The Whole Truth: Too Much, All At Once

I have my biases, and one of them is for focused, elegantly constructed stories. Shit, given that we’re talking about scary movies, you could probably call a preference for an actual story a bias. Whether it’s a simple, cleanly executed premise or an elaborate clockwork of a thing, having a story that ticks along, hitting the notes it needs to hit when it needs to hit them, just feels satisfying to me. You don’t need gore, you don’t need creature effects, you don’t need a lot of screaming. With the right story, just a look or an open door or a well-placed shadow can be utterly frightening.

This is not, unfortunately, a lesson learned by the people who made The Whole Truth. It starts off promising, but gradually devolves into a mess as it tries to cram about three or four different stories together to the detriment of all of them.

Mai is a single mother with two teenage kids - her daughter Pim and her son Putt. Dad’s not in the picture, and nobody mentions him. Mai’s just gotten a promotion at work to head of international sales, which is awesome, Pim’s up for captain of her school’s cheerleading squad, and Putt…well, Putt is shy, disabled, gets bullied a lot, and has a “friend” named Fame who invites himself over to aggressively creep on Pim and threaten Putt with some sort of blackmail. Mai plans to go out with her kids to celebrate her promotion, but she gets stuck at work late - her new job means having to hang around for a long meeting with a major client. On her way home, she’s struck head-on by a drunk driver.

Now Mai is in the hospital, comatose. Her condition is stable, but the doctors only give her about a fifty-fifty chance of ever waking up again. So now Pim and Putt are effectively orphans, and in steps Mai’s father, Phong. He takes them into his care, bringing them back home, where they meet their grandmother, Wan. Pim and Putt don’t really know their grandparents very well - never visited them, didn’t really hear from them, and they’re not exactly the warmest people. Wan fusses over Pim a little, and…mistakes Putt for someone else. As it turns out, Wan suffers from dementia. Where she is, when it is, and who people are get fuzzy for her sometimes. And now it's up to Pim and Putt to make sure she gets her medication, and try not to upset her.

So, this is their life now when they aren’t in school. And soon enough, Pim and Putt start to notice things are a little off…Wan’s oddly insistent on Putt drinking all of his milk, some of the family photos are just empty frames, some have a person cut out of them. There’s a space on the wall where it’s clear something used to hang. And there’s a hole in the wall that appears to look into the living room of the neighboring house.

It’s always nighttime in that house. Even in the middle of the day.

The basic premise - two kids basically at the mercy of grandparents who don’t really know them, at least one of whom may not be in their right mind - has some promise if the story’s going to be more grounded. There’s real tension and unease in the prospect of being dependent on someone who isn’t really aware of what they’re doing. And a story about a family with deep, dark, hidden secrets (why haven’t they had any contact with their grandparents? Who’s the person missing from the photos?) can work right alongside that pretty easily. That’s even assuming everyone is who they claim to be. Separately, a story about a mysterious hole in the wall that sort of shows up one day and seems to offer a window into some other nightmare reality is, by itself, not a bad premise for a more explicitly supernatural story. But piling all of these three together puts too many ingredients in the pot all at once, not letting any of them develop as fully as they could because the movie’s juggling too much as it is. They’re all connected, in that there’s definitely a reason why Mai didn’t really stay in touch with her parents, it has something to do with the person missing from those photos, and whatever’s on the other side of that mysterious hole may be the key to it all. But it’s a lot, so the space you need to build up dread isn’t really there. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Early in the film, when you think it’s just going to be about these two kids being effectively trapped with people who say they’re their grandparents, but don’t seem especially affectionate or competent to care for them, there’s definitely something there. But it dissipates quickly in the face of all of the other moving parts.

And on top of all of that there are two other subplots, neither of which have a whole lot to do with the rest of the film. There’s one concerning drama and high-school intrigue around Pim’s place on the cheerleading squad and Fame’s whole predatory fixation on her, and another concerning Phong’s attempt to get at the truth behind the car accident that left Mai in a coma. They don’t really work to flesh out the characters or give them depth or even set up situations that drive the decisions they make later on, they’re just sort of there, padding out the run time without adding anything to the film, or at least not enough to justify the amount of time they take up. They don’t really end up being anything more than distractions. And I suspect the filmmakers were concerned about their audience being easily distracted, because this is not a film that does subtle at all. Not a moment goes by that isn’t punctuated by some kind of music sting or dramatic zoom or close-up. Nothing’s allowed to breathe or just happen in the background or the periphery of the action, which I think it potentially fatal to a movie like this, one that needs some amount of atmosphere to get over. The  more explicitly supernatural elements are pretty standard Asian-ghost stuff punctuated by some gross-out moments, none of which really land because they’re so obvious and so thoroughly forecasted. When someone looks in the hole, you know something bad is going to happen, so at that point it cannot even startle you. This film doesn’t build anything up, it just sort of flings stuff against the wall. And in case there’s any confusion, the characters are there to say out loud the stuff we’ve already figured out for ourselves.

A film like this (or at least one of the films this is like) works through revelation - what is the thing nobody wants to talk about, what happened on a particular night, stuff like that. Which is fine, and there is some of that, but there’s not a lot of mystery to it, it becomes perfunctory at best and convoluted at worst, everything coming to light in the last twenty or thirty minutes in a way that both restates the obvious and throws in some additional twists that, again, don’t really seem to add to the story, ending the whole thing on a note that I think is supposed to be creepily ambiguous but just ends up being confusing, yet again.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t trust in your audience or in the strength of a single story, and the resulting mess tries to do a bunch of things and fails at all of them.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix