From Beyond: Pushing Boundaries

As a teenager, one of my favorite horror movies was Stuart Gordon’s adaptation (if you can call it that) of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It was the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations he would do, and he had a very definite style. You could rely on them to be full of melodramatic acting, effects that were probably about as good as he could manage on the budgets he had, and a weirdly sexual undercurrent that was more unsettling than titillating.

In this respect, From Beyond is sort of the platonic Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation. It doesn’t have the black humor of Re-Animator but it also doesn’t have the pervasive nastiness of Castle Freak. It’s a film about appetites and a hunger for stimulation and experience that gets increasingly more deranged, and the film getting more deranged right along with it.

It is late at night, and Crawford Tillinghast is working in the attic of a large, old house with what appears to be an array of very sophisticated computer equipment. He is assisting Dr. Edward Pretorius with experiments that would allow them to, upon attuning to exactly the right resonant frequency, view things normally invisible to human beings. Generate a magnetic field that vibrates large tuning forks, throw open the doors of perception. That’s the idea at least, and as Tillinghast runs the equipment through its paces, the room begins to fill with a queasy purple light, and suddenly the air is filled with swimming and floating…things. It’s working. He calls out to Dr. Pretorius, who comes into the room, sees their success and promptly turns everything up to 11 against Tillinghast’s protests.

There’s something out there in the ether. Something big. And now it can see them.

Needless to say, it does not go well for Pretorius or Tillinghast, and by the time a neighbor has called the cops to report more weird lights and noises, they arrive to find a distraught Tillinghast trying to flee the house, and Pretorius’ body upstairs in the attic, his head…twisted off. So, of course, Tillinghast ends up locked up in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for Pretorius’ murder, explanations for how he managed to twist another person’s head clean off be damned. Dr. Katherine McMichaels is assigned to evaluate him to determine whether or not he’s competent to stand trial. But McMichaels has a reputation for a degree of brilliance matched only by her disregard for ethics. She’s compelled by Tillinghast’s account of what happened, and want to take him back to the house to see this equipment for herself. She wants to know how it works. So Tillinghast and McMichaels return to the scene of the crime, accompanied by police officer and hearty skeptic “Bubba” Brownlee. It doesn’t go well for them either.

This film is contemporary to the original Hellraiser, and both films are very much about the hunger for sensation and experience. About wanting to feel more, the lengths people will go to accomplish that, and the often terrible costs. Hellraiser explores it through the supernatural, this film uses weird science instead, but BDSM figures prominently in both as a signifier for exploring the outer realms of feeling. As it turns out, Dr. Pretorius had some pretty serious kinks, and it even seems to be the case that this was the whole reason he was pursuing this line of research in the first place. And the more McMichaels works with the resonator, the more she develops the same urges. So this is a film that is very much about appetite. We witness McMichaels develop something almost like an addict’s dependence on the resonator device, one that produces dramatic shifts in her behavior. Brownlee is constantly talking about food, cooking hearty dinners for the three of them. The resonator ultimately produces radical physical change, and radical hungers to accompany them. In one particular scene, these hungers are sated while an alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens looks on in horror. All examples of the wreckage caused by appetites.

There’s also some examination of the ethical concerns of research and patient care in the margins. Parallels are drawn between the strange science that drives the film and the state of mental health care at the time, in the form of a psychiatrist who holds McMichaels in contempt for her disregard for the well-being of the people upon whom she experiments, but also does not hesitate to dismiss the idea that Tillinghast isn’t culpable for Pretorius’ death, and is more than happy to use equally injurious methods in the name of “treatment.” The real difference between Pretorius’ resonator and ECT, for example, is that one is legally sanctioned and the other isn’t, but they’re both technology that gets into the brain and stirs things up.

Which is a lot for a film that is best described as “lurid.” The resonator paints everything in purples and magentas (the color out of space), one character’s perspective is depicted in smeary thermal-camera vision, the dialogue is as purple as the resonator’s glow, and the acting is done in the broadest of strokes. The effects are reminiscent of those in John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing on a somewhat lower budget, but with a couple of exceptions work pretty well even to modern eyes. It’s all slimy and goopy and full of things that look somewhat human until they erupt into something that isn’t human at all, and even if it’s clear that they’re effects, they still have a grungy power to them. I don’t think any of this is a problem – I actually find it kind of endearing. That might be nostalgia talking, but it’s exactly the intersection of melodramatic, violent and bizarre to which such loving homage was paid in Malignant. It’s bonkers and still has the ability to startle all these years later. There’s more than a little uncomfortably nonconsensual behavior, and the way mental health is discussed hasn’t aged especially well either, but that was pretty par for the course in 1986.

The first time I saw this, I was 17 or so, and expected another Re-Animator, but wasn’t really prepared for what I got. It’s a much more straight-faced affair, with a suitably bleak ending, and there are some moments that are still pretty startling and transgressive today. It’s sort of equal parts Hellraiser, The Thing, and early Cronenberg, which makes it much better than I thought at the time.

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Be My Cat: Only Make-Believe

I’ve written (at length, possibly exhausting length) about the problems I have with most found-footage films. Long story short, it’s a style of filmmaking that aspires to mimic reality, so when it works it really works, because there’s something viscerally upsetting about watching terrible things happen without the comfort of the distance that conventional moviemaking affords. But a lot of the time, the filmmakers don’t go far enough to make what they’re doing realistic, instead falling back on the usual filmmaking toolkit or lazy workarounds. And those take me out of it immediately. Nothing sucks me in like making it easy to forget I’m watching a movie, and nothing loses me faster than reminding me that no, I’m just watching a movie.

Be My Cat (subtitled A Film For Anne) does a pretty nice job of playing to the strengths of the style, and the result is mounting dread, a story of obsession and the blurring of performance and reality.

The film opens with a title card indicating that the footage was assembled from 25 hours’ worth of raw footage found at the “Be My Cat” crime scene. Understated, straight to the point. The little detail about there being 25 hours of raw footage is never elaborated upon, it just sort of hangs there, an unsettling little detail. I like that. It immediately cuts to Adrian. He’s a filmmaker in Romania, and he appears to be recording a pitch, directed at actual real-life actress Anne Hathaway. He wants to make a film with Anne.

A film about a Romanian filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress.

We know from the title card that this isn’t going to end well, but it isn’t immediately apparent how. At first Adrian just seems kind of goofy and awkward, the kind of person whose dreams so far outstrip the possibilities available to them that you sort of want to laugh at him, but that doesn’t last very long. He engages in constant, almost insistent monologuing, punctuated by the nervous, reflexive giggle of an adolescent boy seeing porn for the first time. It’s easy to imagine getting stuck talking to him at a party and being unable to extricate yourself as he prattles on and on with no interest in letting you get a word in. And the more he talks, the more the cracks start to show. We learn that he was bullied in childhood to the point of agoraphobia, and that he developed a fixation on Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, a fixation that calcifies into seeing both girls and cats as innocent and sweet and cute, not like nasty, aggressive boys and dogs. He still lives with his mother because it’s difficult for him to leave the house for any amount of time, let alone leave town. He’s troubled, seriously troubled, and it isn’t too long before it becomes apparent that his grip on reality is tenuous. 

So this isn’t a film with any dramatic twists or anything - you pretty much know what you’re getting right off the bat, it’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take Adrian to crack and how bad the damage is going to be when it does. It works as well as it does because it’s presented as found-footage, and as found-footage goes, the execution is solid. It looks like it really was all shot on the same camera (and might very well have been), the sound isn’t perfect, the editing is choppy and the performances all emerge from improvisation so there’s a real naturalism to it. There’s background noise and passers-by, not everything is always captured neatly in frame, there are plenty of shots of the camera pointed at the sidewalk, forgotten in the midst of an argument. It feels homemade and the locations are all grubby hostels and apartment buildings in Eastern Europe. It is easy to forget, moment to moment, that you’re just watching a movie.

Even when you’re aware that you’re watching a movie, it’ s likely because a large part of this film is examining the blurred line between image and reality. Everyone uses their real names or variations on them, so we’re watching a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian make a film about a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian who is obsessed with an American actress who is himself making a film about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress. And throughout the film, the character of Adrian displays a confusion between fiction and reality fueled, it seems, by the idea that fiction is much more comforting. There’s a line in The Blair Witch Project about how things don’t seem so bad when you’re looking at it through the viewfinder of a camera, and that’s a big part of the text here. The camera is a distancing tool, and it seems like that’s what Adrian is doing, at least initially. He’s making a film to convince Anne Hathaway to come to Romania to star in a film that he wants to make about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an actress, and he’s definitely working out his obsessions through the filmmaking process, using the fiction that this is a fiction, that it’s all make-believe, in order to put some distance between himself and the violence that results from his obsessions and his tangled, thorny past. It’s clear to the audience from early in that the actresses he hires to play the role of Anne are not in safe hands, beginning with impossible acting demands, moving on to an insistence that things not look fake, which becomes a need for the actresses to be “transformed” when they are not perfect enough. It’s my understanding that part of the progression that serial killers often go through is rehearsal of their fantasies, as a midpoint between fantasizing and acting on those fantasies. They’re working up the courage to do it. And that’s what it feels like we’re watching - we’re watching someone taking the first steps toward acting on their fantasy, and justifying it by telling themselves that it’s not them, it’s a character. Not that it matters to his victims.

In some ways, it’s sort of a less-cartoony Sorgoi Prakov, and though it doesn’t reach the heights of feral lunacy that film does, I think it’s the better film, because it is more believable. Adrian doesn’t really go full maniac at any point, he’s the same giggly, oddly insistent nobody throughout, evoking pity and irritation and horror in equal measure. It drags a little at the very end, but I think it comes good with an ambiguous ending that denies us anything neat and tidy, leaving us with the feeling that the film didn’t so much end as we were shut out of anything that came next, and that what seemed like a breakthrough for Adrian could be anything but. It’s an intelligent film that works well within the limits that found-footage prescribes.

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Fresh: Men Only Want One Thing, And It’s (Really) Disgusting

Last month was full of varying flavors of cinematic disappointment at this here thing of mine, and it was starting to annoy me a little. I can handle the occasional stinker, sure, but after awhile it starts to wear on me. I like watching good films, not dunking on bad ones.

So I’m really grateful for Fresh, a very tense, sharply pointed story about women as commodity and objects for consumption. It isn’t subtle, and it’s pretty straightforward in its construction, but it’s very well-executed.

We meet Noa on what is clearly not a good date. There’s awkward silence, a lack of chemistry so absolute that it creates a vacuum, and it goes painfully downhill from there. Dating apps are full of inane come-ons and unsolicited dick pics. It’s tough out there for her, and she commiserates with her friend Mollie about it. Mollie thinks she needs to be more willing to take risks, to just say “fuck it” and follow her heart. And that’s how she finds herself in the grocery store one night, talking to Steve. He’s handsome, charming, funny…a plastic surgeon, so he does well for himself. There seems to be some chemistry there. And so they go out for a drink, and he’s still handsome and charming and funny, so Noa says “fuck it” and takes him home. And that turns into something more promising, so when Steve invites her away for a romantic getaway out in the country, Noa - despite Mollie’s concerns - goes for it. One snag, though - Steve’s got something he has to do, so instead of heading out directly, they’ll overnight at his place and leave first thing in the morning. Mollie’s really concerned at this point, but Noa’s sure it’ll be fine.

And Steve has a really nice house, as befits a plastic surgeon. It’s modern, sprawling, but still feels pretty cozy. There’s easy conversation, some dancing, some drinks…and the next thing Noa knows, she’s waking up in a windowless room, shackled to the floor next to a futon mattress.

As it turns out, Steve services a very particular clientele, made up of people with very specific appetites. He’s not going to kill her, because his clients prefer the taste of the meat when it’s fresh.

This is a great example of what I like to call a film that isn’t a horror movie until it is. Most of the first act could be any kind of romantic comedy - you’ve got the dating woes, the supermarket meet-cute, the flirty chemistry. If you just happened across it, you’d think it was a rom-com. It’s only as it starts to move into the second act that notes of unease really begin to creep in, and then it all snaps shut like a steel trap. And once it does, it is firmly and unapologetically about women as something to be purchased and consumed. As I said, this is not a subtle film, but it does manage to both make observations about the things women have to deal with every day, large and small, while at the same time being a tense, economical story about survival. The men in this film don’t fare very well, but it’s in ways that are entirely believable, and speak to the ways that male selfishness and entitlement constantly betray women.. The date Noa is on at the beginning of the film is excruciating in and of itself - we wouldn’t call it horror, but it is an especially mundane, banal form of horror, the indignities waiting for you out there as a woman.

And as the film progresses, the horrors become more explicit, but no less rooted in the ways male selfishness and entitlement cause suffering on whatever scale. Men who only want one thing, men who can’t handle rejection, and the women who sell out other women to maintain their own comfort and prosperity, it’s all very much up there on the screen. There’s maybe one moment during the climax when it’s more than a little on-the-nose, but it doesn’t really ruin the moment or anything, and the film manages to mine a narrow but deep vein of black humor throughout that runs the usual problems with dating in the modern world through a bloody funhouse mirror.

It's not an especially flashy film, visually, but it’s got a consistent identity and a nice sense of place. A lot of the film takes place in Steve’s house, which looks like something out of a relatively restrained Michael Mann film, all brick and earth tones and natural rock and moody lighting. He’s a well-to-do man whose relationship with an attractive woman rides this woozy line between captor/captive and suitor/courted, which gives it a seductive element that seems adjacent to what (little) I’ve seen of Fifty Shades Of Grey and in that sense could be seen as a sardonic comment on it. That’s the fantasy, this is the reality. The rich man will keep you in his red room because you are meat to him. And we get sporadic flashes of his customers, lovingly unwrapping the parcels they’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars for and consuming them in ways both crude and impeccably refined. The soundtrack is an impeccably curated mix of the sort of pop songs and ballads you’d expect in romantic movies combined with foreboding ambiance and sharp, discordant stings. Flashes of its romantic comedy beginnings shine through in what doesn’t quite ever broaden out into grim parody, but definitely creates a feeling of discordance that almost seems mocking. And late in the game, it presents a nice juxtaposition between the idea of the object (women as actual meat) and the subject (the personal effects left behind), how behind dehumanizing terms like “the product,” there are actual lives and identities and futures lost, which takes what is already a pretty harrowing experience and makes it sobering as well.

For me, this film brought to mind the use of the phrase “body count” to describe the number of sexual partners someone has had. That strikes me as gross, but it seems apt here. Steve’s got a high body count, and even if it isn’t sexual conquest, the women are still objects to be consumed and discarded, commodities to be purchased in order to satisfy desires, and the film makes that point with the confidence of a cleaver chopping through the meat on a block.

IMDB entry
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Ogsuyeog Gwisin: Burying The Story

As much as I dislike the dismissal “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” I have to admit, every now and then I run across a movie that makes me think “well, this is awfully familiar.” My inclination is to blame it on lazy filmmaking or producers desperate to cash in on something transiently popular. Am I being harsh? Probably a little, but every time a film falls back on familiar, well-word stories or plot devices or imagery, it tends to take me right out of it. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of horror movies, but it especially bugs me there. Some people take comfort in familiar things in their entertainment and I’m not immune to or above that, I just don’t like it in horror. The last thing I want out of horror is to say “oh look, more ghosts with grossly distended features…yay.”

And this isn’t the biggest problem with Ogsuyeog Gwisin (The Ghost Station), but that’s mostly because it fumbles its third act. Otherwise, what you’d have is a pleasantly solid, but derivative Korean take on Japanese horror.

Na-young Kim is a reporter at a tabloid news site, and she is in both hot water and deep shit. She took a picture of a young woman in a subway station to present as the “It Girl” of the summer, and didn’t bother to get her consent. It gets more complicated as the “It Girl” turns out to have been a man cross-dressing, and now he’s suing the tabloid. Na-young is on the hook for a settlement that consists of an utterly bankrupting amount of money, and the tabloid’s going to leave her high and dry…unless she can put together some stories that will dramatically increase clicks and ad revenue. And, being a tabloid, the more sensational the better.

And just her luck, her brother works for public transportation, and he says one of his coworkers mentioned some mysterious deaths…the most recent in a whole series of them…at Ogsu Station. They think it’s cursed.

So what we have here is sort of a Korean attempt at the sort of films that would become known as  “J-horror,” as the plucky young reporter sets out to uncover the explanation behind a bunch of unusual deaths, and ends up getting in way over her head. It’s definitely not afraid to borrow elements from Ringu (an old well features prominently) and Ju-On (creepy ghost kids), but in some ways this works to its advantage, because the borrowing ends up giving the film a solid narrative backbone in the form of a mystery that needs to be solved. Things unfold pretty nicely along those lines, with everything become gradually clearer as the film progresses and the gradual unfolding of the mystery providing an opportunity for the audience to put things together for themselves. 

And there’s some interesting subtext too, in that Na-young isn’t really digging into this story because the truth must be told, at least not initially, it’s because she’s in trouble with her boss and if she doesn’t deliver, she’s ruined. So there’s something predatory about it, at least to start, which is sort of a refreshing twist on her character. She grapples at points with all of the death and buried secrets being greeted with more and more enthusiasm at work because they’re driving engagement like nobody’s business. Not to mention how the deeper she goes, the darker and weirder everything gets, and she sees things she absolutely cannot explain. There’s something malevolent here, but she has to keep putting herself in harm’s way because there’s a demand for coverage of this cursed station now, and it’s this or saying goodbye to her livelihood. It’s a nice departure from the hapless innocent.

And that’s about the only deviation from formula we’re going to get. The film gets off to a relatively slow start after an opening that feels a touch predictable (fairly standard “this place is haunted” shenanigans that end up with someone dead) but does settle into a groove in the second act with some nice startling moments paying off in ways that aren’t especially telegraphed. Again, it’s nothing fancy – this film has one gear, and that’s Na-young or her brother poking their nose where they aren’t supposed to, talking to people that they don’t realize are dead, and then boom! Creepy ghost jump-scare. I don’t normally like jump-scares, but the filmmakers know better than to set them up so you see them coming a mile away. They’re sharp and crisp and punctuate the unfolding revelations of what happened on this land long before the station was build, and how some things just cannot be buried.

But then we get to the third act. It’s not a gigantic off-the-rails clusterfuck or anything. Again, this film is resolutely on rails. In fact, by the third act it’s clear that it’s going to keep going back to the same well (ha-ha) over and over again based on what was established in the second act, and so what was working really well to add a certain amount of eeriness and tension threatens to become predictable. And then at the climax, instead of bringing it to some kind of end, they  focus on an element to the story that was barely addressed in the first two acts. It feels like the filmmakers realized that they either didn’t have an ending, still had twenty minutes to come up with so it could be feature-length, or maybe both. The result feels like the third act is tacked on, as if they’d forgotten about part of the story and decided to deal with it all at once instead of weaving into the first two acts. 

The result is that instead of the film wrapping up and coming to a satisfying close, it sort of veers into something that doesn’t really feel organic to the overall story. Worse, it doesn’t do as much with it as it could have– there are elements to it that could tie really nicely into existing story elements, but it contents itself with sort of sputtering out in an end with a fraction of the impact it could have had. Despite having its moments, ultimately it just feels like an assemblage of parts.

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The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

 (I will probably get a little spoilery in this one, but the story doesn’t really have twists and turns, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The story also doesn’t have much of a story.)

Making films is difficult. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate just how difficult, but I know that even low-budget indie films still require a great deal of money and equipment and logistics, and generally don’t have the luxury of multiple locations, high-end cameras or lighting, a schedule that allows for experimentation or even multiple takes. And this is a point raised usually in defense of films that fall short - the idea that making a film is hard work and so criticism is unjustified. That is patently horseshit. You could run a marathon while wearing wrist and ankle weights and be working really hard the whole time as a result, and it isn’t going to make you the winner. You can appreciate the difficulty of doing something and still recognize when it isn’t a success.

Like this week’s movie, for example, in case you were wondering why I was ranting about criticism. The Burned Over District is a clumsy, amateurish attempt at cosmic horror that doesn’t so much miss what’s good about cosmic horror (although it misses that too) as it does miss the basics of storytelling.

It begins as a hazy, sun-drenched reverie. An attractive woman, gazing at someone lovingly. There’s no dialogue, just soft music, softer lighting, and what seems to be a quiet moment with a loved one. And then it is over, cut short by broken glass and blood and crumpled metal. A man and the woman we’ve just seen are sitting in the front of a car, and she appears to be badly injured. As it turns out, her injuries are fatal, and that is how Will Pleasance loses his wife, Natalie. Cut to some weeks later, and his mother (his shrill, awful mother) and his sister are visiting him to see how he’s doing. He isn’t doing well, which really is to be expected when you’ve watched the person you love die right in front of you. His sister’s sympathetic, his (terrible) mother less so, and then they leave.

Sometime later, Will’s out hunting in the woods and in the process of trying to take down a deer, encounters a hole in the ground. A really, really large hole that goes pretty deep. It looks like it might have been an old well, since the sides seem to be lined with brick. But now it’s just a gaping maw, above which dangle a number of crude wooded shapes bent out of twigs and saplings.

Almost like talismans.

There’s no really elegant way to get into this. The film is basically “man loses wife, is very sad about it, then cult shit out of nowhere.” The two things aren’t really connected at all. Like, to the point that in the scene where Will discovers the hole, a friendly older man just pops up suddenly to express his concern and deliver a big exposition dump about the history of the hole. Which is on Will’s property, which makes it odd that he’s never seen it before, especially if he spends any amount of time in the woods hunting. That he’s out there hunting without any safety orange on and with his finger perpetually on his rifle’s trigger is a whole other matter, but he and Natalie have apparently lived out here for a long time, and he’s never seen this hole before today, even though it’s been out here for centuries. And then there’s someone right there to explain it to him. The whole film is nakedly mechanical in that sense, a collection of things that need to happen that never feels like an actual period of time in someone’s life. It’s not chaotic, but things do happen without any real rhyme or reason. Why is Will’s mother back at the house? Who knows? Why is Will’s sister driving back into town in the middle of the night? No idea!

This is made even more obvious by how the story (such as it is) is actually being told moment to moment. The performances come from the ACTING! school of acting, all hammy and melodramatic and two-dimensional. And the writing comes from the WRITING! school of writing, all speeches and cliches and things that nobody ever actually says. It’s a film full of people saying lines, instead of characters inhabiting a believable space. And what they have to say isn’t even especially interesting. So yes, there’s an evil cult in this town that’s been worshiping what’s in the hole for ages (big surprise), and they are boring. The moments when the cult’s leader makes grand pronouncements like cult leaders do, they ramble, they go on and on, and they’re almost less oratory and more just him kind of explaining the same things over and over again while the other members stand around in sort of quasi-Mennonite outfits for no apparent reason.

And I cannot stress enough how ineptly the story is handled. It’s not especially complicated or unfamiliar – man, grieving the recent death of his wife, discovers that the town he lives in holds a dark secret. That is not in and of itself a problem, you can do some good stuff with that. The problem is that the story has an almost-complete absence of connective tissue. Natalie’s death has almost no role in the overall story, even as a facet of Will’s character. Basically, he’s drunk, sloppy and reckless, there’s a nightmare sequence early on, a sort of vision much later and that’s kind of it. At one point, someone intimates that the cult had something to do with her death, but it’s never followed up. I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Will isn’t thinking straight because of grief, but there’s no attempt to establish that or contextualize his actions. It seems almost irrelevant: Wife dies, I’m sad, whoops, there’s a portal to some interdimensional evil on my property that I’ve somehow never noticed and it’s being worshipped by a cult made up of most the townsfolk. There’s no discovery, one thing just sort of happens after another in isolation. He and Natalie have lived in this small, ostensibly tight-knit town for some time and somehow Will has to be told that there’s one really powerful, influential family that owns everything, and nobody else in town seems to know who Will is. That’s what makes small towns such fertile ground for horror - everyone knows everyone else, and everyone’s keeping secrets. For that matter, we're introduced to most of the townspeople as weird cultists first, and then as respectable citizens, which is just...ass-backwards. Again, the effectiveness of this kind of story lies in not knowing who to trust, at the revelation of which friendly neighbors are in thrall to some eldritch menace. When you know it's everyone right off the bat, there's not much you can do with that.

This is so egregious that there’s one scene where Will’s sister is sitting in the kitchen having a drink, then the wind blows a door open, some mysterious force shatters the cup in her hand, and she is subsequently compelled to…walk out into the middle of the woods where she discovers a ritual sacrifice going on. That’s the only way they could get her out there to witness that? It boggles the mind. Add to that the bog-standard pompous speechifying by the cult leader, and the odd way that the story seems to wrap up at the halfway mark to make room for a second half that is one long revenge sequence, and it’s a baffling experience.

There are a few redeeming qualities – it’s obviously got a smaller budget, but it looks pretty good. There’s lots of beautiful footage of snowy woods and mountains, clouds scudding across the sky, and the lighting is generally stark and nicely lurid in places. In general, the film has an aesthetic that would sit nicely next to homages like The Void, and the filmmakers are surprisingly good at not telegraphing startling moments given how not-good they are at so many other things. The violent moments are goopy and visceral in a way that fits with the overall aesthetic and manage to avoid being either gratuitous or silly, but the whole thing is so incoherent, the climax is so hilariously cliched (complete with a Final Girl cocking a shotgun), dragging out entirely too long before ending in what was probably supposed to be a moment of awe and horror but comes across like a bunch of people standing around, unsure of what to do next.

That it’s not especially original isn’t an issue – there are only so many stories in the world – but top to bottom, the execution is so fumbling and inept that it even screws up the basics. They tried, yes. But they failed.

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Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan: The Needle And The Damage Done

Criticism of foreign horror films are, in some ways, a very fine line for me to walk. On the one hand, I appreciate them for the opportunity to experience new perspectives and see things cast in what is to me a new light, but there’s also the danger that I’m exoticizing them, prizing them for their mere difference from my own cultural default or worse, expecting something from them that they have no obligation to deliver. If someone wants to approach your bog-standard mass-market horror film made in the U.S. from their own non-U.S. point of view, they can do that. That is entirely their prerogative. In the case of last week’s It Lives Inside, the result isn’t going to be especially interesting, a mix of multiplex horror cliches and some simplistic treatment of the immigrant experience.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan  (Implant - The Curse Of Beauty, roughly translated) is very much the opposite of last week’s film – it’s made from a very specific cultural perspective with little regard for Western tastes. It has its moments, but it never really coheres.

Ayu and Laras are sisters making a living in Jakarta, in two very different ways. Ayu is a makeup artist who, when the film opens, is working on a bride-to-be ahead of her wedding. Her phone keeps buzzing, and it’s Laras, who’s leaving messages as she gets dressed for what appears to be a fancy night out. But Ayu’s busy and can’t take the call. When she finally gets a chance to listen to her voicemail, Laras is apologetic, acknowledging that she hasn’t been a very good sister, but that she’s working on turning things around, and Ayu’s reaction, interestingly enough, is a resigned sigh and wondering why Laras has to use her as “her excuse.” So it’s clear that their relationship is somewhat fraught, even if it isn’t clear why. We do get a sense, though, of what it might be as Laras travels through the city in a cab. She and the driver seem to know each other very well, and he doesn’t pick up any other fares. He’s taking her to her…appointments. With her…clients.

And this particular client appears to be a man of some wealth and influence. He’s very happy to see her, as he’s bought her a ring. And Laras, much wiser to the game than he is, knows what’s coming and tries to let him down gently, despite his insistence that he is willing to leave his wife and daughter behind to be with her. She knows this isn’t what he wants, knows how it’d look, knows what it’d mean for her. She tries to let him down gently, but he can’t believe it and, as is so often the case with men of wealth and influence, decides that if he can’t have her, nobody can, pushing her off of a balcony onto the roof of a car below.

Ayu gets the call and meets the cab driver at the hospital. She’s angry with him, telling him that he was supposed to look after her. Laras is in rough shape - multiple broken bones and serious head trauma. She’s on life support and isn’t expected to last much longer. There’s a tearful conversation, and Ayu, as her only living relative, makes the decision to discontinue life support. It gets turned off, her heartbeat slows, then stops with the steady whine of a monitor flatline…

…and then Laras sits straight up in bed and starts screaming.

A cursory examination of her x-rays reveals that Laras is wearing a number of susuk - extremely thin gold needles placed under the skin as talismans, as a means of binding powerful spirits to the wearer to confer a boon, often cosmetic in nature. Laras has had too many susuk put in, and the powerful magic they contain is keeping her in a state between life and death. And so Ayu takes her back to the rural village where they grew up, the place they left behind, to try and find a cure. Modern medicine has no idea what’s going on, so they need to try something more spiritual in nature. But there are bad memories in their village, resentments and grudges and secrets.

This film, to its credit, manages to be at once both culturally distinct and universal. Susuk is a specifically Malaysian practice. It predates the introduction of Islam to Indonesia (and as such, is considered haram) and is a practice without any real equivalent in North America (though now it has me wondering about the possible merits of an adaptation that centers on the cosmetic surgery industry – needles, beauty and all). So the language – not just actual language, but cultural language – is distinct, and there are no concessions to Western sensibilities here. This was an Indonesian film made for Indonesians. I have to engage with it on its terms, and I like that. But at the same time, there are ideas here that do transcend culture. This isn’t just a film about a sister’s attempt to lift a very culturally specific curse that is product of a culturally specific practice. It’s also a story about the sometimes-difficult relationships between sisters, especially when they’re all the other has. It’s a story about the lengths people will go to for beauty, it’s about shameful family secrets, and the pettiness and hypocrisy of small-town life. These are things anyone can recognize, and they ground the film well. The notes may be different but the song is familiar.

The execution, however, does have some problems. It’s sort of a fitful film  – its pacing is somewhat erratic, building dread and then letting it fizzle for extended periods of “take Laras to this person to see if they can help, then take her somewhere else,” and though there are some nice turns there (it’s the usual thing where the religious authority can’t help so they seek out someone who knows the old ways, but here he’s sort of a sketchy dude instead of a reclusive mystic), there are stretches where it feels like not much is happening, or not enough is happening to sustain a mood. It’s also a dark film. Not thematically (well, sort of, thematically), but actually dark, especially in the first half, and so a lot of moments that I suspect were meant to be startling (this film likes its mysterious figures showing up out of nowhere) don’t really land because you can’t really see what people are reacting to. You’ll see Ayu scream at the sight of something, but the something she’s screaming at is difficult to see. The exact nature of the supernatural menace inhabiting Laras is never really made clear beyond possibly being a powerful djinn, but also possibly just the restless spirit of another person, and the result is something that feels a little one-size-fits-all, rather than emerging from a specific mythology and tradition. There are mysterious figures in the shadows, creepy hallucinated moments, some quasi-possession stuff that’s impressively visceral and probably the film at its best, and even some fairly effective (if slight) body horror. The difficulty in locating a coherent logic made it feel a little generic in that regard, and though things do pick up in the third act, the climax takes place in the middle of the night in a rainstorm, so again it’s sort of tough to figure out what’s going on.

It doesn’t land with the impact that it should, because there’s this pervasive feeling of not being sure what’s going on. But, all told, I’d rather watch something that doesn’t always land but shows me new ways of looking at the world, that tells stories using imagery with which I’m not already familiar, than something thoroughly homogenized with the thinnest veneer of and gestures toward other cultures.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

It Lives Inside: Assimilated

For me, one of the best things about living in an age where streaming video makes all kinds of films more accessible (even if it does mean putting up with commercials inserted at the worst possible moment) is discovering the breadth and variety of horror films from across the world. Different traditions and cultures and value systems mean that different things are a source of horror in different parts of the world, or even that the same things are scary, but in very different ways, and it’s refreshing to see things in a new light, or even see things you’ve never seen before.

None of which are to be found in It Lives Inside, a dull, rote film about the struggle for identity in an immigrant family, told with the nuance and subtlety of an After School Special.

It opens on the aftermath of something terrible. A house in shambles, moans and screams coming from the basement. A slow dolly shot takes us through the wreckage and into the one place we’re pretty sure we don’t want to go - that basement, where a badly charred body clutches a glass jar, something writhing inside.

Meanwhile, at some point later, in another household entirely, a family of three is coming together around the breakfast table. It’s Poorna, busy finishing up the meal, her husband Inesh, just getting home after working the late shift, and their daughter Samidha, who’s getting ready for school. Samidha doesn’t stop to eat, she has teenage socializing to do, against her parents’ objections. Poorna extracts a promise from Samidha to help with the preparations for a holiday celebration that’s coming up and Samidha reluctantly agrees. At school, one particular topic of conversation is Tamira, who is basically the other Indian girl at this high school. She’s weird, doesn’t have any friends, eats her lunch under the bleachers, and she’s started acting even stranger. She looks like she isn’t sleeping or taking care of herself. Tamira corners Samidha in the hallway and begs her for help. She has this thing that she has to feed. It eats raw meat, and it’s so hungry. She can’t deal with it on her own.

Tamira holds out the glass jar we saw in the prologue, and Samidha, in a fit of embarrassment, slaps it out of her hands, where it shatters on the floor.

The math is not hard to do. That jar had something evil inside of it, and now that Samidha has freed it, it’s wreaking havoc on pretty much everyone, and it’s up to Samidha to stop it. This is not a subtle movie - the thing in the jar is a spirit from Indian mythology, run amuck among whitest suburbia. It’s a film about culture clash, and in that respect it couldn’t be any more obvious. Samidha is the picture of aspirational assimilation, she insists on being called “Sam,” contemplates lightening her skin in her selfies, distances herself from family holidays as well as from Tamira, who used to be her best friend when they were kids, and from whom she immediately distanced herself when they got to high school. Poorna is a stay-at-home mom, speaks Hindi and is a firm believer in tradition. Inesh is more Westernized, speaking English, indulging Samidha’s aspirations and urging Poorna to give her space. So we have one parent who insists on keeping tradition, one who doesn’t, and a daughter trying to run away from her heritage as quickly as she can. And the evil spirit she has to stop is one from Indian mythology called a pishach, which, according to the film, is a dark spirit that feeds on negative emotions, souls and raw meat, and is somehow born from loneliness and isolation. All of which manages to jibe with the information I was able to find online while still making it sound like the most generic evil spirit ever.

And that’s not my only problem with the film, but it’s a big one - it’s absolutely an instance of a generic U.S. horror movie. It all takes place in what appears to be one of the numerous adjoining Southern California suburbs where movies like this tend to take place, and the narrative itself is mechanical and perfunctory, a repeated loop where Samidha tries to figure out what’s going on, she and other have to react to something nobody can see and somebody dies, Samidha has a nightmare, repeat for 90 minutes that feel much, much longer. The nightmare sequences take place in red-lit darkness, people get jerked around like ragdolls by an invisible beast, and that’s sort of it until the confrontation with a special effect at the climax. The filmmakers have no idea how teenagers talk (as someone whose job puts them in regular proximity to people in their late teens, I have never heard someone call a party a “kick-back.” Ever.), and of course there’s the obligatory romance with the hottest guy in school. The performances, cinematography, and scoring are unremarkable but competent, and here again there’s not a single original moment in the whole thing.

My other big problem with the film has to be the degree to which it squanders its ostensible premise. Horror films can absolutely grapple with the experiences of immigrants and the ways some things follow them from their home country no matter how far they run, as in His House. And Indian mythology definitely has its share of rich, horrifying creatures as aptly demonstrated by Tumbbad. So it’s absolutely possible to tell this story in a nuanced, human way that paints the immigrant experience in its messy, conflicted complexity while also being scary as hell, introducing the Western world to the monsters of another time and place. But ultimately Desi culture plays next to no role in the film, and any pretense of examining Samidha’s experience as a young Indian woman in the U.S. goes out the window pretty early except to the extent that it can advance the plot. It’s generic horror start to finish, complete with Final Girl confrontations and Samidha learning the lesson that it was in fact her mother who was right and she who was wrong, ending on a one-year-later note that cribs pretty hard from The Babadook with a “the end…or IS IT?” kick. The film’s as eager to avoid anything really specifically Indian as Samidha is, and that’s sort of amusing on a meta level but doesn’t make for a very interesting film.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon