Odishon: Everyone Is Lonely

Loneliness is corrosive. We’re a social species, for whom community is historically an important part of our survival. And even though it might not be as critical to our continued physical survival as it might once have been, depriving someone of that can impact their mental health negatively, and it can become a vicious cycle - the more disconnected we become, the harder it is to reconnect. It’s easy to forget yourself, forget your humanity even, over a long enough stretch of time isolated from everyone else.

And Odishon (Audition) knows this very well. It’s a masterfully made, absolutely harrowing story about loneliness and how it distorts and misshapes us.

It’s been seven years since Shigeharu Aoyama lost his wife Ryoko to a terminal illness. It’s just him and his son Shigehiko, who is now a teenager. Shigeharu does alright for himself in television production, but even his son sees that he’s lost some of the spring in his step, that he looks tired. It’s the time-honored romantic comedy cliché of the child urging their widowed parent to get back up on the horse, to start looking for love again. Shigehiko’s even got a girlfriend of his own, who comes over for study dates and is impressed with his knowledge of dinosaurs. Even his secretary is about to get married. It’s time for Dad to get back out there.

But it’s tough to meet people the older you get. Shigeharu doesn’t want an arranged marriage, he wants something romantic. He wants to meet someone and fall in love, and that’s not the kind of thing you can just make happen, especially as a busy professional. And one night, out at a bar after work, his friend Yasuhisa hits on an idea. See, Yasuhisa works in film, and it wouldn’t be that difficult for him to arrange a casting call for a movie ostensibly in production. Shigeharu will sit in on the auditions, he’ll be able to look over their resumes, get their contact information. Thirty women, see if there are any he likes. He can follow up with them later, and what do you know, it turns out the funding for the film’s been withdrawn. Tough break…but how about having dinner with me? One comic montage later, complete with actresses doing everything from baton-twirling routines to stripping down nude, one quiet, shy young woman stands out to Shigeharu. Her name’s Asami. She’s very quiet, very demure. She trained in classical ballet for 12 years but her hopes of a career were cut short when she injured her hip. Now she gets by working at a friend’s bar three nights a week. Shigeharu is almost immediately smitten.

Yasuhisa isn’t so sure, though. He thinks there’s something…off…about her.

There’s a lot going on here. It’s got the premise of a romantic comedy, but almost right from the start there’s something more astringent about it. Once they agree to their ruse, Shigeharu and Yasuhisa exhibit the conspiratorial chumminess of less overtly misogynistic versions of characters from In The Company Of Men. There are glimmers of conscience and concern, but it doesn’t stop them from going through with what is basically the presentation of thirty women as commodities, as if Shigeharu is selecting a new car, or a pet, or the fish he wants for dinner. And once Shigeharu falls for Asami, he’s as giddy as a schoolboy, which makes sense, since the idea of having a series of women paraded before you so you can pick out your favorite is a deeply juvenile one, It illustrates the idea that in some ways, some men never really grow up, that when it comes to sex and love, Shigeharu isn’t much more mature than his son. He’s happy, he’s got a new lease on life, he’s excited again, and it all seems sincere. There isn’t really any maliciousness or cruelty to him, it really is the headiness of new love, but the lie it’s predicated upon is never really far away. He’s a man who puts his needs first, and doesn’t really give the implications of that much thought.

And then there’s Asami. She is very much someone who seems fine at first glance, but the longer you look and the deeper you look, the clearer it becomes that there’s something very wrong. She’s demure, but demure to the point of utter stillness, almost dissociated (which would make sense given what we will eventually learn about her). Her background doesn’t check out at all - not her employment references, not anything. She’s a total blank. As Yasuhisa observers, he cannot find anyone who actually knows her. There are allusions to a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family, revealed to be much more and much worse in startling, upsetting flashbacks. She says things like “love only me,” to which Shigeharu readily agrees, not yet realizing how literal she’s being. Asami’s been through a lot from a very young age, and it’s had a profound impact on how she views things like love and connection, abandonment and pain.

The characterization is solid - nobody here really feels two-dimensional. Shigeharu is believable as a man who’s been grieving for a long time, and finds himself excited by the prospect of new love, enough so that he’s willing to overlook some of his qualms at the blatantly unethical way he’s pursuing it. Yasuhisa gives him the idea in the first place, but he also recognizes that his friend isn’t thinking straight and tries to counsel him to be cautious, so both of them are neither wholly unsympathetic nor wholly sympathetic. Like far too many men, they’re otherwise decent people with some pretty serious blind spots when it comes to how they treat women. Asami, from the outside, is just disconcerting enough in speech and manner to be noticeable, but not so much that someone like Shigeharu couldn’t disregard it (and there are some suggestions late in the film that he’s remembered some of their interactions very selectively), and it’s easy to believe her as someone bent into something monstrous by profound abuse and neglect. Shigeharu’s son is your basic heterosexual teenage boy, as interested in dinosaurs as he is in girls, but he doesn’t seem predatory about it. He wants his dad to be happy, he’s starting to discover attraction himself, and that all seems about right.

So it’s a film that’s very much about loneliness. This isn’t even subtextual - at one point, Yasuhisa observes that “everyone is lonely in Japan,” and it sort sets the thesis for everything else. Yes, Asami’s clearly been warped by a childhood filled with abuse to the point that she has real trouble connecting to others, but Shigeharu’s own relative loneliness causes him to ignore his better judgment and disregard some very clear red flags in the things Asami says and how she behaves. That lack of connection estranges people from their sense of self and their good judgment. But it also highlights the idea that there’s lonely, and then there’s lonely. Next to Asami’s utter isolation and disconnection - not just from humanity, but from empathy and healthy boundaries - Shigeharu’s loneliness is very relative. He has a son, coworkers, friends…his loneliness seems more like self-pity compared to the desolation that is Asami’s life and the shape it’s forced her into. We’re introduced to her sitting in her room, staring out the window into the rain, and it’s immediately evocative of someone whose emptiness is total.

And all of this is in service of a story that’s told in an audacious fashion. The film plays a lot with narrative in a few different ways, all to good effect. It begins as a romantic comedy (if you think about it, looking for a spouse under the pretext of auditions for the leading role in a film feels a lot like a rom-com waiting to happen. If you stop to consider it, the implications are appalling, but that’s not unusual for romantic comedies) stem to stern - it’s got the lighthearted, breezy pop soundtrack, a yearning secretary, a no-nonsense housekeeper, and a son urging his dad to get back out there. And then at the end of the first act, the penny drops for the audience in a single scene, as unnerving as it is simple in construction. Now we know for sure that something isn’t right (well, we did anyway, since we’re watching a horror movie), but the film more or less continues as a romantic comedy, even as discordant notes increasingly creep in - as we learn more about Asami (or rather, learn how much we don’t know), as Yasuhisa becomes increasingly concerned by this and urges Shigeharu not to rush into things, while Shigeharu blithely ignores his friend, so strong is his attraction to Asami. The second act has more than a bit of the feeling that Shigeharu is walking toward the edge of a cliff, whistling and looking at the clouds. But it’s still grounded in romantic comedy, where his absentmindedness and willingness to take risks or ignore what’s staring him in the face would read as the dizzy recklessness of new love. But knowing what we know, it reads vert differently, like someone headed toward his doom.

It also plays with narrative visually as well, making inventive use of cutaways to convey beats economically, and flashbacks that mix up time and place - putting the adult versions of characters in situations where they were children and vice versa, and revelations that do the same, turning someone’s process of putting two and two together into a visual recombination of people and places and conversations we’ve already seen that simultaneously suggest the unreliability of memory, the logic of nightmares, and the delusions that accompany extreme ordeal, the wish to be anywhere but here. It jumbles a lot of things up in a way that defies linear storytelling, but it communicates truths nonetheless - there are points where Shigeharu, in terms of the plot, can’t be where he’s shown to be or seeing the things he’s seeing, but nonetheless, it carries the weight of truth. It’s like he’s starting to realize exactly what he’s gotten himself into, as well as having some revelations about his own past behavior, his realizations playing out in front of him and us. He’s almost serving as a proxy for us, showing us the things that have happened even though he wasn’t actually there and things that he did long before the events of this film. And even apart from the inventive use of flashback and dreamlike, hallucinatory revelation, there are a number of moments that are masterfully composed, some haunting, some unsettling, some beautiful, using light and space and the positioning of characters and objects to communicate the emotional states of characters without any words, or to underline exactly how creepy everything is getting.

And then in the third act, it all comes crashing down on him, and he is very much there, and so are we, and has so often been the case in the film up to this point, we are not allowed to look away as Shigeharu learns exactly how much of a mistake he’s made and what the costs are going to be. It’s excruciating to watch, and somehow doesn’t feel at odds with what’s come before - when Asami said he should love nobody except her, that’s exactly what she meant. Other people have told her that they would love her in the past, but they lied. And what Asami has learned is that while other people lie, pain never does. It plays fair in that regard - the film tells us that there’s something off about her, Yasuhisa knows there’s something off about her, it’s clear to us that there’s something off about her, but Shigeharu doesn’t listen, and now this is happening, with the dread inevitability that’s been building the entire time, This film is considered to be a classic of Japanese horror, and there is a very good reason for that.

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L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo: An Odd Bird

Today, I’m going to be writing about my latest in an ongoing attempt to familiarize myself with classic Italian horror. Most of what I’ve taken away so far from the films I’ve seen is that classic Italian horror is visually stylish and utterly unacquainted with things like “subtlety” or “nuance.” And L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage) is where a lot of this begins. It was director Dario Argento’s first sole directing credit, and it…for better and worse…really lays out the thesis for what would follow.

The film opens on an unseen figure typing a note that appears to be the location for a meeting. And then a pair of hands, clad in black gloves, unwrapping an impressive array of knives. There’s a lingering over the knives, over the leather of the gloves. It’d be really obvious to call it “fetishistic,” but that’s because it’s really obviously fetishistic. It’s an opening that leaves nothing in doubt: People are going to get stabbed.

And then we’re whisked away to meet Sam Dalmas. He’s a writer from the United States, in Rome to write a manual about varieties of birds. He was hoping for a novel, but writer’s block means he’s taking the work he can get. He doesn’t even want a copy of the book he’s just written - the check is enough. Sam is maybe kind of a dick, but he’s a dick with a hot model girlfriend and a week or two left on the lease for his apartment. He’s getting ready to move back to the U.S. with abovementioned hot model Julia. And so Sam’s walking home one night, and he ends up going past an art gallery, well-lit, full of sculpture and a front wall and entryway made entirely of glass…

…which makes it very easy to see the black-clad figure inside attempting to stab a woman to death.

Sam manages to drive the attacker off by creating a commotion, and to his credit, sticks around to make sure the potential victim is okay. He is now also the sole eyewitness to this crime, and after an interview with a detective ends in a game of “whoops, got your passport” that Sam loses badly, he’s stuck in Italy until there’s some kind of resolution. So he does what anyone would do in this position, and begins his own search for the assailant, even though he has no background or credentials in law enforcement. It’s not like there’s much else he can do.

The basic structure of the story revolves around Sam’s attempts, working both with the police and on his own, to figure out who tried to kill this woman even as more bodies start to pile up. It’s a mystery, but not necessarily an especially artfully crafted one. In fact, I think the best way to describe this film is as…eccentric. 

It’s eccentric from a visual standpoint - there are a lot of point-of-view shots from both the killer’s and victim’s perspectives (which actually work pretty well even if they are a little predictable(, a lot of close-ups of eyes and (screaming) mouths, and an editing style that can only be described as “jarring.” It’s a film where scenes of violence cut immediately to scenes of domesticity, often in the middle of a conversation, without any real transition or indication that the scene is about to change. It’s also a film in which a police crime lab is represented by a sterile white room with banks of whirring tape drives, as classic a visual shorthand for “SCIENCE!” as you could want. It’s a more visually subdued affair than Argento’s later film Suspiria, depicting everyday Italy in both its glamorous art galleries and modest apartments in crumbling neighborhoods, but the way it’s shown lends it a sheen of strangeness nonetheless.

But it isn’t always gratuitously strange, some of the visuals can be quite inventive. One especially memorable scene has Julia recounting the other murders to Sam in voiceover while we see stills of the crime scene photos from each killing, and it works really well. It also makes good use of flashbacks, sometimes freeze-framed or played over and over, inserted into the middle of scenes in a way that makes them feel almost like intrusive thoughts. And all of this is scored with a soundtrack that is equal parts discordant jazz and wordless female vocalization, landing it somewhere between a crime film and a supernatural horror film, which is appropriate. Though the killer isn’t a supernatural figure, the narrative requires that we don’t see their face until the final reveal, so for most of the film they seem less like a person and more like a presence, an undetectable, unstoppable force.

It’s narratively eccentric as well. It’d actually be more accurate to say that it’s all over the shop. It’s tough to believe that law enforcement would just let a civilian - an American one, no less - just run around conducting his own ad hoc investigation, and on multiple occasions, we get flashbacks to things Sam’s experienced that depict events clearly and vividly, but he struggles to remember the things we’re seeing right in front of us on the screen. It almost makes it feel like he’s holding something back, though at no point is he implied to be the killer. There are strange comic touches as well, like a stuttering pimp and an informant whose portrayal borders on slapstick and who feels like he wandered in from an entirely different movie, along with a deeply eccentric artist with some peculiar dietary habits, and one especially odd scene where Sam recounts an upsetting phone call to a friend, only to turn around and start making out with Julia with such fervor that the friend shows himself out. Between this and the cinematic choices, it’s a film with a tone best described as abrupt. 

None of those things are necessarily weaknesses, given the right context, but it’s got some full-on weaknesses as well. The sexism is toned down compared to Argento’s film Profondo Rosso, but the casual homophobia and transphobia from that film shows up here as well and is, equally juvenile and off-putting here. The end is a mess of fake-outs before the final reveal, jettisoning the offhand clues we get through most of the film to land on a final reveal that mostly comes out of nowhere (unless you’ve seen Profondo Rosso, in which case you will, like me, be expecting it), explained with a lot of psychobabble that to modern sensibilities will probably land as at least a trifle offensive. 

Still, it was Argento’s first sole directing credit, and though it might not have been the first giallo, it’s certainly where the form took off and it sets a tone for a lot of the films that followed. On that level, it’s an assured and confident debut with a distinct vision, and it pioneers themes and techniques that echo through his later work and into the work of other directors. It’s a clumsy mystery, but one that blazed a trail.

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Carnival Of Souls: Unheimlich

The German word unheimlich means, strange, or eerie, or uncanny, and literally translates as “unhome-like.” So something that is strange or eerie is something that is not home. And I can’t really think of a better word to describe Carnival Of Souls, an early-60s oddity that’s earned cult classic status over the years. It’s definitely strange, still pretty eerie in the modern day, and it’s very much a film about someone who doesn’t feel at home where she is, and why that might be the case.

The film opens cold on a group of three women riding together in a car. They stop at a red light, where two men in a neighboring car challenge them to a drag race. Against all good sense, the woman driving the car meets their challenge and they peel out when the light turns green. Soon enough, they come to a narrow bridge over a river. There’s just barely enough room for two cars to run abreast, and in jockeying for position, the car with the women in it gets nudged just enough at speed to send it through one of the flimsy wooden guardrails and into the river below. The car immediately begins to sink. The opening title and credits play out over the rushing water.

Some time later, one woman…only one…crawls out of the river, dazed and covered with mud.

Her name is Mary Henry, and she’s the sole survivor of the crash. The rest of the film concerns itself with her attempt to put something like a normal life back together after the accident. She takes a job as a church organist in a small town, though she herself is not religious, and secures lodging in a boarding house. It’s just her, the landlady, and one very, VERY creepy neighbor. She develops an obsession with a local pavilion, grand and majestic, but abandoned. It used to be a dance hall, and then an indoor carnival, but nobody goes there now. And then the dreams start. And then the hallucinations.

To the extent that this film works (which is pretty well, all told), it’s because it’s a very, very strange film. It was clearly shot on a small budget, but what it lacks in technical sophistication, it makes up for in sheer uneasiness. I think some of this is attributable to the film itself and some of it to the period when it was made. The dialogue and performances  are as stilted as you’d expect from a film made in the late 50s-early 60s. with all the verve and polish of an industrial training film (which makes sense, since that was the director’s stock in trade, and the format to which he returned after making this, his only feature film). It’s shot entirely in black and white, equal parts mundane everyday life and noirish chiaroscuro, with sort of a similar vibe to Night Of The Living Dead in that respect. The soundtrack does a lot of work toward the overall mood, consisting of periods of shrill, dissonant organ music, alternating with complete silence. But even beyond that, everyone feels a little…off, from the tremulous, easily flustered landlady to the furtive, weaselly neighbor, to Mary herself, aloof, brittle and remote, constantly driven by the urge to get away, to separate herself, to be alone. And you don’t really blame her, given that everyone around her seems bent on inserting themselves into her life and her business. It doesn’t have the bug-eyed intensity of something like Messiah Of Evil, but it does have that same sense of a world where everything is just a few degrees left of center.

It’s also a film that’s willing to do the unexpected cinematically. Since the director’s background was in industrial training films, there’s a plain, workmanlike feeling to the cinematography that contrasts with the fantastic subject matter. There are some instances of clever editing and moody, haunting composition, but these just stand out even more against the dry mundanity elsewhere. And there are some definite eccentricities at work here - close-ups get held a little too long or are placed where you wouldn’t expect a close-up to be, and other shots get cut off mid-sentence, so it never really falls into a predictable rhythm. For every sequence in broad daylight, in the waking world, there’s another swallowed by shadows, but one thing that distinguishes this film from a lot of other horror films is that the bad stuff doesn’t just happen at night - as the film goes on, Mary’s visions are as likely to intrude on her waking life as her nightmares, which adds to the overall off-kilter feeling of the film. It skirts convention in how it tells its story and how it conveys it visually, not so much defying expectations as disregarding them.

There’s not much of a story here, really - the film is mostly just Mary going from strange incident to strange incident until it ends, though there is a definite sense of escalation as the film moves along. Her start in a new town seems normal enough, but then the nightmares start, and then the hallucinations, and then there are periods where she seems to slip out of sync with the world altogether, and it does start to wear on her more and more over time. And honestly, her interactions with her lecherous neighbor were as uncomfortable and unsettling to me as anything else, if not more so, but I think a lot of that is the combination of the unsubtle performances and the gender norms of about sixty years ago. Still, it ends up adding a whole other layer of unease to the proceedings. The more supernatural elements are conveyed economically, but effectively, using simple makeup and slightly undercranked shots to give everything an unnaturally hastened feel. Between its theatricality, the soundtrack of spooky organ music, and the simplicity of the makeup effects, the climax reminds me of nothing so much as German Expressionism, crude but still effective.

The ending probably isn’t going to surprise anyone in a modern audience, since films with a similar conceit have become more common since this was released, but I bet this blew minds back in the day. Home is someplace comfortable and familiar, and Mary can’t feel comfortable anywhere anymore. Nowhere is home, and as an audience, we’re equally denied the comforts of familiar, predictable horror storytelling. Her experience and ours are equally unheimlich.

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Hellbender: Wolves And Sheep

A few months ago, I wrote up a film called The Deeper You Dig - I liked it quite a bit, and was very pleasantly surprised at what the filmmakers were able to achieve on a very small budget. It was definitely a low-budget indie horror film, but it didn’t look cheap - the cinematography and editing were excellent, and it had a distinct, surreal vision. I was also really impressed because it was almost entirely the work of three people - a mother/father team and one of their two daughters. They had some help with special effects and publicity, but the family produced it, acted in it, wrote it, shot it, edited it, and scored it. That’s not something you see every day and that it worked as well as it did is deeply impressive to me, and meant I was going to keep an eye out for anything else they did.

And that brings me to Hellbender, their most recent film. It’s a more ambitious and expansive film than The Deeper You Dig, and shares some of that film’s weaknesses, but more importantly, it shares all of its strengths, and the latter far outweigh the former. It’s a slow-burn coming-of-age story that, ever so gradually, reveals a very dark heart.

It opens in the woods, a group of people in period clothing gathered around a hooded figure strung up in a tree. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a lynching. Sure enough, the figure drops, gurgles, twitches…and doesn’t die. A woman takes out an old pistol and starts firing into the body, over and over again. It eventually works, at which point the hooded figure bursts into flames and rockets, screaming, into the sky.

A few centuries later, we’re introduced to a young woman named Izzy, and her mother. They live on their own way up in the mountains, forage for a vegetarian diet, and play music together. Izzy is homeschooled, she likes to hike, and swim, and play drums, and draw. Izzy’s mother goes into town to get stuff they need, but Izzy can’t go with her. She’s sick - she’s got some kind of immune disorder.

Or, at least, that’s what her mother has told her.

The setup is pretty simple - Izzy’s starting to get restless, wondering why she and her mom don’t share their music with other people or play live, why she can’t leave the property, why she can’t have friends. Her mom keeps saying she’s sick, but Izzy doesn’t feel sick, and it’s pretty clear that they aren’t like other families in other ways as well. Like how her mother is the spitting image of the one with the pistol from the prologue, and how her mother can use twigs, berries, and blood to see where Izzy is as she wanders through the woods. It’s clear that her mother isn’t telling her the whole truth. It’s not as tense as The Deeper You Dig - it doesn’t have the same cat-and-mouse sense to it. Instead it trades in a very slow burn - maybe too slow at times, though it does pay off well - that for a good portion of its running time is less full-on horror and more a dark character study about a mother who is bound and determined to keep her daughter safe as she’s  beginning to come into her own and is starting to wonder why her life is so limited, wondering what else is out there in the world. It’s got a lot of The Deeper You Dig’s thematic concerns, though. It’s about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, the mother is well-versed in magic and ritual, the daughter is very much her own person - unafraid of the world and more than a little headstrong - and all of these together inform their relationship in ways that tell a dramatic story through the language of horror films.

Like its predecessor, it’s very strong visually. This is a much more rural film, and it takes full advantage of the vast sweep of the Catskills, placing tiny figures in the middle of oceans of trees, under looming skies. Interiors make great use of light and shadow, and the shot composition is again thoughtful, inventive, and focused. It’s also got the same sense of evocative surrealism, though the contrast is less dramatic here because this is a more explicitly supernatural story. Regardless, it’s striking all the same, from small details in the waking world to full-on visions that remind me of nothing so much as Ken Russell at his most hallucinatory or the weirder moments in In The Earth, making use of effects work that runs the gamut from tasteful to berserk, but never cheap-looking. Again, I’ve seen movies made by big studios that don’t look this good or have such a singular vision. The acting and dialogue is still a little stiff, but it’s placed in such a vivid visual context that, like The Deeper You Dig, it’s easy to forgive. It’s working with a much bigger cast, more locations, and a broader visual palette, and its reach rarely exceeds its grasp in that respect. Like its predecessor, it does err a little on the slow and deliberate side, but strange little bits of business are peppered throughout so it doesn’t feel so much like it’s spinning its wheels. Acts are punctuated by Izzy and her mother playing music, running the gamut from gothy to playful to raging, and even though it's just them playing for each other and themselves, they get fully made up and costumed for it, which lands just strangely enough to add to what already feels off-kiler on its own. It does sometimes feel a little inert, like you know what you’re supposed to take away from a scene but it doesn’t have the impact you’d expect, but it more than comes good in the end, which builds real dread as you start to understand exactly what’s happening, the implications of things you saw earlier, landing on an absolute “oh, fuck” moment that inverts a friendly interaction from the beginning of the film in a way that’s absolutely chilling.

In a lot of ways it’s a film about discovery, and legacy, and the ambition of youth. This isn’t exclusively (or even usually) the realm of horror films, but here it ultimately pays off in the language of nightmares. It’s not really a folk horror film, but its take on witchcraft owes a lot to folk horror and pagan beliefs in general, and it’s central to the film’s conceit. The magic is heavily rooted in nature, all moss and berries and mushrooms and twigs and blood. It’s a earthy film, I think, a film that is comfortable with blood and death as part of the cycle of existence, one that’s almost celebratory about things that most horror films use for shock value. It’s all nature, the film says, it all comes from the earth, from the body, from life and death, It’s a cycle as inevitable as the seasons, or the relationship between wolves and sheep. Adolescence is a time of self-discovery, a time to find out who and what you really are, whether others want you to be that or not. It’s not perfect, but it’s got far, far more going for it than yet another zombie film or demonic possession film or slasher movie. It’s entirely its own thing and all the better for it.

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Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer: The Act Of Killing

I am not generally a fan of serial killer films as a subgenre. They’re often ridiculous, their antagonists somehow criminal masterminds with creative flair matched only by the access to the resources they need to stage baroque murder scenes. Even The Silence Of The Lambs and Se7en - two of my all-time favorite films - fall prey to these clichés to some degree, and lesser films indulge them wholeheartedly, trivializing and reducing serial killers to a cartoonish Other, like zombies or vampires or mummies. And, in reality, they aren’t. They aren’t brilliant, they aren’t clever, and they sure as shit aren’t antiheroes. A lot of serial-killer films - at least horror films - forget that, and I think it can be kind of gross and disrespectful, especially when their victims aren’t anything more than props for cheap scares. Which isn’t to say that I don’t like any horror films about serial killers, but I think the ones I do like are all ones that take their characters and the costs of what they’re doing seriously, and don’t glamorize or romanticize any of it at all.

And that type of film really gets its start with Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. It’s a bleak, unsparing corrective to the idea of the serial killer as a monster apart from humanity and their murders as something creative or even artistic. The late Roger Ebert once described another film as one that “is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” And I can’t think of a better description for this film than that.

It’s the story of three people - there’s Becky, her brother Otis, and Otis’ roommate Henry. Becky shows up at Otis’ place in Chicago, on the run from her abusive husband. She left her daughter at her grandmother’s house and plans to send for her once she’s settled in. Otis is out on parole after a stint in jail, though it isn’t clear why he was there. He met Henry while he was on the inside. Henry’s quiet, reserved, polite. Henry murdered his mother when he was about 24 years old.

Henry goes out a lot at night.

The film tells its story largely in terms of juxtaposition - it’s both the story of a young woman trying to get her life together, getting out from under a bad living situation, and also the story of two men whose ability to assign value to human life is severely compromised. Most of Becky’s segments on her own take place in the daytime, soundtracked by upbeat pop music, as she finds her way around Chicago, trying to figure out what her life is now. In those moments, it’s almost like we’re watching a drama about a young woman trying to find her way in the world. The segments focusing on Henry and Otis take place mostly at night, in the parts of Chicago where tourists never go, and bad things happen there, scored by ominous, pulsing synthesizer. There’s no mistaking what kind of story it is. It’s also a story that takes place in the margins - Henry works when he can as an exterminator but it isn’t steady, Otis works at a gas station, deals weed on the side, and meets with his parole officer monthly. Becky finds work as a shampoo girl at a salon, and it’s a definite step up from her previous job dancing at a strip club. Their world is cars that are barely holding together, squalid apartments, shady characters dealing stolen goods out of a storage unit, furtive assignations with sex workers in dimly lit alleyways. Theirs are lives marked by histories of parental abuse and neglect, of barely getting by from one week to the next, of bad decisions with lasting consequences. You can see how they never really had a chance. It feels like we spend most of the film submerged in the dark, and the brief flashes we get of life outside of their world feel almost like another planet entirely. Becky’s part of their world - she’s suffered as much at her parents’ has as either of them - but she’s also hopeful, optimistic. And has no idea what Henry and...increasingly...Otis are capable of.

Likewise, the first act establishes what kind of story it is through visual juxtaposition. It alternates shots of  murder victims, lying where they fell, long circling shots taking in the devastation, soundtracked by the echoes of their last moments, screams and pleading, as if the violence still lingers in the air, with moments of Henry going about his business - paying for lunch at a diner, going to work and collecting his pay, noticing women who might be headed someplace alone. For the whole of the first act, all of the violence is observed as aftermath if observed at all - there’s an especially chilling detail with a guitar that would be totally innocuous if we didn’t know exactly how Henry came across it. This shifts gradually in the second act as Henry begins to show Otis what’s possible as long as you don’t get sloppy or fall into a pattern, and from here on the violence is increasingly there on camera for us to observe. It’s messy, abrupt, and ugly, blood and the moans of someone slowly dying, begging for their lives. It comes out of nowhere, with little fanfare. One moment, Henry’s having sex in the back of his car and the next he’s choking the woman to death. There’s a home invasion sequence shot through a camcorder, which lends it the kind of queasy, intimate immediacy that most found-footage films never even touch. It honestly feels like you’re watching something you weren’t meant to see. And the film goes on, we’re faced more and more with exactly who Henry is, who Otis is becoming, and we aren’t allowed to look away. Henry’s had a lot of practice, knows what will and won’t attract attention. Otis quickly discovers he has a taste for killing, taking to it with the enthusiasm of a little boy who’s just realized that just because your parents say you can’t do something, that doesn’t actually stop you from doing it. There are some really dark impulses there that maybe surfaced briefly earlier in the film, but come out more and more as things escalate.

It's also a very grounded story, devoid of flourish. The dialogue is naturalistic, consisting of conversations between people who aren’t especially articulate, who are divorced as much from themselves as each other, and the performances are largely understated, free of unnecessary histrionics. Otis isn’t very bright, he’s impulsive and mean in a needling, belittling way, and it’s tough for him to keep his various appetites in check. Henry, by contrast, is quiet and unassuming, able to move through the world without attracting much attention or notice. He’s careful, and it’s why he hasn’t been caught yet. Becky is young but there’s a tiredness around her eyes that tells us everything we need to know about what she’s been through up to this point. Henry’s most likely the first man Becky’s ever met who hasn’t tried to abuse her in one way or another, and to her, that’s kindness. He protects and defends her around Otis, and you get the sense nobody’s ever done that before either. Her attraction to Henry and willingness to put her trust in him are immediate, predicated on not much more than him extending basic courtesy to her. She imagines a life with him, and the moments her face lights up with hope for something better are hard to watch, precisely because we know her hope is seriously misplaced. There’s a tension there, between the three of them - Otis is almost pure id, he wants what he wants when he wants it, and doesn’t think before he acts. Henry knows Otis is a liability, and Becky sees Henry as a hope for a better life. So it’s as much about the relationship between these three people as anything else, almost like a love triangle, as fucked-up as that sounds, and as the film progresses the strain between Henry and Becky on one side, and Otis on the other gets tighter and tighter, until it finally snaps..

The film is based loosely on the story of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, actual serial killers responsible for, in Lucas’ case, possibly eleven deaths. It’s difficult to tell, because Lucas cheerfully confessed to hundreds of crimes in order to secure additional perks while in prison. Like the real killers on whom they’re based, Henry and Otis aren’t glamorous. There’s no flair for the artistic, no themes to their killings. Just a lot of ugly, pointless death. 

That’s the reality, and the film ends on a cold, awful note that settles in your stomach and spreads to your bones. Killing isn’t art, it says. It’s just killing.

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