thing for awhile that’s pretty apparent. Horror thrives on mystery, on the ambiguous, on the unexplained. But it’s a balance - even if the overall feeling of a film is disorienting or dreamlike, there should still be some sort of reckoning. That is, the viewer should be able to more or less make sense of what they’ve just watched, even if that sense arrives very late in the film, otherwise horror is replaced with confusion. You can get away with a lot if you bring everything together in the end.

So this is probably my biggest problem with Reunion. It has a lot going for it - it’s a modern riff on traditional gothic horror, impressionistic, uneasy, and cryptic. But, ultimately, it might be a little too cryptic for its own good.

We open on an academic lecture - we don’t see the speaker, it’s just a voice over a slide show, rapid-fire images of medieval illustrations of reproduction and birth. The unseen lecturer is talking about the transition from medieval ideas of alchemy to modern conceptions of science, and how in essence what we now know as biology and chemistry have their roots in black magic. A subject in which the lecturer has a personal interest, though there’s no time to get into that today.

The lecturer is Ellie. She’s working on a book about this very subject, but she’s taken some time away to travel back to her childhood home. Her father, Jack, suffers from advanced dementia, feeble and wheelchair-bound, and Ivy, her mother, is preparing to sell the house. Ellie’s there to help, though Ivy seems more concerned with Ellie’s health. Ellie’s pregnant, and Ivy doesn’t want her exerting herself. There’s some suggestion that it’s been a difficult pregnancy. Ivy tells Ellie how happy she is that she left her abusive fiancée. There’s tension between them. You get the sense that there are a lot of things that are going unsaid. Ivy really doesn’t want to talk about Cara, Ellie’s adoptive sister, who died a long time ago.

So why does Ellie keep seeing her?

Structurally, it’s a movie that starts off with little hints that things aren’t what they appear, and as the film goes on, more and more is revealed through flashbacks that add a little more context with each iteration, leading to a walloping reveal at the end. And at its heart, it owes a lot to traditional gothic horror - you’ve got a big, stately house full of family secrets and mysterious apparitions, and though Ellie isn’t exactly an ingenue, her mother is certainly a forbidding figure throughout. It’s a lot less stylized and melodramatic than, say, Stoker, but it treads some of the same ground. Even if the characters here feel more like actual people, there’s a lot lurking under the surface, and it gets pretty fucking weird. You’ve got a mother who starts the film as a little controlling, but the longer you spend in the film the more her cruelty and manipulation, her gaslighting, becomes readily apparent. Ivy is desperately trying to cover up something that happened years and years ago, and Ellie is a daughter who’s had to struggle for a sense of normalcy most of her life as a result, burying herself in arcane academic subjects. Their story is told in flashbacks and nightmares, repeated and recontextualized motifs throughout, progressing and giving us a little more context every time in a way that conveys the sense that memories are being recovered, that things long repressed are coming back to the surface. Objects and images keep coming up again and again, like they do in dreams, heavy with significance even when you aren’t sure what the significance actually is. 

This sense of dream logic extends to how the story is told as well. The dialogue is terse, with lots of oblique exchanges and little asides - blink-and-you-miss-it moments that make you think “what did she just say?” The film takes place almost entirely inside the house, all dark wood and stained glass, shafts of sunlight spilling onto antiques and stacks of boxes. There are nightmare sequences that weave in and out of the narrative alongside the flashbacks, so it isn’t always clear how much of what we’re seeing actually happened or is actually happening and how much is metaphor, and the action is punctuated by interludes of a sort - slideshows like the one that opens the film, slow-motion close-ups of cellular reproduction, blood flow, a feeling of the body as universe. The end result is almost as much tone poem as it is gothic horror, something that you don’t so much think about as feel while you watch it, the details blurring into a wash. As the film goes on, things get more and more bizarre, the lecture voicovers spiral into ranting, Ivy’s behavior likewise totters toward madness, and just when you think you have a handle on what this family’s horrible secret actually is, there’s something else that’s been foreshadowed all along, but not so much that it feels obvious when it becomes clear.

