When you think about horror movies, the horror of new relationships probably doesn’t come to mind immediately. Sure, there are films like Honeymoon that use monstrous transformation as a metaphor for the realization that maybe you don’t know your brand-new spouse as well as you thought, or thrillers like Fatal Attraction that describe how a casual encounter can have horrible consequences. But, broadly speaking, embarking on any kind of new relationship - not just romantic or sexual ones, even just friendship - can be scary, because it entails revealing things about yourself to another person, making yourself vulnerable. And there’s always an element of uncertainty there. How are they going to respond? Being intimate with someone is scary.
As is the case with Creep, a strange, persistently uncomfortable film that doesn’t really look or play like much else, and that’s very much to its credit. This is not to be confused with the (somewhat misogynistic) 2004 film of the same name that told the story of a young woman trapped in a disused part of the London Underground with something extremely nasty. No, the monster here, while certainly nasty enough, is something entirely plausible, which makes the whole thing hit just that much closer to home, to great effect.
It’s the story of a young man named Aaron. He’s a videographer by trade, and we pick up with him as he’s traveling out into the woods of what is presumably northern California, though it’s never really made clear, for a private gig. “Discretion is appreciated,” the ad said. And when he gets where he’s going, to an isolated vacation home, there’s nobody around. Nobody answers the door, nobody answers his calls. He’s just about to leave when the client, Josef, shows up. He’s very friendly…very, very friendly. He pulls Aaron in for a hug, saying “this may seem weird now, but by the end of the day it’ll be totally normal.” Josef explains to Aaron that he’s terminally ill, his wife is pregnant, and there’s every chance that he won’t live to see his child born. So he wants to make some video diaries of himself so his unborn son can get to know him after he’s gone. Aaron’s going to spend the day following him around, recording him, as a keepsake.
“This is a partnership,” Josef says.
So right from jump, something feels very, very off, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily feel like a horror movie. You hear stories of people who strike up friendships, acquaintances, work relationships, or even just passing encounters with people who don’t seem to know where and when to stop, who call at all hours, who keep asking if you like them or not, who share embarrassingly personal things about themselves and pressure you to do the same. That happens in everyday life all the time, and the effectiveness of this film lies in how it takes those kind of uncomfortable, but highly relatable encounters and spins them into something much worse. Most of the heavy lifting, then, is in the persistent uneasiness that accompanies really awkward, uncomfortable social situations with people you realize might not be totally stable. There are some jump-scare moments but they’re sort of….not exactly telegraphed, more like they’re integrated into the story in a way that makes sense so they’re as much a part of the character as they are jump scares. Josef’s the kind of guy who thinks it’s funny to leap out at someone as they walk through a door, so you get the jolt in a way that feels narratively plausible. And it suggests a certain meanness, the way certain types of teasing are presented as being all in fun, but sting nonetheless. Or how you can tickle someone until it stops being funny and starts being genuinely distressing. They’re all violations of trust, of intimacy.
The importance of intimacy to the story comes through in the cinematography as well. It’s shot almost entirely in the first person, using a commercial-grade video camera. So it’s nominally a found-footage film, at least in terms of its perspective, but it’s not really presented as such. It feels more like a film that’s just shot mostly from a first-person perspective, as if we’re privy to a video diary. Maybe now and then you’ll wonder “why is he filming this?” But since it isn’t explicitly one of these “all that remains of the night of that horrible tragedy is the footage the missing teenagers filmed” kind of movies, I found it easier to sort of just roll with it. It’s a personal film shot from a personal point of view.
It’s also an extremely minimal production. The whole film is just two people (and one voice on the phone), both of whom also wrote it (to the extent that it’s written - they improvised around a basic outline they came up with ahead of time) and one of whom is the director. There’s no score, there’s one camera, and there are minimal effects. It’s two people interacting with each other in increasingly uncomfortable ways and it feels extremely natural, which makes it work even better. If it reminds me of any other film I’ve written about for this thing, it’s probably Leaving D.C., which is similarly minimal, though this film is tenser and more unsettling, but like the former film, it’s very much centered in believable human experience and that’s why it works so well. This doesn’t scan like most horror films - it’ s set in sunny, cheery suburban environments and it plays for most of its runtime more like an indie drama about someone who finds themselves becoming increasingly entangled with a very lonely. awkward, emotionally arrested man, someone who has a real problem with boundaries for reasons hinted at obliquely in the beginning of the film. It seems more like something you’d expect from Mike White or Todd Solondz, as Aaron tries his best to navigate Josef’s feelings in a way that extricates him from the attentions of this incredibly needy person without hurting him. This is a horror film where most of the horror is expressed in conversations, which is a hell of a thing.
It’s a relatively short film, not even 90 minutes, but it does have some pacing problems. It starts to lose its focus a little in the back half, and so things meander for a bit before a fairly strong ending. There’s also going to be some “why would he do that?” questions asked of Aaron, but Aaron doesn’t know he’s in a horror movie, and once things get extremely strange he does start to fear for his safety. But to look at Josef, so lost and hangdog and forlorn, how could he possibly be anything other than just…kinda creepy?
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
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