I’ve been doing this for awhile, and though my guiding principle has always been “write about the films you feel like writing about, when you feel like writing about them,” as time’s gone on I’ve started to recognize the importance of also paying attention to the breadth and history of the genre as well. Not that I’m gonna claim to be any sort of expert but increasingly I’m coming to feel like if I’m going to write about horror movies, I should probably be pretty literate in horror movies. And the longer I do this, the easier it is for me to see where I’m not as literate as I’d like to be. One of the biggest areas I need to work on is classic Italian horror films. They’re damn near a genre of their own, and having only seen Suspiria and Profondo Rosso, I’ve only begun to even scratch the surface.
So it’s sort of an ongoing project, and this week, that brings me to L’Aldila (The Beyond). In a lot of ways, this feels like something between the other film’s I’ve seen in this style. It’s not quite as bonkers narratively as Profondo Rosso, and it’s not quite as riotous visually as Suspiria, but I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of what the style is all about. I know I’m still barely into the canon, but I’m beginning to think that the word “subtle” is just…never going to apply to these films.
It opens on a flashback, shot in tones less sepia than deep, tarnished gold. It’s Louisiana in 1921, and a crowd of townsfolk are approaching a big hotel. This is intercut with someone inside, feverishly painting a blighted landscape, and a woman reading from a mysterious old book. The crowd breaks down the door, drags the painter from his room. We learn that this hotel is built over one of seven gates to Hell found on Earth. And then the crowd takes the painter to the hotel’s basement, whips him with chains, burns him with scalding pitch, and crucifies him to a wall. The book bursts into flames.
And then it’s Louisiana in 1981, and a young woman named Liza Merril is directing a renovation of the hotel. She’s inherited it, and she sees it as her big break, or last chance at some kind of prosperity and success. Oh, sure, there are problems - the wiring is faulty, the plumbing is completely blocked up, the exterior needs to be repainted, and the interior desperately needs an updating, and she has no budget to speak of. But she’s doing what she can to get the hotel up and running as soon as possible. Which makes the obstacles that much more frustrating, like the workman who falls off a scaffold after glimpsing something inside the hotel.
Like the plumber breaking through a wall in the basement, into where the painter was crucified. And the dead, beginning to walk.
There’s really not much of a plot to this film, beyond “woman inherits old hotel in New Orleans, and as soon as the remodeling begins bad shit starts to happen.” That’s pretty much it. There’s very little character development to speak of, although at least this time the sexism isn’t quite as pungent as it was in Profondo Rosso, and the film sort of moves from one scene to another without a lot of narrative contiguity. Here’s the setting, here’s the cast, now here’s a lot of mayhem. But somehow, it works better than it should, and I think a lot of that is down to an atmosphere of persistent strangeness driven both by deliberate choices and by the byproducts of the type of film it is. It’s an Italian production set in the U.S., and to their credit, it looks like at least some of the film was shot on location, which was more than I was expecting. But as a result, the acting and dialogue are all extremely stilted in that way you get when everything’s dubbed. Almost everyone in this film is a little off in one way or another, even if it’s only in that they talk and act like people do in films set in a specific place but written and directed by people who only have a passing familiarity with that place. Even the blandest of characters, then, feel at least a little strange, and some, like the hotel’s two caretakers, are right out of a gothic novel.
The nature of the production, then, helps create a vibe even if unintentionally. But it works because that vibe is only amplified by the intentional choices made by the filmmakers. This film doesn’t waste a lot of time, telling us within the first ten minutes that this hotel is built on top of one of seven doors to hell, and hitting the ground running from there. It’s a very no-nonsense, no-filler approach. In pretty much every scene, something weird or violent (or violently weird) is going to happen, and it’s got just enough of a throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks vibe to it that it does a good job of resisting predictability. Does it all make a whole lot of sense? Not really, though it’s at least thematically cohesive. Images reoccur in a way that might not make for a linear story, but do at least give the film a consistent vocabulary. Within setpieces, the rhythms vary enough (plus it’s all just so fucking weird anyway) that you don’t really see too much coming, and the filmmakers manage to keep some fun (if largely inconsequential) twists secret for the last act. Shots get held a little longer than you’d expect, the action moves more slowly sometimes, then more quickly at others. There’s a fair amount of graphic violence, and even though it’s all done very much on the cheap and that’s readily apparent, the very specific, personal nature of the violence (this director really, really hates eyeballs) means it’s still pretty squirm-inducing, even when it doesn’t look at all realistic.
In some ways, this is a very impressionistic movie, more about evoking a feeling and using a fairly limited palette, heavy on the repetition of specific images and ideas, to sustain that feeling. It’s less stylish than Suspiria or Profondo Rosso, but individual shots and setpieces do evince some visual flair. One especially vivid moment sees a pool of blood (the consistency of a cherry Slushee) crawling slowly across a marble floor toward the feet of a young girl, but for every moment like that, you’ve got a bluntly depicted gore sequence, and though some are still very effective, some are downright laughable. It’s a much earthier, funkier movie than Suspiria or Profondo Rosso. Instead of stylishly modern apartment buildings you have a run-down hotel with a basement you can practically smell, and all of the graphic violence has a real tactility to it - bodies ooze and drip, blood flows and spills and runs, body parts squish. I wouldn’t call it art, and even when it’s risible it's still pretty fucking gross, but it’s intensely specific and personal.
This extends into the production as well. The camerawork uses a lot of quick zooms and pans to keep things tense, the editing uses a lot of sudden cuts to striking images (especially close-ups on pairs of blank, unseeing eyes) and extreme close-ups in the more violent scenes to keep things uncomfortable. Apart from the gross old hotel, some of the action takes place at a hospital whose interiors are stylishly modern and relentlessly white by comparison, and the contrast throws both into sharp relief. There are just enough establishing shots of New Orleans and the surrounding area to keep it from feeling too much like a film where one city is being played by an entirely different city, so it doesn’t feel as silly as it could. Like other film in the style, the soundtrack is mostly something akin to jazz fusion, all keyboards and uptempo drums and slap bass, which in some instances is innocuous, and in others (usually instances where someone is being dispatched in gruesome fashion) makes the whole thing feel even stranger. The pacing is pretty good throughout until it hits a snag in the last act. It feels like the producers told the director to insert an entirely unnecessary chase sequence, and according to IMDB trivia, that’s exactly what happened. You can tell - it drags on for entirely too long, and it means the protagonists have to mysteriously end up someplace else entirely, but the film still ends on a pretty striking note. It doesn’t quite have the impact it would otherwise because of the pacing issues, but the imagery is still surprising and evocative.
I’m only three movies (and two major directors) in, but I think I’m starting to get a sense of what to expect when I go into films like these now, even if that sense is “shit’s gonna be weird, don’t think too hard about it.” I’m starting to see why this style of film is held in such high regard in some circles, and I’m looking forward to more.
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment