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.

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Freaks: The Nature Of Monstrosity

Horror films are, largely, about monstrosity. That could be a literal monster, some kind of thing that should not be, but it can also be some aspect of humanity grown warped and wrong. That could be the mind, the body, or character grossly distorted into something that is unsettling precisely because enough humanity remains for us to connect to it. The more we see ourselves in it, the more disturbed we become. Conversely, there are also the stories where the monsters aren’t the monsters, because either they possess human qualities like empathy and nurturing, or because the humans are real horrible fuckers.

And honestly, I’ve gotten to the point where “man is the real monster” movies feel sort of facile to me. Yes, people are capable of terrible things. I don’t know that that by itself, is an especially profound statement, and most films along those lines that I’ve seen handle it with the subtlety of a brick. After seeing Freaks, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the final word on the subject. And that was a film made in 1932.

It opens on a carnival sideshow, with a barker walking a curious crowd through the exhibits, pausing at one who is apparently especially gruesome. It is said that she was at one time a woman of exceptional beauty, now reduced to some kind of travesty upon whom it is difficult to look. We don’t see her, but one patron faints at the sight of her.

This film is the story of how this freak became what she is today.

Jumping back in time, we’re introduced to Hans and Frieda. They are two dwarves in this carnival’s sideshow, and they’re engaged to be married. But Hans has his eye on Cleopatra, an aerialist of typical size. He insists there’s nothing going on, but he’s clearly smitten. He isn’t shy about lavishing her with gifts, and Cleopatra isn’t shy about accepting them. She’s also not shy about accepting the affections of Hercules, the carnival strongman, when Hans isn’t around. They both eye Hans and Frieda’s people, the freaks of the carnival sideshow, with contempt. The fortune Hans is reputed to have, however, that has their attention.

None of this is subtle. This is your basic 1930s morality play, at its heart intended for the edification and moral uplift of the viewer. But that’s not what makes this film noteworthy, nor where its power lies. The sideshow freaks in this film are all people who were working as sideshow freaks when the film was made. These are people with any number of different deformities - microcephaly, congenital missing limbs, conjoined twins, dwarfism, and more - and it lends the movie an unnerving power because these aren’t effects or makeup or costumes. There’s no distance here, that comforting reassurance that it’s just a movie doesn’t quite land the same. Even to modern sensibilities this is still a pretty confrontational film in that regard, and it sets up a conversation about the nature of monstrosity. In this film, the freaks are a family, caring for and protective of each other. They don’t prey on others, and seem to be content with the same things that anyone would be - a roof over their heads, food in their belly, and warm sunshine on their face. The “normal” people aren’t all villainous - Cleopatra and Hercules actively scheme, some others are insensitive jerks, but many of their fellow carnival workers are friendly and as at ease with the freaks as anyone else. People are monsters, monsters are people.

As I said above, there’s not a lot of nuance here - this film has a moral and it’s going to give it to you - but I think what continues to make it so confrontational, so potentially uncomfortable, is that in watching it, we have to deal with our own feelings about what we’re seeing. The putative monsters are ultimately just people with feelings and hopes and insecurities, who differ from us only in terms of their biology. If we’re uncomfortable with them, that’s on us and not them. The antagonists aren’t exaggerated in their own monstrosity, they’re just your garden-variety cruel, insensitive, avaricious criminals who’d think nothing of bumping someone off for a fortune. But in their callousness, we’re moved to sympathize with the freaks. 

And I think that discomfort is why this film not only ended up being a lasting part of the cinematic canon, but also why its development and release were so turbulent. It pretty much got made in spite of the studio funding it, the director sank into reclusion after its release, and while it was being filmed, the cast had to eat separately from the other cast and crew at the studio because so many people couldn’t bear the sight of them. Actors approached about starring in the film refused because they didn’t want to be in the same room as the freaks. It was originally about thirty minutes longer but a lot of footage was lost when it was cut for being “too graphic.” Maybe it was really graphic, maybe it was just the freaks daring to be people, it’s hard to say. Some of the pushback was likely the mores of the time, but I think some of it was because the “monsters” weren’t actually the monsters - they were portrayed as sympathetic and kind, and I suspect that was more than a lot of people could handle. One of the hardest things to face is your own shortcomings; it’s easier to be disgusted by the flaws of another than to admit to your own.

These people lived lives, fell in love, married, had kids, all while being far enough away from what we consider “normal” that their primary means of support was exhibiting themselves to crowds of gawking onlookers. Were they all angels in real life? No, but none of us are. They were human, and in that regard, we’re left wondering exactly what separates us from monsters.

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Near Dark: Families Of Blood And Choice

If it isn’t clear from previous posts, I am extremely picky about vampire movies. Mostly because I feel like they’ve been done to (ha-ha) death, and if I’m being honest, the Twilight series both made serious bank and sort of ruined the concept for awhile. I’m not really a fan of the vampire as romantic figure, like you get with Interview With The Vampire or the Twilight series. The whole “oh woe is me for I live forever and must watch all beautiful things wither and die” schtick? Miss me with that. Films like 30 Days Of Night are more my speed. I like it when they’re threatening.

Needless to say. Near Dark has been on my radar for some time as a highly-praised hidden gem of the genre. But it wasn’t easily accessed on streaming until recently, and so when I saw it was available, I jumped on it immediately. And now having seen it, I definitely understand its cult-classic status; it’s a sharp, gritty Western about the nature of family that deals in blood in a couple senses of the word.

It’s a lazy night in rural Oklahoma, the mosquitos are out, and three good ol’ boys are scuffling and shit-talking like you do when you live someplace where that’s all there is to do. They spy a pretty young lady enjoying an ice cream cone, and one of the three - a strapping young man named Caleb - decides to shoot his shot with her. Her name is Mae and it goes fairly well, but she’s awfully concerned about getting home before sun-up. Caleb thinks she’s got a strict daddy and he’ll just charm her out of trouble, but there’s something vehement, almost desperate about it. So Caleb decides that he’s going to blackmail her. He’ll get her home before sunrise, but she has to kiss him. And Mae kisses him, and then bites him. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood, and hard enough for her to drink. Which she does before leaving a dazed Caleb on his own to recover. And when Caleb finally comes to, he feels like shit - sick, woozy, gagging.

When he stumbles out into the sunlight, he starts to burn.

Along comes a Winnebago, its windows lined with foil, and Caleb gets snatched up by the occupants. There’s Jesse, Diamondback, Severen, Homer…and Mae. Whatever it is they do, they don’t like to leave witnesses, and Severen cheerfully explains that he’s going to cut Caleb’s head off. Mae points out that she bit him but didn’t bleed him out. So now Mae has made him everybody’s problem. They have to explain to him what he is now, and what it’s going to take for him to survive. They’re going to see if he’s got the stomach for it. Meanwhile, back at the family homestead, Caleb’s father and little sister are worried because Caleb’s gone missing. Local law enforcement doesn’t seem too bothered - young man like that, he’s probably just off with a girl or something and he’ll come home soon enough. But they know Caleb better than that. So we have Caleb, and two families. There’s his father and little sister, and then this motley band of…well, nobody’s saying the “v” word, but they drink blood and can’t go outside during the day. It’s not much of a leap.

There’s nothing romantic about these vampires; theirs is a life of one stolen vehicle after another, hiding in barns and garages, sleeping under tarps and never staying in one place for too long. Very few of the usual cliches apply – sunlight’s lethal but they don’t give a shit about crosses or running water or garlic. They don’t even have fangs, but they kill and they drink and they live through almost everything else. The violence is quick and brutal – practiced killers who have learned that this is what they need to do to survive. And some of them, especially Homer and Severen, seem to really, really enjoy it with the glee that comes from realizing that rules are just constructs and there’s nothing stopping you from refusing them. But there’s a raw desperation to them akin to any group of people on the run - they’re just one step ahead of getting caught, they can’t ever settle down in one place, and at the end of the day, what they have is survival and really not much else. Mae seems to see some beauty and wonder in the idea of being alive long enough to be around when the light of distant stars finally reaches Earth, but none of the others seem to find joy in anything other than respite and murder.

Vampire movies with a family subtext are nothing new at all – the idea of one vampire siring another makes it a pretty short leap. But there are a bunch of ways to do it, as The Lost Boys, Twilight, Interview With The Vampire, and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To can attest. This film pits biological family (the blood part of blood being thicker than water) against a potential family of choice (that, well, drinks blood). Jesse and his brood are very much in the margins, and it could be argued that there’s not a lot of choice involved, but they’re a bunch of people bound by sharing the thing that makes them different from the norm. So there’s some subversion going on here. Usually it’s the biological family who are the terrible assholes and the family of choice who are welcoming and kind, but here, it’s tenuous. Caleb wants nothing more than to return home, but doesn’t think he can, and the family of choice, usually the safe haven for outsiders, is accepting him begrudgingly at best. Either way, it comes down to blood.

This film also came out in the same year as The Lost Boys, but where that film was closer to slick, glossy teen dramas of the time, with a definite comic streak (and a butchering of one of my favorite songs), this is deadly serious, gritty and raw the way exploitation films of the period were; it’s easy to see the influence of this film in the nomadic True Knot of Doctor Sleep and the ultraviolent road trip of The Devil’s Rejects. It takes full of advantage of the sprawling landscape of the Southwest, the long stretches of road only sparsely dotted by gas stations and roadhouses and the sort of dark that swallows people up. Jesse’s brood are apex predators, practiced at existing in the margins where people aren’t likely to be missed.

And for a lower-budget film, it definitely has some moments of visual flair – there’s a shootout in a small bungalow that makes light more dangerous than the bullets flying, and there’s lots of fiery sunrises and sunsets, long lonely vistas scorched by the sun. The soundtrack is lush synthesizer and stabs of action-movie guitar, which serves to both ground it in the 1980s and heighten the exploitation-film feeling. The protagonists are pretty uniformly decent and The Good Guys, a father who wants his son back, the adorable younger sister, and a good ol’ boy in way over his head. But the antagonists have some flavor to them – Severen, the gleefully unapologetic killer, Jesse the dour patriarch who, with Diamondback (very much the mother figure) is just trying to keep their little family alive and off the radar, Mae is sort of a nonentity, mostly defined by her affection and protectiveness toward Caleb, and Homer, who might be the most interesting one – he’s someone who has been a little kid for a very, very, very, very long time, and the resentment and loneliness are palpable.

So there’s a lot to recommend this, and probably my only complaints are that the tension between one family and the other isn’t really as fully developed as it could be. Caleb’s not really running from anything, and the story can’t seem to settle on this new existence being either alluring in its freedom from morality and consequences or a desperate fight for survival that he’s been thrust into. There are elements of both, but they’re never really fleshed out, and I found the ending a little pat and free of meaningful consequences. But apart from that, it’s a hell of a ride and that rare vampire film that I actually like.

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Lovely, Dark, And Deep: Nature Abhors A Vacuum

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

- Robert Frost

One of the most common taxonomies of narrative conflict divides it into three: Man against man, man against nature, and man against self. And in my experience writing this thing, man against nature definitely earns its keep. The wilderness is scary – beautiful and utterly impassive, indifferent to the fates of the creatures that inhabit it, including humans. The Blair Witch Project knows it, In The Earth knows it, Yellowbrickroad knows it, even lesser films like Gaia and The Ritual know it. The wilderness is full of things that may very well mean you harm, and it’s easy to lose yourself.

Lovely, Dark, And Deep knows it too. It’s an eerie, deliberately (possibly too deliberately) paced story about the burdens we carry and the mysteries of nature.

We’re introduced to a sprawling expanse of forest known simply as “the backcountry,” and the rangers who patrol it from tiny cabins, on their own for months. It’s the start of the day and everyone’s sounding off by radio to indicate that they’re okay. It passes around to Ranger Varney, and we see him outside his cabin, shouldering a pack, closing up the cabin and ignoring his radio. He’s repeatedly asked to sound off, but he goes about his business. The requests turn to pleas, and Varney tapes a piece of paper over the “The Ranger Is In” sign outside the cabin.

It says “I owe this land a body.”