But in some ways, the things that give this film a very specific and uneasy atmosphere are things that work against it as well. The problem is that there’s a lot going on and it’s all presented so cursorily and briefly and in the margins that it’s hard to really get a fix on what the story is, like what the specific through-line is. It seems like it’s about Ellie’s attempts to resolve a childhood trauma, with her own mental health in a precarious condition, and there are ghost-story elements that presumably emerge from that. However, because we don’t really get a firm grounding in “reality” to start, the revelations we get in the last act maybe don’t quite hit as hard as they could, and the final revelation at the climax, which should be a game-changer, feels a little too confusing to have the impact it should, because it’s difficult to tell if it’s something that diegetically happened or if it’s another layer of metaphor, a more dramatically nightmarish expression of Ellie’s trauma. It’s still well-made, well-written and well-acted, and though it does take awhile to get there, it does get really unsettling in ways natural and supernatural by the final act. But if you’re going to be cryptic, then the pieces all need to fall into place in a way that makes all of the prior weirdness clear. There needs to be a reckoning, some kind of resolution, and this film seems reluctant to commit one way or another. It doesn’t ruin it, but it does take some of the sting out of it.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Gretel And Hansel: Avoiding The Obvious “Grim Fairy Tale” Joke

Following from my reconsideration of Midsommar last week, I got to thinking that fairytales, when you get right down to them, are dark and unsettling. They’re supposed to be, because they’re morality tales, ways to teach the young survival skills and cultural mores. They communicate to children that these are the stakes of straying from the straight and narrow, relics from a time when carelessness could easily get you killed. Over the generations their teeth have been lost, but if you look at what actually happens in these stories, holy shit. Every now and then you’ll see what’s supposed to be a horror “reimagining” of a fairy tale, but these are usually just gimmicky riffs on the slasher film. Nothing to write home about.

Gretel And Hansel, on the other hand, is an atmospheric and spooky reimagining of the classic fairytale, less a straight retelling of the story than an opportunity to explore it and the ideas around it, around what a world like theirs would be like, what witches are, and what it means to have (or be in) a story. It stumbles at points, but there’s a lot here to appreciate.

The film opens with the story of a little girl in a pink cap, and the bargain with darkness that her parents struck to save her life. It worked, and their only child did not die, but she was…changed…by the experience. She could bend others’ will to hers, to horrifying effect. And so her mother - now a widow - abandoned her to her fate, casting her out of the village and deep into the forest.

But that was a long time ago, and here and now we are concerned with Gretel, her brother Hansel in tow. It’s just the two of them and their mother, since their father has gone to his reward. She’s gone to the master of an inn to ask for work. She can bake, and launder. But the inn’s master in more interested in whether or not she’s kept her maidenhood. Gretel walks away, realizing she isn’t wanted for honest work, and Hansel asks her why she couldn’t have been more agreeable - he’s very hungry, and there could have been food there. Their mother is equally unsympathetic - poverty, disease, and traumatic grief have made her utterly incapable of taking care of them, and she entreats Gretel to dig their graves instead.

So there is no home for Gretel and Hansel anymore, they have been abandoned to their fate as well. They can do nothing but trek into the woods and hope to find shelter. And after some misadventure, they make their way to a lone cabin in the middle of the forest. There’s a warm light in the windows, and the table is laden with food. An old woman lives there. It seems like she’s been there awhile.

As if she moved deep into the forest a long time ago.

If you’re at all familiar with the fairytale, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how this story goes, but what makes this film interesting (besides its skillful execution) is the spin it puts on that story, how it recontextualizes it and uses it as a platform to think about the importance of self-definition and self-determination. First, it takes place in a very grounded world, one where pestilence and war has devastated the population, and everyone exists on the knife-edge of survival. Starvation and decay hang over the land like a miasma, and there’s little hope or mercy to be found. Gretel and Hansel are children, vulnerable, in a world where there are plenty of people prepared to take advantage. This film recasts Gretel as being older than Hansel, so she has to shoulder a lot of responsibility at what is still a very young age. There’s some resentment there because Hansel is, well, an impulsive little boy. This causes problems because he doesn’t have Gretel’s caution or restraint. He has little sense of danger, only his own desire to prove how brave and strong he is. The first part of the movie, then, almost plays like a 19th-century version of The Road as they fight hunger and exhaustion in their search for safety. 

Once they arrive at the old woman’s house, the film then does a lot of work around the different conceptions of witches. We have the little girl in the pink cap who is inherently evil (described in what is essentially a fairytale-within-a-fairytale), born of a bargain with darkness. But we also have the crone, the old woman who keeps herself to herself, who is wise in the ways of herbs and nature. It’s a depiction of witchcraft with which we’re familiar, albeit not in the context of this story. The film even cheekily nods to The Wizard Of Oz in a couple of places as well, and both the caricatured black-clad, pointy-hatted evocation of witchcraft as well as something closer to the sorceress, a powerful ritual magician. So it’s never as simple as “lure kids in with candy and throw them in the oven.” There’s a lot of other things going on. The crone who takes them in sees something in Gretel, and sees Hansel as burdening her, weighing her down. The story is less “mwhahahaha I am going to eat you,” and more “as long as your little brother is around, you’re not going to be able to grow into your own person because you feel obligated to take care of him.” The crone is almost more of a mentor to Gretel than anything else, and shows Gretel that she is powerful, and begins to teach her how to harness that power and use it to forge her own path, free of the expectations of others. It’s rooted in the original text, but uses it as a springboard to larger ideas. 

Which is not to say that there isn’t something very dark going on here, because there is. The crone doesn’t keep animals, does not raise crops, and yet there is always food. And as Gretel points out, nothing is given without a price. It’s beautifully, beautifully shot, with lots of brooding, windswept forest panoramas and dim, firelit interiors, spikily punctuated with plenty of striking nightmare sequences and inventive compositional and editing choices. The dialogue is a mixture of archaic and modern, mostly period-appropriate with the occasional anachronistic phrase thrown in, and the soundtrack is mostly dominated by synthesizer, which adds to the out-of-time quality while complementing the overall mood nicely. This creates the same sense of dreamy timelessness as the director’s other films - The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House - but here it lands better in some spots than others, and it shares the latter film’s tendency toward pontification, to its detriment, especially in the final act, which tips a little too much in favor of windy monologues at a point when what it really needs is faster pacing and more intensity. It never really builds to the crescendo that it should, and it loses a bit of steam in the last act. It’s vividly realized, but there’s a bit of coldness to it, some distance. 

Even if the denouement isn’t as cathartically scary as I wanted it to be (to its credit, it also never relies on jump scares - this is a film that, when it does do creepy, it does it very deliberately and very well), it invokes the idea of our personal “stories” to interesting effect - these people are literally in a story, a story in which other stories play a role, but the course of our lives is also sometimes called “our story,” so it’s as much about Gretel and Hansel’s right (and obligation) to find their own way, to become who they are meant to be, free of the hindrance of others, no matter how well-intentioned, as anything else. Which is a hell of a note for a fairytale. Pretty much a modern morality tale right there, a way to teach the young our values now, as much as ever.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Reconsidered: Midsommar

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

Midsommar - like director Ari Aster’s other horror film, Hereditary - is very much a film where there’s more going on than is apparent to the protagonists, with some kind of horrifying revelation coming at the climax. Think Rosemary’s Baby, or more recently, Kill List. They’re the kind of films where everything feels a little strange or off-kilter, but you can’t always put your finger on why until some kind of reveal, which puts everything you’ve just seen into context. It’s a tricky thing to pull off - if you’re too opaque, your revelation feels like it comes out of nowhere and the audience is confused. If you aren’t opaque enough, it’s obvious what’s happening, and you lose the shock of revelation.

So Aster really, really skillfully rides the line, by putting everything you need to understand what’s happening right in front of you, but doing so in such a way that you don’t realize it until it’s all over. This isn’t unique to him, but he’s mastered it in a way that few have. In the case of Midsommar, it’s in service of a story that uses the framework of a fairytale to tell a story of toxic masculinity in at least a couple of different forms - one more obvious than the other.

The Dark And The Wicked: Things Unsaid

In any ensemble horror film, there are a couple of ways that things can go - if the protagonists are sympathetic, they’ll generally band together and resist the evil preying on them, because looking out for your fellow human being is a sympathetic trait. You’ve also got the ones where the protagonists are basically selfish, obnoxious jerks who get picked off one by one. Personally, I don’t really think of the latter situation as horror, because there’s not much scary about cheering on the deaths of people you don’t like. Given the evergreen popularity of slasher films, I might be alone in that estimation.

But anyway, lately I’ve been really enjoying films that take people who are generally sympathetic and put them in a situation where they fail to come together, and everything goes bad as a result. Maybe they’re overmatched, maybe they’re deeply flawed, but even though they aren’t bad people, they just don’t or can’t get it together when it matters. Films like Hereditary, Green Room, The VVitch, and now The Dark And The Wicked, a creepy, atmospheric film about how a family’s inability to communicate or connect in the face of a tragedy allows evil to infect their lives and destroy them from the inside out

We open on a farm somewhere in rural Texas. It’s dark outside, not late-night dark, but early, early morning dark. This is a working farm. They raise sheep and goats, and chores start early. An old man lies in bed, hooked up to oxygen, unmoving. An old woman, careworn, works in the kitchen, softly singing a hymn under her breath. The house is modest, maybe even shabby. It’s quiet and still.

Until something unseen creaks a door open. Scrapes a chair across the floor. The old woman holds her breath, clamps her eyes shut, and wills herself not to look.

This is the Straker family farm, and siblings Louise and Michael have come home to look after their parents. Their father is gravely ill and wishes to die at home. Their mother has some help from their farmhand Charlie, but she’s trying to do far too much on her own. So, Louise and Michael have come home to say goodbye to their father and hopefully lighten their mother’s burden. You get the sense that it’s been a long time since the whole family was together. The siblings are worried about their mother - she seems overworked, run ragged, but that’s to be expected when she’s trying to keep a farm going and attend to her dying husband. She also seems…haunted. Afraid of something out there in the dark somewhere. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. 

She doesn’t want to talk about the thing that comes in the night and whispers to her.

This is a film that relies on atmosphere above all else. It’s a dark (thematically and visually) film with a drab palette - all of the color has been drained from this film, and the interiors are largely swallowed up by shadow, even during the daytime. It does a lot of work with silence that hangs in the air so that any interruption is startling. Doors open and lights switch on by themselves, the floorboards creak when there’s nobody walking across them. A wolf howls somewhere in the distance. As the film progresses, there are apparitions, visions, nightmare sequences that expertly punctuate the stillness. A couple of sequences verge on jump scares, but not so much that it becomes annoying, as jump scares often do. It’s as much about framing and pacing as anything else. The result is that a pall of dread falls over the film very quickly. It’s clear something isn’t right here, and that it isn’t going to get better on its own.

This emphasis on silence extends to the people in the film as well. There’s very little dialogue, and most of it is halting and elliptical. These aren’t people who talk a lot, and you get the sense that there’s pain in this house. Neither Louise nor Michael have been home in a long, long time, and they all haven’t been very good about keeping in touch. Michael’s got a family of his own, and Louise seems to be going through a rough patch. There’s definite guilt at how things have turned out, and you never get the sense that these people hate each other, but there is a bit of the feeling that this all too little, too late, that whatever damage has been done to this family is finally irreparable. Even now, in the face of tragedy, their mother doesn’t want to tell them what’s going on, doesn’t want to tell them why she told them not to come. It doesn’t seem unusual to Louise and Michael, they expect their mother not to make a fuss, to refuse help. This is a family that at their bedrock doesn’t talk about things, even things that bother them greatly. 

There isn’t a lot of character development, but people largely act like people - for as uncommunicative as they are, Louise and Michael are at least honest with each other where and when it matters, and when things start to get really strange, their thoughts turn not to how to defeat the evil that’s consuming their family whole, but how this is a bad scene and they should probably get out of there, complicated by their feelings for their parents. There’s also a refreshing lack of explanation for everything that’s happening. No serendipitously discovered ancient tome, no experts on hand to tell Louise and Michael what they need to do, no names, no origin stories, no history of ancient rituals. There’s something out there in the dark, and it’s also in there with them, and it’s feeding on all of them. Even a diary provides nothing but a litany of hopelessness and fear, and the overall feeling is that the die has been cast, and everyone is helpless in the face of something malevolent that is toying with them, torturing them, confident in its final victory. The word I keep seeing used to describe the film is “bleak,” and I have to say, it’s about right. There’s very little light in this film, and terrible things happen in the light too.

There are a few false notes. Not many, but noticeable by contrast in a film otherwise made with so much skill and attention to detail. The music is mostly tasteful strings and ambience, but gets overheated in a couple of spots, underlining the action a little too obviously. This is especially noticeable in a film that relies so much on silence and stillness and small details doing a lot of the work. One sequence falls a little into cliché, another feels less sinister than confusing, and toward the end we become so accustomed to things not being what they appear to be that one particular scene falls a little flat because you can sort of see it coming. But these are really small problems, as much about how nitpicky I get when a film is good as anything else. The overwhelming majority of this film is executed with a taste and restraint that modern horror films (at least in the U.S.) eschew as often as not, but without sacrificing any unease. In its unrelenting grimness and oppressive rural setting, it reminds me a lot of The Abandoned, and it’s one of the few films I’ve seen lately that actually made me gasp out loud more than once.

And if the damage done to this family’s relationship to each other is irreparable, then their fates are equally inexorable. The evil is already here, it’s already found its way in, there’s nothing to keep out. Evil finds its way in through the cracks in our ties to each other, it goes where love isn’t and spreads like a cancer from one person to another. It divides and conquers, and its triumph is absolute. Maybe this could have been avoided, maybe not, but it’s too late now, and it leaves you with an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach when the film ends.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Bug: You’re Never Really Safe

After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years, I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at conspiracy theories, shared irrational beliefs, the needs they meet and their consequences.

We really don’t like the unknown. From a survival standpoint, what you don’t know CAN kill you. So we look for pattern, for meaning, as much as possible. It’s wired into us, this need for things to make sense. Part of what makes horror films so scary is the extent to which they deal with the unknown, unknowable, uncertain, or unavoidable. All of the things that resist our attempts at making meaning.

But the flipside of that- the lengths to which we go to make meaning where there is none or where meaning is obscured - is equally a source of horror. This is where conspiracy theories begin - with an attempt to impose meaning on events which elude it. Sometimes, shit happens that is just too horrifying, traumatic, or too big to really get your head around, and one way people deal with it is to tell themselves a story that makes sense of it, even if that story requires you to believe in vast networks of secret organizations controlling every aspect of life. Bizarre though it might be, for some people it beats the alternative. 

Which brings me to Bug - an intense, nightmarish treatment of folie a deux, psychological disintegration, and the things we’re willing to believe to keep our lives from feeling entirely out of our control.

Agnes is a cocktail waitress in rural Oklahoma, and as the film opens, she’s dreading the return of her ex-husband, Jerry. Jerry just finished doing a bid for armed robbery, and he’s set on reuniting with Agnes - well, moving into her motel room, taking money out of her purse, and beating her when she gets too uppity, at any rate. Turns out they don’t really enforce restraining orders where Agnes lives. They used to have a son, and they don’t anymore.

So this is Agnes, lonely and worn away by tragedy and abuse, living in a squalid motel room in the middle of nowhere, her only comforts the occasional night out with friends, booze and cocaine. It’s not much of a life, and with Jerry back in her life, there’s fear now as well. And then one night her friend R.C. brings over Peter, a guy she just met not too long ago. He’s tagging along with them to a party. He’s shy, and quiet. Sort of awkward, but he seems nice. And they get to talking, and one thing leads to another. A moment of tenderness and grace in an otherwise bleak existence. He isn’t cruel, he isn’t callous.

He’s just really preoccupied with bugs.

And so as the film moves on, we learn more about Peter, about where he’s from, what he’s doing, how he sees the world. He sees bugs everywhere. He sees secret organizations behind every event in his life. There are people experimenting on him, and that’s why he had to escape from the hospital. They were turning him into a zombie assassin, just like they did Timothy McVeigh. But Agnes doesn’t freak out or run away from this. Oh sure, Peter has some weird ideas, but he doesn’t slap her around or steal from her. He’s a buffer between her and Jerry. And for someone in Agnes’ situation, that might just be enough. And in Agnes, Peter has someone who will listen to him, who takes him seriously and doesn’t call the cops when he starts going on about the bugs in his bloodstream. These are two people clinging to each other like the other is their life raft in a cold, incomprehensible world. Just as Peter isn’t Jerry, Agnes accepts Peter for who he is and what he believes, and so it becomes very easy for Peter’s explanation of the world to become Agnes’ as well. It becomes a story they tell each other about each other. one that allows each of them to feel like the horrible shit that has happened to them has an explanation. For Peter, the world is a vast machine manipulated by the military, by governments, by secret societies, and on some level, For someone who’s been through the wringer as much as Agnes, it makes as much sense as anything else, and it keeps Peter close to her. Playing along turns into belief soon enough, and it’s not long before we get a sense of just how deep Peter’s damage really runs.

The whole experience is grimy and claustrophobic - there’s maybe one sequence that doesn’t occur in Agnes’ motel room, which also illustrates the limits of her life, and the segments with Jerry exude menace. This room is almost her entire world, and Peter becomes part of that. People come and go, and as the film moves on it becomes more and more difficult to tell how much of what we’re seeing is actually happening and how much of it is Peter and Agnes’ shared delusion, punctuated with cutaway shots to hatching insects and the rush of blood through veins and arteries, as if their obsessions are invading our experience of the film itself. In this sense, this film is really good at playing with the same vagaries of perception that fuel conspiracy theories. We see and hear what we see and hear, but meaning isn’t made by eyes and ears, it’s made by the brain, and so perception is subjective, contingent on memory, our assumptions about meaning, the most accessible information we have, motivations, and biases. We see and hear what we want to see and hear, what we expect to see and hear. 

In this instance, the results are devastating. The dialogue is a little stagey at times (betraying the story’s origin as a play), but not enough to be distracting. It’s expertly paced, beginning on a note of unease, with Jerry stalking Agnes, and ticking along surely, Peter’s delusions moving more and more to the forefront the more time he spends with Agnes, who is all the more willing to believe them because Peter is, to her, the best thing that’s happened to her in some time, which is as much indicative of how bleak her life is as anything else, until the whole thing erupts into something almost operatic in its horror, the two of them finally collapsing into gibberish as their shared delusion reaches a fever pitch, two people moving further and further away from reality in an effort to make sense of their traumas. 

From the outside, it doesn’t seem plausible, how one person could believe in vast, faceless conspiracies to the degree that Peter does, let alone rope someone else into it. But spend enough time on your own, isolated and fearful, and anything that make sense of it starts to become attractive, because it makes the pain go away, and a lot of times that’s what people want. If believing some weird shit makes the pain go away, they’ll believe it. And it’s complicated by the fact that conspiracies do exist, albeit not at the scale of something like the Bilderberg Group or mind-control chips spread by viral transmission. Peter uses the existence of the very real MKULTRA and Tuskegee experiments as support for and justification of his own beliefs, and the appearance of a military doctor in the third act underscores this. We know Peter is delusional, but…well, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. 

Agnes and Peter are scared, in pain, and don’t feel like they have any control over their own lives, and if building an elaborate shared fantasy is what it takes to make the pain go away, well, that’s what it takes, and it ends badly. There are a lot of people out there who are scared, and in pain, and don’t feel like they have any control over their lives, and all it takes is a community of like-minded people who are all engaged in building an elaborate shared fantasy to make the pain go away, to make things make sense. As Peter says to Agnes, “you’re never really safe.” That’s a hard way to live, and so Agnes and Peter burrowed down into fantasy, burrowed so far that everything they used to be completely disappeared..

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon