Rattlesnake: Not So Much A Slow Burn As No Burn

Different types of stories require different types of pacing. If you’re telling the story of someone who gradually finds their normal life turned upside down, you probably want to go with a slow burn, gradually escalating the tension to a late-film reveal. On the other hand, if you’re telling the story of someone put into an impossible situation, in a fight for survival or a race against time, you’re going to want to keep things tense and fast-paced, to communicate a sense of urgency.

Pacing isn’t the biggest problem with Rattlesnake, but it’s definitely right up there. It’s a dull, interminable, and formulaic exercise, almost entirely devoid of tension or surprise.

The movie opens with a woman and her daughter driving down a long, lonely stretch of Texas highway. The woman is Katrina, and apparently she and her daughter Clara are “starting over,” though exactly what that entails is never made clear. They’re playing an alphabetical version of I Spy to pass the time while they drive. Katrina’s also really big on inspirational podcasts, real power of positive thinking-type stuff.  She and Clara have a conversation about a boy at school who was bullying Clara’s friend. Clara says he deserved to get hurt. Katrina admonishes her, saying “nobody deserves to get hurt.” Even if you don’t know what’s coming, it’s a little on the nose. 

And sure enough, their car blows a tire, and when Katrina pulls over to change it, Clara wanders off and gets bitten by the titular rattlesnake. They’re in the middle of nowhere, Katrina can’t get a phone signal, and her daughter is worsening fast. Katrina spies a trailer in the distance, and although it appears deserted at first, a woman emerges from the back and says she’ll take care of Clara. We don’t see what happens, but Clara’s symptoms subside and the woman directs Katrina to the nearest town, telling her “we’ll discuss payment later.” Once they make it to the hospital in tiny little Tulia, TX, doctors determine that she doesn’t have anything worse than heat stroke, and look at Katrina strangely when she insists she was bitten by a snake. And then a well-dressed man walks into the room after the doctor has left, telling Katrina that he’s here to discuss her payment. Katrina reaches for her insurance information. 

“No,” the man says. “Your other payment.”

It’s very simple, the man says. In exchange for Clara’s life, Katrina must take the life of another person, and it must be done before sundown if she doesn’t want Clara’s healing to be undone. Clock’s ticking.

The premise is established early on, and the biggest problem with this is that little is done to develop the story beyond that. It’s pretty simple - Katrina needs to kill someone in this small town before the sun sets or her daughter will die. And there’s not much to it outside of that. So what this means is that Katrina looks for opportunities to take a life, but you know they’re doomed to fail, because at that point the movie will be over and at this point it’s only about fifteen or twenty minutes in.. For a story in which someone needs to die by sundown, there’s surprisingly little feeling of desperation or urgency. The stakes are literally life and death with a running countdown, but the pacing is sluggish, and Katrina never really registers more than what seems to be mild dismay at her situation, so there’s very little sense of momentum or tension. It all feels…leisurely, settling quickly into a rhythm of Katrina looking for an opportunity, then blowing that opportunity, then some mysterious apparition shows up and does something spooky to remind her of her obligation, rinse, repeat. I found myself saying “how much longer until this is over?” only to realize it was just the end of the first act. I’ve seen some formulaic horror films, but this one almost aggressively failed to hold my attention.

It’s not just the pacing either, there’s also an absence of real stakes as well. Katrina looks for an easy, justifiable victim, and the film front-loads her hard as someone who doesn’t believe in hurting other living things (apart from the “nobody deserves to get hurt” exchange at the beginning, there’s an animal-rights  “Friends, Not Food” bumper sticker on the back of her car, and though they don’t tattoo KILLING IS BAD on her forehead, they might as well). This means the entire premise of the film is a setup to see what it takes to get her to sacrifice her values, and it’s pretty shallow in that respect too. Another source of tension should be the act of pushing Katrina to do something contrary to her core values. We should get a sense of what this is costing her, she should look tortured, desperate, sick with the idea of what she has to do, and she never really seems more than a little worried. There’s no real journey there either - she looks for the easiest, most justifiable targets possible, the film hands her a false start or two before settling on a cartoonishly bad person who totally deserves to die, so it never feels like a challenge or a real conflict. It never rises above the level of cliché, and although it didn’t end exactly how I expected it to, it feinted toward that ending before shifting to some seriously contrived bullshit that took almost all responsibility off of her shoulders, so she barely had to compromise her principles at all and got what she wanted. 

Oh sure, the film tries to end on a spooky note, but it mostly lands flat because it’s not clear what the implications are. I’m certainly a big fan of not overexplaining, especially where the supernatural is concerned, but all of this feels a little out of nowhere. Apparently this town is plagued by mysterious random murders that are the result of people getting caught in this bargain but it’s not clear why or how, and the appearance of previous victims as messengers to Katrina would probably be a little spookier if you didn’t come to expect them like clockwork by the second act. So this might be one of those rare case where I’d like a little more than “oooh, a ghost healed her daughter and now she has to kill someone.” 

I think maybe the best way to describe this film is as deeply mechanical. It’s shot and lit like a well-budgeted TV show, and the soundtrack smothers everything in a layer of ominous ambient sounds, pounding drums, shrieking strings, there’s nothing subtle about it - everything is punctuated with musical stings just in case you don’t know it’s scary. It’s one of the films where you can see all of the moving parts, where it feels about as inorganic as possible. Sure, there are some gorgeous shots of what appears to be central Texas, and the scene where Katrina learns the price of her daughter’s rescue is nicely creepy (because at that point it hasn’t been done over and over again), but that’s about it. Otherwise, you have a pretty good idea how the whole thing is going to play out, more or less, before the first act is over and at no point does it ever surprise. It’s a race against time that meanders, with a central conflict that doesn’t cost the protagonist a thing, and is so predictable that you don’t even really need to watch it to know how any given scene is going to play out. It doesn’t really play as a slow burn, because it never even rises to a smolder. It just sits there, inert and obvious, nothing new.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix 

Game Over: Nope, Not Even A Metaphor

Every now and then I try to expand my horizons a little as I write this thing. I know for a fact that I have my wheelhouse (pretty much anything A24 distributes), and I’m very aware of the sort of stuff I don’t like, but I also know that there’s always the possibility that I’ll get stuck in a rut, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past when I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Every now and then I’ll try to break one of my internal “rules” that I use when I’m flipping through movies looking for something to watch, just to see what happens. It occurred to me this last weekend that most of my viewing history lies heavily in North America and the UK, with a smattering of Japanese or Korean horror films. There are exceptions, but not many, so I went looking for something from elsewhere in the world. Broadening your horizons is a good thing.

Game Over, however, is not really a good thing. It’s a ludicrous, confused mishmash of stories that don’t really work together, with some pretty gross sexual politics to boot. I’m going to end up pretty much spoiling this one entirely, because it’s difficult to explain what’s wrong with it without getting into details. And there’s a lot wrong with it.

The film opens with a photo of a woman, with a number scratched into the corner of the photo.  We cut to a shot of this woman outside of her apartment, paying for a food delivery. The point of view is from across the street. Then it’s from just outside her window. Then inside the apartment, as nightvision. Someone is stalking her. And then they’re killing her, beheading her and burning her body.

Cut to a title card that says “One Year Later” and…another story entirely. We’re introduced to Sapna, a video game designer. She’s got a really nice place in Chennai, with a gated entrance, a security guard, and a maid, a woman named Kalamma who frets over her. She works on designing games, she spends a lot of time playing Pac-Man. She’s got a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a pixelated heart with a game controller inside of it. She doesn’t sleep much. She doesn’t like leaving the house, she won’t return her parents’ calls. She really doesn’t like the dark.

And now, on New Year’s Day, she’s starting to suffer mysterious pains in her wrist, right where the tattoo is. Exactly one year after getting it. One year later. 

What does this have to do with the opening? Who can say? At least at first, this appears to be a story about how Sapna is more or less a prisoner in her own home for reasons that aren’t really clear at first, and the mysterious pain that may or may not be related to her tattoo. The first act is mostly just Sapna not wanting to talk to her parents, wondering why her wrist hurts, and going to therapy (where she goes through VR sessions intended to treat her fear of the dark, and strongly resemble a video game), punctuated by flashbacks to the events of a year before. When, as it eventually turns out, Sapna was abducted and sexually assaulted on New Year’s Day, on her way home from getting the tattoo. The anniversary is hitting her hard. 

And this is where one of my biggest problems with the movie comes in. I think it’s possible to use difficult, uncomfortable subject matter in horror and to use it well, but this…this ain’t it. At no point does Sapna’s pain and trauma and all of their consequences register as anything more than a prop, a contrivance to set up the events of the final act. She’s a woman in a country immersed in institutionalized rape culture - to the point that her parents effectively blame her for what happened to her - and it’s lingered on more than is necessary for the story, culminating in a pretty nasty sequence in a café, where Sapna discovers that her assault was recorded and distributed online when two bros at an adjacent table start arguing about whether or not she’s “the girl in the video” and bring up the footage on their smartphones. Sapna is suicidal by this point, but it’s not treated with any respect or gravity at all, it’s just there so an attempt can leave her wheelchair-bound during the climax. It all feels distastefully glib and more than a little prurient.

So there’s that, but then there’s my other big problem with this film - it careens from one narrative to another with little regard for any kind of through-line. If the first act is about establishing why Sapna is like she is, the second act is what seems to be a…ghost story? Apparently (speaking of contrivances), there was a mix-up at the tattoo studio where Sapna got her work done, and she got tattooed with ink containing ashes from…the remains of the woman murdered at the beginning of the movie. Maybe this is why she’s experiencing this mysterious the woman who was murdered at the beginning of the film. That also happened a year ago, and so maybe Sapna is experiencing her mysterious pain…because…ghost? It’s not really clear, we just find out that her name was Amudha, that she got tattooed at the same shop, and her mother came in after her death with the intent of getting a memorial tattoo that contained some of her daughter’s ashes but whoops! There’s a long film-within-a-film sequence as we (via Sapna) watch a tribute video Amudha’s mother put together after her murder celebrating her life and the cancer that she beat back into remission not one, but three times. Amudha got three hearts tattooed on her arm - one for each time her cancer went back into remission. 

And that’s going to be important, because in the third act it all comes together in the weirdest, most artificial way possible as the killer from the opening targets Sapna. Except it isn’t one killer, it’s three - a gang of men in identical masks and jumpsuits who apparently just go around murdering women, maybe because they got tattoos? That’s not really clear either, though Sapna’s parents are weirdly shaming about her having a tattoo, suggesting that it marks her as less virtuous and so maybe she was kind of asking for what happened to her and it’s all just fucking gross so let’s get back to the third act, which, if the first was half-assed psychological horror (it was) and the second was a half-assed ghost story (it was) , then the third act is a half-assed siege film that goes entirely off the rails as the initially metaphorical becomes really literal in just the most baffling way.

See, Sapna’s incessantly playing Pac-Man at the beginning. This is a game in which you are relentlessly pursued, and you’re constantly moving around a maze trying to avoid ghosts. Now, in the actual game, there are four ghosts, but in the version Sapna is shown playing, there are only three. There’s also the iconography of the heart - in video games, hearts can symbolize the amount of life or health a playable avatar has. Okay, with me so far? All of this metaphor become skull-clutchingly literal as the three killers (like the three ghosts in the version of Pac-Man she plays) stalk her through her own house, and now all of a sudden there are three hearts on her wrist, not one, like Amudha had, and so what happens next is that either Sapna and Kalamma gets caught and murdered, and then Sapna wakes up back at the start of the night with one less heart on her wrist just like in a video game. It makes no fucking sense in the context of anything that came before, except maybe in that it makes the first two acts seem even more artificial than they already did. Really, it just seems like an excuse to murder Sapna and Kalamma over and over again, prolonging their suffering in a way that seems downright sadistic. Basically, Sapna wakes back up, knows what to do differently the next time, then takes another shot at it, but each instance involves long, lingering takes on violence against her and Kalamma. 

So why is Sapna, as a character, traumatized? Because the filmmakers need something to make her helpless. When the psychological trauma doesn’t do, she attempts suicide and ends up with both legs badly broken so now she’s in a wheelchair with physical trauma as well, on top of parents who essentially blame her for her own rape. The bit with the ashes is, I guess, meant to either be something inspirational (though it comes off more maudlin than anything) or maybe that’s why she has “multiple lives” now, for…reasons? It really feels like the filmmakers had ideas for three different movies and couldn’t decide which one to make, so they made all of them instead, stitching them together with the thinnest of pretexts and using a genuinely upsetting subject as the springboard for a series of things that needed to happen to make the movie work. It’s shoddy storytelling and disrespectful to people who’ve gone through what they put their characters through. Suffering and trauma used as a prop, trauma from rape no less, in a film that has no idea what story it wants to tell. 

I’m not somebody who watches horror films to be entertained, really - I want to be unsettled, disturbed, moved to feel something I wouldn’t otherwise, and so I don’t have any problem with difficult or “problematic” subject matter. But, for Christ’s sake, make it mean something, and treat it with the respect it deserves. Don’t just treat it like a plot device. I definitely felt something when this film was over, but it was mostly just baffled, and a little mad at what I’d just seen. What a waste.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Reunion: Family Matter

I’m not generally a fan of films that spell everything out, and if you’ve been reading this thing for awhile that’s pretty apparent. Horror thrives on mystery, on the ambiguous, on the unexplained. But it’s a balance - even if the overall feeling of a film is disorienting or dreamlike, there should still be some sort of reckoning. That is, the viewer should be able to more or less make sense of what they’ve just watched, even if that sense arrives very late in the film, otherwise horror is replaced with confusion. You can get away with a lot if you bring everything together in the end.

So this is probably my biggest problem with Reunion. It has a lot going for it - it’s a modern riff on traditional gothic horror, impressionistic, uneasy, and cryptic. But, ultimately, it might be a little too cryptic for its own good.

We open on an academic lecture - we don’t see the speaker, it’s just a voice over a slide show, rapid-fire images of medieval illustrations of reproduction and birth. The unseen lecturer is talking about the transition from medieval ideas of alchemy to modern conceptions of science, and how in essence what we now know as biology and chemistry have their roots in black magic. A subject in which the lecturer has a personal interest, though there’s no time to get into that today.

The lecturer is Ellie. She’s working on a book about this very subject, but she’s taken some time away to travel back to her childhood home. Her father, Jack, suffers from advanced dementia, feeble and wheelchair-bound, and Ivy, her mother, is preparing to sell the house. Ellie’s there to help, though Ivy seems more concerned with Ellie’s health. Ellie’s pregnant, and Ivy doesn’t want her exerting herself. There’s some suggestion that it’s been a difficult pregnancy. Ivy tells Ellie how happy she is that she left her abusive fiancée. There’s tension between them. You get the sense that there are a lot of things that are going unsaid. Ivy really doesn’t want to talk about Cara, Ellie’s adoptive sister, who died a long time ago.

So why does Ellie keep seeing her?

Structurally, it’s a movie that starts off with little hints that things aren’t what they appear, and as the film goes on, more and more is revealed through flashbacks that add a little more context with each iteration, leading to a walloping reveal at the end. And at its heart, it owes a lot to traditional gothic horror - you’ve got a big, stately house full of family secrets and mysterious apparitions, and though Ellie isn’t exactly an ingenue, her mother is certainly a forbidding figure throughout. It’s a lot less stylized and melodramatic than, say, Stoker, but it treads some of the same ground. Even if the characters here feel more like actual people, there’s a lot lurking under the surface, and it gets pretty fucking weird. You’ve got a mother who starts the film as a little controlling, but the longer you spend in the film the more her cruelty and manipulation, her gaslighting, becomes readily apparent. Ivy is desperately trying to cover up something that happened years and years ago, and Ellie is a daughter who’s had to struggle for a sense of normalcy most of her life as a result, burying herself in arcane academic subjects. Their story is told in flashbacks and nightmares, repeated and recontextualized motifs throughout, progressing and giving us a little more context every time in a way that conveys the sense that memories are being recovered, that things long repressed are coming back to the surface. Objects and images keep coming up again and again, like they do in dreams, heavy with significance even when you aren’t sure what the significance actually is. 

This sense of dream logic extends to how the story is told as well. The dialogue is terse, with lots of oblique exchanges and little asides - blink-and-you-miss-it moments that make you think “what did she just say?” The film takes place almost entirely inside the house, all dark wood and stained glass, shafts of sunlight spilling onto antiques and stacks of boxes. There are nightmare sequences that weave in and out of the narrative alongside the flashbacks, so it isn’t always clear how much of what we’re seeing actually happened or is actually happening and how much is metaphor, and the action is punctuated by interludes of a sort - slideshows like the one that opens the film, slow-motion close-ups of cellular reproduction, blood flow, a feeling of the body as universe. The end result is almost as much tone poem as it is gothic horror, something that you don’t so much think about as feel while you watch it, the details blurring into a wash. As the film goes on, things get more and more bizarre, the lecture voicovers spiral into ranting, Ivy’s behavior likewise totters toward madness, and just when you think you have a handle on what this family’s horrible secret actually is, there’s something else that’s been foreshadowed all along, but not so much that it feels obvious when it becomes clear.

But in some ways, the things that give this film a very specific and uneasy atmosphere are things that work against it as well. The problem is that there’s a lot going on and it’s all presented so cursorily and briefly and in the margins that it’s hard to really get a fix on what the story is, like what the specific through-line is. It seems like it’s about Ellie’s attempts to resolve a childhood trauma, with her own mental health in a precarious condition, and there are ghost-story elements that presumably emerge from that. However, because we don’t really get a firm grounding in “reality” to start, the revelations we get in the last act maybe don’t quite hit as hard as they could, and the final revelation at the climax, which should be a game-changer, feels a little too confusing to have the impact it should, because it’s difficult to tell if it’s something that diegetically happened or if it’s another layer of metaphor, a more dramatically nightmarish expression of Ellie’s trauma. It’s still well-made, well-written and well-acted, and though it does take awhile to get there, it does get really unsettling in ways natural and supernatural by the final act. But if you’re going to be cryptic, then the pieces all need to fall into place in a way that makes all of the prior weirdness clear. There needs to be a reckoning, some kind of resolution, and this film seems reluctant to commit one way or another. It doesn’t ruin it, but it does take some of the sting out of it.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Gretel And Hansel: Avoiding The Obvious “Grim Fairy Tale” Joke

Following from my reconsideration of Midsommar last week, I got to thinking that fairytales, when you get right down to them, are dark and unsettling. They’re supposed to be, because they’re morality tales, ways to teach the young survival skills and cultural mores. They communicate to children that these are the stakes of straying from the straight and narrow, relics from a time when carelessness could easily get you killed. Over the generations their teeth have been lost, but if you look at what actually happens in these stories, holy shit. Every now and then you’ll see what’s supposed to be a horror “reimagining” of a fairy tale, but these are usually just gimmicky riffs on the slasher film. Nothing to write home about.

Gretel And Hansel, on the other hand, is an atmospheric and spooky reimagining of the classic fairytale, less a straight retelling of the story than an opportunity to explore it and the ideas around it, around what a world like theirs would be like, what witches are, and what it means to have (or be in) a story. It stumbles at points, but there’s a lot here to appreciate.

The film opens with the story of a little girl in a pink cap, and the bargain with darkness that her parents struck to save her life. It worked, and their only child did not die, but she was…changed…by the experience. She could bend others’ will to hers, to horrifying effect. And so her mother - now a widow - abandoned her to her fate, casting her out of the village and deep into the forest.

But that was a long time ago, and here and now we are concerned with Gretel, her brother Hansel in tow. It’s just the two of them and their mother, since their father has gone to his reward. She’s gone to the master of an inn to ask for work. She can bake, and launder. But the inn’s master in more interested in whether or not she’s kept her maidenhood. Gretel walks away, realizing she isn’t wanted for honest work, and Hansel asks her why she couldn’t have been more agreeable - he’s very hungry, and there could have been food there. Their mother is equally unsympathetic - poverty, disease, and traumatic grief have made her utterly incapable of taking care of them, and she entreats Gretel to dig their graves instead.

So there is no home for Gretel and Hansel anymore, they have been abandoned to their fate as well. They can do nothing but trek into the woods and hope to find shelter. And after some misadventure, they make their way to a lone cabin in the middle of the forest. There’s a warm light in the windows, and the table is laden with food. An old woman lives there. It seems like she’s been there awhile.

As if she moved deep into the forest a long time ago.

If you’re at all familiar with the fairytale, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how this story goes, but what makes this film interesting (besides its skillful execution) is the spin it puts on that story, how it recontextualizes it and uses it as a platform to think about the importance of self-definition and self-determination. First, it takes place in a very grounded world, one where pestilence and war has devastated the population, and everyone exists on the knife-edge of survival. Starvation and decay hang over the land like a miasma, and there’s little hope or mercy to be found. Gretel and Hansel are children, vulnerable, in a world where there are plenty of people prepared to take advantage. This film recasts Gretel as being older than Hansel, so she has to shoulder a lot of responsibility at what is still a very young age. There’s some resentment there because Hansel is, well, an impulsive little boy. This causes problems because he doesn’t have Gretel’s caution or restraint. He has little sense of danger, only his own desire to prove how brave and strong he is. The first part of the movie, then, almost plays like a 19th-century version of The Road as they fight hunger and exhaustion in their search for safety. 

Once they arrive at the old woman’s house, the film then does a lot of work around the different conceptions of witches. We have the little girl in the pink cap who is inherently evil (described in what is essentially a fairytale-within-a-fairytale), born of a bargain with darkness. But we also have the crone, the old woman who keeps herself to herself, who is wise in the ways of herbs and nature. It’s a depiction of witchcraft with which we’re familiar, albeit not in the context of this story. The film even cheekily nods to The Wizard Of Oz in a couple of places as well, and both the caricatured black-clad, pointy-hatted evocation of witchcraft as well as something closer to the sorceress, a powerful ritual magician. So it’s never as simple as “lure kids in with candy and throw them in the oven.” There’s a lot of other things going on. The crone who takes them in sees something in Gretel, and sees Hansel as burdening her, weighing her down. The story is less “mwhahahaha I am going to eat you,” and more “as long as your little brother is around, you’re not going to be able to grow into your own person because you feel obligated to take care of him.” The crone is almost more of a mentor to Gretel than anything else, and shows Gretel that she is powerful, and begins to teach her how to harness that power and use it to forge her own path, free of the expectations of others. It’s rooted in the original text, but uses it as a springboard to larger ideas. 

Which is not to say that there isn’t something very dark going on here, because there is. The crone doesn’t keep animals, does not raise crops, and yet there is always food. And as Gretel points out, nothing is given without a price. It’s beautifully, beautifully shot, with lots of brooding, windswept forest panoramas and dim, firelit interiors, spikily punctuated with plenty of striking nightmare sequences and inventive compositional and editing choices. The dialogue is a mixture of archaic and modern, mostly period-appropriate with the occasional anachronistic phrase thrown in, and the soundtrack is mostly dominated by synthesizer, which adds to the out-of-time quality while complementing the overall mood nicely. This creates the same sense of dreamy timelessness as the director’s other films - The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House - but here it lands better in some spots than others, and it shares the latter film’s tendency toward pontification, to its detriment, especially in the final act, which tips a little too much in favor of windy monologues at a point when what it really needs is faster pacing and more intensity. It never really builds to the crescendo that it should, and it loses a bit of steam in the last act. It’s vividly realized, but there’s a bit of coldness to it, some distance. 

Even if the denouement isn’t as cathartically scary as I wanted it to be (to its credit, it also never relies on jump scares - this is a film that, when it does do creepy, it does it very deliberately and very well), it invokes the idea of our personal “stories” to interesting effect - these people are literally in a story, a story in which other stories play a role, but the course of our lives is also sometimes called “our story,” so it’s as much about Gretel and Hansel’s right (and obligation) to find their own way, to become who they are meant to be, free of the hindrance of others, no matter how well-intentioned, as anything else. Which is a hell of a note for a fairytale. Pretty much a modern morality tale right there, a way to teach the young our values now, as much as ever.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon