Mandy: Bad Trip

Memory is a funny thing - we tend to remember the gist of things, the way they felt, rather than how they actually happened. We get details wrong, but we get them wrong in ways consistent with the overall feeling of the experience. We’re better at remembering the emotional truth of an experience than its literal truth.

This occurred to me while I was watching Mandy, because the whole film feels like the emotional truth, rather than literal truth, of a specific time and place, of a specific zeitgeist. It evokes a specific aesthetic and set of cultural references while at the same time turning them all up to the point of expressionism.

Red is a lumberjack, and he and his girlfriend Mandy live in a cozy cabin by a lake at the foot of the Shadow Mountains. He chops down trees, she runs the cash register at a small gas station, and in the evenings she draws or reads, they watch television together, talk about their dreams. Theirs is a life of quiet contentment under an impossibly starry sky.

That is, until the day that Mandy crosses paths with Jeremiah Sand, aspiring musician and leader of a small cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Something about Mandy captivates him, calls to him.

He must have her, and Jeremiah Sand is used to getting the things he decides he needs.

 It’s a story as old as time. You’ve got a quiet, hardworking man, the woman he loves, a kidnapping, and that quiet hardworking man set off on a rampage of revenge in the name of the woman he loves. It’s right there in the title: Mandy. This is a film that works in the way it presents discrete images and vignettes that communicate a feeling, moreso than in telling a story. It does have a story, albeit not an especially complicated one, but what makes this film compelling is how richly and vividly the story is put up on the screen, and how far it pushes its imagery. It’s shot with a vivid, gorgeous palette that takes elements of drug/psychedelia, cult, and biker exploitation films and turns them up and up until they achieve hallucinatory majesty, punctuated by intertitles that first tell us the setting (the Shadow Mountains, in 1983, in a flowery period-appropriate script), then the antagonists (the Children of the New Dawn, set in a typeface reserved for Satanic-panic witchcraft stories), and finally, over an hour in, Red’s mission (Mandy, described with the thorny symmetry of a metal band’s logo). How it’s written matters as much as what it says.

Likewise, how it looks tells us how the characters feel. The beginning - our introduction to Red and Mandy and their idyllic existence - has a strong emphasis on the cosmic, lots of color washes and open, brightly starry skies, and as the film goes on, these open vistas are replaced by the chromatic aberration and apocalyptic visions of hallucinogens, then a descent into darkness and firelight and grime, and then back to vivid color again as Red completes his journey through hell, itself chronicled by animated nightmare sequences that resemble nothing more than the cover of one of Mandy’s pulp fantasy novels, or a heavy metal album cover. Mandy’s kidnapping is set in total darkness, punctuated only by flashes of blue electricity, action captured in fragments like a very slow strobe, and even relatively innocuous scenes of everyday life are shot through with period-appropriate film grain and colors, the warm browns and mustard yellows of the 1970s and early 1980s. Still, you’d never mistake it for a period film because everything’s so heightened, all of the cultural allusions so caricatured, that it becomes something else entirely.

The acting contributes to the overall expressionism as well. The characters don’t really have inner lives and largely speak in banalities, but it works, because they’re essentially emotional colors alongside the literal colors of the film. Red speaks mostly in monotone or in pained, guttural screams of rage and grief, and Jeremiah Sand is quietly melodramatic until the second he doesn’t get his way, the facade revealing ugly, angry cracks. A conversation between Red and the Chemist, a purveyor of powerful drugs, seems to consist of Red broadcasting his thoughts telepathically, and throughout, Mandy feels remote, unknowable, unattainable, as if she’s a ghost, as if she’s already receding in Red’s memory no matter how hard he tries to hold onto her. The soundtrack does its own share of the heavy lifting to convey what words do not, shifting from gentle ambience to ominous, pulsing synthesizers and tectonic swells of distorted guitar as Red journeys further into darkness.

It isn’t perfectly executed, however. Most notably, it flags a little at the beginning of the third act. While it’s still beautifully shot and lit, the action, when Red finally arrives at a confrontation, is not paced well. There is a fight against a demonic biker gang that should feel climactic given their monstrous introduction but doesn’t, instead ending as it’s just starting to develop a head of steam, and Red’s revenge against the cultists - something we’d expect to be lingered over - is dispatched summarily. What the first two-thirds of film leads up to is over in a matter of minutes, the end result being oddly anticlimactic. The filmmaker’s lack of facility with action is, however, made up for by a final encounter with Jeremiah that works beautifully, an apocalyptic showdown in the pulsing red light of his church. The end result is a film you feel, rather than one you think about, a simultaneous love letter to and tone poem for an age and aesthetic long passed, and perhaps only dreamed about. But what a dream it is.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Wounds: Nothing Happens, Until Everything Happens

Part of telling any kind of story is pacing, and that’s as true of scary movies as anything else. You can feed information out slowly, or in sudden, shocking reveals, or you can bombard your audience right from the beginning. All of these are perfectly effective ways of creating horror, but they all rely on certain rhythms sustained over the course of the film. Screw up your pacing, and you kill the vibe you’re trying to create and risk pulling your audience out of the experience.

Pacing isn’t the only problem with Wounds, but it’s certainly one of the bigger ones.

We open with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, about telling someone things they don’t want to know about themselves, and in retrospect I’m not sure how it’s supposed to inform the rest of the film. It sounds foreboding, but that’s about it. The film proper opens at Rosie’s, a bar in New Orleans, but not one of the big, tourist-friendly bars on the main drag. Rosie’s is a neighborhood dive, not especially pretty, and the clientele tend toward the rough. Will, the bartender, is entertaining a couple with some parlor tricks in between refilling drinks for the few folks sitting at the bar. This is actually one of the stronger bits of the film, as the bar and the relationships between the people in it are communicated economically. Will’s likely an underachiever, too smart for this job, but not ambitious enough to do anything else. The couple - Alicia and Jeffery - haven’t been together long. Alicia brought Jeffery along, and Will clearly has a thing for Alicia. Some folks are shooting pool, and a group of obviously underage college kids come in, fish out of water, though one of them has a legit enough ID. Just another night at Rosie’s.

And then Eric comes in. Eric’s a tough customer, works on an offshore oil rig and gets fucked up when he’s not at work. He’s on a hair trigger, you get the sense he’s hoping for an excuse to beat the shit out of somebody. But he’s a regular, so Will’s got an eye on him, and so when another tough guy bumps into Eric and shit immediately goes south (the college kids recording the whole thing with their phones), Will’s pretty much already called the cops, but not before the other guy takes a broken bottle and cuts up Eric’s face pretty badly. The college kids scatter.

In the aftermath, as Will cleans up, he finds a phone that one of the college kids must have left behind. Unlocking it reveals the usual text exchanges…well, that bit about “that ritual in that book must have worked” was a little odd…and the usual selfies and party pics give way to images of increasing violence, of broken teeth in pools of blood. Of what could be corpses.

A video of something horrifying and impossible.

Normally, what would follow from this discovery could be, say, the gradual intrusion of whatever nightmare thing Will saw on the phone into his everyday life - hallucinations, unexplained calls, a sense of being watched, stalked by something beyond normal understanding. Instead, mostly what we get next is the story of Will and his girlfriend Carrie. She’s a graduate student at Tulane, and there are problems with their relationship. Carrie’s suspicious of Will, wonders why he has some girl’s phone, and Will’s suspicious of the very friendly relationship Carrie seems to have with one of her professors. And, from what we can observe, both are right to be suspicious of each other. Take out the bit with the weird shit on the phone, this could be an indie drama about the downward spiral of an underachieving bartender.

And that’s where pacing comes in. We get this horrifying reveal, this cursed image on an abandoned phone, but then for a good chunk of the movie, it doesn’t really matter. You’d expect that Will discovers this horrible thing, that events would steadily ramp up, that figuring out what’s behind this nightmarish thing would become a focus. But the film kind of meanders instead. A few weird things happen here and there, but there’s no real connection between them or internal logic or vocabulary for what’s happening. Good stories about curses or hauntings will have a specific image or set of images that denote the presence of something evil and some way to know that certain actions will cause the evil to be summoned. Here, it sort of feels like the filmmakers reached into a grab bag of things from other movies - Ringu-style cursed images, hallucinations, nightmare sequences and body horror most notably - without really making it clear how or why these things are the result of Will finding this phone. It all feels really disconnected and sort of assembled from parts in this respect. There are some effective shots or set-pieces here and there, but very little to tie them together - there’s no sense of things being put together or discovered or revealed, and this sort of aimlessness describes about two-thirds of the film. Then all of a sudden everything goes bad all at once and then it ends.

The reliance on technology to tell the story doesn’t help much either - it’s not impossible to make technological devices effective conduits for something evil (see Ringu and Kairo, for example), but it’s not easy, either, and this film relies way too much on checking text messages and looking at small images on a phone to drive the horror, and it isn’t scary - the messages from who or whatever is behind all of this don’t come across as anything more than just texts, and it robs the film of a lot of power. Had they just left it at an image or a video that when viewed does bad things, that would be fine, but then there’s this whole weird subplot where the college kids who left the phone behind are following the bartender around and they take the phone back for...reasons, and then give it back to him for...other reasons, and maybe they’re possessed? It doesn’t make much sense and the overreliance on the phone as the source of horror makes a lot of it fall flat, and that’s on top of the idea that a group of college kids just happened to find a book on ritual magic and tried something pretty horrifying and then went out for beers afterward. It’s better to just not explain it at all.

To its credit, when it comes to the relationships between the protagonists and setting up their world, it does a pretty good job of showing instead of telling. If their circumstances feel increasingly contrived, at least they themselves feel like real people. They aren’t overplayed. If anything, they’re underplayed - there is very little emotional dynamism in this film. For the majority of the film, most everyone feels inert, and it’s only at the very end that voices get raised and emotions run a wider gamut than A to B, as events suddenly come to a head - not because things have naturally reached some horrible, inevitable conclusion, but because it feels like the filmmakers realized they needed to wrap things up with some more horror stuff. The overall experience is one that starts with a strong, natural sense of place and the people in it, and then squanders that by dropping in a bunch of haphazardly selected supernatural elements, as if that would be enough to make it a horror film.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

Backcountry: Man Versus Man, Man Versus Nature, Man Versus Self

One of the most common criticisms leveled at horror movies is that people in horror movies behave like idiots, doing things no sensible person would do. This strikes me as kind of glib criticism, though, because (as I’ve observed here before), people in horror movies don’t know they’re in horror movies, and let’s face it, actual people in the real world behave like idiots all the time as well. Sure, there are instances where the only explanation for a character’s behavior is the need to move a plot along, but it’s definitely possible to build a gripping story around entirely plausible behavior. Poor judgment in the real world has had shocking consequences.

Backcountry is a very tense, economically told story about man’s folly, one based on actual events.

We open on a slow tilt down the length of a stand of trees. The only sound we can hear is the buzzing of flies. A lot of flies, by the sound of it. As the camera continues down, the buzzing gets louder, and the top of a cloud of flies reveals itself. We cut away before we see what they’re circling.

We cut away to Alex and Jenn, packing up for a camping trip. The car ride out into the woods reveals them to be a pretty normal couple by all appearances - their conversation is easy, familiar, not overly expository, and their interactions seem playful, though there does seem to be some tension or strain underneath. It’s clear pretty quickly that the trip was Alex’s idea, and there’s some friction mixed in with the affection. But soon enough they get to the canoe rental spot at the entrance to the park - it’s a big, sprawling nature preserve that Alex has been coming to since he was a little kid. The guy who runs the canoe rental business tells him one of Alex’s favorite trails has been closed for the season, and he’s sort of evasive about why. He offers Alex a map, but Alex doesn’t need it. He knows the park really well.

It’s a quiet, uneventful trip to their campsite - it’s the end of the season, so they pass more people going out than coming in. They’re setting up for dinner and gathering wood when a handsome stranger comes by the campsite. His name’s Brad, and he’s caught more fish than he can eat by himself. Jenn invites him to stay for dinner, which bothers Alex a little. Brad seems friendly enough, though he’s a little cryptic about what he does for a living, and takes plenty of shots at Alex in the way that men do when there’s a pretty lady in the room. There’s some jockeying for dominance, and then Brad gets up and pisses just outside of the campfire.

Almost like he’s marking his territory.

This film takes its time to set up the events of its second half, to tell us who these people are and what they’re doing here. Jenn is a lawyer who’s never been camping before and has trouble putting her phone away. Alex does some landscaping work, but he’s working on something bigger. You get the sense that maybe he’s a little disappointed with himself, a little insecure. He wants to show Jenn this park, this place that’s been so important to him since he was very young, including all of the really cool places off-trail that the tourists don’t know about. Well, Brad knows about them.

Alex isn’t showy or loud, but he definitely has something to prove, and maybe Jenn’s a little impatient with it. All of this is important for what comes after, because out in the woods, little mistakes can have big consequences. Small injuries can become big problems if left untreated, the weather can turn on you, and memory plays tricks on us. A lot of what happens to Alex and Jenn comes down to his pride, his need to be good at something, to show off for Jenn, to demonstrate his worth to her. And without giving anything away, the second half of the film is a measured, dispassionate look at the ways in which they pay an awful cost for Alex’s pride. A lot can happen out in the woods, and there isn’t necessarily anyone around to help you.

The tension of the first half increases as things get worse and worse for the two of them, without ever really descending into melodrama. Everyone in this film is a believable person, with flaws and strengths and moments of weakness and moments of compassion, and their conversations sound like how people actually talk. The camerawork is expressive throughout but not overly showy, and makes good use of focus and a combination of close-ups and wide shots to communicate both interior states and the precariousness of their position out in the wild. Moments of high tension are punctuated with blurred, shaking shots and an absence of sound, which ends up being highly evocative - this film is good at making you feel what its characters are going through. At times it feels like it signposts things maybe a little too clearly (alternatively, I may just be entirely too vigilant about stuff like this), though there are a few nice feints and red herrings along the way, and the last act drags a little as the action subsides and becomes more about escape and survival, which dissipates some of the tension. I’m not sure it’s avoidable, though - this is a story told at a realistic scale, and hysterics and melodrama would seem awfully out of place.

Ultimately, that’s the film’s strength. This story is relatable, and that makes what happens all that much worse. Sometimes your insecurities and misplaced confidence and need to prove something - to pit yourself against something - lead to terrible consequences, and there’s something about the plainness of that that stayed with me after the film was over. Horror isn’t always moodily lit - sometimes it’s just out there in the world, under an open sky, screams and moans and pleas going unheeded in the middle of nowhere.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

Reading Horror Instead Of Watching It

Due to a combination of technical mishaps at just, like, the worst possible time this week, I was unable to write up a movie for consideration in time for today. So, instead, I think I’m just going to freestyle a little about three horror novels I’ve either read or am in the process of reading right now, and have dug or am digging. Two of these books are either in production as films or have had their rights optioned, and I kind of wonder how well the third would work, so I’ll call it close enough for jazz.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

Penpal is constructed as a series of episodic recollections from different points in the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, and focuses a lot on the unreliability of memory and a childhood perspective that doesn’t quite appreciate the enormity of what’s happening at the moment. Basically, we do a lot of things as kids that it’s only years later we realize were really dangerous, or maybe we consider a specific person’s behavior and realize what seemed innocuous as children really wasn’t, and this book takes that idea and explores it to startling effect. The narrator got hurt when was a kid, he had a best friend with whom he lost touch, a teen romance nipped in the bud, and a school project to find penpals by sending out balloons with notes attached ended up having far-reaching consequences for him and people around him. It creates a tension between the innocence of the narrator’s childhood recollections and our adult understanding of the implications of the events he’s recounting, and as the book moves on, things get worse and worse as the narrator, now an adult, come to a reckoning with his mother about what happened all those years ago.

It hinges a lot on small details and reveals, and does so with sharp effectiveness - it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read that elicited gasps from me. It’s had its film rights optioned, and I think that if someone like Mike Flanagan - someone who knows how to get the most out of small details and understands people as people, not just plot objects - got hold of it, it would make one hell of a horror film.

A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

It’s easy for possession narratives to collapse into cliché, into the same riff on The Exorcist that we keep seeing in one form or another. But A Head Full Of Ghosts pulls off a really nice balancing act. It’s the story of one blue-collar family in Massachusetts, whose lives are upended when their oldest daughter begins acting very, very strangely. It’s told from the perspective of her younger sister, and bounces back and forth in time, told in a quasi-epistolary fashion via modern-day interview transcripts and blog entries, the past represented by diary entries and other sources of information as the family’s economic and emotional situations collapse, leading them to accept help from a local priest who, in turn, thinks that their story would make an excellent reality television show. Which sounds like it’s being set up as some kind of blunt satire of show business and what people will do for fame (which would be boring, in my opinion), but it’s not - it’s an account of the destruction of this family’s lives in the wake of a force that might (or might not) be supernatural.

The plotting uses periodic twists to maintain a sense of unease, alongside some sparingly used but highly effective imagery to illustrate the older daughter’s deterioration. The family themselves sometimes threaten to fall into caricature, but the cruelty that an older sister can visit on an utterly worshipful and trusting younger sister is acutely and devastatingly observed.

The film version is in pre-production, directed by Oz Perkins, whose I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House struck me as a stylishly mixed bag, but he certainly knows his way around a camera, so if the writing isn’t as bloodless and convoluted as that film, it’ll be another one to watch.

The Croning by Laird Barron

I’m smack-dab in the middle of this one, and though I wasn’t quite sure where it was going at first, it’s turning into a nicely atmospheric slow burn that reminds me of a lot of what I like about H.P. Lovecraft’s writing without all of the baggage he brings with him. It opens with what might be reductively described as a gritty, Game-of-Thrones-style retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, but as the adventures of the royal spymaster tasked with discovering the mysterious dwarf’s real name wind on, it makes the mischievous fairytale character a harbinger of ancient evil, before leaping forward to a nightmarishly druggy interlude in modern-day Mexico which introduces us to Don and Michelle, the central characters for the rest of the book so far. From there, it begins bouncing backward and forward in time (I am starting to see a pattern here) through events in their life, narrative asides from their children and friends, and all along, the specter of that long-ago trip to Mexico haunts the edges of Don’s fitful memory. Something evil happened to Don back then, something with roots in the opening fairytale, and slightly wrong, unsettling details about Don and Michelle’s life together flit in and out of the narrative.

Although nothing’s really developed outright by where I am in the book, the sum product of all of these different stories - stories from different places and different times, many colored with the patina of an unsavory family history -  create this feeling that there’s something very bad coming, something very old, and very powerful, a feeling of fates long ago sealed. It’s an audacious book, and it’d make a hell of a film, or maybe a limited-run series, if handled with taste and restraint.

Available from Amazon
Penpal
A Head Full Of Ghosts
The Croning

Midsommar: What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Lots and lots of scary movies take place at night. And that makes sense - the dark is threatening and uncertain, and from a survival standpoint, what you don’t know CAN kill you. As much as we’ve evolved over time, nighttime is still when we can’t see it coming, and darkness is where the monsters lurk, where the hands are waiting to grab us from out of the shadows.

Which makes it all the more impressive that Midsommar manages to wring the dread and uneasiness that it does from the unblinking eye of day. It’s one thing to cloak your nightmares in shadow, it’s a whole other thing to lay them out in plain view. But that’s exactly why this film works - it’s a slow, deliberate exercise in the dread that comes with exposure.

Dani’s having a rough time of it lately - her relationship with her sister is fractious, part of a long and complicated family history, and she’s afraid that she’s driving her boyfriend Christian away with what she perceives to be constant neediness. She’s worried about her sister, who struggles with bipolar disorder, and looks to Christian for support (as one does with their partner), but to her it feels like too much, and so she’s constantly apologizing and accommodating.

And for his part, Christian is…barely there. Over the course of a phone call and a switch in perspective, we learn everything we need to know about him. He’s callow and aimless, a boy in a man’s body, unwilling to or incapable of making not just commitments, but decisions, of taking any direction in life at all. Dani constantly puts her needs aside to keep him around, but it’s immediately apparent that he’s only there until he leaves. His friends are urging him to break it off already, it’s been a year of him dithering and miserable and she’s obviously pathologically needy, you know, what with the wanting reassurance and emotional support and all. But Christian’s afraid of breaking up with her and then regretting it. He can’t stand the idea of making a decision that might make him feel bad.

Dani may very well be clingier than is healthy, and she may very well be asking more from Christian than is reasonable, but Christian is so obviously not the man for the job. Her clinginess stems from insecurity and uncertainty in the strength of the relationship, and if Christian weren’t so shallow, unhelpful and noncommittal, she wouldn’t be so uncertain. it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, where she’s so afraid she’s driving him away that it drives him away, but nothing about him inspires trust or reassurance. The distance between them is palpable - she pulls and tugs at his arm, he keeps saying he needs to go. There’s almost always space between them, in how they talk to each other, in how far away they stand from each other.

This, then, is our beginning - a couple in the throes of disintegration. And he’s just sprung on her, out of nowhere, that he’s taking a trip to Sweden with three of his friends - one he hadn’t bothered to mention before. Which makes an already awkward situation even more awkward. And then something horrible happens to Dani. Something world-shattering. And so Christian invites her on the trip, out of pity, out of not wanting to make any tough choices. He assures his friends that she’s not actually going to take him up on it. And of course she does.

And so they’re off to Sweden - Christian, Dani, Josh, Mark, and Pelle. They’re headed to Halsingland, the tiny community where Pelle grew up. Christian and Josh are in grad school for anthropology, and Josh is going to do some fieldwork. Christian’s hoping he’ll find something to kick-start ideas for his thesis, because he hasn’t found a topic yet. Mark is, well, a pig. Mostly he wants to fuck some “Swedish milkmaids.” They’ll be arriving in time for the midsummer festival, and this year’s is a special nine-day festival that only happens once every 90 years.

As soon as they arrive, they meet up with Pelle’s brother Ingemar, who brought his friends Simon and Connie from London. Everyone’s really happy to see Pelle and Ingemar, home from their traditional trip abroad. Halsingland is a bucolic rural commune deep in rural Sweden, so far in that the sun only sets a little, for maybe two hours a day. It is a place of wide-open spaces, simple livelihoods, bright colors, and constant sunshine. Everyone’s really happy to meet Pelle and Ingemar’s friends.

They’re so happy for new people to share in their traditions.

So here they are, in a foreign country, in a foreign culture, while Dani’s processing intense traumatic grief on top of a toxic, disintegrating relationship, and everyone’s consuming a lot of hallucinogens as part of the festival, strange customs and rituals under a constant, unblinking sun. The commune at Halsingland is both more than what it seems and also exactly what it seems, and the net effect is less out-and-out scary than it is deeply disconcerting. The constant bright light and bright color starts to feel a little oppressive after awhile, and everyone plays their part in the many games and rituals with wide, sincere smiles and joy. This is a community where these traditions have been upheld for countless centuries, and they don’t see anything wrong with them, it’s the visitors who react negatively. There’s a vein of humor running through the film as well, relying on the American fish out of water- in some ways, this is very much a “wacky teens travel abroad” comedy, just thoroughly recontextualized into horror.

Which, make no mistake, it is. The people of Halsingland have some very specific customs and rituals, and while Dani is working through intense grief (while everyone is tripping balls) and dealing with her failing relationship, that tends to take center stage. The role hallucinogens play is central to this film, blurring the line between real and unreal, bringing up deep-seated fears and emotions, all painted in bright, vivid color throughout. Aesthetically, this film is as far away from the standard horror palette of dark, grimy, decaying and rusty as you can get, and it’s absolutely bracing. Space and composition are immaculate and striking, little details inform everything we see, and it all serves as a backdrop to pageantry, abandonment and betrayal in equal measure, scored equally by charming folk songs and keening, dissonant strings, ancient melodies played on equally ancient instruments. The dysfunction between Dani and Christian - separately and as a couple - is acutely observed and deeply uncomfortable throughout, as provoking of unease as any traditional scares. Her self-negation and his selfish indifference are, at times, really hard to watch. This is a film that puts emotional violence front and center. Dani’s alone and afraid, and Christian’s base selfishness and unwillingness to stand for anything destroys everything around him.

And while it puts those things front and center, the real horror shit lurks in the margins. This film works at this level through sudden juxtapositions and cuts, jarring images presented suddenly, without any fanfare and very odd things put right out in plain sight. Folk art plays a big role in this film, and when you stop to consider what the art’s depicting, it’s sort of a “wait a minute” moment, but then it’s gone before it really has a chance to sink in. Things happen in the background - a look here, a conversation there, a distraction, a dismissal - but it’s so protracted that there isn’t a lot of tension built up. Everything’s weird, because it’s a small commune in a foreign country and everyone’s tripping, and it’s only gradually that the weirdness reveals its stakes. Really it isn’t until the very end that it all comes together, Dani’s journey through grief, the cost of community and tradition, and Christian’s fecklessness leading to something truly awful. But it’s less of a punch in the gut than something that lingers, like the remnants of a serious drug trip or a very bad dream.

IMDB entry
Available from Amazon