Matriarch: A Mother’s Sacrifice

Motherhood is supposed to be this sacred, supremely benevolent thing. It’s warmth, nurturance, love, fertility, growth, a thing to be celebrated and valorized. Motherhood is supposed to be sacred, but all too often it isn’t. Motherhood can also be greedy and selfish and narcissistic, manipulative and self-serving. And there’s something profane about that, a massive violation of trust and care. It’s no wonder that motherhood distorted and disfigured comes up so much in horror. It’s one of those things that literally and metaphorically hits us where we live. Some things are supposed to be safe. Some places are supposed to be safe, and some people are supposed to be safe.

And when they aren’t, you get a film like Matriarch, a powerful, supremely uneasy tale of motherhood turned poisonous and sour.

Laura is an advertising executive in London, and we meet her as she’s getting ready for work. She’s coring the rotten section out of a peach and slicing up the rest into her cereal. She eats her breakfast and then promptly goes into the bathroom, shoving her fingers down her throat to vomit it all back up. She chases this with a few swigs of vodka and some snorts from a bottle of nasal spray. She gets into the office a little late, apologizes to her boss, she still has a cold. The same cold, her boss observes, that she’s had for a few months now. But Laura’s got it together. There’s a big pitch meeting coming up and Laura’s ready. Or, at least, she will be. It’s a quick study - she’s obviously running from something - the bulimia, the alcoholism, relentlessly driving herself forward. She’s brittle, pulled tight against her skin. There’s a desperation to her, brought into stark detail that night when she invites an old flame over and the cocaine comes out. It’s an all-nighter, with Laura still doing lines alone as the sun comes up. She’s trying to outrun herself, but ends up clutching at her chest and keeling over on her bathroom floor instead. As everything fades, she has a vision of a hand reaching out of an expanse of dark water…

…and she wakes back up. She should be dead, she knows that, but she isn’t. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her, how she didn’t die, or why dark, brackish fluid is seeping out of her. She needs answers, and that means going someplace she never thought she’d revisit, and seeing someone she’d sworn she would never see again. She’s going home to the small village where she was raised, and she’s going to see her mother. The reunion is polite, and her mother is the picture of health, looking to be in her late forties or early fifties.

But her mother is eighty years old.

This is a film that hits the ground running, in terms of its style and narrative. It takes place in a world that is drab throughout, a place drained of color and icily remote. The big city is all cold fluorescents and sleek, modern design, and the village has its own foreboding, a collection of old buildings and sheep paddocks, clusters of houses sunken into a maze of hedgerows taller than a person and a black, black marsh on the outside of town. It’s very much in the fine English tradition of villages with old, old secrets, observed in details that are modest, but sharp. It’s a place that is ugly and warped without being cartoonish about it. And when it’s not the inner emotional violence of Laura’s life away from home or the weirdness of the village itself, above and beyond all of that it’s Celia, Laura’s mother. Her toxic, manipulative mother, all of Laura’s anger and self-loathing explained by Celia’s immediate descent into a litany of denial and minimization and guilt trips and passive aggressive jabs. Her mood turns on a dime from mock-concern to wheedling to self-absorption to an inability (or refusal) to remember the past as Laura remembers it. Their dialogue is full of repressed anger that’s starting to spill through the seams, old resentments, old regrets, the cathartic venom of people finally saying things they’ve always wanted to say, soundtracked by woozy, discordant ambience. And it’s not just Celia, it’s the villagers as well, so bitter at Laura’s return but so interested in keeping her there. There’s never really a quiet moment in the film,  and since it’s very clear very early on that there’s something Not Right about this place, it’s a film threaded through with unease and discomfort.

And all of that is before Laura really starts to dig into what’s happening to her and what seems to be happening in the village. There are secrets, of course, and they run deep, old, and dark, culminating in a revelation that blasphemes the sanctities of religion and motherhood through vivid imagery and body horror. A bargain has been made, and the cost is coming due again. Motherhood is supposed to be about helping a child to grow and flourish, but for narcissists like Celia, it’s entirely about them instead and how they can use motherhood, capture it, feed upon it. It’s a story told in earthily visceral fashion.  

That said, the biggest problem with the film is that although a lot of the dialogue works, there are points where it does become stagey and affected. Conversations sometimes end up on the verge of becoming monologues, and some of the performances are broader than they should be. This threatens to overwhelm the film when things really start to heat up in the final act, but it rights itself in the end for something that’s equal parts horrifying and emotionally exhausting. It might not be quite as intense in its emotional violence as Hereditary or as carefully staged (few films are, though), but for as wrung out as I was by the end of this, it’s the closest touchpoint I can find. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi: The Devil You Don't Know

There are a number of things I feel like are overdone or just bad for scary movies in general. I think there’s sort of a glut of demonic possession movies, for example. And I’ve gone on the record at length, repeatedly, about how people need to stop making found-footage movies for awhile. And as a rule, I really, really dislike sequels and loathe the idea of “franchises.”

And so, by all rights, I should absolutely hate Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi (Dabbe: The Possession). It’s a found-footage movie about demonic possession and it’s the fourth in a series of six movies. But damned if it isn’t pretty good. Between this and the films of Can Evrenol, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been sleeping on Turkish horror all this time. It’s definitely got some flaws, but I think it manages to overcome the majority of them through sheer energy. It’s an intense film that puts a novel (to Western eyes) spin on some well-worn ideas.

That said, the beginning isn’t especially auspicious. We’re treated to a bunch of newspaper headlines about something terrible that happened in the village of Kibledere back in 1986. There’s a voiceover of a phone conversation between two people - one who’s trying to get at the truth of what happened, and another, a doctor who was there and really doesn’t want to share what he knows. It winds up with the doctor telling this other person to speak to a colleague of his who visited the village recently - Dr. Ebru Keraduman. Then there’s a barrage of horrific images that slam right into the title. It’s…not subtle. At all.

But we cut to Ebru as she’s testing out her camera. She’s a psychiatrist who’s taken an interest in claims of possession and the techniques employed by the people who claim to be able to exorcise evil spirits. So she’s come to watch one such exorcism and interview the person doing it, Faruk Akat. In a small room, a group of women and Faruk gather around another older woman, who alternates between wailing, frenetic cursing and threats to reveal everyone’s dirty secrets, and puking up gross-looking things into a kiddie pool in the middle of the circle. This goes on for some time, Faruk places strips of paper with writing on them into the pool, there’s a great roar and the possessed woman horks up something that looks like a teratoma. Faruk pronounces her cured.

Ebru is, needless to say, skeptical. She interviews Faruk, asking him what the specific mechanisms are behind exorcism, asking how this is anything distinct from more modern diagnoses of mental illness, challenging his narrative in the way you’d expect from a science-versus-mysticism sort of story, though maybe not as obnoxiously as she could. Still, he thinks he can prove what he does is real, and she puts the onus on him by stipulating that she choose his next client - someone he doesn’t know, so that collusion is more difficult. So they travel to visit relatives of Ebru’s - her aunt Refika and Refika’s daughter Kübra. They live in a small village not far from the abandoned ruins of Kibledere. Kübra hasn’t been feeling well lately.

At her engagement celebration, Kübra stabbed her fiancé to death. A voice told her to do it.

In some ways, this film embraces a number of cliches - the opening title sequence is something we’ve seen variations on a dozen times before, and you’ve got the skeptical scientist insisting on rational explanations for everything and the exorcist who insists that there’s more to heaven and earth than her philosophy. The possessed talk in creepy, raspy, unnaturally low voices and know stuff they shouldn’t be able to know. There are narrative turns that you’ll see coming if only because you know how these kinds of stories are structured. But it also avoids a number of cliches simply by being made outside of the West. The forces possessing these people are djinns, not demons, and it’s more than a cosmetic difference. Humanity’s relationship to them as a class of spirits is more complex than the Christian idea of demons, so it isn’t strictly a story of evil infiltrating a family. And Faruk is Muslim, so there’s a distinct absence of holy water, crosses and the Roman Ritual. This is, of course, not exotic at all in Turkey, but it’s new to me, and it gives me a different perspective on old ideas.

And even though the bones of the story are themselves nothing especially novel, they’re handled well and there’s a nice third-act twist that benefits from misdirection leading up to it. The imagery used to tell the story departs from cliché in a number of ways - there are some of the things you’d expect, but a lot of things you don’t see very often, some unnerving, some downright gross, but enough to keep you on your toes. It’s a story about spirits and curses and witchcraft and family secrets, giving it more to work with than the standard possession movie. Some moments may not land exactly right and might seem a little silly, but just as many contribute to a sense of dread, of the protagonists getting in over their head.

The story is told as a found-footage narrative, primarily from Ebru’s point of view, though the camera gets passed around a little, and there are some multi-camera setups for things she’s documenting. And like any other found-footage film, there’s a push and pull between plausibility (cameras being set up for interviews to capture different angles, the camera not always being pointed where it should because someone’s running for their life) and violation of that plausibility. There’s the occasional shot from an angle that can’t be accounted for, incidental music in places even though this is camcorder footage, unlikely close-ups, stuff like that, but for once it doesn’t really bother me because the story’s good enough and it has enough momentum and energy to keep me watching and not be so distracted by failures of verisimilitude.

And that momentum and energy is another thing I think it has going for it. It was obviously made on a low budget, but it isn’t necessarily cheap-looking, and the effects are mostly very simple. Sometimes they’re simple to the point of being a little clumsy or obvious, but it’s in a way that gives the film the same nervy, kinetic energy that The Evil Dead had. There’s an intensity and vigor to moments that sort of propel you past any shortcomings and keep the tension level high. It’s also got the same propensity for letting things happen while nobody’s in the room and use of camera distortion to indicate an evil presence that Final Prayer had, and the camerawork is believably jittery and close, which puts me in mind of [REC]. To my mind, this is some good company in which to be. It does dread and anxiety and creepy settings and normal settings with creepy things happening in them very well. And it’s…a histrionic film, there’s a lot of yelling, but it doesn’t come off as grating or contrived, and the relationships between people feel pretty believable. Even Ebru and Faruk, though they have very different takes on what’s happening around them, are mostly collegial, reasonable adults. And the whole thing rises to a shrill scream at the climax, ending on as dark and bleak a note as you could ask for. It’s a ride.

It does have its problems - the English subtitles are somewhat clumsily translated, which is part of what makes the title sequence less effective than it could be, and it ends up making one fairly important moment unintentionally comic. I was dismayed by the distasteful use of actual photos of children with birth defects to depict victims of a curse, and the ending, for all of its “oh shit oh shit” energy, does take a little long to get where it’s going. And that absolute gut-punch of an ending is somewhat undercut by a fairly unnecessary epilogue that pulls back a little on what we see. But all things considered, it’s a surprisingly strong effort for something that, to my mind, had so much going against it from the start.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Hellraiser (2022): The Flesh Failures

This is going to be a tough one for me to talk about. On the one hand, the original Hellraiser was an extremely formative film for me. Sitting in a free midnight screening in a mostly-empty theater, watching it play out on a big screen in the dark, it was the first time I think I ever watched any sort of film and got the feeling that all bets were off, that anything could happen. It almost felt…unsafe, and that stuck with me. It wouldn’t be the last time a film made me feel that way, but it was definitely the first. And a few years back, I waded into the nine extant films in the Hellraiser franchise (ugh), and barring some special effects that haven’t aged well, it still holds up surprisingly well.

But on the other hand, there’s the other eight films, and what I discovered re-watching the first four for the first time in years and watching numbers 5 through 9 for the first time is that not only would subsequent films fail to replicate what made the original so special, they’d decline in general quality really fucking fast. It was another example (alongside Nightmare On Elm Street) of the studio deciding to just start cranking out sequels while the property was still hot, without any regard for what made the original good or interesting. In the case of these films, the nadir was a slapdash stab at found-footage that was made - start to finish - in three weeks, purely to keep the studio’s license for the IP from lapsing. It was literally a film that wasn’t made to be viewed. It’s hard for me to think of a more cynical and calculated thing, and this is considering that every film in the series after the fourth was an unrelated screenplay that was retrofitted into a Hellraiser movie to varying degrees of success. They didn’t even bother to write them. Another one came out in 2018 to equally poor reception, but I was done.

So, Hellraiser (2022) simultaneously does and doesn’t have a lot to live up to. It has the shadow of the original hanging over it, but on the other hand the remaining films set the bar pretty low. And so my experience watching this film was a confusing one for me. It’s hard for me to tell how much I like it, or if I just appreciate it. And no, it’s not the revelatory experience the first one was for me. It doesn’t really do anything unexpected, and it does have problems, mostly in the third act. But it also does a lot of stuff right, and so it’s safe to say that even with its flaws, it’s miles better than any of the films that followed the original,

It opens on a gray day in Belgrade. There’s a man sitting on a bench with a satchel, and a woman approaches him. The whole thing feels like something out of a spy movie, in a good way. They’re there to make an exchange. She gives him a large sum of money, and he gives her a wooden box containing something that we don’t get to see. Cut to a large mansion in the Berkshires. There’s some kind of party going on, it’s all very stylish in a perfume commercial sort of way, and reminds me of nothing so much as a 1990s take on wealth and decadence. A fit young man sits nervously at the bar, and the woman from Belgrade sits next to him. She suggests that she can introduce him to the owner of the mansion and he jumps at the chance. The young man is Joey, and he’s being introduced to wealthy art collector Roland Voight. He’s ushered into a large room filled with small sculptures and art objects, and one of them is a small wooden puzzle box of intricate design. At Voight’s encouragement, Joey starts trying to solve the puzzle, and with a few twists and turns, it snaps into a new configuration, one that causes a blade to pierce Joey’s hand. Voight is unsurprised by this. The room starts spinning for Joey. Storm clouds gather, and then…something is in the room with them. Something with chains and hooks. Something to which Voight appeals. Something that takes Joey away.

Six years later, we meet Riley while she’s having noisy sex with her boyfriend Trevor…as it turns out, while her brother Matt, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate Nora are in the other room making dinner. It’s a quick study - Riley’s a few months out of rehab, and given that she met Trevor in rehab, she’s kind of a mess. The dynamic between all of them is established pretty economically through how things are said as much as what is said - it’s a little exposition-heavy to start, but it rights itself. Riley’s underemployed, and is trying to figure out something better so she can get out of Matt’s apartment. Trevor starts to suggest something, but hesitates because she’s “trying to be good.” But when pushed, he reveals that at his job he made a lot of deliveries of “billionaire shit” to a warehouse out on the edges of the city, and after one last one, the orders just…stopped, and the warehouse seems to have been abandoned. But maybe there’s still some billionaire shit inside, and he remembers the keycode.

So they break into this warehouse and discover a single shipping container. Cutting the lock reveals a safe. Smashing the dial off the safe reveals a wooden case.

A wooden case with a familiar-looking puzzle box inside.

The film gets off to a wobbly start - the very beginning is a nice inversion of the grubby backroom deal that opens the original film, but then it cuts to the wealthy decadence thing that seems more like something out of one of the sequels. and the beats feel pretty predictable. But then when it shifts into the more intimate story of Riley and her brother, things start to feel more grounded. We settle into this difficult relationship and the people touched by it to one degree or another, and it feels pretty natural. And throughout, Riley’s at the center of all of it, as her decisions spiral outward to suck more and more of the people who care about her into something they can’t begin to explain, something full of blood and pain.

And so this is another way it’s in conversation with the original film. The original was very much about desire, and the price we’re willing to pay to satisfy our desires. And here there’s a definite narrative about needs and weaknesses and compulsions and hungers that runs through the whole film, along with the cost they exert on the individual and everyone around them. Riley has a self-destructive streak a mile wide, one that doesn’t manifest in melodramatic ways, as much as in consistently making the wrong decision, whatever form that takes. Whatever the safe, healthy thing to do is, she runs as far from that as she can. And Matt, time and time again, runs codependently after her, as compelled to try and fix her or rescue her as she is to destroy herself. So where the story of the decadent eager to seek newer and more exotic sensations drove the original film, here it’s more about someone on the ragged end of that, someone who’s become a prisoner to the things they sought. But the point is the same throughout - these needs…all of them… have a cost. And I’ll give the film credit for driving the action with human frailty to the degree that it does.

