Kairo: Alone In The Dark

I have a pretty ecumenical take on horror. I don’t want to limit it to specific forms or subject matter, because that’s boring and if you want that, there are plenty of professional critics happy to pigeonhole horror films as films that provide shocks and jump scares and gore and nothing else. Like I said, boring. I find jump scares and gore, by themselves, boring. At their best, horror films are just as capable of grappling with questions of human nature and experience as any drama, they just paint those questions with a broader palette, and one that tends toward shadows. Some critics want to call those films “elevated horror,” mostly because they can’t bring themselves to admit that horror films can be art too. But that’s an artificial distinction. Horror is just horror. Some of it (a lot of it) is derivative, pandering dreck, but at its best, it examines the human condition.

Kairo (Pulse) is a great example of this. It’s a glacially paced story about the loneliness and alienation of the modern world and the role that technology plays in it, and though over-long, it proceeds with the chilly inevitability of a nightmare.

The film follows two different storylines in parallel. In one, Michi - an employee at a plant nursery - is tasked with tracking down her coworker Taguchi, who has been working on a program that would allow them to track their sales more efficiently. He hasn’t shown up for work in several days. Elsewhere, university student Ryosuke is trying to set up internet access from an ISP installer disk. Once he’s done, his web browser navigates to a page on its own - a page displaying image after image of people sitting alone in dark rooms, barely moving or speaking. One of the figures looks up at him. Spooked, Ryosuke turns off his computer and unplugs it. Elsewhere, Michi finds Taguchi at his apartment. He’s acting distant, moving and speaking slowly, and doesn’t seem to respond when Michi asks him for the disk he was supposed to have. Left to her own devices, Michi goes searching through his stuff, eventually finding the disk.

When she turns around, Taguchi has hung himself. He appears to have been dead for some time.

At Ryosuke’s place, in the middle of the night, his computer turns itself back on, displaying the same site as before. Shadows, sitting in the dark.

The beginning of the internet as we know it today was attended by any number of movies that tried to capitalize on the novelty of this new form of communication, and it’s so easy to make hokey, shitty movies about evil websites or demons that live in the computer. This is not one of those movies. Technology is central to the film’s conceit, but it feels less like another iteration on the haunted house or cursed object, and more like a vector for some kind of spiritual contagion. Modern living already facilitates isolation, technology that allows remote, anonymous communication exacerbates it, and the result, this film says, is people who dwindle away to ghosts, to nothing, to shadows. There’s a more conventionally supernatural explanation in the story, but that’s what it is - it's the story of a lonely world that’s only growing lonelier.

This film is part of the late 90s-early 2000s run of Japanese horror films that have come to be known collectively as “J-horror,” and it’s got very much the same aesthetic as other films from this period. It takes place in a gray, overcast Japan, in concrete apartment buildings permanently stained by rain. There’s very little music (just the occasional tasteful sting to punctuate startling moments) and even less background noise, making this an uneasily quiet film. This works to its advantage as a film about isolation, and along with pacing that could generously be described as deliberate, the result is somehow both dreamy and nightmarish. It’s a languid, chilly story full of eerie, obliquely creepy moments that proceed from a visual vocabulary with an internal logic, like any nightmare where you aren’t sure exactly what’s happening, but you know that whatever it is, it is evil and wrong and coming for you with a mindless implacability. It’s cryptic, but not so cryptic that you can’t follow what’s going on. The film has atmosphere in spades, it doesn’t yank your attention toward the scary bits, instead trusting you to follow what’s going on. It doesn’t need to make a lot of noise because the silence is even worse, and the result is very effective at keeping the audience uncomfortable and priming them for the big moments.

But this approach comes with some problems - the film’s just shy of two hours long, and you feel every second of it. I don’t mind slow movies, especially ones so committed to building a sense of inescapable dread, but this really could have had about 15 minutes or so trimmed without, I think, harming the overall result. There were points where I felt my attention starting to wander because the silence and stillness was tipping over into stasis. Any film that relies on the existence of the internet to drive its premise is going to risk looking dated, and though it’s mostly relegated to the background once things really get going, there’s still something that feels dated in how unfamiliar most of the characters are with how computers work in even the most basic way. Ryosuke bears the brunt of this as a young college student who manages to know almost nothing about consumer-grade computers or software. And sure, this film was made during a period when not everyone knew much about computers (and long before haptic devices like smartphones or tablets), but to modern eyes, he just looks…kinda dumb, in a way that I don’t think was intentional. I appreciate that not everything is explained into the ground (the next person who tells me that they’re going to explore the “lore” of some antagonist from a horror film is getting a very metaphorical foot up their ass), but if you look at what’s supposed to be happening a little too closely, it does seem kind of shapeless and hand-wavey. But this is a pretty minor complaint for a film that sets a tone, commits to it, and ends in impressively bleak fashion.

This is also one of a number of Japanese horror films that got American remakes, and I think I’m going to start doing some compare-and-contrasts, because I think there’s some space between the culturally specific concerns of films like this and the way they get translated for audiences in the U.S. that’s worth talking about. But I suspect any remake is going to have a hard time replicating this film’s monolithic sense of depression and isolation, as much as I’d like to see someone try.

IMDB entry
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Honeydew: Very Little Meat And A Whole Lot Of Filler

Horror is, in my opinion, a genre that benefits strongly from the short story. It certainly isn’t impossible to do long-form horror well, but the longer the story the bigger the risk that you’re going to overexplain or bog it down. Short stories get in, set up a situation, and then take it to some fucked-up place, getting out while the shock still lingers. And I notice something similar in film - one of the most common weaknesses of horror films that I’ve observed over the many years I’ve been flinging my opinion out into the void is a tendency to drag in the middle or to whiff the ending, and I think that’s in part because sustaining feelings of tension or dread or unease or whatever for that long is tough. And for my part, I haven’t spent nearly as much time watching short films as I could be. I’m going to try and rectify that, though it’s tough since they rarely appear on streaming services.

But Honeydew is a great example of this exact problem. It starts off pretty strong, but then it drags into an absolute crawl at the end. It’s the poster child for full-length horror films that would have been better off as a short.

It opens on still shots of woodlands, a lone barn, sprawling wheat fields, steam rising from the ground. There’s an old woman grinding seed into flour. There’s a loaf of bread in an oven. A young woman eats, and scratchy religious music plays on an old tape recorder. It’s nicely cryptic. Then there is a funeral, a few mourners gathered around a simple wooden cross. It all creates a burgeoning sense of rural unease. A poacher skins an animal, wanders into a nearby barn, and discovers something he shouldn’t have.

And now we’re watching an informational film about sordico, a fungal infestation of wheat. It’s being watched by a botany student named Rylie, She and her boyfriend Sam are driving through the country, headed for some kind of getaway. And as is often the case, they make a wrong turn. And as is often also the case, they lose cell reception and their GPS stops working. So they camp for the night, only to be woken up by someone who says they’re on his land. He gives them directions to get where they’re going and tells them he’ll be back in awhile to make sure they’re gone. So they pack up and head out again and what do you know, they happen across a farmhouse! Do we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next? Is that farmhouse going to hide a terrible secret?

Yes we do, and of course it will.

I know, I sound dismissive, but I think it’s because the opening of the film showed a bit of restraint - it created a sense of unease without spelling everything out in the first ten minutes, using just isolated images juxtaposed against each other. And it’s mostly good about showing instead of telling. Sam and Rylie have a somewhat strained relationship, but it’s communicated through small things. The farmhouse is home to the old woman we saw earlier making flour. And she’s nice enough, but she’s also pretty strange right off the rip. There’s maybe a little too much silence between the things she says, an oddness. There’s her very strange son who communicates only in grunts, and his face is bandaged for some reason. He really enjoys old Popeye cartoons. We know that there’s something not right here (if only because we know we’re watching a horror movie), but exactly how it’s all going to go down isn’t immediately obvious. Should they stay? Of course not. Do they stay? Of course they do. So, dumb protagonist behavior aside, it’s a strong opening.

But after that, it starts to go downhill.  It’s hurt most by an almost complete lack of tension, because it’s only got one pace – slow. Which, at first, is fine. The evocative opening and the unhurried pace initially give the film time to build some atmosphere, but then it never tightens up or takes off. It just keeps going at that same slow, methodical pace, and so even though the setting’s good and the performances are suitably restrained and everything gradually unfolds into something that gets stranger and stranger, it starts to feel lethargic and aimless. It is never a good sign when I doze off in the middle of a film and let me tell you, that is exactly what I did. It feels like someone took a short film and stretched it out to almost two hours without actually adding anything, and pretty much the entire second act feels like the film is waiting around until it hits a certain running time before it moves on to something like a climax. And when it does reach a climax, it…continues to sort of plod along and then the whole thing just sort of stops. There’s no tension, no stakes, just a bunch of things happening with entirely too much time in between each thing, and then the third act explains what’s going on and the film ends.

And it’s too bad, because I think the filmmakers have some chops. The cinematography is suitably moody – rural vistas, dimly lit basements, shabby country squalor – and the soundtrack is mostly spooky minimalism, all thumps and clatters and wordless chanting. The editing is a standout, it’s almost percussive in a way and makes use of split-screen to mostly good effect.  I really think all the best bits could have been compressed into no more than an hour, and probably less and it would have worked a lot better. It would have gotten in, set up a situation, dropped in the protagonists and snapped the trap shut before they had time to realize what was going on. As it is, there good things about it, there are a number of good moments, but overall the whole thing just feels inert.

IMDB entry
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The First Omen: The Burden Of History

So much of what I don’t like about sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, reimaginings, etc., is how they so often pale in comparison to the film from which they spring. They tend to be exercises in reduction, pulling one thing from the original film and beating it into the ground over however many attempts are made to wring more cash out of the original idea. And everything else that made the original gets missed, ignored, or worse, deliberately jettisoned for a “fresh new take” on the property. Do you really need a fresh new take on a story after only one film?

Which is what makes The First Omen such an oddity to me. It’s actually pretty good; moreover, it would have been even better as a stand-alone film. If anything, the narrative debt it owes to the original film works against it, dragging it down instead of letting it be its own thing.

It’s Rome in 1971, a city teeming with civil unrest, and a novitiate named Margaret has come here to become a nun. She’ll be working at an orphanage that takes in women who are unmarried and pregnant, providing a home and education for their children once they’re born. The assignment hits home for her - she was orphaned and made a ward of the church herself, though her memories of those times aren’t all pleasant. She was a troubled girl and got her fair share of discipline from the sisters who ran the orphanage. And now she’s come all the way from the U.S. to seal her vows in the heart of Catholicism. While getting a tour of the facilities, Margaret spies some drawings done by some of the children. It’s the usual whimsical crayon scrawls, except for one that depicts a number of sad, hollow-eyed young girls looking up at a bigger girl floating above them, disheveled and slightly deranged though no less sad. It’s the kind of drawing that would likely inspire a wellness check in modern times. She’s told it was done by Carlita, a troubled girl with a history of violence, who spends most of her time segregated from the other girls.

Bad things tend to happen around Carlita, and nobody wants to talk about it.

In some ways, this film is at a fair disadvantage. Even if we factor out its connection to a film about the Antichrist, it is still yet another film where a nun or priest or someone about to become a nun or priest finding themselves at a monastery or convent that seems to be hiding a dark, dark secret. So it’s difficult to sustain any sense of mystery from a couple of different directions. If there’s a convent, there’s a dark secret. If there are nuns, at least some of them are complicit in hiding this dark secret. And because it is a prequel to The Omen, we have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to get there, we know where it’s going. And in horror movies, you really don’t want to see the end coming from a mile away. Maybe it’s because this sort of story has a pretty narrow range of possibilities associated with it, but it was really hard to shake the feeling that this film was checking all the boxes on a list of things that need to be in a convent/monastery with a dark secret movie.

And that sucks, not just because formulaic, predictable stories are the ruin of good horror, but also because this film is really well-made in a lot of ways. The performances are generally on the right side of understated and there’s an acuity and restraint to it that films like this rarely have, if ever. For once, the dark secret doesn’t just stop at “well we’re nuns but we’re actually evil nuns,” there’s at least a rationale there, for as much as it matters. I think more could have been done with it in relation to the film’s time and place, but I appreciate it not just being a bunch of Satanists in habits and wimples. And it’s actually pretty scary! There is no shortage of startling moments, but they aren’t jump scares, and as often as not they’re presented in ways that are inventive. There’s especially something sort of unblinking about how this film treats the female body, and there’s one moment around childbirth that’s as unsettling as anything David Cronenberg did in The Fly or Dead Ringers. I feel confident that these filmmakers could have made a really good movie about the church as a patriarchal force, resistant if not actively hostile to change, intent on controlling women’s bodies and done so in a way that could have been stark and horrifying, if they weren’t saddled with the need to tell a story that dovetails with a film made in 1976 (and remade in 2006, for that matter).

And that’s really the sticking point: The need to tell a story that leads into an existing story really hobbles and constrains this film, to the point that the end drags out for far, far too long in order to absolutely cement this story in relationship to The Omen. The world-building and exposition may be necessary (or at least somebody thought it was necessary) because this is a prequel, but it compromises the quality of the film as a singular film. It shoehorns it into a well-established formula and gives it a foregone conclusion for an ending, and damned if the film isn’t still pretty good in spite of all that. I really want to see more from these filmmakers, ideally not straitjacketed by a studio’s need to create more product in the Omen franchise space.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

We Need To Do Something: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an annual competition to see who can write the worst opening sentence in fiction, named for the author of the novel Paul Clifford, which begins “It was a dark and stormy night.” It’s been going since 1982, which is a lot of genuinely awful opening sentences, and I’ve found it pretty entertaining in the past, but to my mind, a sentence written to be deliberately awful is never going to be truly awful. Knowing it was constructed to be bad makes it entertaining to me. It’s sort of a corollary to the idea that a film made explicitly to be a cult film will never actually be a cult film. There’s an earnestness that you need and can only get when the filmmakers are being utterly serious. It’s the gap between ambition and execution, not to mention disregard for filmmaking convention, that makes bad films into cult sensations. If the Bulwer-Lytton contest is an example of something being funny because the people are in on the joke, films work the opposite way.

But nobody’s going to mistake We Need To Do Something for a cult film, or a comedy, really. It takes place on a dark and stormy night, and it’s just a misfire. It’s clumsy and muddled, with a few good moments, but not nearly enough to redeem it.

I’ll say this, it’s got a nice opening shot of a woodsy suburban neighborhood at dusk, as gray storm clouds start to roll in. It’s foreboding, but not overly so. Cut to a family walking into what appears to be a nice, if small bathroom in someone’s home. Lots of brick, tile, glass block, sort of evoking Spanish style alongside angular modernity. They’re laying down a blanket, and appear to be settling in to ride out a storm. It’s a married couple - Diane and Robert, and their two kids, Bobby and his older sister Melissa. They’ve got boardgames, and Robert’s sipping from a big insulated water bottle, but it’s already clear that something’s a little off. Melissa was late getting home and keeps insisting she was doing homework at her friend Amy’s house, but she’s evasive about it. Robert’s kind of abrasive and short-tempered, and Diane keeps messaging someone on her phone, but won’t let Robert see it and it turns into a whole thing. Meanwhile, it’s getting dark outside and, well, stormy. Then there’s a loud crash outside the door, and when Robert tries to see what it was, he discovers that a tree has crashed through their house and is now solidly blocking the door.

They’re trapped. And there’s something else out there.

It’s not impossible for movies that start off being about something that could actually happen and escalating into the supernatural to be good (see, for example, The Descent), but it doesn’t feel like this film can make up its mind about what it’s trying to accomplish. It doesn’t help that the entire family starts off annoying going into it. Robert and Diane begin the film deep into the first act of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all sidelong looks and snapping at each other about things they won’t say out loud. Robert is especially bad – it’s clear right off the bat he’s an abusive alcoholic trying to be in charge of a family that stopped respecting him a long time ago, Melissa is your basic sullen, nobody-understands-her teenager, Diane is brittle and a little shrill, and Bobby is an odd duck in a way that is slightly off-putting. If there’s one through-line to this entire film, it’s the feeling of being stuck in a small room with a bunch of very irritating people, and the result is impatience as much as it is tension. You’re trapped in there with them, but not in a way that promotes sympathy.

So you’ve got protagonists who are various shades of unlikeable, and a story best described as confusing. It begins as a standard survival story – you’ve got a bunch of people trapped in the same place, without enough resources to go around, and on the one hand, it makes sense that this family holes up in the bathroom when the possibility of a tornado is on the table. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But on the other, they bring a blanket and…some board games. No water, no snacks, no flashlight, no radio. As someone who grew up in prime tornado territory, those are the basics. But, to be fair “suburban family has no fucking idea what the basics are” is a plausible narrative, and if the filmmakers had committed to that, slowly drawing the families’ secrets out as things got worse…well, it still wouldn’t have been a slam-dunk, the writing is broad and the performances not especially nuanced (Robert especially threatens to chew the scenery), but I think the clarity and focus of that kind of story, especially in such a claustrophobic environment, would have had some punch to it.

Instead, the filmmakers inject a supernatural element (with, to be fair, one of the more effectively startling moments of the film), and again, if they were to commit to that, that’s fine too. But the film vacillates, giving neither narrative the room it needs to breathe. The build-up works, at first, but then takes this unnecessary elaborative detour that takes the supernatural element and scrambles it all up until you aren’t sure what the fuck is happening apart from the actual suffering being experienced by these four people. The survival story doesn’t work because they’re so angry with each other to start that you can’t really tell the story of a happy family descending into savagery. The supernatural story doesn’t work because, apart from being confined to two or three moments in the film, it can’t commit to a particular logic or direction, it’s just spooky shit that is initially revealed to be due to one thing, but no, maybe it’s another, or maybe it’s the first thing, or…you get the idea.

And this lack of focus even shows up in the narrative fundamentals. This is a film that, at different levels, doesn’t really think through the details. We get a shot at the beginning that establishes the bathroom door as opening onto the interior of the house (as one would expect), but once the storm is over it seems like the door is looking out onto an exterior, as if the tree demolished the entire house, which…that’s not how collapsing trees work. A trapped snake conveniently becomes un-trapped, blindness disappears as soon as it arrives when it’s necessary for the character in question to act, a smartphone lost in the rain is found perfectly functional. And the supernatural piece gets all of its development in flashback (said flashbacks containing some stuff about self-harm that borders on romanticization, at least enough to feel icky) and that part of the story ends up being all muddy because it’s not satisfied with a very simple, straightforward cause, it piles stuff on and ends up close to incoherent.

There are bits here and there that could be pieces of a better movie, a couple of effective set pieces, some details that are actually nicely underplayed, and some repeated imagery which could be leveraged into a suggestion of dream logic and the idea that this might not be what it appears to be, but nope. It’s not funny enough or strange enough to be a cult film, not deliberately outrageous enough either. It’s just as banal and clumsy as “it was a dark and stormy night.”

IMDB entry
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Fresh: Men Only Want One Thing, And It’s (Really) Disgusting

Last month was full of varying flavors of cinematic disappointment at this here thing of mine, and it was starting to annoy me a little. I can handle the occasional stinker, sure, but after awhile it starts to wear on me. I like watching good films, not dunking on bad ones.

So I’m really grateful for Fresh, a very tense, sharply pointed story about women as commodity and objects for consumption. It isn’t subtle, and it’s pretty straightforward in its construction, but it’s very well-executed.

We meet Noa on what is clearly not a good date. There’s awkward silence, a lack of chemistry so absolute that it creates a vacuum, and it goes painfully downhill from there. Dating apps are full of inane come-ons and unsolicited dick pics. It’s tough out there for her, and she commiserates with her friend Mollie about it. Mollie thinks she needs to be more willing to take risks, to just say “fuck it” and follow her heart. And that’s how she finds herself in the grocery store one night, talking to Steve. He’s handsome, charming, funny…a plastic surgeon, so he does well for himself. There seems to be some chemistry there. And so they go out for a drink, and he’s still handsome and charming and funny, so Noa says “fuck it” and takes him home. And that turns into something more promising, so when Steve invites her away for a romantic getaway out in the country, Noa - despite Mollie’s concerns - goes for it. One snag, though - Steve’s got something he has to do, so instead of heading out directly, they’ll overnight at his place and leave first thing in the morning. Mollie’s really concerned at this point, but Noa’s sure it’ll be fine.

And Steve has a really nice house, as befits a plastic surgeon. It’s modern, sprawling, but still feels pretty cozy. There’s easy conversation, some dancing, some drinks…and the next thing Noa knows, she’s waking up in a windowless room, shackled to the floor next to a futon mattress.

As it turns out, Steve services a very particular clientele, made up of people with very specific appetites. He’s not going to kill her, because his clients prefer the taste of the meat when it’s fresh.

This is a great example of what I like to call a film that isn’t a horror movie until it is. Most of the first act could be any kind of romantic comedy - you’ve got the dating woes, the supermarket meet-cute, the flirty chemistry. If you just happened across it, you’d think it was a rom-com. It’s only as it starts to move into the second act that notes of unease really begin to creep in, and then it all snaps shut like a steel trap. And once it does, it is firmly and unapologetically about women as something to be purchased and consumed. As I said, this is not a subtle film, but it does manage to both make observations about the things women have to deal with every day, large and small, while at the same time being a tense, economical story about survival. The men in this film don’t fare very well, but it’s in ways that are entirely believable, and speak to the ways that male selfishness and entitlement constantly betray women.. The date Noa is on at the beginning of the film is excruciating in and of itself - we wouldn’t call it horror, but it is an especially mundane, banal form of horror, the indignities waiting for you out there as a woman.

And as the film progresses, the horrors become more explicit, but no less rooted in the ways male selfishness and entitlement cause suffering on whatever scale. Men who only want one thing, men who can’t handle rejection, and the women who sell out other women to maintain their own comfort and prosperity, it’s all very much up there on the screen. There’s maybe one moment during the climax when it’s more than a little on-the-nose, but it doesn’t really ruin the moment or anything, and the film manages to mine a narrow but deep vein of black humor throughout that runs the usual problems with dating in the modern world through a bloody funhouse mirror.

It's not an especially flashy film, visually, but it’s got a consistent identity and a nice sense of place. A lot of the film takes place in Steve’s house, which looks like something out of a relatively restrained Michael Mann film, all brick and earth tones and natural rock and moody lighting. He’s a well-to-do man whose relationship with an attractive woman rides this woozy line between captor/captive and suitor/courted, which gives it a seductive element that seems adjacent to what (little) I’ve seen of Fifty Shades Of Grey and in that sense could be seen as a sardonic comment on it. That’s the fantasy, this is the reality. The rich man will keep you in his red room because you are meat to him. And we get sporadic flashes of his customers, lovingly unwrapping the parcels they’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars for and consuming them in ways both crude and impeccably refined. The soundtrack is an impeccably curated mix of the sort of pop songs and ballads you’d expect in romantic movies combined with foreboding ambiance and sharp, discordant stings. Flashes of its romantic comedy beginnings shine through in what doesn’t quite ever broaden out into grim parody, but definitely creates a feeling of discordance that almost seems mocking. And late in the game, it presents a nice juxtaposition between the idea of the object (women as actual meat) and the subject (the personal effects left behind), how behind dehumanizing terms like “the product,” there are actual lives and identities and futures lost, which takes what is already a pretty harrowing experience and makes it sobering as well.

For me, this film brought to mind the use of the phrase “body count” to describe the number of sexual partners someone has had. That strikes me as gross, but it seems apt here. Steve’s got a high body count, and even if it isn’t sexual conquest, the women are still objects to be consumed and discarded, commodities to be purchased in order to satisfy desires, and the film makes that point with the confidence of a cleaver chopping through the meat on a block.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Ogsuyeog Gwisin: Burying The Story

As much as I dislike the dismissal “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” I have to admit, every now and then I run across a movie that makes me think “well, this is awfully familiar.” My inclination is to blame it on lazy filmmaking or producers desperate to cash in on something transiently popular. Am I being harsh? Probably a little, but every time a film falls back on familiar, well-word stories or plot devices or imagery, it tends to take me right out of it. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of horror movies, but it especially bugs me there. Some people take comfort in familiar things in their entertainment and I’m not immune to or above that, I just don’t like it in horror. The last thing I want out of horror is to say “oh look, more ghosts with grossly distended features…yay.”

And this isn’t the biggest problem with Ogsuyeog Gwisin (The Ghost Station), but that’s mostly because it fumbles its third act. Otherwise, what you’d have is a pleasantly solid, but derivative Korean take on Japanese horror.

Na-young Kim is a reporter at a tabloid news site, and she is in both hot water and deep shit. She took a picture of a young woman in a subway station to present as the “It Girl” of the summer, and didn’t bother to get her consent. It gets more complicated as the “It Girl” turns out to have been a man cross-dressing, and now he’s suing the tabloid. Na-young is on the hook for a settlement that consists of an utterly bankrupting amount of money, and the tabloid’s going to leave her high and dry…unless she can put together some stories that will dramatically increase clicks and ad revenue. And, being a tabloid, the more sensational the better.

And just her luck, her brother works for public transportation, and he says one of his coworkers mentioned some mysterious deaths…the most recent in a whole series of them…at Ogsu Station. They think it’s cursed.

So what we have here is sort of a Korean attempt at the sort of films that would become known as  “J-horror,” as the plucky young reporter sets out to uncover the explanation behind a bunch of unusual deaths, and ends up getting in way over her head. It’s definitely not afraid to borrow elements from Ringu (an old well features prominently) and Ju-On (creepy ghost kids), but in some ways this works to its advantage, because the borrowing ends up giving the film a solid narrative backbone in the form of a mystery that needs to be solved. Things unfold pretty nicely along those lines, with everything become gradually clearer as the film progresses and the gradual unfolding of the mystery providing an opportunity for the audience to put things together for themselves. 

And there’s some interesting subtext too, in that Na-young isn’t really digging into this story because the truth must be told, at least not initially, it’s because she’s in trouble with her boss and if she doesn’t deliver, she’s ruined. So there’s something predatory about it, at least to start, which is sort of a refreshing twist on her character. She grapples at points with all of the death and buried secrets being greeted with more and more enthusiasm at work because they’re driving engagement like nobody’s business. Not to mention how the deeper she goes, the darker and weirder everything gets, and she sees things she absolutely cannot explain. There’s something malevolent here, but she has to keep putting herself in harm’s way because there’s a demand for coverage of this cursed station now, and it’s this or saying goodbye to her livelihood. It’s a nice departure from the hapless innocent.

And that’s about the only deviation from formula we’re going to get. The film gets off to a relatively slow start after an opening that feels a touch predictable (fairly standard “this place is haunted” shenanigans that end up with someone dead) but does settle into a groove in the second act with some nice startling moments paying off in ways that aren’t especially telegraphed. Again, it’s nothing fancy – this film has one gear, and that’s Na-young or her brother poking their nose where they aren’t supposed to, talking to people that they don’t realize are dead, and then boom! Creepy ghost jump-scare. I don’t normally like jump-scares, but the filmmakers know better than to set them up so you see them coming a mile away. They’re sharp and crisp and punctuate the unfolding revelations of what happened on this land long before the station was build, and how some things just cannot be buried.

But then we get to the third act. It’s not a gigantic off-the-rails clusterfuck or anything. Again, this film is resolutely on rails. In fact, by the third act it’s clear that it’s going to keep going back to the same well (ha-ha) over and over again based on what was established in the second act, and so what was working really well to add a certain amount of eeriness and tension threatens to become predictable. And then at the climax, instead of bringing it to some kind of end, they  focus on an element to the story that was barely addressed in the first two acts. It feels like the filmmakers realized that they either didn’t have an ending, still had twenty minutes to come up with so it could be feature-length, or maybe both. The result feels like the third act is tacked on, as if they’d forgotten about part of the story and decided to deal with it all at once instead of weaving into the first two acts. 

The result is that instead of the film wrapping up and coming to a satisfying close, it sort of veers into something that doesn’t really feel organic to the overall story. Worse, it doesn’t do as much with it as it could have– there are elements to it that could tie really nicely into existing story elements, but it contents itself with sort of sputtering out in an end with a fraction of the impact it could have had. Despite having its moments, ultimately it just feels like an assemblage of parts.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

It Lives Inside: Assimilated

For me, one of the best things about living in an age where streaming video makes all kinds of films more accessible (even if it does mean putting up with commercials inserted at the worst possible moment) is discovering the breadth and variety of horror films from across the world. Different traditions and cultures and value systems mean that different things are a source of horror in different parts of the world, or even that the same things are scary, but in very different ways, and it’s refreshing to see things in a new light, or even see things you’ve never seen before.

None of which are to be found in It Lives Inside, a dull, rote film about the struggle for identity in an immigrant family, told with the nuance and subtlety of an After School Special.

It opens on the aftermath of something terrible. A house in shambles, moans and screams coming from the basement. A slow dolly shot takes us through the wreckage and into the one place we’re pretty sure we don’t want to go - that basement, where a badly charred body clutches a glass jar, something writhing inside.

Meanwhile, at some point later, in another household entirely, a family of three is coming together around the breakfast table. It’s Poorna, busy finishing up the meal, her husband Inesh, just getting home after working the late shift, and their daughter Samidha, who’s getting ready for school. Samidha doesn’t stop to eat, she has teenage socializing to do, against her parents’ objections. Poorna extracts a promise from Samidha to help with the preparations for a holiday celebration that’s coming up and Samidha reluctantly agrees. At school, one particular topic of conversation is Tamira, who is basically the other Indian girl at this high school. She’s weird, doesn’t have any friends, eats her lunch under the bleachers, and she’s started acting even stranger. She looks like she isn’t sleeping or taking care of herself. Tamira corners Samidha in the hallway and begs her for help. She has this thing that she has to feed. It eats raw meat, and it’s so hungry. She can’t deal with it on her own.

Tamira holds out the glass jar we saw in the prologue, and Samidha, in a fit of embarrassment, slaps it out of her hands, where it shatters on the floor.

The math is not hard to do. That jar had something evil inside of it, and now that Samidha has freed it, it’s wreaking havoc on pretty much everyone, and it’s up to Samidha to stop it. This is not a subtle movie - the thing in the jar is a spirit from Indian mythology, run amuck among whitest suburbia. It’s a film about culture clash, and in that respect it couldn’t be any more obvious. Samidha is the picture of aspirational assimilation, she insists on being called “Sam,” contemplates lightening her skin in her selfies, distances herself from family holidays as well as from Tamira, who used to be her best friend when they were kids, and from whom she immediately distanced herself when they got to high school. Poorna is a stay-at-home mom, speaks Hindi and is a firm believer in tradition. Inesh is more Westernized, speaking English, indulging Samidha’s aspirations and urging Poorna to give her space. So we have one parent who insists on keeping tradition, one who doesn’t, and a daughter trying to run away from her heritage as quickly as she can. And the evil spirit she has to stop is one from Indian mythology called a pishach, which, according to the film, is a dark spirit that feeds on negative emotions, souls and raw meat, and is somehow born from loneliness and isolation. All of which manages to jibe with the information I was able to find online while still making it sound like the most generic evil spirit ever.

And that’s not my only problem with the film, but it’s a big one - it’s absolutely an instance of a generic U.S. horror movie. It all takes place in what appears to be one of the numerous adjoining Southern California suburbs where movies like this tend to take place, and the narrative itself is mechanical and perfunctory, a repeated loop where Samidha tries to figure out what’s going on, she and other have to react to something nobody can see and somebody dies, Samidha has a nightmare, repeat for 90 minutes that feel much, much longer. The nightmare sequences take place in red-lit darkness, people get jerked around like ragdolls by an invisible beast, and that’s sort of it until the confrontation with a special effect at the climax. The filmmakers have no idea how teenagers talk (as someone whose job puts them in regular proximity to people in their late teens, I have never heard someone call a party a “kick-back.” Ever.), and of course there’s the obligatory romance with the hottest guy in school. The performances, cinematography, and scoring are unremarkable but competent, and here again there’s not a single original moment in the whole thing.

My other big problem with the film has to be the degree to which it squanders its ostensible premise. Horror films can absolutely grapple with the experiences of immigrants and the ways some things follow them from their home country no matter how far they run, as in His House. And Indian mythology definitely has its share of rich, horrifying creatures as aptly demonstrated by Tumbbad. So it’s absolutely possible to tell this story in a nuanced, human way that paints the immigrant experience in its messy, conflicted complexity while also being scary as hell, introducing the Western world to the monsters of another time and place. But ultimately Desi culture plays next to no role in the film, and any pretense of examining Samidha’s experience as a young Indian woman in the U.S. goes out the window pretty early except to the extent that it can advance the plot. It’s generic horror start to finish, complete with Final Girl confrontations and Samidha learning the lesson that it was in fact her mother who was right and she who was wrong, ending on a one-year-later note that cribs pretty hard from The Babadook with a “the end…or IS IT?” kick. The film’s as eager to avoid anything really specifically Indian as Samidha is, and that’s sort of amusing on a meta level but doesn’t make for a very interesting film.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Nocebo: Worlds Collide

Usually when you think about two worlds overlapping or colliding or coming together in a horror film, it’s our world and the spirit world, or our world and some alien hell dimension, or maybe the present and the past. But every now and then you’ll get one about two different cultures or socioeconomic strata, though those are usually the province of drama, which is what cultured people watch instead of horror. Yes, that is a chip on my shoulder.

And Nocebo (and maybe The Feast, now that I think about it) fits neatly into this last category while still being very much a horror movie. It’s a nuanced, unsettling story about the convergence of two very different worlds, that unfortunately tips its hand a little too early.

Christine is a hard-working, go-getting designer of high-end children’s clothing, and we meet her as she’s trying to get her daughter Roberta off to school,  and negotiating who’ll be picking her up with her husband Felix before heading to a runway show for her newest line. Things are going smoothly, the presentation appears to be impressing all the right people, and then from backstage she gets a phone call relaying some vague, unspecified bad news. Her response is “I can’t process this right now,” and then she appears to hallucinate a sick, mangy dog, encrusted with ticks. Or maybe it isn’t a hallucination, because when we rejoin her and her family some months later, she seems to be very ill. Respiratory problems, fatigue, memory lapses, joint pain. She’s trying to get back up on the horse, shop around a new line, but she’s in rough shape. Whatever happened to her, it’s clearly taking a toll, and then there’s a knock at the door. It’s a petite Filipina woman named Diana. She says that she’s here as Christine’s home health aide.

Christine doesn’t remember hiring a home health aide.

Nevertheless, Christine hand-waves it as problems with her memory, treating it like someone might treat receiving something from Amazon that they’d forgotten they ordered. And that’s the basic backbone of the film - there’s a definite class element here. Felix and Christine and Roberta are a prosperous (and not especially sympathetic) English family with a lovely house and thoroughly first-world lives. Felix is a marketing strategist, Christine designs high-end children’s clothing, and Roberta’s on the abrasive side of precocious. By contrast, Diana is from a very small village in the south end of the Philippines. And as Diana settles into their home, Christine and her family treat Diana with exactly the sort of dismissiveness and condescension that you’d expect from prosperous Westerners. When Diana cooks dinner for them, Felix calls it “surprisingly good.” So yeah, they see Diana as a curiosity and a servant, nothing more. And when Diana offers to help Christine with her ailment, using traditional shamanic healing practices, Christine thinks it an amusing diversion…until it starts to work. Christine starts to feel better and Felix immediately assumes that either Diana is a charlatan taking advantage of them, or that his wife is mentally unstable, or maybe both.

All of this is punctuated with flashbacks to Diana’s life back home, which sets up a nice rhythm of narrative contrasts between the cloudy damp of England, all modern architecture and design, and the humid, make-work housing of the rural Philippines. The modern and the primitive, a contrast that is extended to the differences between Christine’s medicine, bottles and bottles of pills and a CPAP, and Diana’s practices. These are not just people from two different worlds, they’re people who also see the world in two entirely different ways, and the film neatly avoids pigeonholing what Diana is doing as mumbo-jumbo, whatever Felix’s reaction is to the contrary. The same Christine who is initially resistant to Diana’s treatments and who puts her faith in modern medicine also has a pair of “lucky” shoes and a little mantra she recites to bring herself success in pitch meetings, so there’s the suggestion that maybe Christine and her family aren’t super self-aware, but that’s definitely part and parcel of the characterization. Why would they need to be? Everything’s here for them.

That said, it’s not really cartoonish (for the most part). There’s a shifting dynamic between Felix, Christine, Roberta and Diana that adds some nuance to it, and at no point do any of them seem wholly bad or wholly good. Diana is obviously sharper and more perceptive than Christine and Felix give her credit for, Christine’s chronic illness has left her hanging by a thread, Roberta just wants kids at school to stop picking on her, and Felix isn’t so much a villainous caricature as yet another wealthy white man who can’t imagine a world where he isn’t right about everything. All of this works to the film’s benefit.

But none of that would necessarily point to horror. The horror is really more in how the story is told. It's a slightly cold, distant film, with a faint but pervasive strangeness that makes even (or especially) scenes of children walking the runway or dancing for a commercial feel sinister, and mundane moments are punctuated by startling juxtapositions where worlds overlap or one intrudes upon the other, their impact heightened by the underpinning of constant unease. As the film progresses and we start to put together the reason Diana is there and who she is in relation to Christine, it becomes clear that there is going to be some kind of reckoning, and the film’s denouement stitches them together in sacrifice. Unfortunately, I also think attentive viewers will end up seeing the whole thing coming from pretty early on, as the first act calls our attention to some details that point directly at what was probably meant to be a revelation for much later. And then, when we do get the revelation, it’s played with less nuance than the rest of the film, turning one character into something a little more two-dimensional, or at least pandering to a particular stereotype in a way that rings a bit false when the way they’ve been depicted up to that point would have been just as effective and just as condemnatory. Unfortunately, knowing where it’s going robs the film of a lot of the mystery and ambiguity that would have been central to its effectiveness up to the moment all the pieces get put together.  

Which is a shame, because it’s a well-considered, thoughtful film apart from that. In some ways, it’s a movie about what makes us sick, and what can heal us in turn. The term “nocebo” is related to the term “placebo,” but instead of positive effects being attributed to an inert substance, it’s negative effects instead. Whether it’s medicine or poison, it’s not the substance, it’s not the technology, it’s not the ritual, it’s you. It was in you all along.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon 

Gwledd: Conspicuous Consumption

There’s something about the wilderness - there’s an uneasiness to our relationship with it, a wariness. Even people who love the wilderness acknowledge that it is not safe. Like our wariness of the dark, I think it goes back to our earliest days as a species, when things lying in wait in the dark, or the forest, or the long grass, or the lake, could leap out and end us. And just like we light fires against the dark, we build walls to keep the wilderness out. Modernity is not just about ease and comfort, but also about protection. A reassurance that yes, we have tamed the wilderness, and it can no longer hurt us.

Of course, this is a foolish idea, and Gwledd (The Feast) is a sharply and skillfully told story about how we presume mastery over the wilderness at our peril.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is a diesel-powered drill boring into the earth, like something you might use to explore for oil or take core samples. Its operator lurches away from the drill, staggers across the green, green fields, and collapses insensate, blood leaking from under his ear protection.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is also a house, and the entire story takes place here and in the surrounding woods. Inside, a family is getting ready to host guests for dinner. There’s Glenda - a farm girl who married up, upon whose family property the house is built. There is Gwyn, a successful politician and Glenda’s husband, and their two sons, Guto and Gweirydd, both of whom seem profoundly out of place, city boys plucked from their flats and set down in the middle of rolling hills and tall trees. Glenda is nervous - she doesn’t host often and she’s eager to make a good impression. She’s arranged for Lynwen, a young woman who works at the nearby village pub, to come out and assist with food preparation, service and cleanup. But Lynwen wasn’t able to make it, and recommended Cadi, who also works at the pub, in her place. Cadi turns up, oddly quiet, at the gate to their property. No car, no bus, no bicycle. One minute she isn’t there, and the next she is.

As if she appeared from thin air.

So you’ve got an obviously wealthy family with a nice, aggressively modern home out in the middle of the country, and the entire story takes place over the course of a single day. The film begins by sketching in the family, who they are and who they are to each other. There’s an ambivalence to Glenda - she seems proud that she’s erased almost all signs of her rustic upbringing by tearing down the old family home, but made a point of saving old quilts and blankets and one of her mother’s old dresses. The abstract painting in the dining room is a rendition of the property and its boundaries. She has left home, and she has never left home. Gwyn is a gruff, emotionally distant man’s man who likes to sit out in the woods, sip whiskey and shoot rabbits that he then leaves Glenda, the former farm girl, to skin. Guto is a troubled bad boy, floppy hair, electric guitar and neck tattoo, who liked living in London, with its parties and easy access to heroin. Gweirydd, has temporarily dropped out of medical school to train for a triathlon, and right off the bat there’s something dissolute and unwholesome about him.

They could have been a poor little rich family caricature, but they aren’t entirely. There’s a restraint to their depiction that keeps things from getting too histrionic (until it’s right for them to do so). You do get the expected beats for this sort of story, but they aren’t the sum total of these people. Glenda fusses and orders Cadi about, but isn’t above helping to make the food, even joining in with Cadi when she starts singing an old familiar song. Gwyn is very much the potentially corrupt politician, but doesn’t seem especially unlikable or abusive and seems to genuinely see his office as a privilege. He has appetites, yes, but they’re human-scale. Guto and Gweirydd are the resentful children you expect, but they aren’t raging assholes and they have their reasons. Guto is irresponsible and directionless, but he’s sensitive and passionate. Gweirydd  does seems like the kind of rich dilettante who decides he’s going to take a break from med school to be an athlete, but like Guto, he seems wounded by his father’s disapproval and emotional distance. The cliches are there, but everyone seems actual like people underneath those cliches. And Cadi floats through all of this, almost entirely silent.

And in that sense, Cadi sets the tone for the film. It’s not especially dialogue-heavy (several minutes elapse before anyone speaks at all), nor does it have music outside of a few diegetic pieces. It tells its story through silence and its sharp interruption. The film is punctuated across its running time by title cards that move from innocuous (“I want to make a good impression”) to disquieting (“She mustn’t be awakened”) and by scenes and segments that play out quietly until something ends the quiet – a scream, a gunshot, a piercing sound, a shocking act, cutting to the next scene and its relative quiet abruptly, so we don’t have time to fully process what’s just happened. It could threaten to become cliched or repetitive, but it doesn’t. It adds to a feeling of inevitability, like a steady march. 

And it's chilly and austere, all overcast countryside and a home that’s made out of sharp angles, glass, bleached wood and brick with more than a hint of the mid-century modern about it. Shots are artfully composed, themselves all lines and angles and figures placed in relation to the house, or each other, differences in focus and glass between them,  with good use of slow fades and superimposition. It’s a slow burn, but one that lets you know, however subtly, or not that something is wrong right off the bat, and it’s content to build the unease and the surrounding story in the background, through asides and details dropped in gradually. The first two acts are table-setting (in some cases literally) but there’s a constant drip of unease. You know immediately something bad is going to happen, even if the shape of it isn’t immediately apparent. Some things that start little and start early become big and bad by the end, some things are revealed late to good effect, some things you may be able to see coming from early on, but not in a way that gives it all away. This film is exceptionally good at giving you bits of information gradually and allowing you to make the connections yourself.

And when it all comes to a head halfway through the third act, it does so in blood and flame and screams. There’s one bit of what I thought was unnecessary flashback and there’s some brief montage at the end that felt unnecessary and sort of tacked-on, but these are minor quibbles. It’s another excellent addition to the fine British tradition of films about the pagan power of nature and the awful cost of disregarding it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Busanhaeng: The Hero’s Journey

I’m sort of tired of zombie films in general. The idea of a zombie apocalypse has been so overdone that it’s hard for me to see how you can mine any real dread out of the concept. As often as not, the ones that aren’t outright goofy or excuses for rivers of gore boil down to Mankind Is The Real Monster, which okay, sure, but after awhile there’s not a whole lot that’s new or interesting that you can do with that. I get that you sort of have to focus more on humanity because zombies, at their most effective, are effective because they are ciphers - a human form with all the humanity drained away - and that kind of blankness is unnerving when handled well, but maybe doesn’t make for the most engaging movie all by itself.

So the default is how the existence of zombies affects the living, and it’s very easy for that to turn into all of the ways that humanity can be bad. I’m not saying that isn’t a legitimate thing to explore (it’s a big part of horror, really) but…I dunno. It’s so easy for it to turn into relentless miserabilism. And that’s dull in its own way.

And this is a big part of why it took me so long to get around to watching Busanhaeng (Train To Busan). No matter how much praise I heard, all I could think was “ugh, another zombie movie.” But I’m really glad I came around. It’s an intense, kinetic story about survival and the things we sacrifice for it. And yeah, that’s what a lot of zombie movies end up being about, but what this film does right is ground the story in sympathetic characters whose plight makes the point in ways that feel personal, rather than setting up a grim situation and preaching.

It’s just another day in South Korea, as a truck driver encounters a roadblock where his truck is inspected and disinfected before he can continue on. There’s been some kind of leak at the biotech research facility nearby and they’re here making sure nothing spreads. Just another hassle trying to get his cargo to its destination, and no sooner does he get through the roadblock than dammit, he hits a deer. Terrific. Now he’s going to have to clean off the front of the truck and he’s already late and so, grumbling, he drives off.

And then the deer stands back up.

Meanwhile, back in the big city, fund manager Seok-woo is having his own hassles. Some recent news reports about mysterious mass animal deaths have him concerned about one of the companies in which his fund holds stock, and he tells his assistant to sell it all off. This is a big deal and stakeholders aren’t going to be happy, and neither are his bosses. But it’s his call to make and his static to deal with. On top of that. he’s divorced from his wife, and they share custody of their daughter, Soo-an. And she wants to spend her birthday with her mother instead of him, and she’s prepared to take the train all the way to Busan to see her, all by herself. She’s all of eight or nine years old. Seok-woo really can’t take the time off work - this decision, however sure of it he is, is going to mean a lot of reports and a lot of meetings on top of all of the reports and meetings he already has just because he works in finance. But he loves her, and he’s acutely aware that even though he has to spend so much time at work to provide her with a good life, it means that he’s not actually around to watch her live it. And she feels it too. So he finds the time to take the train with her from Seoul to Busan, where she will stay with her mother. They board and get seated, and Seok-woo, unable to stop following the news, sees reports of outbreaks of violence all over the south.

Outbreaks of violence, and some mysterious illness.

So in short, we have a train full of people hurtling through a country that is rapidly falling apart due to what is, pretty obviously, a zombie outbreak. Communications are patchy, people can’t get through to their loved ones, and the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And like so many disaster movies, this becomes how everyone’s true character gets revealed, who these people are in a crisis. There’s nobility and selfishness, cooperation and craven opportunism, the best and worst humanity has to offer. Bur it’s not a turgid exercise in moralizing, it’s a crisp, knife-sharp exercise in relentless tension and momentum. Because it’s mostly set on a train, there’s a lot happening in a very enclosed space, one strictly demarcated by doors between cars, which focuses most of the action on a moment-to-moment, foot-by-foot struggle for survival. This alternates with interludes in larger, open public spaces, which allow for grander moments highlighting the scope of what’s happening. And part of why both work so well is that this film takes the same approach to zombies as films like [REC], 28 Days Later, and World War Z  - they’re like an insensate force of nature, falling and spilling over each other in waves and piles, a flood and encroaching plant species and predator all at once. Transformations are marked by slightly over-cranked camera work, which makes them feel even more frenetic, lurching and hissing and hurtling forward with headlong momentum. Everything and everyone in this film is in motion.

And it doesn’t spend too much time on the zombies themselves - encounters are mostly quick and nasty, with just as much of the tension coming from gradual, understated reveals of a nation falling into chaos. The way the news footage on the train goes from isolated instants of violence to mass panic, all played out with equanimity on little screens, pulling into a station only to find it utterly deserted, save for smears of blood and abandoned riot equipment, far-off cities that have erupted in flames. It’s either at a remove or hideously immediate, with not a lot in-between, and it’s very effective in that regard. We’re not in the middle of the cities as they collapse, we’re coming along in the aftermath. It’s a story told equally in small, understated reveals and claustrophobic, oppressive action sequences, and there’s not a lot of room to breathe. The pressure is sharp and constant, as much about how these people relate to each other and the decisions that they make as the insensate corpses flailing toward them. There’s definitely an element of “who will survive, and what will be left of them?’ to it -  everyone’s put to the test, and not everyone passes. There’s not a ton of depth to the characters, but they’re distinct and relatable, and at the center of it is Seok-woo, torn between the ruthless calculation that serves him so well at work, and kind, sensitive Soo-an. Who is he going to be in this situation? It’s a story about the people on this train.

That said, there is a pretty clear through-line here about social class, and one that definitely hits different in a post-COVID-19 world. You’ve got the people in coach and the people in first class, and while everyone else is following directions, hurriedly moving from one place to another, hoping to remain safe, men in suits with smartphones are arranging private escape routes, leveraging insider information, making exceptions of themselves and sacrificing anyone and everyone for their own self-preservation. I was immediately reminded of a photo I saw on Instagram during lockdown of some tech bro who’d amassed cases and cases and cases of toilet paper, showing off his hoard like it was something to be proud of. Neckties act important symbols of class and resulting inequality, at one point literally being used to bind doors shut to keep people out. It’s not an especially subtle allegory, but no less effective for it.

And this is what I think makes it such a strong film - it’s not just spectacle, not just gooey gore effects and wallowing in violence, and it’s not just another “humans bad” reduction either. There are elements of that, but it’s clearly grounded in human frailty, weakness, cowardice and venality. There are clear heroes and clear villains, but also a lot of people who fall somewhere between those two poles, in the messy, complicated place between, and so it’s a journey of growth (or lack thereof) as much as anything else. And on top of that, it’s supremely tense, harrowing, and full of striking visual moments. It’s also a journey of escape, of flight away from a danger that is everywhere and the increasing impossibility of safety. Brains (braaaaiiiiiiiiiiins) and brawn alike.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Tubi 

Infinity Pool: Sex And Dying In High Society

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” 

            - F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy:”

“My mouth is drinking from your pool of tears

I saw your heartbeat in the radium screen

What does a body mean?” 

            - Swans, “Where Does A Body End?”

Horror films share a lot of ground with fables, in the sense that they can provide some kind of lesson through vivid, sensational imagery. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the ostensible edification in the slasher-film clichés of the wanton, reckless teenagers who get bumped off and the virginal Final Girl who ends up being the lone survivor.  But that’s not especially subtle. Far better, I think, are the moments when horror holds up a warped mirror to everyday life in a way that lays the monstrosity bare without passing too much overt judgment. Sort of like a modern version of Bosch’s satirical paintings. There’s a point, but it’s made through grotesque depiction, not blatant didacticism.

And in that respect, Infinity Pool is an excellent addition to this tradition. It’s a surreal fable about identity, morality, and the potential of wealth and privilege to distort both.

The film opens in disorienting fashion, the camera wheeling and careening through tranquil island landscapes, tumbling end over end before settling on a couple sitting at breakfast in what appears to be a resort. Everything is white and spotless, and the host is explaining that today marks the beginning of an important native festival, one celebrated before the beginning of the rainy season. He is flanked by the wait staff, all decked out in immaculate white suits and native masks that could generously be described as monstrous. It feels like there are nightmares standing right there in the middle of what otherwise looks like sleekly professional hospitality and nobody’s batting an eye. 

The couple don’t look especially happy - there’s something of a malaise to them, that particular exhaustion that you feel in places that relentlessly exhort you to enjoy yourself. They’re James and Em Foster, vacationing at a resort on the island of La Tolqa in an effort to help James get his creative juices flowing again. He’s an author with one book and six years of writer’s block to his name. Em is his wife, and the daughter of his publisher, which seems to provide one explanation as to how he got published in the first place. His book didn’t really sell or garner much in the way of critical attention, and so now here he is, a mediocre author who married rich and who is acutely aware of both of those things. But soon enough, they meet Gabi and Alban Bauer, another couple staying at the resort. Alban’s a mostly-retired architect and Gabi is an actress. More to the point, Gabi read James’ book, and apparently loved it. She invites James and Em to dinner, and the two couples seem to hit it off. They have many drinks together, and Alban manages to bribe a resort employee to lend them his car and let them out of the resort, which is strictly forbidden. Well, one thing leads to another and James, the only one sober enough to drive back, gets careless on a dark back road, striking and killing a local farmer. Law enforcement finds out, and as it turns out, part of why people are prevented from leaving the resort is because La Tolqan culture is extremely strict, and most things -including this - are punishable by death.

But, the police officer tells them, they do have a special service for tourists. For a large sum of money, they will create a double of the accused, a perfect physical copy with all of their memories, to stand in for them at the execution. The law is satisfied without a paying guest having to die.

Alban and Gabi are very familiar with the procedure.

James agrees to go through with having a double made, and from there it’s a delirious, hellish plunge down the rabbit hole of identity and consciousness - if there’s more than one of you, which is actually you? Physically identical, with all the same memories and experiences, can you ever be sure of which one is the “real” you and which one is the double? And if the only thing standing between you and making another you to pay for your crimes is money, what happens when you have far more than enough money? The process becomes recreation, as well as license to never take responsibility for your actions, not when you can make another you to bear all the punishment like some kind of sin-eater, or like the poor young men who were hired by wealthy families to take their son’s place in military drafts. And it’s not just a body, it’s a body with memories and consciousness, something functionally identical to a human being purpose-built to die. Whose life is it? Is it any less the double’s? What differentiates James from his double? The distinctions begin to blur.

And from this ability to pay on demand for someone else to die in your place emerges an examination of the idea of vacation as license to suspend morality, the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” writ large. In some ways, it’s a more highbrow take on Hostel’s examination of spring break culture and the way economies are built around the satisfaction of appetites, with a more existential bent to it. It’s bad enough when tourists from the U.S. travel abroad and expect their laws and freedoms to come with them, but here we have tourists in a cloistered environment designed to serve them deciding that nobody's laws apply to them. And like any colonial tourism situation, corrupt law enforcement benefits at the expense of the populace. After awhile, depravity becomes another pastime, as sequences of delirious violence and hallucinatory sex cut immediately to next-day mundanity, as if this is all just normal vacation behavior. Leave a trail of ruined property, bodies and psyches and leave someone else - or, rather, another you - to deal with the bill, and go back to your normal, polite lives. It’s easy if you don’t have a soul. At the end of the day, wealth is the best medicine: It anesthetizes you to suffering, and immunizes you from consequences.

The whole thing is told with an impeccable visual sense. The resort is full of bright, saturated colors (as are a number of hallucinatory sequences, suggesting that neither are real life) and everything is polished to gleaming, while the world outside of the resort is drab stone, wood, rust and poverty. The native language looks more like ideograms than anything else, and the absence of the Latin alphabet, along with the bizarre masks in the beginning, emphasize a sense of the local culture as utterly alien, as though we’re seeing them through the eyes of the tourists. There are two worlds here, divided by high fences topped with razor wire and guarded gates. By the end of the film, it seems like it’s as much to protect the natives from the tourists as the reverse. There’s almost no music, just enough to emphasize tense moments, and the performances are slightly chilly, the dialogue tending toward speeches, but it works because it underscores how unnatural all of this is. And the technology used to create the doubles is sort of grungy and low-tech, lots of technicians taking measurements, sharp electrical arcs and thick red paste in a tile room that looks like a shower. There’s nothing futuristic about it, it has the grubby functionality of any decently maintained industrial machinery.

Director Brandon Cronenberg’s films have been, right from jump, explorations of identity, body, and power structures told as unapologetically violent fables, and this is no different. But with each film it feels like he’s growing more and more into his own - he’s never plagiarized his father’s work, it’s always been his own spin on similar ideas, but between this and Possessor, his own distinct vision really seems to be taking shape and I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Dashcam: The Ugliest American

Folks, I am not gonna lie, this one’s going to be difficult. Not for you to read, I don’t think, but for me to make some sense out of, because Dashcam was an extremely frustrating film to watch. It’s a found-footage film, but for once that’s not a bad thing, because it’s got the sort of headlong plunge-into-nightmare intensity of the best moments in V/H/S. No, the problem here is that it’s also got a protagonist so deeply unpleasant and unsympathetic that it’s a huge distraction. Every now and then I’ll watch something that sticks with me for awhile, and this film does, but for all the wrong reasons.

It opens cold on what appears to be a livestream for “BandCar: The Internet’s #1 Live Improvisational Music Show Broadcast From A Moving Vehicle.” You’ve got the name of the show at the top of the screen and her show’s audience chat scrolling up in the lower left-hand corner, and it becomes apparent pretty quickly that “live improvisational music show” consists of Annie taking words suggested by her chat and working them into one of the most puerile, clumsy attempts at rapping ever. So we’ve got a white girl…in Los Angeles…rapping…usually about buttholes…and livestreaming it for an audience. As protagonists go, already a tough sell.

But wait! There’s more! This is all taking place during the height of pandemic lockdown! And she’s a dedicated conspiracy theorist! She thinks masks are a government plot! And she taunts people about it everywhere she goes! So, sick of the “oppression” she’s experiencing in the United States, she decides to take off for England - she’s going to stay with her former bandmate Stretch, just get away from all the stress and hassle of a novel virus causing hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. When she gets to England, she greets her sleeping friend by spitting in her hand and slapping him awake. Charming.

One huge fight with Stretch and his partner (who has less than zero interest in putting up with Annie’s shit), she steals Stretch’s car for reasons and drives off into the night. After getting ejected from a coffee place (a pattern is starting to emerge), she ends up in a deserted chip shop. She contemplates cracking open the cash register, but before she can, she’s interrupted by the owner, who offers her a large sum of cash to drive her friend someplace. At this point, it’s clear that Annie doesn’t exist in a world where good judgment is an option, so she agrees. The woman’s friend is Angela. Angela is a silent, masked, elderly woman who looks extremely ill. Soon enough, Annie decides this was a bad idea and shoves Angela out on the side of the road, driving off looking for god-knows-what…

…only to realize that Angela has reappeared in the back seat.

What follows is the story of what has to be the worst night of Annie’s life, and normally I’d talk about how the narrative proceeds, what the cinematography is like, and all of that. But Annie sucks all of the air out of this movie. I cannot stress enough how obnoxious this character is. She’s the picture of a very specific type of person - she lives in Los Angeles, her only source of income is what could generously be called niche livestreaming content (but she can still afford to jet off to England at a moment’s notice), and she expresses herself by engaging in what is absolutely the most rudimentary form of rapping in the most juvenile fashion possible. Constantly. She never drops character, everything is a joke to her, everything is another opportunity for “content.” Speaking only for myself, she’s like nails on a chalkboard made flesh based on this alone. On top of that, we have her atrocious, conspicuous posturing - she wears a sweatshirt with the word “liberal” crossed out on it with a MAGA hat, and she’s written the word “SLAVE” across the mask that she habitually wears under her chin. It’s ideology as temper tantrum, desperate attention-seeking like a five-year-old shouting the one bad word they know in the middle of the room, waiting for someone to react. If someone this simultaneously antagonistic, self-involved, and unconcerned with the people around her did not already exist, they would spontaneously congeal from the grubbiest corners of the Internet like a fatberg of all of our worst impulses.

And I think playing the character so bad and so loud ends up being harmful to the film. First, our engagement with the protagonist shifts from “oh no, what’s going to happen to her?” to “I cannot wait for this person to die,” and that tends to make horror less effective for me. I don’t ask that the protagonists of a film be angels or even necessarily good people, but I think they should be, at the very least, relatable. They’re our way into the world of the film, so when they’re alienating, we’re alienated from the experience of the film. Second, a lot of screen time is taken up with her antics, which ends up having sort of a numbing or deadening effect. There’s no opportunity for rest, no quiet spaces to accentuate the loud ones. It’s just a barrage of chaos. Sometimes it’s the antagonist, as you’d expect, but then it’s also the protagonist throwing one shitfit or another. It just never stops, and so what should be building intensity is instead just one insensate blare. There are still some effective moments of escalation, but I can’t help but think they’d hit even harder if our main character weren’t filling every quiet moment in the film with more of her bullshit. 

Finally, for a good chunk of the film, her stream’s chat scrolls up the left side of the screen, and the majority of them are enablers, egging Annie on, taking her side against the people she’s abusing, using terms like “cuck” and “libtard” freely, and treating everything they’re watching like it’s entertainment, no matter how awful it gets (and it gets pretty awful). If it happens on the Internet it’s not real, so why care? The few people that do seem to take the atrocities unfolding in front of us seriously get mocked and shouted down. They’re basically a Greek chorus of shitheads. The chat itself is a distraction insofar as it divides our attention, as well as being depressingly accurate at showing how the distancing effect of Internet communication can bring out our worst impulses. One way or another we’re spending most of our time with monsters, so it’s hard to feel much of anything for anyone except Annie’s poor friend Stretch, who gets put through a wringer for absolutely no good reason.

But apart from that (in a “how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln” sort of way), it’s actually a pretty well-constructed film. It uses signal loss plausibly to subtract the distraction of chat during especially tense sequences, steadily raises the pitch from sketchy to full-on nightmare, and doesn’t noticeably violate the constraints that come with everything being streamed through phone cameras. Shots aren’t always perfect, sometimes the camera’s pointed at nothing, and sometimes that nothing turns into something in ways that actually elicit dread. The stunt and effects work is very good, and the filmmakers know not to linger too long on anything - just a glimpse of blood, bared teeth, something getting torn is enough. There are some really creepy moments as well, and a sequence toward the beginning that has to be one of the grossest things I’ve seen in awhile (this is a film in which not all, but most, bodily fluids come into play). So if Annie were played much more low-key, like she and Stretch were both normal human beings, I think this film would have packed a wallop. As it is, it’s sort of tiring because we’re mostly just trapped with this awful, awful person who is as much a force of destruction as the actual monster of the film, if not more of one.

If I were to quibble, there are a couple of moments that stretch plausibility - people sort of reappearing out of nowhere, the action conveniently ending up at one particular location toward the end) - but the lunatic momentum sort of carries you past it. It’s deeply frustrating - it really does feel less like a horror movie and more like an exercise in different types of disgust. It’s a hard watch, but not in a good way.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon