Leaving D.C.: Who You Are When Nobody Else Is Looking

Human beings are, for better or worse, fundamentally social creatures. Living and working in groups enables us to accomplish things we’d have a hard time with by ourselves, and community provides us with emotional support and reassurance. The need to belong is a powerful one. It’s a big part of why solitary confinement is such a debilitating form of punishment. And so there’s a tradition in horror of stories about people driven mad by their isolation; people who, without the grounding influence of others in their life, lose touch with reality. Introduce supernatural elements as well, and thus doubt - am I seeing ghosts or am I losing it from sheer loneliness? - and well, we’re off to the races.

Leaving D. C. is a nicely minimal found-footage film in which isolation is probably more malevolent than any spirits.

This is the story of Mark Klein. Mark’s a technical writer by trade, and he’s in the process of moving from Washington D.C. to Anole, West Virginia. He’s bought a really nice old house out there, far away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. He’s full-on in the middle of nowhere, 35 minutes by car from the nearest town of any size at all. He’s documenting his move with a small camcorder, for the sake of a support group for obsessive-compulsive disorder that he belongs to back in D.C.. The idea, then, is that they’re a source of community for him, they’re interested in his well-being, and so he’s keeping them apprised of this big step in his life. As he points out, for as much as people talk about getting out of the big city and away from its attendant headaches, few actually do.

He gets to the house, records a little tour, invites anyone from the group (but especially one person) out to visit him. There’s plenty of room in the house for guests, after all. And then comes the afternoon where he’s out hiking and finds a cat’s skull nailed to a tree, with the letter “B” carved above it. It’s odd, and a little unsettling. And then there’s the sounds that wake him up in the middle of the night, sounds from outside of his bedroom window. Chopping sounds. A flute. A woman moaning.

His is the only house for miles.

The film is structured as a series of dispatches - the updates he’s sending back to his friends in the support group. This gives it a pretty snappy, economical pace - segments end with Mark shutting off the camera, and so there’s that sense of curiosity and dread at what new development there’s going to be when the camera comes back on. And the supernatural elements develop slowly but steadily - the unnerving discovery at the tree, the mysterious sounds, and so on - but they’re also developing in parallel with the story of Mark, and how he’s handling living so far away from anyone else. With a couple of exceptions, the film is just Mark, talking to the camera, and that’s a lot to hang a film on, but it works. Mark Klein seems very much like a real person -he’s kind of a dull guy, preoccupied with details and instructions and the right way to do things, like a technical writer would be. He’s very much a dad-jeans-and-phone-on-a-belt-holster kind of guy. There are occasional references to the medication he’s on to manage his OCD, but it never tips over into cliché or full-blown pathology. What ultimately matters is that Mark is the kind of guy who expects the world (and the people in it) to behave in ways he believes they should. That’s not necessarily OCD, that’s a pretty common expression of a certain type of masculinity.

And that’s really where the strongest parts of this story are - in watching Mark as he deals with events as they unfold, more and more of who he is becomes apparent. The story is told as much by what goes unsaid (or how things are said) as it does by what’s actually said. He’s a mild-mannered enough guy on the surface, but right behind that there are reserves of tightly-wound resentment or antagonism. When he talks about how so many people talk about leaving D.C., but he actually did it, he sounds almost accusatory, as if he’s railing against some unseen critic. There’s a definite edge in his voice when he points out that two specific people only wrote “Best Wishes” in his farewell card. Some of his updates are intended for one person and one person only, culminating in a visit from that person that does nothing to help his composure. I got the sense as I watched this film that if we were to see the support group’s side of the story, it’d be one where everyone said “oh great, yet another ‘update’ from Mark.” The frequency of the updates, and the trivia with which many of them are occupied, feel like fumbling attempts at maintaining a connection that might be more valued by one party than the other.

So we have this awkward, lonely man, alone in the country with his jealousies and insecurities, and the inexplicable starts happening. And it really is inexplicable for the most part -it’s possible that everything happening to him is the work of locals fucking with him, but it doesn’t feel likely. Local law enforcement is unhelpful to say the least (though not without cause - some city person moves out to the country and freaks out when it’s not like the city, you’re not going to take them very seriously), and so Mark becomes increasingly more and more unbalanced the less he’s able to explain what’s happening, his frustration curdling into rage and provocation of whatever’s out there in the rural dark.

Although I don’t think it’s derivative, this film does bring a few other films to mind, entirely to its credit. Its juxtaposition of  psychological disintegration and supernatural phenomena is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, and it’s as naturalistic in its found-footage conceit as that film. This is one of those cases where a near-nonexistent budget works because it means the footage is actually being captured on a consumer-grade camcorder by the protagonist, and so there’s very little to pull you out of the story. It feels like you really are watching someone’s home movies. It develops its supernatural elements in small, incidental things for the most part, and so it has the same unsettling feel that there’s some horrible secret just out of sight that Resolution has. None of it is flashy, but most of it is effectively strange, and nothing is over-explained. Its treatment of masculinity as embodied by rationality (and technology), contrasted with a femininity represented by nature and the unknown, and what happens when male entitlement reacts badly to female power reminds me a lot of Paranormal Activity (another found-footage film that knew how to use the transition from one vignette to the next).

At no point does it feel like it’s trying to ape any of those films, it just shares their virtues. On the other hand, I think its biggest flaw is that it’s over much too quickly. It ends very abruptly, at what feels like should be the transition from the second to third act, and so as a result doesn’t have the power those other films do. It charts a path for things to escalate and  introduces a visual and sonic vocabulary to communicate that escalation, but then sort of ends just as shit is starting to get real. It has being unsettling all wrapped up, but I would have liked to see it escalate to balls-out scary, and I think it could have, pretty easily, within the constraints it had set for itself.

There’s a saying that the measure of a person is who they are when nobody’s looking. To an extent, we perform or put on personae around other people. That’s just part of being a social creature. So if you want insights into someone’s character, you pay attention to how they act when they aren’t concerned with how they’re coming across. Mark’s all on his own out in the country, as if he desired solitude or escape from the big city, but he’s sending constant updates back to the one group of people with whom we know he shares a connection. It’s pretty clear that there’s something supernatural going on, but there’s no indication that it’s malevolent. Mark reacts the way he does because he just can’t handle things not being exactly the way he wants them to be. His entitlement and rigidity in the face of the inexplicable brings all of his ugliness to the surface. Nobody’s looking, and this is who he is.

IMDB entry
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