Horror anthologies are a tough proposition. On the one hand, I think horror lends itself especially well to short-form narrative because it’s easy for scary stories to sort of sag or bog down in the middle, or to kind of stumble to an end. A short story gets in there, scares you, and ends before you can really catch your breath. On the other, anthologies run the risk of inconsistency, of strong segments and weak segments, and that can sometime detract from the overall quality.
There is none of that to worry about with Southbound. It’s a sharp, smartly paced and remarkably consistent anthology that never lets off the gas.
It’s also a little different, narratively, from most anthology films. It doesn’t really have bookending segments (well, it does, but they’re fleshed out enough that they’re practically stories of their own), and it doesn’t signpost its discrete segments. Rather, one story dovetails into the next, with the common thread being the same long, lonely stretch of desert road, where signs of life are few and far between, and what life there is seems...strange, somehow.
The Way Out
So the opening segment really sets the tone for the anthology as a whole. It sort of picks up in medias res, with two men - Jack and Mitch - pulling their pickup truck into a gas station/convenience store out in the middle of nowhere. Something bad has happened to Jack and Mitch last night - they’re covered with blood and decidedly freaked out, and there are these shadowy things on the horizon, watching, never far behind. They talk elliptically about what they did, about having to pay a price, and as much as they try to pretend like nothing’s wrong as they gas up the truck and wash off the blood in the gas station restroom, it is very clear that there is something very wrong, and it’s coming closer all the time. And as they drive away…they end up right back at the gas station. Over, and over, and over again. As I said, this segment sets the tone for the anthology. There’s a lot of energy here, an irresistible momentum that comes from two men on the run from something that they seem unwilling to talk about, something that it’s clear they can’t outrun. Because they can’t, and when it catches up, things get very weird and very bloody very quickly.
Siren
The focus shifts from Jack and Mitch to three young women - Sadie, Ava, and Kim - blearily stumbling out of their room at the motel adjacent to the gas station from the first segment. They’re a band on tour, on the road going from one gig to another. Three young women, but in pictures they have, there’s a fourth that they don’t really talk about much. It isn’t immediately clear why she isn’t with them now. There’s some tension around that. Sure enough, once they’re well away from the gas station, the van blows a tire. They don’t have a spare because they needed room for the drum kit. GPS can’t find them, their phones can’t get a signal. They’re miles from anything and anywhere. And what do you know, a couple stops when they see the women need help. They’re Dale and Betty, a surprisingly (unnervingly) chipper couple who seem to have stepped right out of the 1950s. They’re happy to help, happy to offer them a place to stay for the night until they can get a replacement tire. They’ll even introduce them to their friends, the Kensingtons, a couple (with very odd twin sons) equally out of time. They’re so happy that these young ladies are staying for dinner.
This segment is more atmospheric than the previous segment, with a lot of the work being done by the relentless strangeness of their hosts as well as the gradual revelation about the missing fourth woman. It’s not subtle, this isn’t a case of everything seeming normal until something sinister is revealed, no, everything is pretty fucking strange right from the start, and it plays out with the woozy inexorability of a nightmare.
The Accident
This one leans even more into atmosphere than the last one, as Lucas - a man on the road, trying to get back home to his wife Claire - has a horrible accident in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert. He’s hit someone with his car, and they’re still alive, but just barely. Lucas does the right thing and calls 911 to try and get help. Only 911 can’t locate him. They’re trying to give him instructions while he drives to the nearest town to get them to a hospital. Emergency services are too far away and they aren’t sure exactly where he is, so he’s flying by the seat of his pants when he pulls into a small, blink-and-you-miss-it town. It’s a church, a bar, a tattoo parlor…and a hospital. He pulls in and rushes them to the emergency room entrance…
…but there’s nobody there.
So we have one man alone in what appears to be an abandoned hospital, trying to save someone’s life by following instructions given to him on the phone by an EMT and a surgeon. The hospital itself is creepy and awful in its emptiness - especially when accentuated by half-eaten meals and phones left off the hook, as if everyone left very suddenly and not of their own free will. It’s excruciating to watch at points, as Lucas is trying to do things he isn’t trained to do - it’s one of those stories where someone’s being talked through how to save someone’s life, but turned up to 11 as the person he’s trying to save is in desperately bad shape and getting worse by the minute, conscious the entire time but unable to speak. One of the common threads running through all of the segments of this film is a feeling of wrongness, of there being something unsettling lurking at the margins, of people too caught up in the momentum of desperate situations to notice the red flags all around them, and nowhere is that more evident than here.
Jailbreak
This one starts off relatively sedate, compared to the previous segments (well excepting one awful revelation from the previous segment that plays out at the beginning of this one), it’s just a bunch of folks at a neighborhood bar trying to have a quiet drink. Though the bartender’s insistence on making sure the door is latched shut is a little odd. Just a bunch of locals having a quiet beer at the end of the day, until a wild-eyed man toting a shotgun breaks in. The man with the shotgun is Danny, and he’s looking for his sister. He knows these people knows where he is, and he’s intent on them taking him to her. The locals are, well, nonplussed by the prospect, and they warn Danny that he’s not going to like where this is headed. And so the rest of the segment is basically Danny finding out exactly where this is headed, and how badly it’s going to end for him. It’s not as immediately nightmarish as the previous segments, and it reminds me of some of the work of Nathan Ballingrud or Clive Barker, in how it’s describing a world that coexists right alongside ours, just out of sight unless you know exactly where and how to look for it. The horror here, then, is the horror of revelation, as Danny learns what has happened to his sister, and how there’s much much more to this little desert town that he ever imagined.
The Way In
And so we end the film at the ice cream stand from the previous segment. Daryl and Cait are stopping for a bite to eat, along with their daughter Jem, as they’re taking a road trip to see her off to college. They’re worried about her ability to live on her own, to stand up for herself, the usual stuff that you get when your child is getting ready to leave the nest. They’ve rented a house nearby to stay the night.
And then, as they’re settling in, three men in masks show up. It’s not clear why they’re there, and they aren’t saying much. But they have knives and baseball bats. It’s very much a siege story in miniature, hitting all of the right beats without a lot of padding, pivoting around who is where in the house at any given moment, and who does or does not have the upper hand. It’s never made precisely clear why these three men are here, but we get the sense that Daryl has done something terrible and he is finally facing a reckoning for it. Just like that, an idyllic last night with their daughter turns into a fight for survival, and you get the sense that everyone involved is paying some terrible price for their part in all of this.
So we have five segments, with different directors, but more than pretty much any other anthology I’ve seen, this film is aesthetically consistent enough that it feels less like an anthology and more like one film with a series of shorter stories contained within it. Throughout, the cinematography has a grainy, washed-out feel to it, it relies on lots of dingy location settings, and the score is full of ominous, pulsing, analog synthesizer. This gives the whole thing sort of a grindhouse feel without tipping over into pastiche or even homage. It’s more like it preserves the rawness and the energy of those sorts of films at their best without being self-conscious about it, and the pacing and editing gives the whole thing a constant sense of momentum. It starts off with two men running, and just as their story winds down the next one picks up the slack, and that one ends with the beginning of the next, and so on. We’re sort of carried along without being given much time to catch our breath. Just as we’re processing what we’ve just seen, we’re on to the next, so the unease -whatever form it takes - is constant.
On top of that, it does a really good job of telling a lot of its stories in asides, allusions, throwaway lines and reveals. This is not a film that overexplains. In every segment it feels like we’ve come in after something bad has already happened, and something worse is about to happen. The stories are told very economically, giving us everything we need without slowing down, and the loose ends it does dangle in front of us just enhance the uneasiness. There’s not a lot of world-building or mythologizing, but we get the sense of a coherent world nonetheless, that this is all happening in a particular place and time, one with its own rules and logic. It’s tough to write this up without spoiling it because each story shares elements with the one that comes after it, and there’s a strong sense, never made explicit but available if you pay close attention, that there’s a cyclical or closed-loop element to the whole thing, as if this lonely stretch of road and the small towns and gas stations that dot it aren’t somewhere you’d be able to find if you just went out for a drive. That this stretch of road, this little town, the motel, the gas station, the tattoo parlor, the ice cream shop, that they all exist…elsewhere, and that maybe everyone we’ve seen is here for a reason.
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