The Reflecting Skin: The Nightmare Of Childhood

“Kids can be so cruel.” Let’s think about that for a second. It’s certainly true, as any veteran of childhood or adolescence can attest. But it’s also often used dismissively, as if it’s a self-evident statement, not something to explore. But it’s worth looking at more closely because it’s almost two sides of the same coin. Cruelty is part of innocence, because if you don’t know that what you’re doing hurts someone or something, you’ll do it, and you’ll laugh, and their pain is no lesser for it. It might even be worse. Childhood can be full of casual cruelty because often you haven’t yet learned regard for anything outside yourself. And all too often, horror sells the idea short by going no further than the idea that if it’s creepy when an adult does it, it’s even more creepy when a kid does it.

I’ve had the cult film The Reflecting Skin on my radar for awhile, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get around to it, because it’s really striking. It’s lyrical, haunting and strange, a story of cruelty, and tragedy, and innocence lost, all wrapped tightly together like a ball of venomous snakes.

It’s rural somewhere in the 1940s, a stretch of lonely farmhouses standing in oceans of wheat under an unblinkingly blue sky, and the film begins with summer childhood shenanigans, three friends playing out in the fields, up to some kind of mischief. It’s horrible, and bloody, and the three friends - Kim, Eben, and Seth - laugh and laugh and laugh at the prank they’ve pulled, oblivious to their own viciousness. In its wake, we follow Seth back home. His family runs a gas station and garage, and they’ve got another boy, Cameron, off fighting in the Pacific. There’s a peculiar, solitary woman who lives a little way. It was she who was the target of Seth and his friends, and he’s sent to apologize. She’s reclusive, pale to the point of colorlessness, clad all in black and although she looks young, she tells Seth very seriously that she is over two hundred years old.

Seth knows what she is. His father reads pulp novels about creatures like this.

What follows is the story of one summer in Seth’s life - the mysterious neighbor lady, the secrets everybody keeps, and a string of unexplained deaths striking at the little community’s most vulnerable members. It’s like an Andrew Wyeth painting came to cold, surreally detached life, and it’s a story suffused with pain. Everyone in this film is damaged somehow, estranged from their own feelings and experience, wounded by life in one way or another. There’s Seth’s mother, seething with rage at the disappointment of her life and taking it out on Seth and her husband alike. There’s Seth’s father, taciturn, resigned, passive and ultimately pathetic. Joshua, obsessed with his own sins, and Dolphin, the mysterious neighbor lady, brought from her home in England to this rural place by a husband now long-gone, repressed and constricted and utterly alone. And lurking in the margins, the sheriff and his deputy, both with eyes like stone, and a nameless young man in a black Cadillac, whose intentions are unclear but don’t seem wholesome at all. The result is a lot of cruelty, because everyone is disconnected from themselves and from everyone else, consumed by their own horrors and obsessions. And in childhood, you don’t know any better, so Seth, already damaged by his mother’s abuse, moves through this broken and damaged world, hurting and being hurt and not knowing the why of any of it, while real evil lurks right under everyone’s nose.

And it’s a story told vividly. This would never be mistaken for a realist piece or character study, not when everyone is so alien and alienated, but it leaps off of the screen. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, with color choices that can only be described as painterly, and careful consideration for composition in every shot. It’s full of little details and moments that aren’t exactly subtle, but convey the impression that everything about this film is pointed in the same direction, devoted to telling this story using every means at its disposal. Hell, there are moments where even the editing is breathtaking and evocative. The orchestral score is lush, prickly and foreboding, giving it the feeling of some kind of timeless fable, and the result is rife with a sense of strangeness. It’s a film that is perfectly willing to have bizarre things happen and not bother to explain them (the sheriff’s introduction is both startling and oddly funny, and Seth finds…something…in the barn that becomes a confidante), but at the same time it doesn’t feel gratuitous or contrived. It’s a bleak existence seen through the eyes of a child, and even if it doesn’t make literal sense, it makes emotional sense. The whole thing feels like a languorous nightmare.

I think it’s lazy to call things “Lynchian,” and all too often just means something is a little quirky, but here I think it does make sense. Thematically, it operates on a somewhat similar wavelength – everything and everyone seems at a slight remove from reality and each other, as if they’re sleepwalking through their own lives and only capable of communicating in the most direct, emotionally naked way possible without the heat of actual emotion. There’s a strong undercurrent of desire contorted by repression as well, and the suggestion of a small town hiding dark secrets, so I definitely see similar notes to Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, but maybe less hermetically sealed, if that makes sense. It’s a story of growing up and the loss of innocence, and a story about wounded people trying to find connection, and a story about the senselessness and inexplicability of sudden untimely death, a fable told in the merciless glare of a perpetually, unbearably blue summer sky. I don’t think I’ve seen something that hit me like this since Possession, and though this doesn’t plumb that film’s lunatic depths, it comes a lot closer that most anything else I’ve seen.

IMDB entry
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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
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Enys Men: Lost At Sea

I don’t know that I’d call myself a sucker for cryptic, enigmatic horror films, but if I were put under oath, I couldn’t really deny it either. I think this goes back to my contention that horror is, at the end of the day, not about thrills and chills and gore and jump-out-of-your-seat moments exclusively, like some (many) professional critics seem to think. There’s a whole palette of emotions that could be said to fall under the umbrella of horror, and to me, that’s the important bit: How does it make you feel? And you don’t need to be literal to evoke a feeling. Sometimes, watching something play out that sits just at the edge of comprehension, that may not make logical sense but fills you with unease…that’s the territory of nightmares, and what are horror movies if not our nightmares?

So yeah, I don’t think a film has to make strict “sense” to work. Cryptic, enigmatic, oblique, tone-poem movies can work and work well, but also risk falling apart into incoherence, and that’s unfortunately what I think happens to Enys Men. There’s a lot going for it, but it never really comes together and the result is something that is ultimately more confusing than haunting.

There isn’t really a story so much as there is a series of events and possibly recollections. There’s a woman (credited only as “The Volunteer”) who lives on the remote island of Enys Men, where her sole regular duty appears to be observing a small patch of flowers, noting soil temperature and the condition of the flowers on a daily basis and recording the results in a logbook. The records go back quite some time. She gets up, checks the flowers, checks an abandoned mineshaft by dropping a rock down into it and noting how long it takes to hit bottom, then she goes inside and makes her breakfast. It’s a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and the crumbling stone ruins of what appears to have been a small mining village. She lives in the one intact structure on the island, a cottage that’s almost overtaken by the greenery creeping up its sides, as if the island is reclaiming any memory of human occupation. She has running water, but electricity is provided by a generator and rationed out for lights and some broadcast music in the evening. Her only contact with the mainland is a dodgy two-way radio and a supply boat that comes by on a regular basis. There’s a standing stone in her front yard, a monument to some long-ago tragedy.

Otherwise, she’s alone all the time, just her and all of the ghosts of this island.

Not to be too reductive, but it being a story of someone who’s ostensibly going mad from loneliness, told in largely disconnected static moments, results in something that is sort of like The Lighthouse as told through the lens of Skinamarink. It looks like something from a bygone era - scratchy, grainy film and a saturated color palette that nonetheless consists mostly of mossy greens, grays and browns, with striking patches of color - the sea, the sky, the woman’s bright blue eyes and brighter red coat, a bright red generator contrasted against a gray stone wall. The sense of isolation is effectively conveyed by the film being very quiet. There’s very little music  - the score is mostly ambience with some string and horn swells at especially fraught moments and there’s some diegetic music from her little radio, tinny and faint. There’s almost no dialogue as well (it’s about 10 minutes in before you even hear a voice), so you get these long stretches of silence punctuated by the rattle of a generator, the squawk and buzz of the radio. They aren’t jump scares per se, but the sudden cuts to them do have a startling, unnerving effect. This is probably the most effective thing about the film - the way it alternates long takes with sudden cuts keeps you off-balance. The camera spends as much time off of the woman as on, maybe more, which makes the island itself as much of a character as she is.

The quiet is unnerving, and so is the apparent monotony of the woman’s existence, described through repeated motifs of her daily routine which start to give way to what could be flashbacks or visions, and the way they combine and recombine starts to make everything stranger as the film goes on, in a fashion reminiscent of I Am A Ghost, another story of a woman all alone in an isolated location. What is at first innocuous becomes, over repetition, sinister, and for the first act at least, there’s a real eeriness to it all. But after the first act it starts to fizzle out, and I think it doesn’t work as well as it could for a couple of reasons. First, the pacing is very, very slow. This isn’t always a problem (in Skinamarink, for example, it works toward the dreamlike mood and a sense of constant tension), but here it serves to bog down the film in the second act, and any tension built up during the first dissipates. It starts to feel very repetitive, but not in a way where the repetition communicates anything. A film moving slowly isn’t a problem, but it does need to move. There’s less of a sense of disintegration or escalation than there needs to be as the film goes on. And this ties into the second problem, and that’s that ultimately it’s very difficult to make sense of what’s actually happening. There are what appear to be elements of the supernatural and even some body horror which have some kind of logic to them, but as everything moves away from routine and toward something more fragmentary and irrational, it seems less like the supernatural or a deteriorating mental state and more just a bunch of scenes that sort of relate to each other without committing to a particular through-line. The brief is mostly “person living in relative isolation starts to lose it,” or maybe “is she losing it or is she really being haunted” but the end result is mostly confusing - how much is memory and how much is losing grip on reality isn’t clear, and though there are some moments in isolation that are eerie and unsettling, the whole never really gels like it should and it just sort of ends without pointing toward any particular understanding. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re just going for pure mood, but there’s enough underlying story here that some kind of revelation is expected, and not enough structure for us to really grasp it. 

It's a shame, because the editing, cinematography and sound design are all really good - the aesthetics are there and very distinct, which is important for a visual medium. It definitely has a vision, which goes a long way with me, but the execution is messy enough that it feels like a missed opportunity.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

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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
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Matriarch: A Mother’s Sacrifice

Motherhood is supposed to be this sacred, supremely benevolent thing. It’s warmth, nurturance, love, fertility, growth, a thing to be celebrated and valorized. Motherhood is supposed to be sacred, but all too often it isn’t. Motherhood can also be greedy and selfish and narcissistic, manipulative and self-serving. And there’s something profane about that, a massive violation of trust and care. It’s no wonder that motherhood distorted and disfigured comes up so much in horror. It’s one of those things that literally and metaphorically hits us where we live. Some things are supposed to be safe. Some places are supposed to be safe, and some people are supposed to be safe.

And when they aren’t, you get a film like Matriarch, a powerful, supremely uneasy tale of motherhood turned poisonous and sour.

Laura is an advertising executive in London, and we meet her as she’s getting ready for work. She’s coring the rotten section out of a peach and slicing up the rest into her cereal. She eats her breakfast and then promptly goes into the bathroom, shoving her fingers down her throat to vomit it all back up. She chases this with a few swigs of vodka and some snorts from a bottle of nasal spray. She gets into the office a little late, apologizes to her boss, she still has a cold. The same cold, her boss observes, that she’s had for a few months now. But Laura’s got it together. There’s a big pitch meeting coming up and Laura’s ready. Or, at least, she will be. It’s a quick study - she’s obviously running from something - the bulimia, the alcoholism, relentlessly driving herself forward. She’s brittle, pulled tight against her skin. There’s a desperation to her, brought into stark detail that night when she invites an old flame over and the cocaine comes out. It’s an all-nighter, with Laura still doing lines alone as the sun comes up. She’s trying to outrun herself, but ends up clutching at her chest and keeling over on her bathroom floor instead. As everything fades, she has a vision of a hand reaching out of an expanse of dark water…

…and she wakes back up. She should be dead, she knows that, but she isn’t. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her, how she didn’t die, or why dark, brackish fluid is seeping out of her. She needs answers, and that means going someplace she never thought she’d revisit, and seeing someone she’d sworn she would never see again. She’s going home to the small village where she was raised, and she’s going to see her mother. The reunion is polite, and her mother is the picture of health, looking to be in her late forties or early fifties.

But her mother is eighty years old.

This is a film that hits the ground running, in terms of its style and narrative. It takes place in a world that is drab throughout, a place drained of color and icily remote. The big city is all cold fluorescents and sleek, modern design, and the village has its own foreboding, a collection of old buildings and sheep paddocks, clusters of houses sunken into a maze of hedgerows taller than a person and a black, black marsh on the outside of town. It’s very much in the fine English tradition of villages with old, old secrets, observed in details that are modest, but sharp. It’s a place that is ugly and warped without being cartoonish about it. And when it’s not the inner emotional violence of Laura’s life away from home or the weirdness of the village itself, above and beyond all of that it’s Celia, Laura’s mother. Her toxic, manipulative mother, all of Laura’s anger and self-loathing explained by Celia’s immediate descent into a litany of denial and minimization and guilt trips and passive aggressive jabs. Her mood turns on a dime from mock-concern to wheedling to self-absorption to an inability (or refusal) to remember the past as Laura remembers it. Their dialogue is full of repressed anger that’s starting to spill through the seams, old resentments, old regrets, the cathartic venom of people finally saying things they’ve always wanted to say, soundtracked by woozy, discordant ambience. And it’s not just Celia, it’s the villagers as well, so bitter at Laura’s return but so interested in keeping her there. There’s never really a quiet moment in the film,  and since it’s very clear very early on that there’s something Not Right about this place, it’s a film threaded through with unease and discomfort.

And all of that is before Laura really starts to dig into what’s happening to her and what seems to be happening in the village. There are secrets, of course, and they run deep, old, and dark, culminating in a revelation that blasphemes the sanctities of religion and motherhood through vivid imagery and body horror. A bargain has been made, and the cost is coming due again. Motherhood is supposed to be about helping a child to grow and flourish, but for narcissists like Celia, it’s entirely about them instead and how they can use motherhood, capture it, feed upon it. It’s a story told in earthily visceral fashion.  

That said, the biggest problem with the film is that although a lot of the dialogue works, there are points where it does become stagey and affected. Conversations sometimes end up on the verge of becoming monologues, and some of the performances are broader than they should be. This threatens to overwhelm the film when things really start to heat up in the final act, but it rights itself in the end for something that’s equal parts horrifying and emotionally exhausting. It might not be quite as intense in its emotional violence as Hereditary or as carefully staged (few films are, though), but for as wrung out as I was by the end of this, it’s the closest touchpoint I can find. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Isolation: Against Nature

Sometimes, the premise of a film is not especially promising. I can’t count the number of films I’ve passed over because they’re about a family whose darkest secret has come back to haunt them, or about a house or hospital or whatever hiding an ancient evil, or about a mysterious force terrorizing someone. You get the idea.

I’m probably a little pickier than I should be, if I’m being completely fair. There really are only so many ways you can describe any kind of film (I mean, the blurb for Hereditary is “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences,” which doesn’t even begin to capture the scope of that film) and I’d rather it be too vague than give too much away any day. But when you don’t know anything else about the film, it’s tough, because generic descriptions make it easy to assume that the film itself is generic. And when you run across enough that are just as generic as their description makes them sound, that doesn’t help.

But then, every now and then, I’ll run across one that grabs me, Not necessarily because it’s compelling - those do happen, though they’re few and far between - but because it seems just improbable or odd enough to pique my curiosity. And I gotta say, Isolation was absolutely one of those. It’d been on my radar for some time, and the premise, on paper, sounds deeply silly. But in practice it isn’t. It’s a somber, tense monster movie that works better than you'd think

After an opening credits sequence that reminds me of old Nigel Kneale films (this is a good thing), we’re introduced to Dan and Orla. Dan owns a cattle farm in rural Ireland, and Orla is a veterinarian who’s come out to look at one of his cows. The cow is pregnant, and there’s something special about her - she’s being kept separate from the rest of the herd, in her own pen. We don’t get a lot of details right away, but apparently Dan, whose farm is in the red financially, took some money from a scientist named John, who works for Bovine Genetics Technology, to let John test a new genetic procedure on some of his stock, and Orla’s been contracted by the same company to do the check-ups. There’s tension there, and some history between them. But Orla is a professional, so she gloves up and lubes up to check on the calf. Everything seems normal...

...until something bites her hand. Calves don’t do that. Especially not unborn calves.

The broad strokes, then, are pretty clear. John is working on some kind of genetic modification that will make cows more fertile at a younger age, and allow their calves to grow faster. Dan’s cow is a test subject, her calf a product of this modification, and Orla discovers pretty quickly that there is something...extremely wrong with the calf. And while this is all going on, Dan has to deal with a Traveller couple who are parked up on the road just outside his property. John doesn’t want them there because of security issues, and Dan doesn’t especially want them there either, but the couple - Jamie and Mary - seem desperate, cornered. They’re hiding from something or someone and don’t want to budge. And then that night, the cow goes into labor. Dan can’t reach Orla because his phone service got shut off. So he recruits Jamie to help him deliver the calf himself. And in the process, Dan gets bitten as well. 

Like I said, there’s something very, very wrong with the calf.

When the brief for a film is "mutant cow terrorizes people on a remote Irish farm," you expect it to be silly, played for camp and laughs, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't go into it thinking "okay, how is this gonna work," but honestly? It worked better than I thought it would. A lot of this comes down first to the setting - there's a gap between the romanticized and realistic depictions of farms in film, and this is very much a real, working farm, gray and muddy and rain-sodden, corrugated metal sheds and rusting chutes and pens. Everything is overcast and gloomy, which sets the tone right from the start, and the setting helps ground the premise as well. It's a working farm, and so there's nothing romantic or sentimental about the livestock, just animals in their pens, lots of rain, mud, and shit. This contributes to the larger sense of biological horror as well - just the process of delivering a calf is already pretty hard to watch, all winches and ropes and fluids and steam, so perversions of it have their own horror while still feeling of a piece with the setting. The biological modification of animals through hormones and selective breeding is already all too common in the livestock industry, so really this isn't that much of a step away from real life, even if the results are even more horrific than usual. .

So the setting is suitably grim, and on top of that, everything is played completely straight - there are no nods and winks to the audience about the absurdity of the premise or anything. Something very bad has happened here and these five people are going to have to deal with the consequences, and that's the most important part. It all takes place over maybe two days or so, just five people basically caught in the middle of a crisis, the implications of which necessitate quick action, before something starts to spread. This seriousness extends to how the story is told as well. The characters are sketched in enough to be believable as people, though John does start to verge on mad-scientist caricature toward the end - it's not exactly that, he's acting both from desperation and a sense of what the stakes are, but it feels a little abrupt. But you get a sense of who these people are to each other and what’s going on without too much unnecessary exposition. The dialogue is mostly believable, maybe a little exposition-y at the top of the third act, when everything starts to escalate, but all in all, the setting and the sense of restraint help sell what could have been a deeply goofy premise. It’s paced well, setting the table economically and then developing the premise gradually so that by the time we have a sense of just how wrong everything has gone, it's time for shit to get real in the third act, which is when the tension really starts building and this farm at night, all industrial equipment and moisture and fitful lighting, isn't all that different from the guts of the Nostromo. I’m not saying this film is as good as Alien - few are - but it’s definitely cut from the same cloth, and that’s entirely to its credit.

It does have some problems - there's a disease subplot that only comes up fitfully, and we could have used maybe just a little more background on the nature of John's research. Not a whole lot more, I'd rather a film under-explain than over-explain any day, but some stuff is hinted at maybe a little too obliquely and a little more detail would have added some punch. As with any monster movie, there's always the problem of how well the creature effects are going to hold up, and though these largely do and the filmmakers are mostly judicious in their deployment, there are a couple of moments, especially toward the end, when things get dodgy, though never for very long. And to be fair, that was a problem in Alien as well. Finally there's a story beat in the second act that, for me, pretty much telegraphed the ending, but though it does end on the note I thought it would, it’s handled with the same sense of restraint and winds everything up on a nicely inconclusive note, so it's not too huge a deal.

It's easy to forget how much of a story relies on how it’s told. A premise that sounds terrifying on paper can be risible in its execution, and something that looks goofy on paper can actually work after all. This is a film that locates monstrosity close to home, ties it into an existing context of callousness and life as commodity and takes it all seriously. It may not be an unqualified success, but it’s better than I expected, and I’ll take that any day.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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The Magnus Archives: Let Me Tell You A Story

I’ve been feeling a little aimless around horror movies for the last couple of weeks, with nothing really jumping out at me right now, so I thought instead I’d take this opportunity to talk about another horror podcast I’ve been enjoying lately. Like the last couple I wrote about here, The Magnus Archives takes advantage of the audio-verite aspects of podcasting to good effect, producing a series of concise stories in a number of styles, with some careful overarching development happening over the course of the series.

The opening conceit is that we’re listening to archived recordings of statements made to the Magnus Institute, an organization for paranormal study located in London. You get the impression that the Institute is an old, somewhat fusty institution, not taken especially seriously and treated with a certain amount of distaste by younger, bolder ghost hunters. They’ve been around for a long time, and they do things the old-fashioned way, using old cassette recorders and antiquated filing systems to catalog the statements they’ve collected over the decades from people who have had encounters with the supernatural. When the series begins, we’re introduced to newly-hired archivist Jonathan Sims, who has been brought in to replace the late Gertrude Robinson, whose approach to cataloguing was haphazard at best. Jonathan is none too pleased with the task that’s been left to him, nor is he especially impressed by his coworker Martin Blackwood, who seems to be a bit hapless. Nevertheless, Jonathan sets to making audio recordings of older written statements, supplementing them with follow-up investigation where feasible, digitizing and uploading the results. At first, it’s just a matter of sorting through the archives (which don’t appear to be in anything resembling order, chronological or otherwise) and recording as he goes, occasionally stopping to include new statements as they come in. Getting the archives organized is a monumental task, and Jonathan’s frustration is palpable in every entry, along with a sense that he’s not much of a believer in the supernatural, a certain dismissiveness present as he offers his input on each statement.

But then, the further he gets into his task, the more he starts to notice things - the same names start cropping up across entries, different statements attest to similar phenomena…

…one particular entry strikes far, far too close to home.

There are five seasons to this show, and I’m most of the way through the first one, which consists of 40 separate entries. A quick glance at the other seasons (I’m trying to remain unspoiled) suggests similar lengths for seasons 2-4, and season 5 looks to be considerably longer. Each story is relatively brief - 20 to 30 minutes on average - and in the beginning it’s just Jonathan reading someone’s written statement, so it feels a bit like we’re listening to someone telling ghost stories. The result is concise (none of the stories really overstay their welcome, though some work better than others), sort of snack-sized bits of horror. The style varies as well, ranging from tales of the supernatural (“Angler Fish,” “Do Not Open,” “The Piper”), to cosmic horror (“Alone,” “Dreamer,” “Growing Dark”), monster stories (“Vampire Killer,” “First Hunt”), body horror (“The Man Upstairs,” “Taken Ill,” “Colony”) and even demonic possession (“Confession,” “Desecrated Host”). Plenty of stories defy easy genre categorization as well, and when they work (and they mostly do), they do the work of the best horror short stories - they get in there, lodge under your skin, and then finish, leaving you with as many questions as answers.

And if that’s all the show was, that’d be enough. But something I’ve noticed over the course of the first season is an expansion of the show on a couple of levels. First, as the season progresses, more voices get added to the cast. At first, it’s just Jonathan, alone in his office, committing these statements to audio. But then we start to get asides (in the form of interruptions) from his colleague Martin, an account from assistant archivist Sasha James, and then…unwelcome guests, intruding on the proceedings. It gives you the sense that a larger world is opening up around this beleaguered archivist, and in the second form of expansion, that larger world is probably not especially friendly. Certain names keep coming up in relation to supernatural occurrences - a long-dead antique book dealer with a taste for especially malevolent work, a mother and son duo who seem intent on tracking down said dealer’s books, a shipping company that specializes in unusual objects, among others. And when Martin and Sasha have their own face-to-face encounter with the protagonist of one of the stories, it brings danger to the Institute’s literal front door, in what’s looking to be a climactic showdown at the end of the first season. 

I’m a little skeptical about turning collections of discrete stories into an overarching narrative, because - as it did in The Lovecraft Investigations - it threatens to undermine the horror of each individual story and turn the whole enterprise into something else, like an action/adventure story with supernatural trappings. Horror works well, in my opinion, when it leans into the unexplained, and overarching narratives tend to explain things. But, at least right now, it seems to be working pretty well here. Part of this is because you get the sense it was built into the stories from the start, rather than being retrofitted onto the stories afterward. And it’s used sparingly, and very gradually over the course of the season, so it feels surprising when a recurring character pops up, creating a slight sense of paranoia, of things moving under the surface of the world that Jonathan is only beginning to discover. And, at least as of where I am right now, there’s no attempts to shoehorn everything discussed over the course of the season into some kind of unifying mythos, which I appreciate. It’s still something to be careful about, though, as one of the least effective entries of the season seems to pretty much exist to establish an antagonist for the last third of the season, rather than function as a stand-alone story. I get the sense that there is a larger continuity being established here that’s going to span all five seasons, but as long as it’s employed judiciously and doesn’t take over what makes the podcast good, I’m more curious than anything as to how it is going to play out.

There are a couple of weak points - that the accounts are (with a few exceptions) Jonathan reading written statements out loud means that they can threaten to feel a little samey (especially a problem for me since I tend to listen to three or four episodes at a go) in way that they wouldn’t if it were a more traditional interview format, and the voice acting is a touch stagey in a way that you wouldn’t expect from someone recording an account for posterity. It’s noticeable, but once the stories really get going you don’t really notice it. Or maybe the character of Jonathan Sims is just that pompous. It’s certainly a possibility. But regardless, if you’re looking for concise, creepy, unsettling horror, this is definitely worth a listen.

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Let Us Prey: All Of The Devils Are Here

(I’m going to end up spoiling this one to a degree, so if you’re interested in watching it, maybe do that before reading this.)

Sometimes, you look up a movie and it’s pretty clear what you’re going to get from the thumbnail, the title, and the brief description. And Let Us Prey isn’t exactly subtle in this regard - there’s that title (ugh), a thumbnail of a bloodied figure covered in barbed wire, and the brief description “Held in a remote police station, a mysterious stranger takes over the minds and souls of everyone inside.” So yeah, we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen: Late at night in some tiny police precinct, someone with no name or identification gets hauled in and thrown in a cell, and over the course of the night he basically possesses and/or torments everyone else there because he’s actually the devil or some shit like that.

This is by no means a fresh or original story idea, but here’s the thing: Let Us Prey is actually not what you’d expect from the description and relentlessly generic title. But, as much as I appreciate the film trying to defy expectations, I’m not sure the means by which it chose to do so actually works all that well. It’s not so much scary as a grim slog to an ending that isn’t terrible, but one that feels sort of like a foregone conclusion.

The film opens with portent - shots of crashing waves, flocks of crows against storm clouds, the sun fitfully breaking through. At first it’s nicely atmospheric, setting up a feeling of impending dread. But then it keeps going…and going…and then there’s an unnecessarily lingering close-up on a single crow, and it might be a special effect, but it’s like “okay, we get it, something’s coming and crows have something to do with it.” A lone figure appears in silhouette. Whatever’s coming, it’s here.

Elsewhere, on the other side of the title card, it’s dark early morning in some unidentified part of Scotland, and Police Constable Rachel Heggie is awake, doing push-ups, getting ready for her first day at her first assigned precinct. She heads out the door, walking to the station,, just in time to catch a young hoodlum coming the other way in a car that’s going too fast. Too fast to see the figure right in front of him, and he runs right over a man standing in the middle of the road. A man who vanishes immediately. Rachel sees the whole thing and takes him into custody.

The station is not very promising. It’s dingy and small. Sergeant MacReady, the ranking officer, is sort of a puzzle. He disapproves of profanity, but not of roughing up the kid Rachel’s brought in when he gets a bit lippy. He’s contemptuous of Rachel’s attention to procedure, but expects her to toe his line. The kid - who calls himself “Caesar” - is a bit of a regular at the station house, and gets thrown into lockup alongside Mr. Beswick, a mild-mannered schoolteacher. Elsewhere, we’re introduced to PCs Jack Warnock and Jennifer Mundie, who are spending their shift having sex in the front seat of their patrol car. Rachel radios them to look out for someone matching the victim’s description and they make fun of her over an open channel.

So we aren’t off to a good start. There’s the new cop stuck at her first probationary assignment, with what appear to be a bunch of corrupt fuck-ups stuck at a backwater station where they can’t do too much damage.

And then in walks the mysterious man, the one Caesar hit earlier, with barely a scratch on him, no name, no identification, the fingerprints of a man who died years ago, and a book. Full of names.

So yes, the mysterious man gets examined by the local doctor and then thrown into lockup himself, where he starts to make everyone uneasy. And under normal circumstances, this would be where the mysterious man would be revealed as the devil, or a demon, and start doing horrible things to everyone in the station and it’d be a siege film, all these people locked in with a personification of evil. That isn’t exactly the plot of Last Shift (there’s only a couple of people in that film), but still, you have an isolated police station and someone in the cells who isn’t who they appear to be. But Last Shift was good, and this…well, it certainly ducks expectations, but not in a way that works.

See, what we discover pretty quickly is that everyone in this police station - MacReady, Warnock, Mundie, Caesar, the doctor, and Rachel - have secrets that they’re hiding. And in most cases, those secrets are fucking horrifying. When vehicular manslaughter and killing a suspect in custody are the least objectionable ones, you know you’re in for some shit. The mysterious figure isn’t the devil here, pretty much everyone else is. So almost everyone is incredibly unsympathetic to start with, and as the film goes on it goes quickly from “unsympathetic” to “monstrous,” detailed in brutal, blood-soaked flashbacks that linger just long enough to get the point across, Apart from being kind of unbelievable in its scope, it also means that the movie stops being about how a police station full of people deal with this supernatural entity and instead starts being about us waiting for these absolutely awful people to get picked off one by one. We know that pretty much everyone (with one exception) is one degree or another of being a terrible person, so there’s no stakes or tension to their demise. It’s just a matter of waiting until they get theirs, which they do, often in supremely gory fashion, and as often as not by each other’s hand. There’s an inevitability to it, but not an inevitability that evokes dread, just a feeling of “okay, he’s probably next.” And the turn is revealed pretty early on, so it’s not like there’s a lot of horror to be found in the discovery that these otherwise average people have done awful, awful things. They’re unlikeable to start, so the only real surprise is the sheer depravity to which some of them have descended.

And I’m all in favor of subverting cliches, of taking the obvious and doing something difference with it. So there’s something interesting, at least in theory, about a movie that takes the “bunch of people trapped with a mysterious evil figure” conceit and turns it on its head, where the mysterious figure is actually more of an avenging angel and everyone else is awful and paying for their sins. But there’s no subtlety to it, no mystery. The moody opening doesn’t know when to stop, and for every shot of convenience stores or gas stations half-lit in the encroaching dark that, if they occurred in a film that played things quietly and low-key would create something haunting and uneasy, there’s relentlessly stagey dialogue, interiors that are obviously sets, and constant cutaways to flashbacks, often of horrible violence, not gratuitously lingered upon but also depicted in absolutely brutal fashion, without blinking or looking away. It doesn’t give us a chance to see the protagonists as sympathetic or relatable people before yanking that away. So we’re denied any horrifying revelations (beyond exactly how fucked-up some of these people are), and once we know the deal, the rest plays out pretty much like you’d expect. The end result means it’s not especially scary, and none of the people are developed to any degree beyond the terrible things they’ve done. We’re just waiting to find out the extent of their crimes and then waiting for them to die. In that sense it’s a lot more like a typical slasher films, where indiscreet teenagers are punished for things like drinking and premarital sex, with the lone sympathetic character surviving, complete with the sense that they’ve survived…but at what cost? You think it’s going to be one set of cliches, but it’s another.

In the end, a police station full of extremely bad people -cops and civilians alike - are shown doing bloody, horrible things to other people, and then doing bloody, horrible things to themselves and each other, and the one who’d normally be the bad guy is nothing of the sort, and maybe it’s an empowerment narrative for the protagonist, but it’s all so thoroughly nasty and unpleasant that it’s hard to care much about it. It’s grim, it’s pointless, it’s pointlessly grim and grimly pointless. Hell is empty, Shakespeare wrote, and all of the devils are here.

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The Wicker Man (1973): You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

 Every now and then - most recently with the release of Midsommar - the idea of “folk horror” will come up in the conversation. It’s a very pure expression of a fairly basic premise, that of the outsider coming to an isolated community where ancient beliefs and rituals are still practiced and meeting with a bad end. What I gather distinguishes folk horror from films as wildly different from it (and each other) as Dagon and Children Of The Corn and Cannibal Holocaust is that in folk horror, the traditions being drawn upon are distinctly pagan in flavor and rooted in real historical traditions (the “folk” part(, and not just stock-standard crazy evil cult worship.

It’s not something of which I’ve seen a lot, but it’s really difficult to talk about without bringing up what is largely considered the modern beginning of the genre, The Wicker Man. This is another one of those classic films (it’s been referred to as “the Citizen Kane of horror films”) that I haven’t seen…well, no, that’s not entirely true. I have a dim recollection of watching it many years ago and not being especially impressed. But I was much younger and less patient then, so I thought it’d be good to give it another look and see if it still holds up decades later.

And the verdict is…well, sort of. It definitely has its moments and I can’t say I’ve really seen anything else like it (in a good way), but ultimately it’s more interesting as an exemplar of a style than it is effective as a horror film.

The film opens with a cheeky title card where the producers thank the lord and residents of the isle depicted in the movie for their cooperation, and I have to say, it’s a nicely off-kilter touch…much like thanking the residents of Halsingland for their cooperation in the filming of Midsommar. We cut to a seaplane flying across a stretch of rocky islands in what are presumably the Hebrides, before landing just off the harbor in a small village. The plane is flown by Sergeant Neil Howie, a police officer sent to the small, isolated island village of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. Howie floats out on the water as a crowd gathers at the harbor, gawking at him without sending a dinghy out to bring him to shore. A fair amount of shouting on his part doesn’t change this, and he’s told that nobody’s allowed to land in the harbor without the permission of Lord Summerisle. Howie eventually manages to convince them that refusing to cooperate with a police investigation would be a very bad move, and he’s allowed to come ashore.