Elsewhere, it acknowledges the original film in tasteful, restrained ways - there are a number of visual and musical allusions throughout, more like it’s using the vocabulary of the first film than repeating scenes or anything obvious like that. It feels as much like an updating of what the first film did (and none of the subsequent films bothered to do) as anything else, nothing so blatant as stunt casting or fanservice, and what little bits of worldbuilding there are don’t distract from the story too much. There’s always the danger of spending more time on the mythology than the story or the people, and that doesn’t really happen here. If anything, it explores some of the ideas from the second film from a slightly different angle, in ways that are sometimes more successful, and in others less so, but never to the corny, sub-Freddy Kreuger depths of that film’s final act. In a lot of ways, it feels like what a sequel to the original film would have been with a bigger budget and a focus on making a good film instead of trying to crank something out as quickly as possible. To be fair, Hellraiser 2 had a really good second act, but that’s about it.

But as well-made as it is, it does feel like it’s missing something for me, and I can’t tell how much of it is how the film is made and how much of it is me bringing my own history to it. It has a couple of good, tense moments in the third act and a twist I didn’t see coming, but I’ve seen variations on this story, I know how the world of this film works and it never really stretches that or does much to upend it. It’s respectful to the original, and that’s good, but perhaps too respectful. I’m never really surprised or shown anything new, and though I suspect that someone who’s never seen the original film could be startled by this - it’s still got a vision unlike anything else in horror - it also doesn’t capture the grimy fervor of the original, that sense that you’re in the hands of someone who isn’t playing safe with their ideas. It gets very violent in places, though not often, so there’s still a punch to it when it happens and as much is accomplished through restraint as graphic depiction. But it’s all…maybe a little too clean, a little too polite, missing that sense of connection to hunger and desire that the original film has. It’s colder, more cerebral in ways, where the original had a kinky, transgressive heat to it. I do appreciate that the antagonists are as aloof as they originally were, and the updated designs work well in some places, less well in others. But the sense of menace is largely restored.

And there are narrative issues as well. The pacing lags at times, and the ending drags out a little too much, trying to tie up too many pieces all at once, slowing things down and reducing the tension, and the way it all resolves feels a little stock to me. There’s a coda that seems maybe a little obvious and sequel-baity, though it’s well-done for all of that. It’s certainly better than any of the increasingly misbegotten sequels that followed the original, and in its subject matter I feel like it’s a better take on what Hellraiser 2 was trying to do than what that film accomplished, but it’s not the original. You can only make a film like that once.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Inunaki Mura: Secrets And Lies

How many horror movies have you seen that revolve around a secret? Whether it’s a “terrible secret” or “dark secret” or some other variation, people have them, houses have them, entire towns have them, and the horror generally lies in the revelation of that secret, the truth of what happened oh so long ago. As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that that’s also not that unusual a premise for drama too, but shhhh, we don’t talk about that. The point is, it’s something that comes up a lot.

Like lots of ghost stories and stories about cursed places, Inunaki Mura (Howling Village) is very much about secrets, especially secrets kept intergenerationally. And it could have been a pretty good ghost story, but ultimately it tries to do too much and suffers from pacing issues, especially in the third act.

Akina and her boyfriend Yuma are out in the country in the middle of the night, testing an urban legend. They’ve heard that there’s one particular old tunnel, known as the “Howling Tunnel,” and every night at 2am, the pay phone next to the tunnel entrance rings, and when it does, the tunnel opens up as a pathway to a mysterious, forgotten village. And so here they are, at this payphone in front of this tunnel at two in the morning, recording themselves, and they’re just about to give up and go home when the pay phone suddenly rings. Akina answers it, and we don’t hear what she hears, but she says “we’ll be there right away” and then runs off, Yuma desperately trying to keep up.

They run down the length of this old, dark tunnel and come out into the woods. They find a sign lying on the ground. A sign that reads “the Constitution of Japan does not apply beyond this point.” There’s a village, deserted and falling into ruin.

Well, not entirely deserted.

Akina and Yuma make it out alive (barely), and Akina isn’t really the same afterward. Elsewhere, Yuma’s older sister Kaneda, a psychologist at a hospital, is working with a little boy whose parents have brough him in because he’s exhibiting some unusual behavior. Like talking to people who aren’t there. Except Kaneda can see them. And they can see her. So we’ve got a village that doesn’t show up on any map but appears mysteriously under the right circumstances, and ghosts sort of walking around in the waking world. This being a Japanese horror film, stories about lost and vengeful spirits fit right into a larger tradition, but unlike films like Ringu or Dark Water, it never really develops the same sense of brooding atmosphere those films have. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its moments - it absolutely does, making up for the lack of atmosphere with inventive visual approaches to flashbacks and some genuinely startling moments. But these strengths are undercut, first by the film’s pacing. The story hits the ground running, which isn’t a problem by itself, but it only lets moments breathe intermittently, sometimes falling into a tendency to barrage us with spooky moments or melodrama, so nothing really has a chance to take hold, and there’s little sense of events building either. And it’s not so consistent as to feel unrelenting or oppressive, so it doesn’t really generate tension that way either. There are moments in and of themselves that work very well, that are unnerving in ways that avoid cliche, but they just sort of exist as discrete moments placed next to each other, rather than as a cohesive experience.

The other big problem is a few too many ingredients in the stew. At the core of this film is a really good idea about a mythical village that doesn’t appear on any map and can only be reached through a specific abandoned tunnel in the middle of the night. And behind this village is a story, a really upsetting and horrifying story, one that drives a lot of the better moments and which could have easily carried the film by itself. But then there’s also a psychic doctor who can see dead people and on top of that there’s some kind of curse associated with the village (one which appears to have a pretty distasteful origin) that’s starting to affect people and all of it together just ends up being too much. The curse especially dominates the third act, crowding out the more interesting stuff about the village’s history, and since it’s something that’s sort of introduced in the middle of the film, it feels like the whole story just takes a hard left turn into a different, less interesting story. On top of that, the third act, when things should be coming to a head, just drags and drags until the film sort limps to a close with another instance of “the end…OR IS IT?” that lands with a thud. It's like the film sort of forgot what it was about as it was concluding, or that it realized it had this whole other storyline with which it hadn’t done much up to this point.

Like in the other Japanese horror films I mentioned above, water is an important signifier of death and the afterlife here, as well as the futility of trying to hide the sins of the past, because they always stay with you and will rise to the surface eventually. There’s a terrible secret about this village, one that residents of the area would rather forget, alongside other, smaller secrets - doctors who falsify autopsy reports to hide a family’s disgrace, fathers who lie about their children’s parentage to save the mother’s feelings, all of these ways that tragedies past and present are covered up for the sake of appearances. If the film had been content to keep this more metaphorical and centered on the story of the village, it would I think have been a much stronger offering. As it is, it becomes entirely too literal in some ways that end up making the whole thing kind of a confusing mess in the final analysis.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Gaia: Getting Lost In The Forest

Sometimes, you think you know what you’re in for when you go into a movie and it ends up being something else - either in a sly subversion of the premise or what is just a hard swerve out of nowhere. There’s something appealing to me about going into something with expectations that get firmly upended. You watch enough genre films, you’ll start to get a sense of what the beats are going to be. So anything that jolts me out of that is going to be welcome. At least, it will be when it’s done well, This is the biggest problem with Gaia. There’s a good, effective body-horror story in this film somewhere, and it’s a pity that that’s not the story it ultimately chooses to tell.

It opens on a vertiginous shot of a vast, unbroken expanse of forest that slowly upends itself in a way that is disorienting. It’s a good moment, really establishing a sense of nature as something alien and hallucinatory, but as one of those people who’s watched a lot of genre films, all I could think was “wow, drone shots are starting to turn into their own sort of cliché, aren’t they?”…before it cuts to someone in a canoe, on a river, flying a drone. Well-played, film, well-played.

There are two people in the canoe - Winston and Gabi. They’re rangers for the South African forestry service, out doing surveys, collecting footage from stationary cameras, making sure nothing’s amiss. Gabi’s piloting the drone and it’s about two kilometers out when it collides with something, or someone and loses signal. This isn’t good, it’s expensive equipment and they don’t want to leave their trash in the forest. Winston doesn’t want Gabi to go out alone - people disappear in these forests - but she insists she’ll be fine and won’t be gone long. Meanwhile, two figures dressed in handmade rags, covered in mud, move slowly through the forest. One of them has the drone strapped to his back. They smear mud of the lenses of the rangers’ cameras. They set booby traps in the forest.

People disappear in these forests.

Gabi discovers that the two mysterious figures are Barend and Stefan - father and son who have left the modern world behind to live off the grid in the forest. Not just living off of the land, worshipping the land. Specifically, a giant mycorrhizal network spanning the breadth of the forest. A vast, singular organism that, as Barend puts it, was old before apes even started dreaming of gods. It is ancient, huge, and its spores have a way of taking over those exposed to them, until none of their humanity is left. This is why they set traps, and Gabi is, effectively, trapped with them in their ramshackle cabin in the middle of the forest.

In ways both large and small, this film bears more than a bit of a resemblance to In The Earth - they take place in two very different parts of the world, in two very different cultural contexts, but both concern themselves with people who go into the forest for work and discover hermits living there, in the middle of something vast and strange at a point where nature becomes something entirely other. A vast fungal network underlying the forest is important in both cases, as are ideas about what our relationship to nature is or should be or even can be. Coincidentally, really unpleasant foot injuries are also key to both films. I don’t think it’s plagiarism or anything as much as convergence on common themes (both were written and made in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown, which was certainly fertile ground for malevolent-nature stories). And both have their shortcomings, but I think In The Earth comes out of the comparison better, because although Gaia has a lot of what you’d need for a good, visceral take on nature at its most indifferent and alien (something In The Earth largely forsakes for a more cerebral approach and a barrage of psychedelia), it decides instead that it primarily wants to be the story of the dynamic between Gabi, Barend and Stefan. And honestly, the characterization isn’t there to support it. It’s got all this other compelling stuff around parasitic plant life and body horror that it effectively relegates to the background by the halfway point. In The Earth, for its faults (mostly a messy ending), creates a mood of real tension and danger, mostly around the people in this strange landscape. This film squanders a vivid, more conventionally horror-based expression of that same landscape for what is effectively a relationship drama. And relationship dramas are fine, but it’s not what we came here for and the characters aren’t fleshed out enough for us to really care at that level.

And it sucks, because it really is a vividly told story when it’s good. Microphotographic shots of plants and time-lapse footage of sprouting fungi, floating spores and branching tendrils really work to sell the almost Lovecraftian otherness of the deep forest, and the ecosystem that holds sway out there, centered around a massive fungal presence that almost seems to breathe, makes for some really striking and unsettling body horror. It’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s definitely not your stock infection narrative - there’s a resemblance to some of the imagery from Annihilation (and the video game The Last Of Us, which is getting its own adaptation on HBO soon enough), but it isn’t really derivative. It’s less in the service of surrealism and more meant to unnerve us, which it does quite well. There’s an icky, visceral tactility to it because it takes things we see in nature all the time and puts them in contexts which make you sort of realize that yeah, something like this could very well be out there, waiting for us to delve too greedily and too deep, to burrow into our flesh and begin to sprout.

At least, when that’s the story and imagery that’s at the forefront of the film, which it is only fitfully, and in a way that doesn’t really sustain a sense of dread. This is another problem with the film - it’s got all the right parts, but they’re put together in a way that largely undercuts their impact. The film’s pitched in such a way that we’re supposed to think that Gabi only gradually realizes that Barend and Stefan might not be entirely benevolent, but it’s clear early on that they have their own agenda. Rather than gradually building to a reveal of just how far the fungal organism has spread and what it’s actually done to people and the forest, things that feel like major revelations are sort of dropped in here and there without a lot of buildup or sense of their importance, and though they’re moments that are impressive and still startling in and of themselves, they don’t really hang together because they’re seeded in between the development of a dynamic between Gabi and Barend and Stefan, and in the second half of the film, that seems to be what the filmmaker’s more interested in exploring. 

And there’s not much to explore there, as it turns out. Not that they’re cartoons (well, Barend starts getting there toward the end), just that we don’t know much about them one way or the other. It’s a very terse film in terms of dialogue, which is fine and for a story focused on the threat all around them that’d work well, but for a character and relationship study, it falls short. We don’t really know why Gabi makes some of the choices she does, Stefan is largely a cipher, almost a Tarzan to Gabi’s Jane, and Barend goes from having some potential depth to ranting fanatic, right on cue. There is, on the other hand, some interesting subtext with Barend, in that you have this highly educated Afrikaner rejecting modern civilization and presuming to go native and in the process decide that he in effect knows what’s best for humanity. Meanwhile, you’ve got African natives Gabi and Winston, working to preserve the land that Barend’s decided he understands better than everyone else. It echoes South African colonialism, and though it’s never explicitly addressed, I don’t think it needs to be. It might just be down to opportune casting, but it does give the film in whatever form it takes a little bite it otherwise wouldn’t have had.

There’s a lot of vivid, disturbing imagery, and to the extent that this is a monster movie, the designs are supremely creepy and the effects entirely believable. This is a film with a good sense of restraint about how and how long to keep creatures on camera, so the mystery’s never really dispelled. On the other hand, the filmmakers made the puzzling choice to locate as much of the horror in nightmare sequences as in actual happenings, even though they’re both pretty similar in imagery and outcome. Usually nightmare sequences are used to communicate some kind of oncoming dread in a way that violates our understanding of the real world, so it doesn’t make much sense for the nightmares to be of things that actually end up happening in the waking world. It feels redundant, and nightmares get used often enough that it starts to feel repetitive and tiresome. There’s one extended hallucination sequence (because, again, fungi and Mother Nature, it’s kind of the law) that, oddly enough, feels if anything a little pedestrian given what we’ve already seen elsewhere.

And finally, though the end of the story proper is a very evocative sequence, it feels sort of anticlimactic, and then there’s a coda that’s not just a “the end...OR IS IT?” cliché, but manages to be preachy in the process. I get wanting your film to Say Something, but I think one thing some filmmakers miss is that a very straightforward film is just as capable of that, if not more, than one where the filmmakers are consciously trying to communicate a message. That ends up being clumsy and didactic, as it is here, and so the film ends with kind of a thud.

The movie about the utter unknowability and mystery and indifference of nature, about how our bodies aren’t necessarily our own, that movie would have been a pretty straightforward monster film with some great almost Lovecraftian touches in malevolent nature. But trying to actively make points about mankind and nature and our relationship to each other and to nature and What It All Means just ends up feeling kind of callow and missing the mark. It certainly takes a hard swerve into the unexpected, just not in a way that’s at all satisfying.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

The Whole Truth: Too Much, All At Once

I have my biases, and one of them is for focused, elegantly constructed stories. Shit, given that we’re talking about scary movies, you could probably call a preference for an actual story a bias. Whether it’s a simple, cleanly executed premise or an elaborate clockwork of a thing, having a story that ticks along, hitting the notes it needs to hit when it needs to hit them, just feels satisfying to me. You don’t need gore, you don’t need creature effects, you don’t need a lot of screaming. With the right story, just a look or an open door or a well-placed shadow can be utterly frightening.

This is not, unfortunately, a lesson learned by the people who made The Whole Truth. It starts off promising, but gradually devolves into a mess as it tries to cram about three or four different stories together to the detriment of all of them.

Mai is a single mother with two teenage kids - her daughter Pim and her son Putt. Dad’s not in the picture, and nobody mentions him. Mai’s just gotten a promotion at work to head of international sales, which is awesome, Pim’s up for captain of her school’s cheerleading squad, and Putt…well, Putt is shy, disabled, gets bullied a lot, and has a “friend” named Fame who invites himself over to aggressively creep on Pim and threaten Putt with some sort of blackmail. Mai plans to go out with her kids to celebrate her promotion, but she gets stuck at work late - her new job means having to hang around for a long meeting with a major client. On her way home, she’s struck head-on by a drunk driver.

Now Mai is in the hospital, comatose. Her condition is stable, but the doctors only give her about a fifty-fifty chance of ever waking up again. So now Pim and Putt are effectively orphans, and in steps Mai’s father, Phong. He takes them into his care, bringing them back home, where they meet their grandmother, Wan. Pim and Putt don’t really know their grandparents very well - never visited them, didn’t really hear from them, and they’re not exactly the warmest people. Wan fusses over Pim a little, and…mistakes Putt for someone else. As it turns out, Wan suffers from dementia. Where she is, when it is, and who people are get fuzzy for her sometimes. And now it's up to Pim and Putt to make sure she gets her medication, and try not to upset her.

So, this is their life now when they aren’t in school. And soon enough, Pim and Putt start to notice things are a little off…Wan’s oddly insistent on Putt drinking all of his milk, some of the family photos are just empty frames, some have a person cut out of them. There’s a space on the wall where it’s clear something used to hang. And there’s a hole in the wall that appears to look into the living room of the neighboring house.

It’s always nighttime in that house. Even in the middle of the day.

The basic premise - two kids basically at the mercy of grandparents who don’t really know them, at least one of whom may not be in their right mind - has some promise if the story’s going to be more grounded. There’s real tension and unease in the prospect of being dependent on someone who isn’t really aware of what they’re doing. And a story about a family with deep, dark, hidden secrets (why haven’t they had any contact with their grandparents? Who’s the person missing from the photos?) can work right alongside that pretty easily. That’s even assuming everyone is who they claim to be. Separately, a story about a mysterious hole in the wall that sort of shows up one day and seems to offer a window into some other nightmare reality is, by itself, not a bad premise for a more explicitly supernatural story. But piling all of these three together puts too many ingredients in the pot all at once, not letting any of them develop as fully as they could because the movie’s juggling too much as it is. They’re all connected, in that there’s definitely a reason why Mai didn’t really stay in touch with her parents, it has something to do with the person missing from those photos, and whatever’s on the other side of that mysterious hole may be the key to it all. But it’s a lot, so the space you need to build up dread isn’t really there. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Early in the film, when you think it’s just going to be about these two kids being effectively trapped with people who say they’re their grandparents, but don’t seem especially affectionate or competent to care for them, there’s definitely something there. But it dissipates quickly in the face of all of the other moving parts.

And on top of all of that there are two other subplots, neither of which have a whole lot to do with the rest of the film. There’s one concerning drama and high-school intrigue around Pim’s place on the cheerleading squad and Fame’s whole predatory fixation on her, and another concerning Phong’s attempt to get at the truth behind the car accident that left Mai in a coma. They don’t really work to flesh out the characters or give them depth or even set up situations that drive the decisions they make later on, they’re just sort of there, padding out the run time without adding anything to the film, or at least not enough to justify the amount of time they take up. They don’t really end up being anything more than distractions. And I suspect the filmmakers were concerned about their audience being easily distracted, because this is not a film that does subtle at all. Not a moment goes by that isn’t punctuated by some kind of music sting or dramatic zoom or close-up. Nothing’s allowed to breathe or just happen in the background or the periphery of the action, which I think it potentially fatal to a movie like this, one that needs some amount of atmosphere to get over. The  more explicitly supernatural elements are pretty standard Asian-ghost stuff punctuated by some gross-out moments, none of which really land because they’re so obvious and so thoroughly forecasted. When someone looks in the hole, you know something bad is going to happen, so at that point it cannot even startle you. This film doesn’t build anything up, it just sort of flings stuff against the wall. And in case there’s any confusion, the characters are there to say out loud the stuff we’ve already figured out for ourselves.

A film like this (or at least one of the films this is like) works through revelation - what is the thing nobody wants to talk about, what happened on a particular night, stuff like that. Which is fine, and there is some of that, but there’s not a lot of mystery to it, it becomes perfunctory at best and convoluted at worst, everything coming to light in the last twenty or thirty minutes in a way that both restates the obvious and throws in some additional twists that, again, don’t really seem to add to the story, ending the whole thing on a note that I think is supposed to be creepily ambiguous but just ends up being confusing, yet again.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t trust in your audience or in the strength of a single story, and the resulting mess tries to do a bunch of things and fails at all of them.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix 

Extremity: Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

Another one of horror film’s time-honored traditions is stories of make-believe that goes too far. Maybe it’s a movie, or some kind of game, or more recently a reality show or an escape room, but what they have in common is the idea that something that’s being presented as simulated danger turns out to be real, actual danger. It’s an idea that’s easy to do badly, as films like The Task, Hellraiser 8, or The Houses October Built readily demonstrate. It’s a pretty simple premise - what if they’re being murdered for real? - and it’s often treated simplistically, starting and ending with the obvious. It’s the kind of film I’m likely to skip over, all other things being equal.

But as an example of this kind of story. Extremity avoids a lot of the cliches I was afraid it was going to fall into, and largely tells a story that finds tension in places other than the obvious and keeps you guessing. At least, until the third act, when one seriously wrongheaded narrative choice undoes a lot of the film’s goodwill and it limps to its end as something much less compelling. I’m not mad, just disappointed.

After a brief, cryptic scene of someone we can’t see possibly engaging in self-harm, the film opens with sensationalistic title cards and voiceovers about extreme haunt attractions, and how they’re totally unregulated with no safe words or supervision and how anything could happen in one, interspersed with ostensible footage from such haunts, with people being slapped around, covered in cockroaches, etc. You get the impression that this is going to be a movie about how some unsuspecting patrons are lured into some kind of snuff operation, and that threatens to be really boring.

But then the camera pulls back to reveal that what we’re seeing is a video that a young woman is watching on her phone. Her name is Allison Bell, and she’s applied (and selected) to be a participant in an extreme haunt (sometimes called “immersive horror experiences”) called Perdition. She receives instructions to drive to a building out in the middle of nowhere. Then she’s on the phone with someone else, presumably her girlfriend, who’s begging her not to go through with this. Allison assures her she knows what she’s doing, that this is something that she needs to do. Allison had some very bad things happen to her as a child, things maybe she’s never really gotten over. There have been suicide attempts. She’s obsessed with horror films - not your standard stuff, not like what I write about here, the real grimy underground stuff. The kind that sometimes gets confiscated by customs. She arrives at her destination, gets out of the car and dumps her medication out.

Allison wants to push herself as far as she can.

In retrospect, the opening scene sort of sets the thesis for the whole film. It’s not a complicated one - everything is not what it seems - but it’s handled well for the most part, and gets at the compelling thing about these sort of attractions, the degree to which the line between theater and reality blurs. And these sort of attractions do exist in real life, though the pearl-clutching about no safe words or regulations doesn’t seem to have much basis in fact. They’re money-making operations, and require publicity. They’re on the radar, so there are precautions. Guests have to sign extensive waivers of liability, health checks before admission are not uncommon, and there are most definitely safe words. It’s all because attractions like Blackout and McKamey Manor really do ride a line between haunted house, immersive theater, and BDSM scene. They are absolutely not for most people. And much of what we see of Perdition is very similar to what I know of those attractions, so it all feels plausible in that regard. It’s pretty grim - Allison and another participant, a guy named Zachary, find the releases they have to sign in the bathroom of the abandoned building and then begin the game by fishing something out of a toilet filled with actual shit.

This is the gist of this kind of experience: Once you’ve committed to it, once you’ve signed the release, you’re theirs. And it becomes clear very quickly that what Allison and Zachary imagine that is going to mean is very different from what the people running Perdition have in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride. It’s too late to get off now. The narrative, then, features a lot of interplay between what’s artifice and what’s real. Part of it is in how the story is told from multiple perspectives. The film bounces around between what’s happening in the present, flashbacks to Allison’s childhood, conversations with her therapist and a fraught life with her partner, along with the occasional dream sequence, and the perspective of a Japanese news crew there to document Perdition. So there’s what Allison and Zachary are enduring, what brought Allison here in the first place, and what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s a lot of perspective-juggling going on, but it’s all easy to follow. Anyone coming into this expecting a story about an extreme haunt where the make-believe is ALL TOO REAL or some shit like that is going to be disappointed. For most of its running time, this is more about the tension created when someone who is most likely very unstable puts themselves in a position where their already-fragile ability to cope is pushed to its limits, as well as what happens when you’re trying really hard to make your artistic endeavor a success and maybe you’re taking some chances you shouldn’t, or cutting some corners. It’s more of an accident-waiting-to-happen film, and that’s where a lot of the tension is.

And in that regard, it does a good job of keeping us on our toes - at any given time, it isn’t clear how much of what’s happening is really this attraction going off the rails and how much of it is theater, or to what degree Allison is decompensating or not. Just when you think you’ve gotten it figured out one way or another, it’ll throw something else in to wrong-foot you. There was one twist that I guessed pretty early on, but to the film’s credit, it took a long time to pay it off, which made it easier to believe that maybe it wasn’t coming after all. As the film moves on, we start to get a sense that everyone’s sort of got their own issues - Allison’s are obvious, but the person running Perdition is dealing with a lot behind the scenes, you get the sense that his motivations might not be the healthiest (though not in the way you’re probably thinking), leading to him breaking with protocol and overstepping boundaries, and his staff run the gamut from competent professionals to relatively untested amateurs, to people who seem quite possibly legitimately unhinged. So it’s a story where we’re getting a glimpse into all of the places where this could all fall apart, a confluence of the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time leading to avoidable tragedy. But it’s never (well, almost never) as simple as unsuspecting teens being lured to their doom.

Also to its credit, it has a great sense of setting and style - exteriors are snowy and rural, forests and the outskirts of town in what might be the Rust Belt, though it’s never made clear, interiors are suitably dank and decaying urban ruins, all lit in lurid funhouse reds and blues and purples, as befits the nature of Perdition. It’s one of the few times the abandoned hospital aesthetic doesn’t seem like a cliché to me precisely because Perdition is leaning into that aesthetic like any horror attraction would, and it looks quite real. There’s sort of a late 70s/early 80s grindhouse scuzz to it in places without it ever feeling like pastiche. The soundtrack is ominous synthesizer, shrieking strings, discordant rattles and clanks and thumps, and though it’s nothing surprising, it conveys a feeling of jittery anxiety well, and never really overwhelms the action. The acting is serviceable to good, but the dialogue - especially the sequences with Allison’s therapist - runs toward the clumsy and affected, and it’s definitely distracting at times. There are, on the other hand, some deft cinematic touches in the visual storytelling, so the overarching proposition is still one of a film that’s smarter than you’d expect from the premise.

The biggest problem to me is probably the third act, which starts strong, but then climaxes in a twist that absolutely beggars believability and leads to a series of events and narrative choices that push everything into much more disappointingly conventional territory. A lot happens very quickly and sort of glosses over how plausible any of it would be, some characters behave in really puzzling ways, and it takes the otherwise relatable, grounded story that we’ve been watching so far and pushes it into Grand Guignol in a way that to me didn’t really feel earned. There’s also one final flashback that feels like it’s supposed to be an important revelation, but it’s not really set up as well as it should be so it just feels a little confusing and out of nowhere, ending on a note as cliched as you might have expected before you started watching it. Which is too bad, because there was definitely something here that was working well for most of its running time, and it’s by the same director who made Last Shift, another film that seemed like it was going to be hackneyed mediocrity and ended up being much better than that. But that film, although not perfect, came nowhere close to sabotaging itself in the home stretch like this one did. You don’t get what you were expecting, and that’s good, until it isn’t.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi