Wednesday, January 19, 2022

The Old Ways: Coming Home

I have to say, I tend to approach any film that has “characters travel to another country and get menaced by primitive, superstitious natives” with a certain amount of trepidation. There are ways to do the tourism-gone-awry angle well, but it’s also really easy to do it poorly. It’s really easy to conflate fear of the unknown with fear of the other, and if the other is distinguished in terms of race or class or nationality, well…if not handled carefully, it can get icky. It’s not impossible subject matter, but it’s not easy either, and call me a snob but I don’t really trust the kind of movies going straight to streaming to handle it with aplomb.

Well, much to my relief, The Old Ways manages to handle its premise well on that front, and ultimately it’s much more about recovery, identity, and belonging than anything else. Unfortunately, there are some pretty big narrative missteps, and the substance threatens to be drowned out by those poor choices. As often as not, it’s sort of muddled and formulaic.

Cristina is a reporter who’s traveled to Mexico to write a piece about the people of a small village deep in the jungle. In the course of her investigation, she travels to a local cave called La Boca to look around. The problem being that La Boca is a taboo place that her local contacts warned her not to visit. She did anyway, and this is why as the film opens, following a brief flashback, we jump right to Cristina in a room, bound, with a bag over her head.

The locals believe she came back from La Boca with something inside her. Something that needs to be...exorcised.

This film makes the interesting choice to get right into the action and to develop Cristina and the story of what brought her here in flashback, over the course of the movie. I don’t hate this choice - it’s certainly a departure from the formula - but in the execution I think it ends up having some drawbacks. Part of the problem is that because Cristina starts off as sort of a blank slate, the revelations about her don’t have as much impact as they could. We don’t know anything about her to start, so there’s no expectations to reverse or things to recontextualize. That the information is mostly communicated through straightforward exposition doesn’t help either. For example, she’s a really good reporter. How do we know this? Well, there’s a scene where she reminds her editor that she’s a really good reporter. It doesn’t really paint a picture so much as just tell you what you’re looking at.

But the biggest problem on this front is that Cristina starts off highly unsympathetic. I think films like this work best when we identify with the protagonist and want to see them escape danger, and here we have a hotshot reporter who goes where she’s told not to go, and who defends her decision to do the exact opposite thing she was warned against doing with what is essentially “I wanted to do it.” Now, there’s a reason for all of this that makes perfect sense once we have more information, but in that moment, it reads like she’s a spoiled, willful kid who’s about to pay the price for her thoughtlessness, and so it’s harder to invest in her. This is compounded by the revelation that she has an opiate addiction on top of everything else, This revelation is actually handled pretty well and is addressed throughout in a pretty understated fashion, which works well and becomes a more important piece of the film as it goes on. Which is all to the good eventually, but it also means that for the first half of the film she pretty much has two modes: “shouty” and “dopesick.” By contrast, her captors are hardly malevolent at all - sure, they’re holding her captive and her accommodations aren’t great, but they don’t brutalize her, and so there’s this weird reversal where the antagonists seem more sympathetic than the protagonist, culminating in something around the halfway point that should be read as “heroine makes a daring bid for escape” but ends up coming off more like “obnoxious tourist commits assault.” It marks a turning point for the film, and what follows is largely better and more thoughtful than what came before, but it’s off-putting.

Following this, then, the tone of the movie (and of the protagonist) shifts, and here’s where Cristina’s drug addiction fits in - it’s never really signposted or made too obvious, but this shift suggests that what we’ve been watching all along is a metaphor for addiction - the idea of an all-consuming need that feeds on pain and despair, denial, hitting bottom and realizing what you’ve become, and then turning to something better, including making amends and being of service. To the film’s credit it’s never made blatant, and it gives it a bit of thematic heft, which it sorely needed. And as possession-as-addiction metaphors go, it’s handled well. And as we learn more about Cristina, from this also comes some interesting stuff about identity and belonging and who family is as well. But I feel like the choices made in the first half of the film - how Cristina is portrayed, not having a fuller picture of who she is outside of what’s revealed - mean the back half of the film doesn’t have the emotional impact that it could have had. Mostly there’s just relief that Cristina isn’t so relentlessly awful anymore.

Apart from some of the unfortunate characterization, this film never really develops much of a mood, either. The things that are supposed to be scary are so rote that you never don’t see them coming, and it’s not especially inventive in its imagery. It’s kind of demonic possession 101 - there are nightmare sequences, mysterious figures lurking outside, stuff moving around in the shadows, strange things getting vomited up, and you can see it all coming a mile away. Things do improve somewhat on this front as well in the second half of the film, adding some tension to the mix, but it’s sort of too little too late. And then just when it feels like it’s getting good and is going to stick the landing, the ending - which I think had the right idea in its broad strokes - goes on far, far too long and throws in some dopey “badass Final Girl” cliches for good measure. There’s a good movie in here somewhere, a thoughtful, understated, unsettling movie about where home really is, about finding where you belong. But, like Cristina, it’s lost in something else.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

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