Sometime later, the backcountry rangers are gathering for the start of a new season. Lennon is a ranger new to the detail, someone who’s worked her way up the ladder to this assignment. It’s what she’s always wanted to do, but the other rangers seem awkward around her. She’s prickly and distant, but she knows how she’s seen by the others. There’s a backstory there and rumors get around. It’s a tough gig working in the backcountry - you’re out in the middle of nowhere, reachable only by helicopter, for months in monastic living conditions. A lot of weird shit happens out there, and people go missing all the time, with only a fraction ever found. As it turns out, one of those people was Lennon’s sister Jenny. It was a long time ago, and Lennon has become a ranger specifically to take this assignment, to patrol the woods where her sister vanished, and do her best to pick up a trail that went cold decades ago. She’s a woman on a mission and she’s used to being seen as crazy or obsessed. And maybe she is, given the distance she’s gone to try and solve her sister’s disappearance. But she’s a competent ranger, if not always good at following orders.

What follows is Lennon moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, dealing with another missing hiker case (people go missing in the wilderness, but an unusual number go missing out here), clashing with her superiors and realizing that there’s something else out there. It’s not an especially histrionic film, performances and dialogue are believable and low-key, the somber reserve of people who have a difficult job to do. Everyone seems believable and even Lennon, in her rash decisions and tendency to disobey orders, comes across as someone deeply driven by guilt and grief, possibly to the point of obsession. But no scenery gets chewed, there aren’t really any jump scares. It’s very quiet and meditative with brief but effective moments that communicate the sinister strangeness underneath the beauty. This film lets things happen in the background (which I’ve always found more unnerving than showing something in my face and yelling BOO!), and it has an excellent sense of wrongness without going overboard. It’s not overexplained, and it doesn’t need to be because the visuals do a lot of the work, cryptic but evocative.

That said, I do think that the deliberate pace is, in this case, a bit of a double-edged sword. I like it when a film has the confidence to slow down and build a mood, and the pace and relative quiet communicate what it’d be like to spend months by yourself in the actual middle of nowhere. But the deliberate pace also means that the film drags at points, spinning its wheels a little. More escalation wouldn’t have been out of place, but the overall effect is that of gradually sinking into a dream, where reality, grief, and something outside of our understanding gradually come together and it works pretty well on that front.

The end does let it down a little as well. It builds to a climax, but that climax could have used more tension instead of continuing the very even, gradual pace of the previous acts, and the ultimate reveal is maybe a little on-the-nose and over-exposited. The film is very good about showing instead of telling everywhere else, so I think they could have carried that a little more into the end, but otherwise it carries some of the same narrative and tonal DNA as Absentia and Censor, however different the settings, resulting in a nicely creepy meditation on grief, guilt, and letting go.

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The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

 (I will probably get a little spoilery in this one, but the story doesn’t really have twists and turns, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The story also doesn’t have much of a story.)

Making films is difficult. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate just how difficult, but I know that even low-budget indie films still require a great deal of money and equipment and logistics, and generally don’t have the luxury of multiple locations, high-end cameras or lighting, a schedule that allows for experimentation or even multiple takes. And this is a point raised usually in defense of films that fall short - the idea that making a film is hard work and so criticism is unjustified. That is patently horseshit. You could run a marathon while wearing wrist and ankle weights and be working really hard the whole time as a result, and it isn’t going to make you the winner. You can appreciate the difficulty of doing something and still recognize when it isn’t a success.

Like this week’s movie, for example, in case you were wondering why I was ranting about criticism. The Burned Over District is a clumsy, amateurish attempt at cosmic horror that doesn’t so much miss what’s good about cosmic horror (although it misses that too) as it does miss the basics of storytelling.

It begins as a hazy, sun-drenched reverie. An attractive woman, gazing at someone lovingly. There’s no dialogue, just soft music, softer lighting, and what seems to be a quiet moment with a loved one. And then it is over, cut short by broken glass and blood and crumpled metal. A man and the woman we’ve just seen are sitting in the front of a car, and she appears to be badly injured. As it turns out, her injuries are fatal, and that is how Will Pleasance loses his wife, Natalie. Cut to some weeks later, and his mother (his shrill, awful mother) and his sister are visiting him to see how he’s doing. He isn’t doing well, which really is to be expected when you’ve watched the person you love die right in front of you. His sister’s sympathetic, his (terrible) mother less so, and then they leave.

Sometime later, Will’s out hunting in the woods and in the process of trying to take down a deer, encounters a hole in the ground. A really, really large hole that goes pretty deep. It looks like it might have been an old well, since the sides seem to be lined with brick. But now it’s just a gaping maw, above which dangle a number of crude wooded shapes bent out of twigs and saplings.

Almost like talismans.

There’s no really elegant way to get into this. The film is basically “man loses wife, is very sad about it, then cult shit out of nowhere.” The two things aren’t really connected at all. Like, to the point that in the scene where Will discovers the hole, a friendly older man just pops up suddenly to express his concern and deliver a big exposition dump about the history of the hole. Which is on Will’s property, which makes it odd that he’s never seen it before, especially if he spends any amount of time in the woods hunting. That he’s out there hunting without any safety orange on and with his finger perpetually on his rifle’s trigger is a whole other matter, but he and Natalie have apparently lived out here for a long time, and he’s never seen this hole before today, even though it’s been out here for centuries. And then there’s someone right there to explain it to him. The whole film is nakedly mechanical in that sense, a collection of things that need to happen that never feels like an actual period of time in someone’s life. It’s not chaotic, but things do happen without any real rhyme or reason. Why is Will’s mother back at the house? Who knows? Why is Will’s sister driving back into town in the middle of the night? No idea!

This is made even more obvious by how the story (such as it is) is actually being told moment to moment. The performances come from the ACTING! school of acting, all hammy and melodramatic and two-dimensional. And the writing comes from the WRITING! school of writing, all speeches and cliches and things that nobody ever actually says. It’s a film full of people saying lines, instead of characters inhabiting a believable space. And what they have to say isn’t even especially interesting. So yes, there’s an evil cult in this town that’s been worshiping what’s in the hole for ages (big surprise), and they are boring. The moments when the cult’s leader makes grand pronouncements like cult leaders do, they ramble, they go on and on, and they’re almost less oratory and more just him kind of explaining the same things over and over again while the other members stand around in sort of quasi-Mennonite outfits for no apparent reason.

And I cannot stress enough how ineptly the story is handled. It’s not especially complicated or unfamiliar – man, grieving the recent death of his wife, discovers that the town he lives in holds a dark secret. That is not in and of itself a problem, you can do some good stuff with that. The problem is that the story has an almost-complete absence of connective tissue. Natalie’s death has almost no role in the overall story, even as a facet of Will’s character. Basically, he’s drunk, sloppy and reckless, there’s a nightmare sequence early on, a sort of vision much later and that’s kind of it. At one point, someone intimates that the cult had something to do with her death, but it’s never followed up. I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Will isn’t thinking straight because of grief, but there’s no attempt to establish that or contextualize his actions. It seems almost irrelevant: Wife dies, I’m sad, whoops, there’s a portal to some interdimensional evil on my property that I’ve somehow never noticed and it’s being worshipped by a cult made up of most the townsfolk. There’s no discovery, one thing just sort of happens after another in isolation. He and Natalie have lived in this small, ostensibly tight-knit town for some time and somehow Will has to be told that there’s one really powerful, influential family that owns everything, and nobody else in town seems to know who Will is. That’s what makes small towns such fertile ground for horror - everyone knows everyone else, and everyone’s keeping secrets. For that matter, we're introduced to most of the townspeople as weird cultists first, and then as respectable citizens, which is just...ass-backwards. Again, the effectiveness of this kind of story lies in not knowing who to trust, at the revelation of which friendly neighbors are in thrall to some eldritch menace. When you know it's everyone right off the bat, there's not much you can do with that.

This is so egregious that there’s one scene where Will’s sister is sitting in the kitchen having a drink, then the wind blows a door open, some mysterious force shatters the cup in her hand, and she is subsequently compelled to…walk out into the middle of the woods where she discovers a ritual sacrifice going on. That’s the only way they could get her out there to witness that? It boggles the mind. Add to that the bog-standard pompous speechifying by the cult leader, and the odd way that the story seems to wrap up at the halfway mark to make room for a second half that is one long revenge sequence, and it’s a baffling experience.

There are a few redeeming qualities – it’s obviously got a smaller budget, but it looks pretty good. There’s lots of beautiful footage of snowy woods and mountains, clouds scudding across the sky, and the lighting is generally stark and nicely lurid in places. In general, the film has an aesthetic that would sit nicely next to homages like The Void, and the filmmakers are surprisingly good at not telegraphing startling moments given how not-good they are at so many other things. The violent moments are goopy and visceral in a way that fits with the overall aesthetic and manage to avoid being either gratuitous or silly, but the whole thing is so incoherent, the climax is so hilariously cliched (complete with a Final Girl cocking a shotgun), dragging out entirely too long before ending in what was probably supposed to be a moment of awe and horror but comes across like a bunch of people standing around, unsure of what to do next.

That it’s not especially original isn’t an issue – there are only so many stories in the world – but top to bottom, the execution is so fumbling and inept that it even screws up the basics. They tried, yes. But they failed.

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Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan: The Needle And The Damage Done

Criticism of foreign horror films are, in some ways, a very fine line for me to walk. On the one hand, I appreciate them for the opportunity to experience new perspectives and see things cast in what is to me a new light, but there’s also the danger that I’m exoticizing them, prizing them for their mere difference from my own cultural default or worse, expecting something from them that they have no obligation to deliver. If someone wants to approach your bog-standard mass-market horror film made in the U.S. from their own non-U.S. point of view, they can do that. That is entirely their prerogative. In the case of last week’s It Lives Inside, the result isn’t going to be especially interesting, a mix of multiplex horror cliches and some simplistic treatment of the immigrant experience.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan  (Implant - The Curse Of Beauty, roughly translated) is very much the opposite of last week’s film – it’s made from a very specific cultural perspective with little regard for Western tastes. It has its moments, but it never really coheres.

Ayu and Laras are sisters making a living in Jakarta, in two very different ways. Ayu is a makeup artist who, when the film opens, is working on a bride-to-be ahead of her wedding. Her phone keeps buzzing, and it’s Laras, who’s leaving messages as she gets dressed for what appears to be a fancy night out. But Ayu’s busy and can’t take the call. When she finally gets a chance to listen to her voicemail, Laras is apologetic, acknowledging that she hasn’t been a very good sister, but that she’s working on turning things around, and Ayu’s reaction, interestingly enough, is a resigned sigh and wondering why Laras has to use her as “her excuse.” So it’s clear that their relationship is somewhat fraught, even if it isn’t clear why. We do get a sense, though, of what it might be as Laras travels through the city in a cab. She and the driver seem to know each other very well, and he doesn’t pick up any other fares. He’s taking her to her…appointments. With her…clients.

And this particular client appears to be a man of some wealth and influence. He’s very happy to see her, as he’s bought her a ring. And Laras, much wiser to the game than he is, knows what’s coming and tries to let him down gently, despite his insistence that he is willing to leave his wife and daughter behind to be with her. She knows this isn’t what he wants, knows how it’d look, knows what it’d mean for her. She tries to let him down gently, but he can’t believe it and, as is so often the case with men of wealth and influence, decides that if he can’t have her, nobody can, pushing her off of a balcony onto the roof of a car below.

Ayu gets the call and meets the cab driver at the hospital. She’s angry with him, telling him that he was supposed to look after her. Laras is in rough shape - multiple broken bones and serious head trauma. She’s on life support and isn’t expected to last much longer. There’s a tearful conversation, and Ayu, as her only living relative, makes the decision to discontinue life support. It gets turned off, her heartbeat slows, then stops with the steady whine of a monitor flatline…

…and then Laras sits straight up in bed and starts screaming.

A cursory examination of her x-rays reveals that Laras is wearing a number of susuk - extremely thin gold needles placed under the skin as talismans, as a means of binding powerful spirits to the wearer to confer a boon, often cosmetic in nature. Laras has had too many susuk put in, and the powerful magic they contain is keeping her in a state between life and death. And so Ayu takes her back to the rural village where they grew up, the place they left behind, to try and find a cure. Modern medicine has no idea what’s going on, so they need to try something more spiritual in nature. But there are bad memories in their village, resentments and grudges and secrets.

This film, to its credit, manages to be at once both culturally distinct and universal. Susuk is a specifically Malaysian practice. It predates the introduction of Islam to Indonesia (and as such, is considered haram) and is a practice without any real equivalent in North America (though now it has me wondering about the possible merits of an adaptation that centers on the cosmetic surgery industry – needles, beauty and all). So the language – not just actual language, but cultural language – is distinct, and there are no concessions to Western sensibilities here. This was an Indonesian film made for Indonesians. I have to engage with it on its terms, and I like that. But at the same time, there are ideas here that do transcend culture. This isn’t just a film about a sister’s attempt to lift a very culturally specific curse that is product of a culturally specific practice. It’s also a story about the sometimes-difficult relationships between sisters, especially when they’re all the other has. It’s a story about the lengths people will go to for beauty, it’s about shameful family secrets, and the pettiness and hypocrisy of small-town life. These are things anyone can recognize, and they ground the film well. The notes may be different but the song is familiar.

The execution, however, does have some problems. It’s sort of a fitful film  – its pacing is somewhat erratic, building dread and then letting it fizzle for extended periods of “take Laras to this person to see if they can help, then take her somewhere else,” and though there are some nice turns there (it’s the usual thing where the religious authority can’t help so they seek out someone who knows the old ways, but here he’s sort of a sketchy dude instead of a reclusive mystic), there are stretches where it feels like not much is happening, or not enough is happening to sustain a mood. It’s also a dark film. Not thematically (well, sort of, thematically), but actually dark, especially in the first half, and so a lot of moments that I suspect were meant to be startling (this film likes its mysterious figures showing up out of nowhere) don’t really land because you can’t really see what people are reacting to. You’ll see Ayu scream at the sight of something, but the something she’s screaming at is difficult to see. The exact nature of the supernatural menace inhabiting Laras is never really made clear beyond possibly being a powerful djinn, but also possibly just the restless spirit of another person, and the result is something that feels a little one-size-fits-all, rather than emerging from a specific mythology and tradition. There are mysterious figures in the shadows, creepy hallucinated moments, some quasi-possession stuff that’s impressively visceral and probably the film at its best, and even some fairly effective (if slight) body horror. The difficulty in locating a coherent logic made it feel a little generic in that regard, and though things do pick up in the third act, the climax takes place in the middle of the night in a rainstorm, so again it’s sort of tough to figure out what’s going on.

It doesn’t land with the impact that it should, because there’s this pervasive feeling of not being sure what’s going on. But, all told, I’d rather watch something that doesn’t always land but shows me new ways of looking at the world, that tells stories using imagery with which I’m not already familiar, than something thoroughly homogenized with the thinnest veneer of and gestures toward other cultures.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Underwater: As Above, So Below

Two of the most forbidding environments you can make movies about are deep space and the depths of the ocean. They have a few things in common - they’re both dark, they’re both cold, and they’re both extremely hostile to human life. We know for a fact there’s life in the deep ocean (and boy is some of it fucking weird-looking), and life in deep space is a source of constant speculation, explored in films both horror and not. But I don’t think it’s any accident that H.P. Lovecraft drew most of his inspiration for his best known work from both outer space and the deep sea. Places we were not meant to go, containing things we were never meant to meet.

One of the best films about the terrors of space has to be Alien, and I have to say, watching Underwater - a film about the terrors of the deepest ocean - I couldn’t help but be reminded of that film. Which isn’t to say it’s plagiarism, it really isn’t. but it has enough similarities that it’s difficult for it to escape Alien’s shadow. It never quite rises to greatness, but it’s helped along by generally strong performances and direction that doesn’t make any real missteps.

The opening credits set the scene in compact, efficient fashion, using a mix of time-honored news article headlines, architectural specifications, and topographical maps. A mining company has managed to plant a drill at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which plunges over 36,000 feet down from the sea floor at its deepest points. Pitch-black, crushing levels of pressure. The drill is down there, as well as Kepler Base, a facility of 316 crew whose job it is to control and maintain the drill. The opening credits also tell us that the project has been dogged by controversy - accidents and “mysterious sightings.” But accidents happen, and arguably anything at that depth is going to be mysterious.

Cut to the interior of the base. Long, utilitarian hallways, fluorescent lights, work suits hung up on hooks. Night-shift mechanic Norah Price is brushing her teeth when there’s a rumble. Could be nothing, but then again, that far down with only the base’s structure between you and a nasty death by either drowning or implosion, you want to pay attention. It happens again. It feels like an earthquake.

And then it happens again, and Kepler Base begins to come apart at the seams.

From here on out, there’s just one objective - escape to the surface. Along the way, Norah encounters other survivors - including Lucien, the base’s captain - and not a lot of hope. About 70% of the base is compromised, and most of their escape vehicles are either nonfunctional or inaccessible. Lucien proposes that they suit up and walk across the ocean floor to the drill itself, using pipelines as guides, and using the equipment there to head for the surface. Are the suits rated for exposure to those depths for that long? Nope. Will breathable air supplies be an issue? Yep. Do they even know what the hell is going on out there that caused the base to collapse? Nope. Is this their only option apart from dying a horrible death from drowning, oxygen deprivation, or being crushed to death? Yep. Everything and everywhere is blocked by collapsed structure, water’s pouring in, and, well…they don’t appear to be alone in the base.

One of the biggest strengths to this film is that it’s very well paced. It hits the ground running and doesn’t really stop. With maybe one or two exceptions, this is a film about constant forward momentum, and the urgency works very much in its favor. In that sense (among others), it’s less like Alien than it is something like The Descent - a group of people faced with an increasingly hostile environment and only one way out. Alien was a slow burn, and this is about as far from a slow burn as you can get. The first half of the film or so is effectively a disaster movie, one that maintains the tension without sacrificing much in the way of believability or giving into histrionics. These are people who make their livelihood in a base hundreds and hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, and they’re generally competent and good at keeping their heads straight. In an environment like that, panic could easily be fatal, and it’s kind of a breath of fresh air to have protagonists who generally know their shit. This sense of actual people in an actually difficult situation, responding like people actually would is helped quite a bit by a strong cast who manage to infuse their characters with definable personality under conditions that don’t really lend themselves to character studies. There is the one obligatory wisecracker who manages to keep the quips coming no matter how dire their situation and okay, that one felt a little contrived, but he wasn’t actively grating. Interactions aren’t the tetchy naturalism of Alien - these are people who generally support and trust each other and are able to keep their eye on the ball. The setting does stumble a tiny bit (why on earth would emergency airlock releases use a swipe card and touchscreen keyboard?) but not enough to really distract, especially since it’s also when the film’s at its most relentless.

So we begin with a tight, focused disaster story that shifts focus in the second half to something potentially more sinister, and what’s frustrating is that I think it’s here…right at the moment when it has a chance to become something bigger and stranger…this is the moment when it suffers most from its inability to rise above its inspirations. It’s not bad by any means, just…workmanlike. The effects are solid, but not especially striking. The action doesn’t really slow down, but it sort of needs to, a little, so the implications of what we’re seeing can sink in. It’s not bad, and it doesn’t feel calculated, but it also doesn’t really do anything that I haven’t seen before. Barring the quality of the effects work and the performances, it kind of turns into any number of other Alien-but-underwater creature features you might see pop up on TV on any given Saturday afternoon. It hits all its marks, but doesn’t really do anything different or interesting with them.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There are some blink-and-you-miss-it allusions late in the film to something bigger and darker and the ending nicely inverts some things, but the sort of constraints that give the first half of the film so much urgency really limit what can happen in the second half, and when it really needs to open up and get weird, it rushes past that to head for the ending. It sounds like I’m damning this film with faint praise, and maybe I am, but that’s the frustrating thing - it’s not a bad film, really, but it’s most easily compared to a great one, and the contrast, along with an inability to commit to some ideas that would really set it apart, does it no favors.

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

The Pond: Stagnant

I sort of feel like trailers are a necessary evil for this thing of mine. I like going into films as blind as possible, but if I’m curious about something or am just casting about for more films to consider, trailers (and trailer compilations on YouTube if I’m being totally honest) can give me a quick thumbnail sketch, not just in the trailer itself, but how it’s put together. If the trailer indulges in the stylistic cliches of the moment, the film probably will too. If it doesn’t, if it shows me something promising, then cool. Now I’ve got another movie to check out.

Usually it serves me pretty well, but I gotta say, I feel like I got suckered this time. When you watch the trailer for The Pond, it’s promising - you think it’s gonna be some out-there folk/cosmic horror shit, but no, it’s just a pointlessly cryptic slog that feels like someone watched shows like Katla and Zone Blanche and thought it’d get over on quirk alone. It does not.

That said, it’s got a pretty striking opening shot. It’s an aerial view of a body lying in the middle of a field. The shot is held for a bit, before the body…just gets up and walks away. It’s a little odd, a little sinister. But that doesn’t last long. We cut to a man sitting in a small, modest trailer, typing out things on a laptop. He doesn’t even have a name, he’s credited as “The Professor.” And he’s definitely the stock academic – salt-and-pepper beard, rustic sweater, sleeping with a former student, the whole deal. He’s living on a remote island in a rural part of Eastern Europe, studying…something? It’s never clear, he’s just looking at a bunch of maps of incidence rates of things like death from disease, obesity rates, paths of hurricanes and deaths by accidents, and they’re all connectable by Fibonacci spirals. Then he types out some quasi-profound stuff like “SOCIETY PRODUCES FEAR” and he looks up some stuff about how we can only see a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum…so there could be things out there we cannot see! Spooky! When one shot shows him consulting a website called “The Daily Science,” it is…not reassuring. He was apparently suspended from his position at…a university, I guess?...because he has some weird ideas about impending apocalypse. At least, I think that’s the deal. Nothing is made very clear, which is in and of itself not always a bad thing, but this film has a bad habit of dropping all kinds of stuff into our lap with little to no context or opportunity to figure things out for ourselves. There’s little telling, and no showing. Just a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to add up to something and never really does.

So he’s out here with his former student and his daughter by his late wife, in some kind of academic exile. He’s convinced that there’s something terrible coming and he’s on the verge of grasping it, and so he’s out here in the sticks, in a trailer camp on the edge of a large pond (hence the title, though the importance of the pond is never made clear) in a small community of people whose chief defining characteristic is that they’re all kind of weird. There’s another guy that the professor plays chess with, and they have conversations that I think are supposed to be mysterious and inscrutable but just come off as the musings of a college freshman who just discovered weed, there are two obnoxious little girls who keep pestering the professor to let his daughter play with them, there’s a woodsman with an anger management problem, and a boatman who ferries people across the pond. He doesn’t speak at all, he just sort of sits slumped and unresponsive in the boat with a strange piece of headgear that looks sort of like pillows that you just keep strapped to your head. It’s all reminiscent of that whole strain of television that sort of sprung out of Twin Peaks, the rural community where strange things are happening, except in my experience those shows have actual characters with lives and relationships. Here, less so. It’ s just a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere being gratuitously weird. Every now and then the professor’s daughter will talk about a monster that she sees in her nightmares, and every now and then someone in an effectively creepy mask made out of branches will sort of show up in the background. Nobody really comments on it.

So the narrative falls flat, and so does the execution. This film was written and performed by people for whom English is not a first language, and though I won’t fault anyone for that by itself, I think the decision to have English be the film’s spoken language was a mistake. The dialogue is clumsy and stilted, as are the performances. People don’t say things so much as they recite them, and it’s all slightly off – not the worst translation I’ve ever heard (still looking at you, Seytan), but…just awkward enough to inhabit some kind of linguistic uncanny valley. It's sort of off-putting, and again, this by itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it doesn’t feel intentionally off-putting. Everything is delivered so flatly, with so little emotion that it’s almost parodic, a comedic approximation of Scandinavian art films where people stand stiffly and say things that you get are supposed to be profound but just seem like nonsense. I don’t know that the filmmakers were going for profundity so much as surrealism, but they didn’t hit that either. Mostly it’s just obtuse, and there’s no payoff, no revelation of some kind of purpose behind the strangeness. What horrifying truths I think we’re supposed to glean all show up in the last ten minutes, and because our ability to invest in these characters is minimal, and the stakes never really made apparent, they feel less like horrifying truths and more like “oh, okay.”

And absolutely none of this is helped by the film’s pacing – well, I say “pacing,” but there’s one pace: Slow. Things just sort of happen at the rate of a drip, People say things, they move from one place to another, occasionally something odd or unsettling pops up in the background before moving on to the next thing, without notice or comment. It’s a bad sign that I was only about a third of the way through it before I was moved to check to see how much longer I had. It’s not slow enough to create a feeling or mood, it’s just a metronomic plod with no rising tension, no moments of action, just one thing after another. It’s clumsy, frustratingly slow, and…drab. Gray, overcast, colorless, and that’s a legitimate choice, but when everything else about the film is equally colorless, the overall feeling is…well, again, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it oppressive, it just sort of lands at dull. At 90 minutes, it’s a trudge. Flat people delivering clumsy lines in a gray setting. The number of even slightly unsettling moments can be counted on one hand, and they pass as unremarkably as any other moment in this film.

Slow, strange, cryptic, bleak, all of these are valid choices, I think. But cryptic only works if the audience can, by the time the film is over, make some connections for themselves. There doesn’t have to be one correct interpretation (miss me with all of the videos “explaining” the endings of movies) or anything, just the opportunity to derive some meaning from it. And slow, strange, and bleak only work if they evoke a mood, if they make the audience feel things. Nothing about this film inspires feelings beyond impatience and frustration. The trailer promises something upon which the actual film can’t even begin to deliver.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

No One Will Save You: Taken Away

There’s a podcast that is, as near as I can tell, about films that are so bad they end up transcending their own badness. It’s called “How Did This Get Made?” and although I’ve never listened to it, that phrase got me to thinking. See, I’ve seen some real stinkers over the years I’ve been writing this thing, but I’ve never really asked myself how those really garbage films got made. I know how they got made. There’s a mindset out there that horror movies don’t need to actually be good, they just need to deliver scares and gore and maybe some titillation. So somebody puts up the money, the assumption being it’ll be a pretty safe bet to turn at least a modest profit. This can describe exercises in ineptitude and in slick mediocrity alike.

And it’s not like the people responsible are really to blame for this - if a casual look at box office numbers and the state of criticism in the enthusiast press is any indication, a lot of the people spending money on horror films aren’t exactly picky. Maybe scares and gore and titillation is all some people are looking for. Hell, the notion of a horror film that’s actually thoughtful and intelligent and made with some level of artistry is so alien to some critics that they’ve invented the term “post-horror” or “elevated horror” to describe it. And…no. It’s not elevated, you’ve just set the bar that fucking low because you’re a condescending jackass. How do those films get made? They have commercial potential. That’s it.

And this is why I find myself asking how No One Will Save You got made. It is by no means inept or mediocre. But in its premise and narrative and execution, it’s very hard to sum up neatly, and it’s certainly surprisingly non-commercial for something distributed by 20th Century. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before, and that’s not something I say very often.

It opens on a lovely old farmhouse set back in the woods on a beautiful, sunny day. A young woman named Brynn lives there, and she’s up and about, sewing cute sundresses, packaging them with ribbon and thank-you cards to mail off presumably to paying customers. It’s easy to imagine that she has a successful Etsy store. The house is sunny and full of charm, and in her basement workspace, she’s got a whole miniature town laid out across a long table. A picture-book village being kept by a picture-book young woman, shot in picture-book colors and lighting. You half-expect animated birds to land on her shoulders before she bursts into song. She grabs the packages she needs to mail and drives into town. The town is Mill River, and it’s as lovely and charming and bright and sunny as her house and the world that encompasses them both.

But all is not well here. As Brynn drives through town, heads turn to stare, lips curl in disgust. She waves at someone, and the wave goes unreturned. She tosses the packages in the mailbox, shunned. From there, a visit to her mother’s grave, and then home to write a letter to her friend Maude. She notices an odd circular patch of dead grass on her lawn, and gives it extra water.

And then, that night, when all is dark - that real country dark, just you and the stars - Brynn notices that her door is open. The door is open, and she hears footsteps. Footsteps and low, inhuman chattering.

This is the kind of film that might get tagged as “high concept.” It’s ultimately an alien-invasion film very much in the mold of something like Signs or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (with which it shares a basic visual vocabulary, all tall, skinny grey aliens and floods of light so dense they’re almost solid), but as the film goes on it gets gnarlier than Close Encounters ever did, and all of this is surrounded by the mystery of how Brynn ended up with the life she did, young and alone in this big old house, a pariah to the local community. And, on top of all of that, it’s doing this with an almost total absence of dialogue. Apart from a diegetic piece of music with sung lyrics, there are a total of five words spoken throughout the entire film, and two of those are repeated, so it’s only three distinct words. It could be very easy for this to devolve into a gimmick, but it doesn’t - there are a lot of things almost said, faint murmuring in the background too indistinct to make out, so the end result feels more like an entire film of the awkward silences that come when the person you’re talking about enters the room. The tentativeness before saying the thing that’s hard to say. It’s not that people don’t talk, they just don’t talk to Brynn. And since Brynn is the only person on screen for large swaths of the movie, it creates a palpable sense of isolation. The film’s title feels like it’s directed at her.

And this is on top of the faint but persistent strangeness of the film’s tone. It really does feel like it takes place in some kind of idealized all-American small town, but almost as soon as that impression is established, it becomes clear that something’s off - the way nobody talks to or even smiles at Brynn, all of the miniature houses arranged as if she’s building her own perfect little town, in her letters she alludes to something she regrets. From the start, there’s a sense that something’s off here. There’s a mystery to unfold, and then when night falls, it all turns into a siege film.

And the siege film works pretty well. It’s a mix of cat-and-mouse and fraught confrontation, and the beats are all pretty familiar but executed crisply and with restraint and a good sense of rhythm. The aliens start off as your garden-variety greys, strange but not especially threatening. But as the film goes on they become increasingly more inhuman, their features becoming more exaggerated, their manner more savage. They chase Brynn, roaring, clambering and skittering like spiders. There starts to be some suggestion that maybe they’ve already infiltrated the town, leading to a bit of body horror to round things off. Between the wordlessness (compensated for by a score that knows exactly when to sting),and a lot of the action taking place in a big house late at night, there’s a good, solid hum of tension to it that never really crescendos but never flags either, ticking along like a slightly too-loud metronome. You can’t really ever quite relax, right up to a climax that eschews edge-of-the-seat thrills, leaning more into revelations about how Brynn’s life ended up like this, before dropping an ending into your lap that somehow manages to recapitulate the film’s sunny opening in a way that is now, with context, chilling.

It makes sense that a film about an alien invasion is going to deal with the idea of people being taken away, but there’s a lot of different ways you can be taken away - alien abduction, sure, but also nostalgia, wishes for a better time, and worse. Some are taken from us too soon. Somehow this film manages to do justice to all of them. It’s both intensely familiar in its feel and simultaneously like nothing else, and I’m sure a lot of people aren’t going to know what to do with it. That’s their problem. There’s a lot to like in a film that harnesses nostalgic ideas about Americana and classic alien-invasion imagery and uses them to tell a surprisingly tense story about the escapism and denial of nostalgia. I’d rather watch that that the umpteenth iteration on Saw any day. I don't know how this got made, but yeah, more risky stuff like this, please.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

Perempuan Tanah Jahanam: Expect The Unexpected, But Not In A Good Way

I’m not usually a huge fan of particularly well-worn premises, mostly because the potential for surprise, in my experience, is pretty low. Is it a little reductive to say “if you’ve seen one ‘The Possession Of…’ movie, you’ve seen them all?” Yeah, probably. But at the same time, flip through any number of horror films on your streaming site of choice and see how often the same blurbs turn up. People who move into a new house and discover something is very wrong. People who move into an OLD house and discover that something is very wrong. People in difficult situations forced to reckon with their personal demons or dark secret. People vacationing at a cabin and discovering that they’re being stalked by a mysterious presence…you get the idea. There are few entirely original ideas under the sun.

But that’s also okay, because a story is more than what’s being told, it’s also HOW it’s being told. And when you tell an old story well, the results can be really exciting.

So, I guess this is where my problems with Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (Impetigore, literal translation “Hell Woman”) come in. The story itself is nothing new, but how it’s told does it no favors at all. The film starts strong and has some great visuals, but ultimately falls apart into something sluggish and repetitive, squandering a lot of the potential in the story it could tell.

It opens up on a toll plaza, late at night. Two booth operators, Maya and Dini, exchange casual chatter, gossip, the usual ways of whiling away a long shift at a dull job. Maya’s complaining about one particular creepy regular customer when, lo and behold, here he comes again. And yeah, he just kind of spends the entire transaction staring at Maya. He tells her he’s from a small village called Harjosari, and oddly keeps calling her “Rahayu.” Eventually, another car comes up behind him and honks for him to get a move on. Maya breathes a sigh of relief until she sees that he’s just parked by the side of the road on the other side of the plaza. And he’s walking toward her. And he has a machete.

Maya tries to run, but he catches up to her, and his look is oddly pleading. He says that he just wants what’s happening to his family to stop, that they don’t want what her parents gave them. Before he can kill her, he’s shot dead by the police.

Maya and Dini take this as a cue to quit their jobs as toll booth operators and start the clothing business they’ve always talked about. Only that doesn’t go so well, peddling cheap designer knockoffs in the market stalls of Jakarta is a rough way to make a living, and they’re falling behind on rent. Maya gets an idea. See, she never knew her parents, and all she has to remember them by is a single photo that her aunt has. It shows a young Maya standing with her mother and father in front of a huge, palatial house in Harjosari.

But the name on the back of the photo isn’t “Maya,” it’s ”Rahayu.”

So, against all good instinct, Maya and Dini take off for Harjosari, a small village way out in the sticks. A village that most people don’t want to talk about or take them to. But Maya’s sure that as the daughter of the homeowners, she could sell her family’s house for the kind of money that could bail her and Dini out of debt. It’s a small, poor village, and there aren’t any children around, and her parents’ house stands long-abandoned. You think you know how it’s going to go from here - woman returns to the family home and the dark secret that it holds - but it’s not really a haunted-house story, which is too bad, because it could have been a really good haunted-house story. The visuals are evocative (making especially good use of light and shadow, with traditional Javanese shadow puppetry as a recurring motif), and there’s plenty of atmosphere, lots of foggy forests and suitably dark, shadowy, cobwebbed interiors in the family home. Something bad happened here, and nobody wants to talk about it. There’s a real unease there.

But after a suitably creepy start, the film decides that the real center of the story isn’t this creepy abandoned house and the mysteries of Maya’s childhood after all. Instead, it puts all of its energy into the story of a remote village suffering under a curse, which wouldn’t be a bad storyline either (especially since it seems to be tied to Maya’s parents somehow) except it ends up taking over the whole movie. The house is only used for a handful of scenes and there’s little in the way of investigation. Worse, the basic outlines of the story the film presents are easy to figure out pretty early in, so there are very few twists or shocking revelations that actually land. For any reasonably attentive viewer, they’re going to have the broad outlines figured out in about ten minutes, and the rest is just the film catching up to where the audience already is. Almost everything plays out exactly like you’d expect it to, and most of the second act consists of reiterating what we’ve already figured out - there’s a curse, Maya’s family is involved somehow, and it affects the children born in the village - so the middle of the film drags pretty badly. Since a lot of it is just going over the same narrative ground again and again, there’s no reason for the film to be nearly two hours long. 

Then, as if that weren’t enough, in the third act we get an extended flashback that adds some new information (I guess it’s a twist, but I’d think a twist would be something that meaningfully changes the story, and I don’t think this does) that you wouldn’t really be able to puzzle out yourself, a climax that is pretty much exactly what you think it’s going to be, and then it ends on what could be a nice nod to another, better movie, but then insists on tacking a totally unnecessary “one year later” tag on the end. In some ways, it’s more of a melodrama (albeit a bloody one - throats keep getting cut in this film) than horror, strictly speaking. Ultimately what are supposed to be the shocking revelations feel more like kind of a supernatural soap opera than anything else, and when I stopped to think about them, they actually made everything make less sense. But not in a creepily ambiguous way, in a “hold on…what?” way.

Which sucks, because it’s got a look and locations that cry out for something that’s primarily about evil spirits and how the old ways persist even into today, but nah, let’s belabor this whole curse thing for about an hour in case the audience missed that there was a curse. Because there’s totally a curse. Yes, you figured thar out early in the second act, but we’re going to keep telling you anyway. The result feels like something that defies your expectations in all the wrong ways.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

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