What Sergeant Howie finds is a very strange place indeed. Summerisle is known for its especially delicious fruit, exported all over Scotland, but the local pub only has canned food. The usual evening pub crowd is unusually bawdy and lascivious. The local church and its attendant graveyard are left to ruin, overrun with weeds. And even though a letter from the island requested the police’s help, everyone swears that they don’t know the missing girl.

They have their own traditions here.

Right off the bat, this film is not so much scary as it is relentlessly uneasy - the juxtaposition of pagan belief with otherwise contemporary English village life lends the whole film a feeling of pervasive strangeness that dovetails well with the story of an outsider come to an isolated, rural place with its own strange ways. The people are never explicitly sinister or leering villains, this is just their way of life, as normal to them as any other, but there’s definitely the paranoia you expect when someone from outside comes nosing around. All conversation stops when Howie walks into the room, windows open and people peer out as he passes, and with that comes cheerful, friendly obstruction and noncompliance with the investigation. People are happy to tell him that no, they’ve never heard of this girl, and even the woman who presumably wrote the letter insists that there must be some mistake, even though it’s ostensibly her daughter he’s come to find. He can’t even search the local records without the explicit permission of Lord Summerisle. The small village with its secrets works well in establishing a mood because it is an environment at once familiar and alien, so nothing can be taken for granted.

All of that works fine as it goes, and it’s a good foundation on which to build a story, but it’s undercut by the characterization of its protagonist. Sergeant Howie is depicted as a Christian devout almost to the point of puritanism, which makes sense as a contrast to a village full of people practicing pre-Christian beliefs and rituals, but the story constantly trips over the clash between these perspectives. Howie flip-flops between being a policeman investigating a crime and a puritanical zealot in ways that don’t quite feel believable and end up distracting. It’d be one thing if her were a devout Christian experiencing a crisis of faith as he sees a community flourishing in the absence of his god, but almost from the moment he hits the island he’s a bull in a china shop, doing as much harm as good to his investigation by loudly objecting to everything he sees and as often as not exceeding his jurisdiction to satisfy his moral outrage. I think either story by itself could have potentially worked, had Howie been a priest sent to a post on Summerisle as the village’s vicar, primarily characterized by his shock at the absence of God on this island, or in a procedural story as a police officer trying his best to navigate an extremely unfamiliar culture while trying to find a missing girl. Either of those works, either of those has interesting story beats associated with them, but cramming the two together disrupts the flow of the story and worse, tends to make Howie unsympathetic, which I think makes the film less effective overall. A more sympathetic Howie and a story that didn’t feel like a police investigation interrupted by a lot of exposition and argument about faith would have made for an even more compelling story than what we get.

To its credit, it certainly doesn’t look or play like most horror films, and I’m always here for a singular vision. It’s extremely colorful, with lots of sunlight and soft focus and even when the locations are drab, the villagers and their community pop with color. The people are cheerful and smiling and even though there’s no leering villainy, it still all feels unsettling. The soundtrack is largely English folk music, which makes sense for a film about Britain before Christianity came, but the overall result is something that feels,- at least on the surface - pastoral rather than sinister, which adds to the utter strangeness of the village itself.

There’s a tremendous eye for detail in the strangeness as well. There are lots of little bits of business in the background from the villagers, the local drugstore is stocked with ancient remedies, not modern ones, schoolchildren are taught about May Day rituals as naturally in school as history would be anywhere, and everyone, multiple generations in on this island, are as natural and comfortable in their beliefs as would be anyone anywhere, but they’re just different enough from modern sensibilities (especially around sex, which bothers Howie to no end) that it’s a little disquieting. There are a number of musical interludes as well, which adds to the otherworldly feel at the level of narrative. Horror isn’t usually musical (Sweeney Todd aside), so again in this we’re slightly wrong-footed throughout, to the film’s credit.

It’s definitely easy to see the DNA for a film like Midsommar here. It has some of the same beats, the colorful village and geniality of the villagers, the way the real story is sort of hidden in plain sight the whole time, but between the character of Howie (and some desultory editing which tends to break the film up into vignettes rather than a single story with momentum), I’m not sure this one still works as well to the modern eye. It definitely, definitely has its moments (and the end, while somewhat overlong and convoluted, ends up as a doozy), but it maybe tries to be too many things at the same time. You can do a lot with the story of someone looking for a little girl who’s gone missing, especially against a backdrop as vivid and evocative as Summerisle, and bringing ancient beliefs into a modern context makes for a surprisingly uneasy experience, but piling on a debate about faith on top of everything else just ends up making it a bit of a muddle.

IMDB entry
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Dark Touch: Won’t Someone Think Of The Children?

It’s a time-honored technique: If you want to really freak people out, bring children into the picture. Put them in danger, put them in pain, or better yet, make them the antagonist. Nothing like a good creepy child to add value to a scary movie. Hell, we don’t even need to be talking about horror films - if you want to whip up some good old-fashioned moral panic, simply suggest that some type of film or music or literature or whatever will be dangerous for our children. The amount of self-righteous, authoritarian nonsense that gets pushed for the sake of “the children” is considerable. And that’s because it works - who wants to be the person who opposes child safety? Nobody, that’s who.

But this week isn’t really about moral panic. It’s about Dark Touch, an unsubtle exercise in formulaic nastiness that pretends to something more and fails.

It opens with sort of a false start - it’s late at night, raining, and a little girl runs out of her family’s house. She’s found outside, taken in by another family, and then her parents come to retrieve her. There’s some tense, oblique conversation, something goes unspoken and then…it’s a few years later? What was the point of that? I know I usually deride flashbacks for neatly underlining that a particular place or person is bad, and no shit, we’re watching a horror film, you don’t need to tell us bad shit is coming, but this…doesn’t even do that. It’s just a scene where a little girl runs out of her house and then gets brought back.

And then we cut to this little girl, a few years older, with her family. Her name is Niamh, and she and her family live in a small town in Ireland, far away from the big city. It’s her, her mother and father, and her infant brother. But it’s also here that the puzzling opening scene starts to make a little more sense. It’s the old story - a prosperous, middle-class family, nice house, cute kids, but when night falls, father goes into Niamh’s bedroom and locks the door. No wonder she runs away. And then, one night, it all goes wrong. Niamh screams at the top of her lungs, and the house rattles, objects shift. By the time it’s all over, Niamh’s parents are dead, crushed beneath heavy furniture, and the police find Niamh hiding in a cupboard. She clutched her brother so tight it suffocated him.

So, traumatized, Niamh is placed in the care of her neighbors, Lucas and Natalie. They have two children of their own and the memory of a daughter lost to cancer. It’s just until they get more permanent accommodations set up. This way she can keep going to school while the police look for the gang of vandals that obviously tore up her family’s house. And it all seems nice enough, initially, until one night when Lucas reaches for his belt in response to an errant child…

…and the house starts to rattle, and objects start to shift.

It is clear almost from jump where this movie is going. It’s weird that it tries to pretend at all to be anything other than what it obviously is, as if it’s as much in denial as the adults that populate the film. This is a story about a traumatized girl who can move things with her mind, set against a backdrop of pervasive child abuse. From the opening scene, this is a film crawling with children - infants, toddlers, pre-teens - in almost every scene. This is a small town with a lot of kids, and it becomes pretty clear that a lot of these kids are getting beaten or molested and that nobody talks about it. And now one of them has supernatural powers. So it’s also pretty clear that this isn’t about survival, it’s about revenge.

So no, there’s no mystery here - not in the soundtrack, which fills most of the space in the film with minor-key piano or buzzing ambience or swells, all intended to communicate that this is very sinister and spooky. It’s not a film that is content to let moments be. Nor is there any mystery in the basic narrative - it’s clear very early on exactly what has happened and who’s responsible no matter how much the characters in the film look the other way. What we’re left with offers no revelation, no actual horror. There’s nothing to discover, it’s very clear pretty early on exactly what’s going to happen, so there’s no tension - it’s just a matter of watching everything play out and wondering how far they’re going to push it. And as the film goes on, everything feels less and less grounded in plausibility (and the contrast between the very ugly reality of child abuse and supernatural powers makes the whole thing feel trivialized) and more and more like an excuse to do shocking things.

The film itself is equally obvious. The cinematography leans heavily into shadowy interiors and dark exteriors with few sources of external light, and the dialogue is extremely stilted and expository throughout. Combined with the intrusive soundtrack, it all has a real movie-of-the-week feel, where absolutely nothing is left to mood or inference that can’t be spelled out in the most obvious way. It does succeed to some degree early on in creating a very oppressive atmosphere by emphasizing abuse’s many forms and making it almost omnipresent, but it doesn’t last - as the movie goes on it becomes less interested in the cost of violence against children or the very real horror associated with it, and more and more interested in a supernatural riff on the “bad seed” film that uses the very serious topic of child abuse as a rationalization for violence, and that feels kind of gross to me.

It’s not that I have a problem with provocative or transgressive filmmaking in horror, far from it. But in my opinion, if you’re going to traffic in subject matter closer to taboos, you need to earn it. You need to treat the characters with a certain amount of respect, treat the topic with the gravity it deserves, and this film just doesn’t. Instead of locating the horror in the experience of victims of abuse, it ultimately uses that abuse merely as justification for everything that comes afterward. The humanity of its protagonists and antagonists alike gets lost along the way, ultimately discarded in favor of empty, escalating atrocity. It feels less like an articulation of trauma, or even of a small community’s complacency in the things going on behind closed doors, and more like an attempt to shock by pivoting all of the violence around children - either as the victims or the perpetrators - without ever really reckoning with (or even tapping into) the impact that either of those things actually has. It’s like I said, if what you’re bringing to the party is a load of bullshit, just bring up “the children” and hell, maybe that will get you over.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Censor: Your Life Is Already Half Video Hallucination

Psychological horror does a good line in blurring the line between reality and delusion, in featuring protagonists who aren’t sure if what they’re experiencing is real or not. And horror films (alongside other forms of popular entertainment) have been singled out as inspiration for real-life violence for decades. The argument is that people cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, and so seek to reenact horror films in real life. For this reason, the argument goes, horror films should be restricted or banned, in order to protect the public. In my (cynical) experience, it’s rarely if ever truly about public safety. Generally it’s a convenient way to gin up outrage or to present someone as a moral exemplar ahead of a political campaign or a fundraising effort. It’s not about horror movies, it’s about something else. Horror movies are just a useful proxy.

Censor is a genuinely unsettling psychological horror film that directly engages with these ideas, and doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence in the process.

It’s set in Thatcher-era Britain, the early 1980s. It’s a time of extensive civil unrest and increasing suppression. More to the point for this film, it’s the height of the “video nasty” era of film censorship, and we follow Enid Baines, a censor at the British Board of Film Classification. It’s the job of her and her colleagues to screen films, impose a rating, and recommend edits that make the film compliant with obscenity guidelines. She and her colleagues have to watch a lot of what were colloquially termed “video nasties” - exploitation films high on graphic violence and low on production value, intended for distribution directly to video rental places.

Enid is good at her job. She’s thoughtful, careful, determined to make the right decisions. She takes the idea that these films are potentially corrupting and dangerous at its word, and she’s passionate about protecting people. It’s personal for her. Her sister Nina disappeared without a trace when they were both very young. It’s haunted her ever since. And she has a lot of stress in her life - her parents are having Nina declared dead, a recent murder case is tied by the tabloid press back to a film that Enid passed for certification and so now she’s getting nasty phone calls at all hours and the press are camped outside her job. And she just finished screening a film called Don’t Go Into The Church, a film with scenes that looked suspiciously like childhood memories of hers. She would have sworn one of the actresses looked familiar too.

She looks a lot like Nina.

The central conceit, then, is that we have someone who job it is to protect people from confusing fantasy and reality finding that the line between fantasy and reality is blurring. In this sense, it treads some of the same ground as Berberian Sound Studio. Both feature protagonists in hostile environments - in Berberian Sound Studio, it’s being alone in a foreign country, and for Enid it’s being mired in the controversy around a recent classification. Both protagonists are also immersed in violent films - as part of the production in Berberian Sound Studio, and here as a viewer - and it both cases it’s taking a psychological toll. The biggest difference here is that Berberian Sound Studio was a much more restrained, cerebral film. There’s something much more disturbing about what happens to Enid as the film goes on. It’s very much a slow burn - everything starts to go sideways so gradually, beginning with nightmare segments and then the gradual intrusion of repeated motifs, the contrast between Enid’s perspective and others’ becoming more sharp as the film goes on, that you don’t realize just how far gone Enid is until it’s much too late.

Like I said last week, dealing with your nightmares by denying and suppressing them doesn’t end well, and Enid cannot bring herself to face her nightmares, to confront what happened all of those years ago, and the film, to its credit, keeps a lot of things unexplained and unresolved. We get hints, clues, possibilities, but Enid won’t admit to herself what happened, and we experience most of the film from Enid’s perspective, so we never know for sure ourselves. The possibilities, the glimpses, the stuff we get around the edges, they’re disturbing, but it’s also hard to tell how much of that is the reality of what happened and how much is Enid excoriating herself for things out of her control. Again, there are no easy answers to be had, and the interweaving of Enid’s life with both the films she’s investigating and her own internal psychological landscape is intuitive and seamless, making the final act really, really unnerving. 

The production is handled skillfully - as I said above, it reminds me a lot of Berberian Sound Studio, and that’s as much about the aesthetic as narrative similarities. Like that film it’s a period piece dominated by primary-color lighting and drab environments, longer takes that focus on the minutiae of everyday workplace behavior and highlight the ways in which the protagonist is sort of an outsider. Although the censors aren’t portrayed unsympathetically - they’re not strident moralists for the most part, they’re doing a job, and they mostly seem to have a wry distance on the films they’re watching - some of them do seem to see Enid as being a little too strict and serious about it. They’re friendly enough, but there’s a bit of a chummy boys’ club atmosphere to the place, and you get the sense that she doesn’t have too many friends. There are lots of shots of Enid on her own, walking back to her tiny, drab apartment, and even at work she’s generally pictured apart from her colleagues. It underlines an alienation that only gets worse as the film goes on.

It’s also really good at using contrasting cinematic vocabularies to describe what’s happening. Video nasties were low-budget exploitation films, high on graphic violence and low on production value, meant to titillate and shock, and they’re recreated very faithfully throughout - honestly, I’m not sure how much is recreated and how much is archival footage, it’s damn near impossible to tell. So we start with glimpses of the films Enid is screening - grainy, garish, obviously made on the cheap - and as the film goes on, their presence makes itself known in increasingly intrusive ways without being too literal about what’s happening. It’s the blurring of the line between film and reality, and it isn’t even really necessarily that noticeable until the point where you realize how much it’s swallowed up everything

It’s sort of a truism that the most vehemently moralistic have all kinds of skeletons in their own closets, but here it seems less a case of rank hypocrisy and more that this is how Enid is processing her trauma. She can’t bring herself to face what happened to Nina, she’s deeply in denial, so she sublimates it into her work as a censor. She couldn’t protect or save her sister, so she’s going to protect and save everyone else instead. But putting that level of denial in an environment suffused with violence, being constantly exposed to graphic violence as a viewer, well, those aren’t going to mix well, and in Enid’s case it makes for a nightmarish downward spiral from which we get little relief and even less closure. It’s thoughtful, powerful stuff.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Saint Maud: The Agony And The Ecstasy

When you stop to think about it, some expressions of religion are extremely lurid, if not downright terrifying. In Christianity, this goes all the way back to Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, moving up through the hellfire-and-damnation tradition in Protestantism, alongside the horrifying tribulations of Catholic martyrs. I mean, there’s a reason there’s a (very good) horror movie called Martyrs. And a younger, edgier me would have called The Passion Of The Christ the first real “torture porn” film, because it’s sure as shit as bloody as one, and its violence as lovingly lingered over. I mean, the word “awe” can refer both to reverence and to dread.

Devotion is fertile ground for horror, is what I’m saying. And Saint Maud - a stark, carefully told story about the place where faith and madness overlaps - explores it skillfully. It’s equal parts drama, horror, psychological character study, and account of tragic decompensation.

The film opens on a woman huddled in the corner of some kind of institutionally tiled room. There’s a pile of rumpled bedding on a gurney, the dim flicker of fluorescents. A roach crawls across the ceiling as the woman, her face smeared with blood, stares blankly upward.

Flash forward to some time later. The woman is Maud, and she’s a nurse for a private hospice care organization in seaside England. She finds value and purpose in her work, bolstered by her recent conversion to Catholicism. She credits her faith for rescuing her when she was lost, and tries to be an agent of grace for the dying. She’s starting a new posting at the mansion of Amanda Kohl, a celebrated dancer and choreographer, who is in the late stages of spinal cancer. Dying and confined to a wheelchair, Amanda sits in her big house in small-town England, away from London, watching recordings of her old performances. There’s an anger there, a bitterness. It’s understandable. Maud helps her with her exercises, administers her shots, her vile-tasting medications, bathes her, cooks for her. And as they begin to converse, Maud explains the value of her faith to Amanda, and Amanda seems receptive, if not someone astray in her grief. And so Maud realizes what she must do - it is her responsibility to bring Amanda back into the fold of the saved, to make her soul ready for heaven.

You see, Maud hears God speaking to her.

This film is less balls-out horror than it is a relationship drama and character study - well, at least until things go bad, as they must, and then they go pretty damn bad. We mostly see the world through Maud’s eyes - the dreary English seaside town, its garishly lit main drag, the dimly lit interiors of Amanda’s mansion, Maud’s squalid bedsit. There’s not a lot of honest light in her world, so no wonder she seeks it elsewhere, seeing what she wants to see. And this is definitely a film with an unreliable narrator, with a division between delusion and reality that sharpens as the film goes on. We see what she sees, but we also see her through others’ eyes, and shifting between them starts off as slightly disconcerting, and escalates to, well, that’s where the horror comes in.

It’s told in small, smartly underplayed ways - this is a film that is very good about showing instead of telling. It’s not short on dialogue, but people’s behavior, how they say things, tells us as much as (if not more than) what they actually say. Occasional flashbacks and asides give us brief glimpses into who Maud might have been before, and how she ended up like she did, but it’s never entirely spelled out, and doesn’t really need to be. Something bad happened, she took it perhaps harder than she should, and it broke something inside. She’s looking for transcendence, penance, salvation, and she feels God moving through her, speaking to her. So for as much as we’re aware of her devotion (and the things underneath she’s repressing), we also see that she’s lonely, traumatized, and not really stable. It’s longing for connection, for forgiveness, for punishment. There’s a lot of guilt there, and she’s just barely holding it together.

And what this means is that at some point, she’s going to fall apart. She’s a devout young woman caring for someone older, someone unapologetically gay, someone angry at a world that has condemned her to a slow death and the denial of movement after a lifetime spent celebrating it. Amanda lashes out - somewhat cruelly - and Maud falls, and falls hard. There’s a lot to unpack in her fervor in contrast to the life she led before, suggestions of repressed or sublimated sexuality, a need to punish herself for her transgressions, real or imagined. Lots of stories about saints involve tribulations and mortification - for some expressions of religious faith, the line between agony and ecstasy is extremely thin, and there’s all sorts of stuff to be mined here, given what Maud seems to be grappling with and traumatized by. The second half of the film shifts the focus from Maud and Amanda to Maud alone, as she spirals into something masochistic and sordid, soundtracked by moody synthesizer which moves from minor key ambience to ominous swells, the rumbling before the storm and the thunder alike.

Maud takes her penance and her holy mission very seriously indeed, and as the movie goes on the contrast between how she sees herself and how she is seen by the world becomes sharper and sharper until the very end, which is as horrifying as you’d expect, in many of the ways you’d expect. And I think maybe in some ways this is a weakness of the film. As a character study, it’s pretty strong - it’s not often that the films I write about here remind me of Taxi Driver, for example, but this one sure does - but the shift in focus halfway through robs the film of some momentum and tension, and for me the end was forecasted maybe a little too heavily - it feels less shocking than it does a foregone conclusion (though it’s certainly strikingly conveyed) and would have benefited from a stronger commitment to the unreliability of Maud’s perspective that brings us to that point so well. Still, it plays fair with everyone involved, and for as horrific as it can be, it’s tragic as well. As so often is the case with martyrs.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon