There’s only a handful of directors who make me legitimately excited when they put out a new film. Some careers are more uneven than others, and it’s not unusual to follow a good film with a turkey. But even more than that, it’s not that many directors whose work really engages me, shows me something that stays with me long after I’ve seen it. There’s good filmmaking, and then there’s filmmaking that makes me feel like I’ve seen something transformative. There are only a few directors who make me say “they’ve got a new film coming out? I am fucking there.”
Among them is…well, it’s not a single person. You might call them a filmmaking collective if that weren’t the most pretentious-sounding thing ever. The Adams family is a married couple - John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu. They write, direct, act in, shoot, edit and score their own films, with some outside help for effects work and marketing, via their Wonder Wheel Productions imprint. But their films are, in some important way, homemade. It’s often the case that writing and directing is shared. When one of them isn’t on-screen, they’re behind the camera. This would be a novelty if their films weren’t so good. I’m not familiar with their dramas, but they’ve made a couple of horror films that do seriously impressive things with the budgets they have, and have a style and vision absent from a lot of larger productions. They’re a little rough around the edges, but are so much more interesting than most films with far larger budgets. I’m a fan, pure and simple.
Where The Devil Roams is probably their largest production yet, and maybe it does overreach a little, but all of their usual strengths are intact, so this is still a striking addition to horror film. There’s nobody else out there making films like they do.
The opening is scratchy black and white. There’s a stage, and an attentive audience. A legless man comes out from stage left, and begins to read a prologue about the devil Abaddon and his doomed attempts at love. His heart is lost, his love scattered in pieces. The audience applauds, and so our story begins. It’s the story of three people - Seven, Maggie, and their daughter Eve. Seven was a country doctor, and the horrors he saw during World War I left him so traumatized that the sight of blood renders him catatonic. Maggie worked for him as a nurse, and Eve cannot speak, but sings with the voice of an angel. They have a family act of sorts featuring Eve’s singing, and they travel a dying carnival circuit, among the freaks and carnies, trying to eke out a living. It’s getting harder and harder to get by, and sometimes things get desperate to the point of violence. There’s one act that consistently does well. He’s a magician of sorts, calls himself “Mr. Tipps,” and his act consists of some religious testimony, followed by the dramatic appearance of a pair of shears, which he then uses to snip off his fingers, one by one. One evening, after the show, Eve comes by his tent out of curiosity, and watches him take a special needle and thread out of a box, and carefully stitch his fingers back on.
He has, he says, made a deal with the devil.
But even at its slowest, there are things to appreciate about it. One real strength of their films is their striking, distinct visual sense, and this one is no different. There are a lot of beautifully framed shots, set up almost like tableaux, and because this film is set in the Depression-era U.S., there’s an interesting aesthetic at work, using a mix of black and white, desaturated color, and full vivid color, and the action is punctuated by photographic stills, sepia-toned, full of dusty light, reminiscent of crime scene photos from the early 20th century. The carnival itself tends toward the macabre in the appearance of the performers, and as a result the whole thing has an unearthliness to it that feels like something between the works of Guy Maddin and Diane Arbus. Dialogue and performance has typically been the weak point in their previous films, but here it actually adds to the dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality of the film, along with a score consisting mostly of drums, bass, distorted guitar and ethereal singing. It’s as singular a treatment as anything else they’ve made.
And for the most part, it rewards the viewer’s patience. Gradually, as more and more about these people is revealed, the clearer it becomes that the prologue was indeed the thesis for the film. It’s a story about love, attachment (in more ways than one), and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love. We desperately try to hold things together, to hold ourselves together, to keep our relationships together, and when they or we come apart, the things we have to do to repair that…well, we find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d be able (or willing) to do. The unhurried pacing (punctuated by striking moments of violence as the film progresses) muddies the final act a bit, drawing things out a little longer than they needed to be, though it does come good with a tragedy that escalates things quickly in horrific fashion, leading to a final image as startling as anything else they’ve done.
It’s definitely not as tight as their other two horror films, and I think their attempts to make a period piece might have stretched their resources, but the Adams family are responsible for a singular vision that doesn’t owe jack shit to traditional horror cliches. Even flawed, their films are absolutely worth your time.
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon
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