1922: The Family Plot

Ghosts  in stories are often the consequence of some kind of tragedy or injustice - they exist because a wrong has not been righted, and they are tied to our world until it is, whether that’s by giving the spirit justice or exacting revenge. Usually, the story is about the ghost itself and how some outsider stumbled upon their existence and tries to set them right, usually discovering whatever injustice was done to them in the process.

1922 is a somber, measured story of damnation, ruin, and regret that cuts out the middleman, and tells us the ghost’s whole sad story, no outside intervention necessary.

It’s…well, it’s 1922, and the James family - Wilfrid, Arlette, and their son Henry - live on a farm in Hemingford Home, Nebraska. It’s a working farm, Wilfrid raises corn and cattle, and like any farm, they have their flush periods and their lean periods, depending on how good the crop is. But they’ve got land, and they’ve got their home, and even a Model T that Wilfrid is starting to let Henry drive around town. Which will come in handy, since Henry’s sweet on the neighbor girl, Shannon Cotterie. Idyllic enough, but for the strain around the edges. Wilfrid’s got a stubborn streak when it comes to his land, one that gets exercised at the thought of a large hog-farming concern that’s coming in and buying up as much land as they can. Arlette’s not from the country, and she never really has become accustomed to farm life. When she’s had a few too many, she becomes bitter and crude, resentful at how a youthful indiscretion saddled her with a husband and a son and life she never wanted.

The James family could have carried on like this for some time, until Arlette receives news that she’s inherited 100 acres of land from her late father. To Wilfrid, this means expanding the farm, a chance at something more than just getting by. This means turning into a larger operation, a shot at prosperity. But to Arlette, the land - or rather, its sale to the large hog farming concern - means a ticket out of Hemingford Home, back to a life in the city. Given how strained things are, naturally the talk between Wilfrid and Arlette soon turns to divorce, and Arlette’s firm conviction that she’s going to take the land and Henry and get as far away as she can.

And so Wilfrid decides that Arlette will have to die.

This is all set up pretty economically in the first act of the film, and neither party is really wholly sympathetic here, though Arlette certainly gets the shorter end of the stick. She resists any negotiation or compromise, and feels utterly entitled to things going entirely her way. Wilfrid sees everything he cares about - land and family - slipping away from him, but admits in voiceover that every man contains within him another version of himself - a conniving man, prone to the wrong thing. Wilfrid gives into the conniving man, and not only plots to kill Arlette, but also begins to convince Henry that this is the only choice they have.

The first act, then, feels a little bit like something from a Jim Thompson novel as we bear witness to the machinations of a man who knows what he’s doing is wrong, but is just selfish enough to find ways to justify it. As he moves closer and closer to killing Arlette, the film feels increasingly claustrophobic, as these two people who mean each other ill continue to share a house and a bed.

When Arlette’s death comes, it is messy and chaotic. It is an ugly and inelegant death, the work of someone unprepared for the reality of what he’s committed to doing.  The disposal of her body ends up being more difficult than anyone anticipated, and then there’s the problem of how to explain her absence. But this isn’t so much a story about whether or not Henry (who helped hold her down while his father cut his mother’s throat) and Wilfrid are going to get caught by the law, it’s about everything that happens afterward.

The film begins with Wilfrid, bearded and much the worse for wear, checking into a hotel, giving an unusual amount of consideration to whether or not he can hear anything in the walls of his room. He sits down to write out what is essentially a confession, the tale that makes up the rest of the film, and he talks a lot about damnation. And so that is the business of the second and third acts of the film, chronicling how this most selfish and cruel of acts destroys everything Wilfrid has. Wilfrid and Henry’s relationship begins to disintegrate under the weight of what they’ve done, under the steadily mounting realization that Wilfrid’s stubbornness is only making their life harder. Moreover, Wilfrid’s ceded any moral high ground he could use to counsel his son and keep him in line. Why should Henry listen to his father? Who is he, a murderer, to tell Henry what he can and cannot do?

And then the rats come. The rats that found Arlette’s body so quickly, the rats that find their way into everything.

Wilfrid and Henry drift apart, and so Henry makes a bad decision of his own, and in the third act, Wilfrid’s damnation sealed, his land cursed, everything he ever had or wanted slips away from him anyway. Death chases down anything and anyone he ever cared about, heralded by shadowy visions of Arlette and waves of rats. It’s equal measures unsettling and heartbreaking, an awful, lonely decline attended by visions of the dead past and yet to come. Wilfrid faces a reckoning in the end, and if you did spot a pale, disfigured woman by an old well in Hemingford Home today, it wouldn’t be because she’d gone unavenged.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

A Field In England: Other People, Not Necessarily Hell

I’ve got a pretty generous definition for what constitutes horror, hence my use of the term “scary movies” as a replacement, since all kinds of stuff can be scary, not just what is conventionally labeled horror, but sometimes even I find myself a little baffled as to how a film might end up marketed as horror. It can’t - or at least shouldn’t -be the mere presence of graphic violence, because something can be horrifying without being graphically violent, and not everything that is graphically violent is scary. I mean, I don’t think films like Friday the 13th are actually scary, though tastes vary on that count. As I’ve said before, for me it’s more about the feelings or moods evoked by a film that make it a scary movie - it has to scare or unnerve or unsettle or disturb, whatever the trappings.

Even though it’s labeled “horror,” A Field In England isn’t all that scary. It’s somewhat unnerving, yes, but otherwise, it strikes me more as absurdist black comedy, like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, plus some witchcraft.

The time is the 16th century, and the place is, well, England. It’s the English Civil War, and we’re dropped into the film as a man cowers in a hedge while a pitched battle rages around him. The man, the coward Whitehead, is not a soldier by any means. He’s apprenticed to an alchemist, tasked with tracking down and apprehending O’Neil, a fellow apprentice who has made off with some of their master’s documents and materials. His attempts to evade the battle bring him into the company of first Jacob and Trower, two soldiers themselves eager to get away from battle, who may or may not be on opposing sides, and then of Friend, a fool who cannot seem to stay dead. Whitehead enlists these three to help him search for O’Neil, as they march across a seemingly endless field, moving further and further away from the clamor of battle.

And they do find O’Neil, in this vast field, bordered by forest. And that’s when their fortunes change.

It’s not immediately clear what’s happening - once O’Neil is found (in a dizzying, hallucinatory sequence that suggests he has concealed himself with the aid of magic), he presses Trower, Jacob, Friend, and Whitehead into locating and digging up some kind of treasure, but as the film progresses, the treasure ends up being kind of a MacGuffin, overshadowed by the malign influence of the field in which they’re searching. Whitehead begins to experience visions that are oblique in meaning, possibly prophetic, and the rest turn on each other, their already tenuous trust abandoned. There are suggestions that there are supernatural forces at work in the field, but everything is so odd and disjointed already in its cinematic and narrative conceits that it doesn’t really build a lot of tension. There are some unsettling sequences, but they occur in isolation, and there’s as much comedy as anything else, ranging from dry wit to outright violent slapstick (it’s hard to go wrong with a good smack to the face with a shovel). The result is not scary so much as unsettling or unnerving, but that’s largely a product of how utterly dislocated the audience is from the film, insofar as it takes place in the distant past and the narrative is not a conventional linear one.

Part of that dislocation has to do with the setting. The dialogue (which has some really nice Shakespearian rhythms to it) and dress are period-appropriate for the 17th century, and it’s shot in black and white, and so we’re distanced from the characters by the unfamiliarity of the time period and their language, and distanced from the setting by its presentation in black and white. On top of that, there’s a surreal abstractness to it that recalls the Theater of the Absurd - the film is punctuated by smash cuts to black, which serve to divide it into vignettes or chapters, and these are sometimes bookended or interrupted by tableaux, where the actors stand still in stylized, dramatic poses, as if the events of the film are slowly becoming the woodcut illustrations which would depict them in that time period. So it’s as much theatrical as cinematic. The music is a mixture of electronics and period-appropriate songs and instrumentation, sometimes juxtaposing the mournful, or violent, or the profane with the whimsical. It’s odd to see a black and white film described in press blurbs as “psychedelic,” but there are sequences of strobing, mirror-imaged scenes used to indicate the presence of magic or something of evil portent, along with unconventional shot framing and composition, and so the film is both a product of antiquity in how its characters look and speak and think, and something more modern in how it’s presented to the audience. The result is a little jarring, though not in a bad way, and it’s well-executed and engaging, but I’m not really sure that it is, at any point, horrifying. A bunch of characters, brought together by fate, wandering to little purpose across an endless landscape as they slowly crumble or implode makes for an interesting film, just not one I’d call horror.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

You Were Never Really Here: When Joe Comes Back, Joe’s Head Will Crack

The Joe man is back
When Joe comes back, Joe's head will crack
When Joe's head cracks
When that big head cracks
It's "Welcome back, Joe
Welcome back, Joe."
You don't have to be alone Joe
You don't have to be alone Joe

- Big Black, “Bazooka Joe”

So I guess right now I’m thinking a lot about films in conversation with each other - remakes, like last week’s Suspiria, are one example. Another example would be a film that isn’t an explicit remake, but owes narrative or stylistic debts to other specific films, and in their unique combination, end up commenting on those films. I kind of like thinking about this, and truth be told, this week’s film is probably the furthest thing I’ve done from horror in a while, so I’m coming at it from a somewhat different angle anyway.

So, as glib as this sounds, I think You Were Never Really Here is really interesting in that it ends up taking the basic narrative thrust of action potboiler Taken and filtering it through Taxi Driver, and the results are pretty good. It’s a somber, impressionistic take on the idea of a damaged hero going to great lengths against powerful people to bring one person home safely.

The opening is cryptic, a sequence of brief actions, an unseen figure cleaning out a hotel room - burning a photo of a young girl in the room’s trash can, disposing of some jewelry, smoothing out the covers on the bed…

…wiping the head of a ball-peen hammer clean and flushing bloody rags down the toilet.

The man is Joe. Joe is ex-military, ex-FBI, and as we get to know him, the scars (both physical and psychic) left by his time in both make themselves evident in startling, intrusive flashbacks. In the here and now, Joe lives with his ailing mother (whose own history of abuse and Joe’s childhood witnessing it also intrude in flashback) and earns a living tracking down young girls who have gone missing - often runaways who have been trafficked into sex slavery. He tends to hurt the people responsible. Joe, then, has seen some shit, and the toll it’s taken on him is stark. He’s a deeply damaged hulk of a man who moves through his world as circumspectly as possible, carrying around a death wish that nestles right up against his very particular set of skills.

When the film begins, he’s just successfully finished one job and has had to break off ties with a particular middleman because that middleman’s son has a friend who recognized Joe as he was leaving a meetup. For reasons that aren’t quite clear (at this point, it becomes all too clear further in), this is unacceptable, and Joe walks away from his business relationship with this man in the blink of an eye. This is Joe’s biggest priority - that he move through the world as invisibly as possible, avoiding recognition or detection. He is never really there. He picks up a new job - the runaway daughter of a politician who is working on a high-profile gubernatorial campaign. As it must in films like this, things spiral out of control as it becomes apparent that there’s much more at stake than in your typical rescue job, and the film details this economically but powerfully. Once the other shoe drops, everything moves very fast, as Joe attempts to outrun both the people trying to kill him and his own suicidal urges in an effort to set things right and figure out what the hell is going on.

So, thinking about the idea of films in conversation with each other, this really can be though of as the anti-Taken in a lot of ways. Both feature men trying to track down young women who’ve been taken by human traffickers, but Taken features a lot of monologues, a lot of posturing and extended action scenes - massive shootouts and brawls that linger over glibly expressed violence. You Were Never Really Here keeps the talk to a minimum. Joe is a man of few words, and it’s a film of little dialogue - much of it mumbled or muttered. Likewise, very little violence is directly observed - it’s almost always just off-camera, or has already happened and we are witness to the aftermath instead. What glimpses we do get are absolutely brutal, but the camera doesn’t linger, and will just as often show it in a mirror or at some other remove instead. As a result, it isn’t trivialized - the suddenness of the aftermath is as shocking as any fight scene, if not moreso.

What we get is almost a haiku of a film, the story and the protagonist’s internal state all put up on the screen for us, communicated through images, rather than exposition. The New York in which the film is set is very much in the mode of Taxi Driver, as it takes place mostly at night, in places the tourists don’t go, light spilling over luxury and menace all alike. Like that film’s Travis Bickle, Joe is obviously damaged and has trouble with most human connection, but his violence is controlled, channeled into more morally acceptable outlets, and where Bickle ultimately exploded, you get the sense that Joe would implode instead - if he didn’t have sex traffickers on which to focus his violence, he’d direct it at himself instead. The girls he rescues aren’t an obsession or pretext for violence like Bickle’s underage sex worker, they seem to genuinely be his way of trying to do good in the world. Where our only real insight into Bickle’s mindset are his monologues and fumbling attempts at relationships, Joe’s is all up on the screen for us to see. The line between actual events and what Joe is imagining is often thin and both are depicted alongside each other to sometimes startling effect. The result is a film that eschews a lot of the melodrama of Taken and ultimately much of the nihilism of Taxi Driver, talking to both, but very much its own thing

And as its own thing, it’s so well realized. It’s beautifully shot - very composed, with lots of dynamism in light, color, tone, and perspective, which you kind of need when the dialogue is so sparse. Longer, slower takes are interrupted by sudden, intrusive shorter cuts, so much like Joe can never really relax, we can’t either. Likewise, the soundtrack relies on a mixture of electronics, discordant strings, thumps and rattles to convey deep unease. It isn’t until an end bathed in light and silence that Joe can finally rest, and let go of so much that haunts him. It’s a film that moves quickly, but never feels rushed - instead, it feels, elegant and economical in conveying the costs this life has exerted and what it might feel like to finally be free.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Suspiria (2018): Adagio Con Moto

I am not normally a huge fan of remakes. Maybe it’s stubborn or irrational, but I refuse to believe that we’ve run out of stories and need to tell the old ones again. “Rebooting” an old film (or worse, an entire - ugh - franchise) feels lazy to me most of the time.

That said, even though it doesn’t happen very often, every now and then you get a remake that is less a duplication of the original and more something in conversation with the original - something that takes the basic structure or premise or what-have-you and then deviates from it in specific, potentially meaningful ways. If it’s done right, you’ve got a film that’s compelling on its own AND gives people who also saw the original a new way to think about it. Like I said, I don’t see this very often, but one that immediately comes to mind for me is We Are What We Are, the remake of Somos Lo Que Hay that made a couple of important inversions - first, it relocated the story from an urban setting to a rural one, and second, it flipped the genders of the protagonists. So what started off as a story about poverty and desperation in the big city, and the role of men in providing for their families and the ways in which they failed to do so turned into a story about preserving old ways, old traditions, and the role of women in maintaining a family and household. The basic bones of the story didn’t change much, but specific, deliberate deviations from the original put an entirely different spin on it.

Remakes like that can be interesting. Suspiria (2018) likewise makes some interesting, deliberate choices in response to the original, but for me, one byproduct of those decisions was an end result that felt overlong and somewhat cold and detached.

This is the story of Susie Bannion, a young woman from a Mennonite family in Ohio, who travels to Berlin to audition for a place in the highly esteemed, highly selective Markov Dance Company. She’s never had any formal training, comes without any references, and only manages the audition because she caught one of the instructors on a good day. It is Berlin in 1977, a city still divided into East and West by the aftermath of World War II, a city gripped by the terror actions of the Red Army Faction. It is a time of chaos and upheaval, and into this city comes this young woman from the Midwest of the United States, untutored, whose natural capacity for dance gets her immediate admission to the school. As it so happens, a student named Patricia has just left the school under mysterious circumstances. There are rumors that she vanished to go underground with an RAF cell, and rumors that it was something darker.

Meanwhile, the teachers, a large group of older women, gather to discuss the new girl, and how she may be of use to them.

In these ways, this remake is very much like the original - one student vanishes just as another is admitted, and there are suggestions of witchcraft and sacrifice. But beyond that, the remake positions itself very much in opposition to the original.

The original Suspiria was a riot of color, texture, and sound, with every frame leaping off the screen and an insistent, layered sound design, and the remake forsakes those for the drab Brutalist winter of 1977-era Berlin and a soundtrack best described as unobtrusive. Although the original was set at a dance academy, it barely featured any dance at all, and the protagonist was thrown into the middle of a hostile environment full of vain, selfish students who resent the new girl. Here, dance figures heavily throughout as an expression of ritual, and Susie is welcomed warmly.  It’d be easy to go the gothic route, to have this ingénue thrown headfirst into a snake pit of repression and sadism (sort of the go-to for dance academies in film), and this film doesn’t really do that. It presents a rigorous, but not vicious, academic environment, within which some really weird shit is gradually revealed to be happening. The original got over primarily on excess, the remake emphasizes restraint.

So, as a response to the original version, this approach is interesting to me. But I’m not sure how well it works as a horror movie as a result. The original wasn’t especially subtle or nuanced, but it had this lunatic energy that kept pushing you forward as things got weirder and weirder, and on that level it worked. The remake stretches out and takes a fair amount of time to develop its ideas. Instead of locating everything at the academy, it bounces back and forth between what’s happening at the academy, an investigation into the academy by a psychologist who was the last person to see Patricia alive, and Susie’s home in Ohio. It isn’t confusing - the connections between the three stories becomes clearer as the film moves along - but it does lend it a slightly desultory, disconnected feeling. In isolation, there are very striking moments (this is one of those films that does an excellent job of juxtaposing the horrifying with the mundane), but there isn’t a lot of narrative momentum, and at 2 and a half hours give or take there’s a lot of time for tension to dissipate.

Make no mistake, this is a horror film. The dance academy is run by a coven of witches, yes, and they’re trying to prepare for some very important ritual, but it takes its own sweet time to get there, and it’s mostly played very low-key. I think this is a problem because I think  it’s important for horror films to evoke and sustain a mood. Technically the film is executed well - it’s shot on period-appropriate film stock, which gives it a singular look that again speaks to the original - but it’s kind of cold and airless, so the effect is ultimately one of a film more easily appreciated from a distance than engaged with directly. I guess that makes sense as part of the conversation with the original film as well, insofar as the original got over on feverish intensity, on pushing everything so hard over the top that the audience couldn’t help but get caught up in it. It makes for an interesting intellectual exercise, but as a horror film, it could benefit from a wider dynamic range in the acting and a tighter edit, one that would pull the audience in and not let them go until the bloody, crazed denouement.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Amazon Prime Video

Reading Horror, Redux: Experimental Film

Travel for the holidays has meant that I haven't had an opportunity to watch anything for this thing I write (but it has meant I had plenty of time to contemplate the interiors of the Detroit airport), but while I was on various and sundry airplanes going places, I read another really good horror novel, Experimental Film by Gemma Files.

It's the story of Lois Cairns, a Toronto film critic struggling to balance her attempts to actually make a living as a film critic with being a mother to a child with an autism spectrum disorder. She's got a loving, supportive husband (and an equally loving but not especially supportive mother), but she's wracked with self-doubt, and the pickings in Canadian film are slim at best. One night, she attends a program of experimental film at an alternative arts space in hopes of putting together a piece she can freelance out. One of the films - by a tiresome rich kid who cobbles together footage from other sources and calls it "sampling" - contains segments from something that looks very, very old. Like, earliest days of film old. And so Lois, certain that she's onto something that this dilettante missed, begins chasing down the provenance of the old footage. And so Lois begins to learn the sad story of Iris Macalla Whitcomb, a woman of the early 20th century who lost her only child and descended into eccentric seclusion. A woman interested in spiritualism, seances, mediums. A woman trying to contact her son. One day, Iris Whitcomb got on a train, but when the train arrived at its destination, she was nowhere to be found. All that remained in her passenger car was a burned sheet pinned over a window, and the melted remains of what might have very well been an early film projector.

The majority of the book, then, is Lois' descent down a long, dark rabbit hole. The author builds the story carefully, gradually shifting away from the geography of Toronto, the politics of the Canadian film industry, and the daily struggles that come with having a child on the spectrum to older mysteries, the tragic life and mysterious disappearance of Iris Whitcomb, the Germanic folktales with which she was obsessed, a world of lesser gods forgotten by time and hungry for worship, and the way that early filmmaking - reliant on highly volatile silver nitrate stock - resembled nothing so much as alchemy. It's largely paced well, giving the most startling events impact by leaving plenty of room to breathe between them (though it does get a little rushed and exposition-heavy toward the end), and leans into a mythology not often drawn upon by horror to great effect, rendering its monsters vividly and making light as oppressive and threatening as darkness.

Stories about people chasing down cursed or mysterious books and films are some of my favorite types of stories when they're done well, and this is absolutely done well. I could see someone like Ari Aster adapting this quite effectively, given his acute attention to detail at every level of the process. He is excellent at depicting fractious, complicated relationships, and his films are packed with subtle details and powerful images alike. The use of light and pagan traditions in this book often reminded me of Midsommar, and if anyone could find a way to turn a film about film into a metatextual ghost story, it'd sure as shit be him. If you haven't read this, you should definitely do so.

Available from Amazon