Self-reflexivity in horror movies, in my opinion, usually doesn’t land well. If you’re trying to scare people, reminding them that this is all just a movie is going to more often than not foster the kind of distance that discourages engagement with the film. If you’re going to go that route, you probably need to make sure you play it as straight and serious (or balls-to-the-wall weird) as you can to get people to forget that fact. The Cabin In The Woods gets lumped in with horror movies, but it’s so distanced and so self-reflexive that I think it’s better described as a movie about horror movies, and it’s constantly reminding the audience that it’s smarter than the material, and by extension the audience is smarter than the material, so it’s not really scary. It’s an examination of genre, not an example or expression of it.
So when you title your film A Classic Horror Story, this is exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind for me. It’s one of those films that I think is better appreciated as a cinematic exercise than really experienced or engaged with, and on top of that, it’s kind of a mixed bag. I see what it’s trying to do, but it doesn’t quite get there.
It opens strong, on the interior of some kind of farmhouse. There’s a young woman, smeared with blood and shackled to an equally bloodstained table. Hooded figures enter, one carrying a huge mallet. Cut to someone staring through a hole in the wall as the hammer comes down off-screen. Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t good.
Cut to the title, and an RV driving down a country road in southern Italy. There are five people inside, and it seems that they’re strangers who are carpooling out into the country for various reasons. There’s Fabrizio, the host and driver. He’s a film student who’s making a travel vlog, so he interviews everyone else along for the ride. There’s Mark, an obnoxious Englishman, and Sofia, his Russian girlfriend. There’s Elisa, who has some kind of initially unspecified health condition and an overbearing mother who pesters her about an upcoming medical procedure over the phone, and then there’s Riccardo, a doctor who seems to be in the middle of a failing marriage. Elisa’s on vacation, Mark and Sofia are headed to a wedding, and Riccardo is evasive. There’s some light getting-to-know-you stuff, the day turns to night, and Mark insists on taking the wheel because they’re not getting where he needs to go fast enough for his liking, and because he’s had a couple of beers. Sure enough, Mark nods off at the wheel and nearly hits an animal in the middle of the road. Fabrizio grabs the wheel and swerves at the last minute, sending the RV careening into a tree. Smash to black.
When they wake up the next morning, they’re nowhere near the road. They’re in a field, and Mark’s leg was badly broken in the crash. Riccardo splints it up, but Mark is going to need a hospital. So they head for a nearby building. What looks like, well, some kind of farmhouse.
Closer investigation reveals some suitably red flags - yes, it’s the farmhouse from the opening, festooned with animal heads and both paintings and photographs of people in creepy masks. There’s some kind of shrine out back, decorated with freshly severed pig’s heads, and Fabrizio identifies it as a shrine to a local legend about three knightly brothers from “another realm” who saved a village’s population from famine…at a terrible, eternal price. So our five protagonists are out in the woods, past the reception range of any cellphone towers, and night is starting to fall.
This film is not really a character study - you’ve got five people carpooling out into the southern Italian countryside, and none of them are much more than a single defining trait. They’re basically your typical motley crew of characters trapped together in the woods and rubbing each other the wrong way - the conflict starts pretty much immediately, not helped by Mark being an obnoxious prick, and it becomes clear quickly that the creepy farmhouse-turned-church is still very much in use. If all of this sounds like stuff we’ve all seen before, well, let me just refer you to the film’s title. One thing I will give it is that it seems to be drawing primarily from a uniquely Italian horror tradition, from the kind of films made by directors like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Ruggero Deodato. My experience with Italian horror is very, very limited, but I’ve read enough synopses to see the connections. It’s not shot as a period piece, it’s very contemporary, but still feels connected with the tradition on which it’s drawing. There’s a lot of emphasis on vengeful spirits, cannibalism, quasi-medieval torture and graphic violence consistent with their work, though this film doesn’t linger so much in that last regard - most of it is presented either briefly, off-camera, or from a distance with a couple of suitably gruesome exceptions, and it isn’t a film afraid to highlight the suffering that the victims of this violence are going through.
This lends it some visceral (ha-ha) moments, but “travelers menaced by creepy backwoods folk” is hardly the most original conceit, and there aren’t too many big surprises for the majority of the film.. It’s well-shot, using fog-shrouded woods, shadowy interiors and stark, dramatic lighting to good effect, and though the protagonists are all archetypes, they don’t quite descent into caricature. There are some interesting, better-than-expected moments, some striking imagery and creative composition, but the best moments tend to exist in isolation from each other. The action plays out in pretty desultory ways - first they’re over here, and now they’re over there, with not a lot of narrative flow, so it doesn’t really build up tension or momentum for most of its runtime. The whole doesn’t really cohere until fairly late, which hurts it some - there are narrative reasons for this, but it doesn’t help engagement much. Even if it makes sense, if it means my attention’s going to flag, that’s a problem. The third act remedies a lot of this, while at the same time shifting tonally in a pretty big way, but…
…this is where it gets difficult to talk about this movie, because there ARE narrative reasons for its shortcomings, and there are some interesting things to say about the third act, but this is a film best gone into as blind as possible, so I’ll put the rest of this write-up under a spoiler block.
It’s a little way into the third act when the other shoe drops, and it’s interesting, if a bit of a mess. As it turns out, the majority of what we’re seeing - the legend, the creepy spirits and villagers, all of it is a fiction. Everything up to this point has been staged, in what sort of makes this a riff on The Cabin In The Woods that uses Italian horror as its reference point instead of U.S. horror, and though I think we’re meant to understand that majority of the deaths are real, a lot of the third act plays as this blackly comic indictment of the cliched nature of horror films (and indeed, this one ticks pretty much all of the boxes) and in an entirely too-preachy turn, Italy’s disinterest in the form. Even the title, then, makes sense in this regard - it is a film that draws on a lot of horror cliches because it’s a scenario being staged by an aspiring filmmaker who’s looking to do not much more than replicate those cliches with an Italian spin. It’s got a generic title because it’s explicitly a movie about genre.
So the third act yanks back the curtain to generally good effect, and it’s got a cohesion and intensity that the first two don’t really have, but even this doesn’t land as well as it could because it doesn’t quite bring the story home. The antagonists are essentially staging snuff films to look like Italian horror movies (for…reasons? There’s an explanation that has to do with the economic survival of the village and the Mafia, but it doesn’t really make sense), and though it’s a pretty interesting twist, I think it draws the ending and its feelings about the state of Italian horror film out too long and gets too obvious and didactic about it in a monologue from the antagonist that beats the audience over the head and then goes back to it yet again after the ostensible end of the film. robbing the conclusion of its power. This is what I mean when I say it’s better appreciated as an exercise - as an exploration of a particular tradition in horror films, albeit a flawed one - than as a film. Its distance hurts the film, and it’s too bad because I think if they’d made the first two acts as tight and punchy as the third, then the third-act reveal would have had more of a wallop, making it an actual film instead of a film about film.
No comments:
Post a Comment