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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Where The Devil Roams: Love Will Keep Us Together

There’s only a handful of directors who make me legitimately excited when they put out a new film. Some careers are more uneven than others, and it’s not unusual to follow a good film with a turkey. But even more than that, it’s not that many directors whose work really engages me, shows me something that stays with me long after I’ve seen it. There’s good filmmaking, and then there’s filmmaking that makes me feel like I’ve seen something transformative. There are only a few directors who make me say “they’ve got a new film coming out? I am fucking there.”

Among them is…well, it’s not a single person. You might call them a filmmaking collective if that weren’t the most pretentious-sounding thing ever. The Adams family is a married couple - John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu. They write, direct, act in, shoot, edit and score their own films, with some outside help for effects work and marketing, via their Wonder Wheel Productions imprint. But their films are, in some important way, homemade. It’s often the case that writing and directing is shared. When one of them isn’t on-screen, they’re behind the camera. This would be a novelty if their films weren’t so good. I’m not familiar with their dramas, but they’ve made a couple of horror films that do seriously impressive things with the budgets they have, and have a style and vision absent from a lot of larger productions. They’re a little rough around the edges, but are so much more interesting than most films with far larger budgets. I’m a fan, pure and simple.

Where The Devil Roams is probably their largest production yet, and maybe it does overreach a little, but all of their usual strengths are intact, so this is still a striking addition to horror film. There’s nobody else out there making films like they do.

The opening is scratchy black and white. There’s a stage, and an attentive audience. A legless man comes out from stage left, and begins to read a prologue about the devil Abaddon and his doomed attempts at love. His heart is lost, his love scattered in pieces. The audience applauds, and so our story begins. It’s the story of three people - Seven, Maggie, and their daughter Eve. Seven was a country doctor, and the horrors he saw during World War I left him so traumatized that the sight of blood renders him catatonic. Maggie worked for him as a nurse, and Eve cannot speak, but sings with the voice of an angel. They have a family act of sorts featuring Eve’s singing, and they travel a dying carnival circuit, among the freaks and carnies, trying to eke out a living. It’s getting harder and harder to get by, and sometimes things get desperate to the point of violence. There’s one act that consistently does well. He’s a magician of sorts, calls himself “Mr. Tipps,” and his act consists of some religious testimony, followed by the dramatic appearance of a pair of shears, which he then uses to snip off his fingers, one by one. One evening, after the show, Eve comes by his tent out of curiosity, and watches him take a special needle and thread out of a box, and carefully stitch his fingers back on.

He has, he says, made a deal with the devil.

Their films typically have a pretty unhurried, conversational pace, at least at their outset, but this one is a much slower, at times almost obtuse affair compared to previous works. It’s not necessarily clear exactly what’s happening for most of the first act, and even once it is, the whole thing relies more on mood, as sort of a tone poem, than anything else. It’s a film with a lot of stillness and air between words, and I think right at the point where I was asking myself “okay, where is all of this going?” was when it all started to cohere. And it does cohere, but it takes a little bit. It’s definitely a film that requires more patience and goodwill on the part of the viewer than most.

But even at its slowest, there are things to appreciate about it. One real strength of their films is their striking, distinct visual sense, and this one is no different. There are a lot of beautifully framed shots, set up almost like tableaux, and because this film is set in the Depression-era U.S., there’s an interesting aesthetic at work, using a mix of black and white, desaturated color, and full vivid color, and the action is punctuated by photographic stills, sepia-toned, full of dusty light, reminiscent of crime scene photos from the early 20th century. The carnival itself tends toward the macabre in the appearance of the performers, and as a result the whole thing has an unearthliness to it that feels like something between the works of Guy Maddin and Diane Arbus. Dialogue and performance has typically been the weak point in their previous films, but here it actually adds to the dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality of the film, along with a score consisting mostly of drums, bass, distorted guitar and ethereal singing. It’s as singular a treatment as anything else they’ve made.

And for the most part, it rewards the viewer’s patience. Gradually, as more and more about these people is revealed, the clearer it becomes that the prologue was indeed the thesis for the film. It’s a story about love, attachment (in more ways than one), and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love. We desperately try to hold things together, to hold ourselves together, to keep our relationships together, and when they or we come apart, the things we have to do to repair that…well, we find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d be able (or willing) to do. The unhurried pacing (punctuated by striking moments of violence as the film progresses) muddies the final act a bit, drawing things out a little longer than they needed to be, though it does come good with a tragedy that escalates things quickly in horrific fashion, leading to a final image as startling as anything else they’ve done.

It’s definitely not as tight as their other two horror films, and I think their attempts to make a period piece might have stretched their resources, but the Adams family are responsible for a singular vision that doesn’t owe jack shit to traditional horror cliches. Even flawed, their films are absolutely worth your time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da: Fucked Around And Found Out

Last week I expressed a certain amount of disappointment with Cerdita for taking a pretty sharp riff on a specific type of revenge film and ending it in the most obvious and cliched way possible. And now this week I find myself with another type of revenge film that has very, very few surprises to it, start to finish, but executes what it does so well that I honestly don’t mind all that much. And I think the difference lies in restraint, or the lack thereof. Cerdita kept a lot of its violence off-screen, which I think was the right choice for that film, but Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da (I Saw The Devil) puts everything right up front, and there’s something about its relentlessness and unwillingness to look away that takes a pretty by-the-numbers story and gives it a fair amount of heft.

It's a cold, snowy night, and a bus, empty but for its driver, heads down the highway, soon encountering a young woman stranded by the side of the road. She has a flat tire, and so the driver stops to offer her help. She declines, saying she’s already called a tow truck. It doesn’t matter. Things turn ugly, and soon enough she is dragged off to a dismal garage someplace and butchered. The driver dumps her remains into a stream, where they’re discovered the next day in what can only be called a shitshow of a search. She was Joo-yeon, the daughter of the local police chief, and her fiancée, Soo-hyeon, is an agent with the National Intelligence Service.

Sure, there’s going to be an official investigation, but they’re going to have to outrun Soo-hyeon, who only has one thing on his mind.

So this is the setup. Soo-hyeon is a man with a particular set of skills, who has lost someone dear to him and knows some people in the police department. This could easily be something similar to a Korean take on Taken, but it isn’t. First of all, it’s not dour monologuing broken up by explosions, slick and glossy in its mayhem. It’s something grubbier, more raw and tough to watch than that. It depicts Kyung-chul - a school bus driver who satisfies his hatred of women through kidnapping, torture, and murder - as crude and angry, something oafish and not especially clever. And Soo-hyeon doesn’t waste a lot of time on angst. He’s a professional, used to tracking people down and setting his feelings aside until the job is done. And we know this not because he tells us, but because he shows us through his utter calm, his impassive face, all while he’s doing terrible things to the man who murdered his fiancée, things to which he displayed grief and horror before he decided to make it his mission. Because he isn’t just content to track him down and make a big speech and shoot him. No, this is catch-and-release, where Soo-hyeon finds Kyung-chul, takes something away from him, and then lets him go, all to wonder when he’s going to pop up next. Soo-hyeon doesn’t just want Kyung-chul to die, he wants him to suffer.

The result is an excruciatingly violent film, simultaneously graphic and dispassionate. It doesn’t feel gratuitous - as much happens off-camera as on - nor does it feel like the camera is leering at violent spectacle. It hurts to watch what’s happening to people, even the ones we don’t like, because it’s unflinching and there’s visible suffering. Women are constantly, routinely victimized in places and ways that suggest that Kyung-chul isn’t some kind of criminal mastermind, but rather some barely controlled id, heedless of getting caught, so intent is he on satisfying his appetites how and when he wants to. Scenes where he hurts others and ones where he is the one being hurt play out exactly the same, which suggests that violence is violence, no matter the justification or context. There’s more than a whiff of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer around it in that respect - everything around Kyung-chul seems to happen in sort of a shadow world of petty criminals and criminals with bigger, stranger appetites, a world that comes out late at night, where everyone is a predator as bad or worse than him. It feels like the violence he brings into Soo-hyeon’s life is not an aberration, but just what lies out there in the dark, once everyone else has gone home. It’s what lies behind closed doors in remote areas, on the streets, in cabs and buses. It’s been there the whole time, now he’s just aware of it.

It's a long film, and it feels long, though it doesn’t drag much. The length makes itself known in shots that stretch out just a little longer than you expect, pacing that takes its time (until it doesn’t - this is a film where not much happens until all kinds of horrible shit happens all at once). It does feel a little padded in places, but not too much, and in its climax it sews everything up tight, bringing it full circle back to a dark road at night and a lonely ramshackle building out in the middle of nowhere, paying off early details. There are long stretches of silence - music only makes itself known at the height of especially intense moments, otherwise the rest of the film, stylishly shot for the most part, just lets things play out, however long that takes, so even scenes that just require someone to respond to a question develop a certain feeling of tension. It’s a film where we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Subtitles mean a couple of moments come off more humorous than I think was intended, though there is some effective black comedy as well. Settings are generally squalid - garages, abandoned hotels, apartments as filthy as they are tiny, and a lot of the film takes place at night, in the dark. Again, until it doesn’t and everything is laid bare by the light of day. In that sense it reminds me of Se7en, a film that feels more lightless than it actually is, one where having the antagonist show up in broad daylight feels a little obscene.

There’s definitely a formula to revenge films - how far is too far, don’t fight monsters unless you want to become a monster, revenge carries a terrible cost, etc. And this film definitely hews to the formula, though it saves the most on-the-nose stuff for the third act. But it also doesn’t descend completely into cliché. It never really felt to me like Soo-hyeon’s humanity was ever in question, and Kyung-chul wasn’t really redeemable in any way. Repellent, sadistic and utterly unapologetic, it’s difficult even at the film’s worst, when he is brought lowest, to say that maybe this is too much. His humanity is never in doubt, he's just someone for whom only his own life has value and everyone else exists to sate his appetites. And the end, as fitting (and in some ways typical) an end to a revenge film as you could ask for, also highlights the cost Soo-hyeon has paid, as the feelings he’s been burying to focus on the mission finally crash down on him all at once. You get the sense that Kyung-chul learned nothing, and Soo-hyeon learned too much. Either way, they both got involved with something much bigger than they expected. They fucked around and found out.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Hulu
Available on Tubi (dubbed)

Antlers: Sometimes The Monsters Are Real

 “We pray for the children…

… who never get dessert,

who watch their parents watch them die,

who have no safe blanket to drag behind,

who can’t find any bread to steal,

who don’t have any rooms to clean up,

whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,

whose monsters are real.”

                         - Ina J. Hughes, Prayer For The Children

Scary movies are often intended as allegories, addressing real-life monstrosities through mythical monsters. From something as intimate as grief to as sweeping as war, fictional monsters let us safely explore things that might hit a little too close to home otherwise. Of course, it seems like in the last few years the commingling of real and fictional monsters has become the province of “elevated horror” or “post-horror,” or “what people who’ve been looking down their noses at horror all this time came up with when they ran across films well-made enough that they couldn’t dismiss them out of hand.”

Okay, that got away from me. And it’s certainly not the first time I’ve effused about good films that examine real and fictional horrors in parallel. The point is that Antlers is another film in that tradition, a grim and somber story about natural and supernatural monstrosity. It stumbles at the finish line somewhat, but for most of its running time it’s pretty compelling.

Not that you’d know it from the opening title card, a bit about how mankind has pillaged the earth and awoken a malevolent spirit. It’s ham-fisted and totally unnecessary. But once we’re past that, there’s a little boy, playing in what appears to be the wreckage of an abandoned work site. He’s passing the time while his father takes care of some business, and soon enough makes his way back to the pickup truck. His dad cautions him about wandering off alone and tells him they’re almost finished. And so dad heads back into what turns out to be an abandoned mine, he and his brother wearing respirators as they clear out beakers, blowtorches, empty cold medicine boxes, all the hallmarks of bathtub chemistry of a certain type. But then there’s a noise, coming from further down the tunnel. It sounds like some kind of wild animal. We don’t get to see what it is, but it gets at them, badly.

We cut to the boy still waiting in the truck. And waiting, and waiting.

This film is basically the story of Cispus Falls, Oregon, a small town in the perpetually overcast Pacific Northwest. It’s a town the color of a bruise, a town where the mining company packed up and left, taking all the jobs with them, leaving the people to fend for themselves. It’s a place where it seems like almost everyone does everything with a sense of weary resignation and doesn’t aspire to much more than getting by. Julia Meadows is a recent arrival, teaching at the one school in town. She grew up here, had a really hard life here, ran and didn’t look back. Except now some unspecified setbacks in California have brought her right back. She’s living with her brother - the town’s sheriff - and it seems to be a fraught, cautious relationship. They spend a lot of time tiptoeing around what happened when they were kids. Until they don’t. Julia’s frustrated that she can’t get the kids to engage with her - she knows their situation, and it’s the knowing that frustrates her. She knows how badly they need some ray of light. There’s one kid who especially concerns here - Lucas. Keeps showing up in the same clothes, has trouble focusing, gets bullied a lot. He draws really unsettling picture of monsters in the dark.

He's the kid from the truck in the beginning.

So it’s the story of land poisoned by mining and a dying town poisoned by despair. Both give birth to horrible things. Cispus Falls is a bleak place - drug labs in abandoned mining tunnels, another eviction or foreclosure every week, all the things that go on behind closed doors, parents who homeschool their children so they can mule drugs or so the teachers don’t smell the meth on their clothes from their parents. Malnutrition, poverty, abuse of every type, a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness. It’s a town with a lot of pain, and that pain’s been taken out on its children, as it was taken out on their parents, as it was taken out on their grandparents, and so on. It’s a place that was broken long ago. There’s no shortage of real monsters here. And sometimes our real-world monstrosities coalesce into otherworldly ones, as if the earth itself came alive to protest our abuses. In that respect, the town is well-realized as a character in and of itself. Even the sunny days here feel drained of anything good. 

This is complemented by a largely understated approach to the narrative - wordless looks and terse flashbacks do a lot of storytelling here, and though the gaps aren’t hard to fill in, it’s a film that mostly trusts its audience. I say mostly, because there is the occasional bit of exposition-y dialogue (and some bigger problems around this toward the end), but for the most part it’s a story told carefully and deliberately, a bit at a time, without a lot of histrionics or hysterics. This restraint extends to a score that is mostly ambient, just there enough to color the scene, and a palette primarily consisting of muddy grays and browns, with the occasional cold fluorescent light of a corner market, and a lot of desaturation in the color. There’s occasional sunshine, but not for very long, and the even more occasional breathtaking panorama of forest or mountains to break up the sad squalor of this town the mining company forgot. It’s inhabited by characters who are largely believable, though some of them get developed more than others, and though none of them feel like sketches, some people do feel like they’re in and out of the story a little more quickly than is ideal. Even if the dialogue is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, the relationships and dynamics between people feel real.

This pervasive foreboding is helped along by thoughtful pacing as well. The first two acts are mostly subdued table-setting with just enough peeks into what’s happening to build a sense of dread without giving the entire game away at first. Something bad is going on here but it isn’t immediately clear what, and not everything is exactly what it seems to be. There’s some explicit violence, but more often we’re just witness to its aftermath, the horrible wreckage of what were once human bodies, depicted dispassionately. Quick images and little details build things up leading into the third act, where all the monsters become real - and here, the effects work (always the toughest proposition for a film like this) holds up quite well. That said, the move toward more action means that some of the atmosphere is lost. Although it never stops being evocative visually, with rainy days exchanged for foggy moonlit nights and mine interiors lit only by stark red flares, it does lose some of the mood so carefully built up in favor or something more disappointingly obvious. 

And this shift toward the more obvious is why I don’t think it quite sticks the landing either, with a climax that’s a little too obvious and an “the end…or is it?” ending that feels entirely unnecessary, given how strongly this film relies on ideas of generational trauma and the nature and consequences of abuse. The obviousness of the opening title card about what mankind has done to the earth infects the ending as well. So not a slam dunk, but there’s a lot to recommend it nonetheless.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

May: Under Glass

In any genre of film, you’re going to have classics - films that are platonic examples of the style, something like a canon. Sometimes you know which films these are because they’re held up time and time again as classics. Others, though, maybe don’t get the official recognition but are so widely and enthusiastically discussed that you get the tacit sense that this is one of those films as well. Even if they don’t have the gold frame around them, they’re very much part of the curriculum.

Over the years of writing this thing, I’ve tried to apply myself to the curriculum. I’m constantly working at becoming more literate in horror film, and that means catching up on classics, revisiting old favorites with a critical eye, and checking out films that everyone seems to know and talk about even if they aren’t part of the recognized canon. And May is definitely one of those films - I definitely feel remiss for not having watched it sooner. It doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as The Exorcist or Night Of The Living Dead, but it gets mentioned a lot in discussions of horror film and it shows up on a lot of favorites lists.

Having finally seen it, I can see why. It’s an offbeat, stylized story about the costs of loneliness, and although it’s very much of its time and hasn’t aged as well as it could have in some ways, it’s still very smart, well-made, and it still has a lot of power.

It opens with a zippy title sequence more at home in a light comedy about the world of fashion than a horror film - stitches making their way across cloth, outlining the credits, before smash-cutting to a shot of a woman standing in front of a mirror, clutching her bleeding eye and screaming. It's brief, like a nightmare finding its way into a different movie, and it works.

That horrific image is gone as quickly as it comes, and we’re introduced to May Canady as a little girl. She’s got a lazy eye and a polished, glossy mother for whom imperfection is unacceptable. May is going to have to wear an eyepatch, and her mother wants her to cover it with her hair because nobody will want to be her friend otherwise. And her mother seems to be right. We get a brief sequence of May’s birthday - it’s just her, her parents, and a cake. Her mother gives her a present - the first doll her mother ever made. The doll’s name is Suzie. Suzie is very fragile, so she has to be kept behind glass. Suzie can’t be touched or held, and she is May’s first friend.

We next see May as an adult, shy and plain, gawky. She works as a veterinary assistant, and in her spare time she likes to sew. She makes her own blouses and dresses and lives on her own in a small apartment full of dolls. She still has Suzie, and as near as we can tell, Suzie is still her only friend.

May talks to Suzie, and responds like Suzie is talking to her.

This film is very much a product of its time period. It takes place in the kind of relentlessly quirky, just-off-center-from-everyday-life world emblematic of a certain style of film made from the mid-90s to early 00s. Films like Pulp Fiction, Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, and Donnie Darko, set in worlds that take what was then a modern setting and salt it with anachronistic costumes or settings more reminiscent of the late 1950s, early 1960s and affected dialogue and characterization that don't really try for naturalism at all. The characters aren't really fully fleshed-out people (her coworker Polly is especially caricatured, but it's a film full of caricature) but that feels of a piece with the heightened world of the film, and it doesn't interfere with the really important moments. It's an approach that you don't really see again until 2012's Excision, a film that, in retrospect, owes more than a bit of a debt to this film. The quirkiness does dilute some of the film’s power, but never completely overwhelms it, largely down to strong central performances, a careful portrayal of the protagonist, and solid, consistent direction.

We find May at the beginning of an infatuation with Adam, a young man who works at the body shop across the street from her job. She’s clearly smitten, and it’s equally clear that she has no real understanding of how to go about making a connection. May is obviously awkward and very lonely, desperate for human companionship after a childhood where her only friend was a doll - a doll too precious to be taken out of its glass case, which is wonderfully emblematic of the alienation May suffers and serves as a sort of visual barometer of her condition throughout the film. The story begins as one about her attempts to connect with Adam, and where her attempts take her. Were it not for the brief flash-forward at the beginning (and the worrying way she describes the whole thing to her coworkers), for most of this movie's run time you could be forgiven for thinking that it's an indie romance about a late bloomer's attempts to find love and free herself from the shackles of her own insecurities. There's definitely an "ugly duckling becomes a swan" vibe here.

And it’s actually that vibe, that particular narrative, that is really the source of the film's tension and discomfort for most of it. May is so awkward, so vulnerable, so starved of human connection that even when you can see that she's not especially stable, she's still more sympathetic that not, and even while you know things are going to break bad eventually (even were it not for the flash-forward, the signs are all there), every fumbling encounter, every rejection, every instance of being used or betrayed, it all hurts to watch. I found myself looking away at things that weren't violent at all, just because I was able to empathize enough with May that I knew how hurt she'd be. It’s hurt somewhat (especially in the final act) by the cartoonish setting and characters, which threaten to trivialize the horror of her descent, but for every goofy, extremely 90s moment, there’s another one of honesty and sincerity where it really matters, and May herself never descends into caricature.

And it also helps, despite all of the affectation, that this is a smartly directed film. It’s crisply shot and edited, and makes good use of montage and repeated visual symbolism. The reduction of living things into their parts is a recurrent theme, played out most in terms of the dolls with which May decorates her bedroom, but in other ways as well, and her childhood doll is a constant presence, understated but always there, her only friend one that cannot speak and that she cannot even touch. A side story about a day care center for blind children speaks to the importance of being seen for May, who has spent most of her life believing herself unattractive and being overlooked, but it’s far from being played for sentimentality. The score is minimal, confined mostly to periodic pop songs, both contemporary and classic, which in some ways encapsulates May's experience - The Breeders’ "Do You Love Me Now" being an excellent example here of a sweetly-sung song about love that gradually reveals a hardness, corroding into feedback. When May finally snaps, the violence is rarely lingered upon, at least the physical violence.- the emotional violence is really the centerpiece here. It's a film that is brightly colored and sunny and chirpy right up to the point that it isn't, when that all falls away to reveal the pain of one lonely young woman and where it sends her. You know it's not going to end well, but May is sympathetic enough that you at least hope, against all logic, that you're wrong and it's going to be a happy ending.

But it isn’t. Like Excision, like Saint Maud, like The Eyes Of My Mother, this is a story of an unstable woman's spiral into something much worse, and watching that spiral begin is painful and hard. May finally feels emboldened enough to take risks, to step out into the world, to reach out, and she pays for it. None of it is unusually cruel, it's the base insensitivity of which human beings are far too capable, and at least in Adam’s case is as much a sensible response to May’s behavior as anything else. But to someone like May, it is absolutely the worst thing that can happen, and her transformation is basically watching all of what's good fall away. I think the climax loses some of the power and impact it could have had because the offbeat setting renders a lot of it cartoonish when it could stand to be deadly serious, and May retains just enough sympathy that it feels more like revenge than anything else, but it’s redeemed by a final sequence that is powerfully honest and emotionally raw, casting everything that came before as a tragedy. When you put glass between a person and their only friend, it’s going to shatter eventually.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

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.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

L’Aldila: A Place Between

I’ve been doing this for awhile, and though my guiding principle has always been “write about the films you feel like writing about, when you feel like writing about them,” as time’s gone on I’ve started to recognize the importance of also paying attention to the breadth and history of the genre as well. Not that I’m gonna claim to be any sort of expert but increasingly I’m coming to feel like if I’m going to write about horror movies, I should probably be pretty literate in horror movies. And the longer I do this, the easier it is for me to see where I’m not as literate as I’d like to be. One of the biggest areas I need to work on is classic Italian horror films. They’re damn near a genre of their own, and having only seen Suspiria and Profondo Rosso, I’ve only begun to even scratch the surface.

So it’s sort of an ongoing project, and this week, that brings me to L’Aldila (The Beyond). In a lot of ways, this feels like something between the other film’s I’ve seen in this style. It’s not quite as bonkers narratively as Profondo Rosso, and it’s not quite as riotous visually as Suspiria, but I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of what the style is all about. I know I’m still barely into the canon, but I’m beginning to think that the word “subtle” is just…never going to apply to these films.

It opens on a flashback, shot in tones less sepia than deep, tarnished gold. It’s Louisiana in 1921, and a crowd of townsfolk are approaching a big hotel. This is intercut with someone inside, feverishly painting a blighted landscape, and a woman reading from a mysterious old book. The crowd breaks down the door, drags the painter from his room. We learn that this hotel is built over one of seven gates to Hell found on Earth. And then the crowd takes the painter to the hotel’s basement, whips him with chains, burns him with scalding pitch, and crucifies him to a wall. The book bursts into flames.

And then it’s Louisiana in 1981, and a young woman named Liza Merril is directing a renovation of the hotel. She’s inherited it, and she sees it as her big break, or last chance at some kind of prosperity and success. Oh, sure, there are problems - the wiring is faulty, the plumbing is completely blocked up, the exterior needs to be repainted, and the interior desperately needs an updating, and she has no budget to speak of. But she’s doing what she can to get the hotel up and running as soon as possible. Which makes the obstacles that much more frustrating, like the workman who falls off a scaffold after glimpsing something inside the hotel.

Like the plumber breaking through a wall in the basement, into where the painter was crucified. And the dead, beginning to walk.

There’s really not much of a plot to this film, beyond “woman inherits old hotel in New Orleans, and as soon as the remodeling begins bad shit starts to happen.” That’s pretty much it. There’s very little character development to speak of, although at least this time the sexism isn’t quite as pungent as it was in Profondo Rosso, and the film sort of moves from one scene to another without a lot of narrative contiguity. Here’s the setting, here’s the cast, now here’s a lot of mayhem. But somehow, it works better than it should, and I think a lot of that is down to an atmosphere of persistent strangeness driven both by deliberate choices and by the byproducts of the type of film it is. It’s an Italian production set in the U.S., and to their credit, it looks like at least some of the film was shot on location, which was more than I was expecting. But as a result, the acting and dialogue are all extremely stilted in that way you get when everything’s dubbed. Almost everyone in this film is a little off in one way or another, even if it’s only in that they talk and act like people do in films set in a specific place but written and directed by people who only have a passing familiarity with that place. Even the blandest of characters, then, feel at least a little strange, and some, like the hotel’s two caretakers, are right out of a gothic novel.

The nature of the production, then, helps create a vibe even if unintentionally. But it works because that vibe is only amplified by the intentional choices made by the filmmakers. This film doesn’t waste a lot of time, telling us within the first ten minutes that this hotel is built on top of one of seven doors to hell, and hitting the ground running from there. It’s a very no-nonsense, no-filler approach. In pretty much every scene, something weird or violent (or violently weird) is going to happen, and it’s got just enough of a throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks vibe to it that it does a good job of resisting predictability. Does it all make a whole lot of sense? Not really, though it’s at least thematically cohesive. Images reoccur in a way that might not make for a linear story, but do at least give the film a consistent vocabulary. Within setpieces, the rhythms vary enough (plus it’s all just so fucking weird anyway) that you don’t really see too much coming, and the filmmakers manage to keep some fun (if largely inconsequential) twists secret for the last act. Shots get held a little longer than you’d expect, the action moves more slowly sometimes, then more quickly at others. There’s a fair amount of graphic violence, and even though it’s all done very much on the cheap and that’s readily apparent, the very specific, personal nature of the violence (this director really, really hates eyeballs) means it’s still pretty squirm-inducing, even when it doesn’t look at all realistic. 

In some ways, this is a very impressionistic movie, more about evoking a feeling and using a fairly limited palette, heavy on the repetition of specific images and ideas, to sustain that feeling. It’s less stylish than Suspiria or Profondo Rosso, but individual shots and setpieces do evince some visual flair. One especially vivid moment sees a pool of blood (the consistency of a cherry Slushee) crawling slowly across a marble floor toward the feet of a young girl, but for every moment like that, you’ve got a bluntly depicted gore sequence, and though some are still very effective, some are downright laughable. It’s a much earthier, funkier movie than Suspiria or Profondo Rosso. Instead of stylishly modern apartment buildings you have a run-down hotel with a basement you can practically smell, and all of the graphic violence has a real tactility to it - bodies ooze and drip, blood flows and spills and runs, body parts squish. I wouldn’t call it art, and even when it’s risible it's still pretty fucking gross, but it’s intensely specific and personal.

This extends into the production as well. The camerawork uses a lot of quick zooms and pans to keep things tense, the editing uses a lot of sudden cuts to striking images (especially close-ups on pairs of blank, unseeing eyes) and extreme close-ups in the more violent scenes to keep things uncomfortable. Apart from the gross old hotel, some of the action takes place at a hospital whose interiors are stylishly modern and relentlessly white by comparison, and the contrast throws both into sharp relief. There are just enough establishing shots of New Orleans and the surrounding area to keep it from feeling too much like a film where one city is being played by an entirely different city, so it doesn’t feel as silly as it could. Like other film in the style, the soundtrack is mostly something akin to jazz fusion, all keyboards and uptempo drums and slap bass, which in some instances is innocuous, and in others (usually instances where someone is being dispatched in gruesome fashion) makes the whole thing feel even stranger.  The pacing is pretty good throughout until it hits a snag in the last act. It feels like the producers told the director to insert an entirely unnecessary chase sequence, and according to IMDB trivia, that’s exactly what happened. You can tell -  it drags on for entirely too long, and it means the protagonists have to mysteriously end up someplace else entirely, but the film still ends on a pretty striking note. It doesn’t quite have the impact it would otherwise because of the pacing issues, but  the imagery is still surprising and evocative.

I’m only three movies (and two major directors) in, but I think I’m starting to get a sense of what to expect when I go into films like these now, even if that sense is “shit’s gonna be weird, don’t think too hard about it.” I’m starting to see why this style of film is held in such high regard in some circles, and I’m looking forward to more.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Dead & Buried: Sometimes, Dead Is Better

Every now and then, you’ll see a film described as a “curiosity.” This usually means that it’s not all that well-known, and isn’t necessarily typical for its time, but has some quality that makes it worth considering nonetheless. It’s easy to forget that in any given time period a lot of films get made, but not all of them get remembered. So, for example, if you think about horror films in the late 60s, you’re probably thinking about Rosemary’s Baby, not Spider Baby. And Rosemary’s Baby is excellent, no doubt, but Spider Baby has a unique charm and vision of its own that owes absolutely nothing to the former film, and it’s largely sat in obscurity. So when you stumble on one of these films that the zeitgeist has forgotten, they can be a real treat.

This is very much the case for Dead & Buried, which got made in the middle of the first wave of slasher films (a genre that’s become synonymous with the late 70s and into the 80s), but owes very little to that style of filmmaking. It does have its problems, but it’s also entirely its own thing and defies easy expectation a lot of time.

The film opens on a small coastal town in New England called Potter’s Bluff. There’s a man walking along the beach, taking photographs of nature, of fishing nets, seabirds, and then into his viewfinder comes an attractive young woman. They get to talking - he’s a professional photographer, she asks if he’s famous, it gets flirty, then it gets flirtier, then it gets blatantly sexual as she comes on to him…

…and then he’s surrounded by villagers, who -with the woman’s assistance - begin to beat him with shovels and bats, before tying him up and burning him alive, filming the entire thing.

Enter Dan Gillis, the local sheriff. He’s a local boy made good - went up to the big city to get a Master’s degree in criminology before coming back to Potter’s Bluff to take care of law enforcement. And now he’s looking at what appears to be the aftermath of an especially gruesome accident. There’s a car, overturned and burnt out, with a man - the photographer, as it happens - trapped inside. It looks like he burned to death in there, but something about it doesn’t sit right with Dan, so he consults with William Dobbs, the local mortician, and begins an investigation. There’s something strange going on.

So the basic narrative spine of this film is the small town with a dark secret, and the film does a good job of leveraging that feeling of small-town intimacy to create a pretty solid sense of paranoia throughout. Everyone’s friendly, everyone seems normal, and it’s not immediately apparent why some of the fine folks of this village are murdering tourists. Dan goes down a very dark, very strange rabbit hole over the course of the film, and it largely pays off. The rhythm of the film is a little perfunctory, leaning a little more towards a connected series of set pieces rather than a single organic story, but the filmmakers do a good job of setting up the important twists and reveals at a good pace, so it holds your attention and manages some very solid surprises. Most importantly, the whole game isn’t given away all at once - the “what” of the film is revealed bit by bit, but it isn’t until the absolute last moments of the film that you really get a sense of “why,” and even then there’s room for one last audacious reveal. This is a film that is very good at knowing when to drop the next surprise in your lap.

It also works well because it isn’t afraid to create a mood and commit to it. Since it’s set in a coastal New England town, everything is weather-worn buildings and gray, cloudy days and lights cutting through thick fog at night. A lot of this film is bluish and backlit, and it’s not very subtle in that regard, but it definitely helps maintain an atmosphere, and there’s a lot of very, very good practical effects work that still really holds up today, making it effectively creepy and gruesome without being especially gory. It’s not the obvious hatchet to the face of its slasher-film contemporaries, it’s something more evocative and uncomfortable than that, and combined with the small-town paranoia and the relentless gloominess, it’s a pretty uneasy experience, especially considering its age.

But speaking of age, in a lot of ways it is still definitely a product of its time. The dialogue is pretty stagey throughout, not all of the effects work holds up equally well, and the acting ranges from absolutely fine to scenery-devouring. And if you came of age in the 1970s, some of the casting is probably going to be a bit distracting. But then yet again, in some instances this actually works for it. At points it makes things feel nicely off-kilter, like a lighthearted TV movie about the wacky folks in a small town took a very dark turn at some point when you weren’t looking. And for a film made in the middle of the masked-killer craze, it really feels more like it’s riffing on things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even The Stepford Wives to some degree, and is even sort of adjacent to H.P. Lovecraft in his less cosmic mode. It’s a bold choice, and it pays off in both a sustained sense of paranoid uneasiness and in some surprising little choices in some scenes, culminating in a third act that is an absolute ride, capped by an ending that I can only describe as bonkers in its staging and its final reveal. If you stop to think closely about it, it’ll fall apart a little and there’s some stuff that isn’t ever really explained or resolved, but that didn’t really bother me at all while I was watching it - I was just letting it wash over me and getting swept up in the strangeness of it all. You don’t see films like this much anymore, and hell, you didn’t even see movies like this when it was new. It’s definitely worth a look.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Hunter Hunter: Predators

Pretty much any monster movie (and I’ll include serial killer films in there because ultimately that’s what most of them are) leans into the idea that the monster is a predator and its victims are its prey. So, in other words, it’s just replicating relationships that exist in nature, but since we, as a species, are supposed to have transcended those base transactions, and so that’s where the horror comes in. That despite all of our evolution and technology, under the right circumstances, we can be reduced to a target, to food. That we aren’t so special after all.

Hunter Hunter, then, is an absolutely harrowing film about the relationship between predator and prey, and it goes some unexpected places.

Joseph and his family - his wife Anne, and daughter Renee - live off the land, in a remote parcel, far even beyond rural, out where tourists don’t usually go and even the seasonal crowd hasn’t built homes (though that’s certainly changing). Joseph and Renee are out setting trap lines, collecting pelts and meat. The pelts they can sell in town, the meat’s what they’ll eat to survive. This is how Joseph lives, how his father lived, how his father’s father lived, and so on and so on as long as this has been their land. He’s focused on the work and showing Renee what needs to be done when he notices one of his traps has had its catch gnawed away, all that’s left in the trap is a leg. It looks like the work of a wolf. This is going to have to be taken care of quickly - winter’s coming, and that’s when they move to their other cabin further south, and they’re going to need supplies to take with them. Pelts aren’t bringing in the money they used to, and food is starting to run low. The last thing they need is another predator taking the prey they need to survive..

Especially one that isn’t afraid to venture into another predator’s territory.

So Joseph resolves to set up traps and stake out the area, waiting for the wolf to reveal itself. He and his family represent a dying breed - they live off the grid, off the land, hunt and trap to keep themselves fed. He’s aware he’s part of a world that’s vanishing as modernity encroaches, and he’s very much the taciturn alpha male, with the protectiveness that comes along with it, that desire to stand between his loved ones and the dangers of the wild. He doesn’t want Anna and Renee to know how bad this situation is, how much danger they’re in, but Anna and Renee are no pushovers, they’re accustomed to this life as well, and capable of taking care of themselves. That said, you get the sense that there’s some restless, some dissatisfaction there. Anna wonders if Renee wouldn’t be better off going to school like any other kid her age, and it’s getting harder and harder to make a living off the land, and maybe a house in town wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Joseph doesn’t want to hear it. He’s got his pride, but that idea that the modern world is pushing in, imposing itself on nature, is an idea that runs throughout the film. 

It’s a very tense film - it’s mostly about Joseph’s attempts to survey the forest, to try and find signs of the wolf, and Anne and Renee’s attempts to keep the household going while he’s away and radio silent. In either case, you’ve got people in a forest that is very still, very quiet, and where that quiet is likely hiding something that sees them as food. The slightest sound could portend disaster, so things (especially in the first half) operate on a constant low boil, the awful waiting before the even more awful action. The music is minimal, mostly ambient hums and understated strings (with one especially striking exception at the very end), and the cinematography alternates sprawling shots of the woods and ominous, cloudy skies with more claustrophobic moments, all in a mostly drab, desaturated palette. This isn’t the nature people go to on vacation, this is the nature people live and work in, unsentimental at best, cruel at worst. 

At first it doesn’t seem like a horror film - some horror films announce themselves from the opening credits, others take varying amounts of time to reveal themselves, and this one takes its own sweet time to get there, but make no mistake, this is a monster movie, but you don’t really see the monster all that much, and that’s to the good - a lot of this film is in little things, in inference, things briefly glimpsed, so the few really graphic moments hit that much harder as a result. The characters are all believable as regular people - Joseph might be a little bit of a caricature, but not much, and there are a number of beats that underscore the fundamental humanity of the people on screen, for better or worse. There’s some denial here - Anna and Joseph want to protect Renee, and so maybe they aren’t as honest with her as they should be, but in the end it isn’t really their undoing. These are competent, capable people who think they understand the world they live in and the rules of that world. 

When it turns out they don’t, it upends everything in a climax that I can only describe as shocking, as trite as that word is, for as sudden and intense as it is. The end is jarring, even, and probably really polarizing. I go back and forth on it - the majority of the film has been constant simmering tension, so when the turn comes, it’s startling without feeling totally inconsistent to the rest of the movie. I think it’s shocking, but also that it plays fair - and it sets off something that builds the film to a primal howl before ending on a smash to black and total silence, leaving me with an empty feeling in my stomach for what I just witnessed. Remember: It’s about predators, and prey, and whether or not that relationship can adapt to the modern world moving in around all of them.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Gretel And Hansel: Avoiding The Obvious “Grim Fairy Tale” Joke

Following from my reconsideration of Midsommar last week, I got to thinking that fairytales, when you get right down to them, are dark and unsettling. They’re supposed to be, because they’re morality tales, ways to teach the young survival skills and cultural mores. They communicate to children that these are the stakes of straying from the straight and narrow, relics from a time when carelessness could easily get you killed. Over the generations their teeth have been lost, but if you look at what actually happens in these stories, holy shit. Every now and then you’ll see what’s supposed to be a horror “reimagining” of a fairy tale, but these are usually just gimmicky riffs on the slasher film. Nothing to write home about.

Gretel And Hansel, on the other hand, is an atmospheric and spooky reimagining of the classic fairytale, less a straight retelling of the story than an opportunity to explore it and the ideas around it, around what a world like theirs would be like, what witches are, and what it means to have (or be in) a story. It stumbles at points, but there’s a lot here to appreciate.

The film opens with the story of a little girl in a pink cap, and the bargain with darkness that her parents struck to save her life. It worked, and their only child did not die, but she was…changed…by the experience. She could bend others’ will to hers, to horrifying effect. And so her mother - now a widow - abandoned her to her fate, casting her out of the village and deep into the forest.

But that was a long time ago, and here and now we are concerned with Gretel, her brother Hansel in tow. It’s just the two of them and their mother, since their father has gone to his reward. She’s gone to the master of an inn to ask for work. She can bake, and launder. But the inn’s master in more interested in whether or not she’s kept her maidenhood. Gretel walks away, realizing she isn’t wanted for honest work, and Hansel asks her why she couldn’t have been more agreeable - he’s very hungry, and there could have been food there. Their mother is equally unsympathetic - poverty, disease, and traumatic grief have made her utterly incapable of taking care of them, and she entreats Gretel to dig their graves instead.

So there is no home for Gretel and Hansel anymore, they have been abandoned to their fate as well. They can do nothing but trek into the woods and hope to find shelter. And after some misadventure, they make their way to a lone cabin in the middle of the forest. There’s a warm light in the windows, and the table is laden with food. An old woman lives there. It seems like she’s been there awhile.

As if she moved deep into the forest a long time ago.

If you’re at all familiar with the fairytale, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how this story goes, but what makes this film interesting (besides its skillful execution) is the spin it puts on that story, how it recontextualizes it and uses it as a platform to think about the importance of self-definition and self-determination. First, it takes place in a very grounded world, one where pestilence and war has devastated the population, and everyone exists on the knife-edge of survival. Starvation and decay hang over the land like a miasma, and there’s little hope or mercy to be found. Gretel and Hansel are children, vulnerable, in a world where there are plenty of people prepared to take advantage. This film recasts Gretel as being older than Hansel, so she has to shoulder a lot of responsibility at what is still a very young age. There’s some resentment there because Hansel is, well, an impulsive little boy. This causes problems because he doesn’t have Gretel’s caution or restraint. He has little sense of danger, only his own desire to prove how brave and strong he is. The first part of the movie, then, almost plays like a 19th-century version of The Road as they fight hunger and exhaustion in their search for safety. 

Once they arrive at the old woman’s house, the film then does a lot of work around the different conceptions of witches. We have the little girl in the pink cap who is inherently evil (described in what is essentially a fairytale-within-a-fairytale), born of a bargain with darkness. But we also have the crone, the old woman who keeps herself to herself, who is wise in the ways of herbs and nature. It’s a depiction of witchcraft with which we’re familiar, albeit not in the context of this story. The film even cheekily nods to The Wizard Of Oz in a couple of places as well, and both the caricatured black-clad, pointy-hatted evocation of witchcraft as well as something closer to the sorceress, a powerful ritual magician. So it’s never as simple as “lure kids in with candy and throw them in the oven.” There’s a lot of other things going on. The crone who takes them in sees something in Gretel, and sees Hansel as burdening her, weighing her down. The story is less “mwhahahaha I am going to eat you,” and more “as long as your little brother is around, you’re not going to be able to grow into your own person because you feel obligated to take care of him.” The crone is almost more of a mentor to Gretel than anything else, and shows Gretel that she is powerful, and begins to teach her how to harness that power and use it to forge her own path, free of the expectations of others. It’s rooted in the original text, but uses it as a springboard to larger ideas. 

Which is not to say that there isn’t something very dark going on here, because there is. The crone doesn’t keep animals, does not raise crops, and yet there is always food. And as Gretel points out, nothing is given without a price. It’s beautifully, beautifully shot, with lots of brooding, windswept forest panoramas and dim, firelit interiors, spikily punctuated with plenty of striking nightmare sequences and inventive compositional and editing choices. The dialogue is a mixture of archaic and modern, mostly period-appropriate with the occasional anachronistic phrase thrown in, and the soundtrack is mostly dominated by synthesizer, which adds to the out-of-time quality while complementing the overall mood nicely. This creates the same sense of dreamy timelessness as the director’s other films - The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House - but here it lands better in some spots than others, and it shares the latter film’s tendency toward pontification, to its detriment, especially in the final act, which tips a little too much in favor of windy monologues at a point when what it really needs is faster pacing and more intensity. It never really builds to the crescendo that it should, and it loses a bit of steam in the last act. It’s vividly realized, but there’s a bit of coldness to it, some distance. 

Even if the denouement isn’t as cathartically scary as I wanted it to be (to its credit, it also never relies on jump scares - this is a film that, when it does do creepy, it does it very deliberately and very well), it invokes the idea of our personal “stories” to interesting effect - these people are literally in a story, a story in which other stories play a role, but the course of our lives is also sometimes called “our story,” so it’s as much about Gretel and Hansel’s right (and obligation) to find their own way, to become who they are meant to be, free of the hindrance of others, no matter how well-intentioned, as anything else. Which is a hell of a note for a fairytale. Pretty much a modern morality tale right there, a way to teach the young our values now, as much as ever.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Evidence: Well, That Happened

(Just as a heads-up, this one’s going to get a little spoilery.)

Well, just when I think I should maybe be a little more generous in my assessment of found-footage films, after last week’s exemplary Gonjiam, along comes something that reminds me of just how crummy they can be. Evidence was recommended to me by a friend who described it as “not very good, but it really gets batshit as it goes along.” I appreciated the caveat going in, and my friend wasn’t wrong. This is a film that starts off in conventional territory and, as it goes along, just piles more and more and more shit on until the end is sort of a barrage of images, though the cumulative effect is more annoying than anything else. Like, if we were to talk about film in terms of having a cinematic “voice,” this movie would be a lot of incoherent yelling. I mean, it kind of is, literally, but also metaphorically.

This is the story of two couples - Ryan and Abi, and Brett and Ashley. Ryan fancies himself a filmmaker, and he plans on making a “documentary” out of an upcoming camping trip the four of them are taking. It’s not entirely clear what kind of documentary Ryan intends to make, since his entire thesis seems to be “let’s watch Brett - who hates camping - as he suffers through a weekend of camping.” You sort of get the idea that Ryan thinks owning a camcorder makes him a filmmaker, the same way that owning a notebook makes you a poet. Ryan and Brett are friends, but they have that sort of low-key antagonistic fratboy kind of friendship that seems to be mostly based on ball-busting. They’re not loathsome, at least not to start, just your garden-variety white male assholes. Abi and Ashley’s distinguishing traits are that Ashley likes musicals, and Abi is blonde.

So these are our protagonists, and they head off into the woods in an RV (which they won’t be sleeping in, but Ryan needs it to…charge his camera’s battery packs? No, it didn’t make sense to me either) for a weekend of reluctant outdoorsmanship, drinking, and filming not much of anything interesting. This is the kind of film it is: Ryan talks Abi and Ashley into making out for the camera, and they do so contingent on Ryan and Brett doing the same. We see Abi and Ashley’s kiss in lingering detail, but the camera cuts off before we can see Ryan and Brett kiss. There’s even some gratuitous, like entirely gratuitous, T&A right up front. Like other found-footage films, everyone uses their real first names for verisimilitude, and certainly the cinematic choices made by Ryan the film’s writer echo those made by the character of Ryan that he plays in the film. I have to assume they are - being actors and all - playing characters, but moments like that give me pause.

But anyway, drinking and Brett being grumpy and Ryan being a dick and Abi and Ashley sort of put up with all of it, and then comes the strange, misshapen figure they spot in a ravine.

And the feral shrieks from the deep woods, late into the night.

So yes, we have four campers being menaced by mysterious creatures in the woods around them. That’s not the totality of the film, but it does describe the most coherent part. The best way I can describe this film is perfunctory - it hits story beats because it needs or is expected to, but doesn’t really develop or contextualize them. This is one of those movies where stuff just happens, and keeps happening. Ryan takes Brett, Ashley, and Abi camping, even though Brett hates the idea of camping. Why? Because he wants to make a documentary. Why? Well, then otherwise, the filmmakers seem to think, you wouldn’t have any reason for there to be a camera out in the middle of the woods. It’s narratively flimsy. Why did they bring an RV? The RV is there so they can get trapped in it during a siege sequence. This is one of those movies where everything happens because the movie needs it to happen, not as a consequence of people’s behavior or the environment, and there’s very little attempt to make any of it plausible. 

The first half isn’t all that eventful - Brett gets annoyed at Ryan repeatedly, Abi and Ashley get annoyed at Ryan, Ryan is annoying, and then things start prowling around in the woods, at which point Ryan instantly morphs out of absolutely nowhere into someone maniacally obsessed with filming everything, against all sense or reason, regardless of his friends’ well-being or safety. This film has a serious, serious problem with finding reasons for people to keep filming. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem for the filmmakers, since they solve it with Ryan (and subsequent characters) just sort of grabbing the camera and filming, whether it makes sense in the moment or not. This film reaches the point where its characters should say “fuck filming any of this, let’s get out of here” and blows by it without even slowing down. Doesn’t even attempt to give a reason.

But, to be fair to it, it does a pretty good job of using its limited resources (this is not a film with a large budget) pretty effectively. We don’t really ever get a good look at the creatures stalking the protagonists, and that’s good because we see just enough to know that a closer look would reveal them as cheap gorilla costumes. The illusion isn’t broken, but you never forget that they’re, like, an inch away from that point at all times. We get glimpses of people who’ve been gutted and torn apart, but just glimpses, and it’s effective, but again, you also sort of know that lingering shots would have betrayed the cheapness of the practical effects. A lot of the edits in this film revolve around someone turning the camera off or pointing it away from the action when the action would be too expensive to show, and I think that’s okay - it’s realistic that average people wouldn’t hold a shot on something terrible happening, and the awkwardness and choppiness of the camerawork throughout feels appropriate. 

So the filmmakers evinced some awareness of how to use what they had to work with, at least on that level. But I wonder why they didn’t pick a better premise - why not just have them camping and have someone bring a camera along? Why did it have to be a documentary? Why does Ryan go from zero to obsessed? It’s like the filmmakers saw other found-footage films and decided there were certain things they had to do, whether they made sense or not. A sketchy-looking guy with a gun comes by the campsite, looking for his dog, gets kind of tense with Ryan, and then leaves. Why? No reason, apparently. It never comes up again. For some reason, movies about people camping really like the “stranger drops by the campsite and acts menacing” thing. Again, it’s not part of a larger, organic story, just one more thing that feels like the filmmakers included it because that’s what you do in movies like this.

But then, unsatisfied with just making a film about a group of campers hunted by mysterious creatures, the second half of the film shifts focus as Abi and Ashley stumble on what is meant to be some kind of secret research facility (but is clearly just a horse farm), and the rest of the film morphs into one long sustained bout of running and yelling and bleeding as all hell breaks loose at this “facility”, and somehow the camera keeps rolling through all of it. The tension ramps up considerably at this point, driven mostly by all of the running and yelling, but whatever semblance of believability it has goes right out the window. Once military special ops types get involved, the dialogue goes from nothing special but believable to cringingly bad (to quote: “die, die, die!”) and everything sort of goes into a blender as our remaining protagonists run through one building and hallway after another as more of the creatures, and then rabid-seeming human beings acting like “fast” zombies join the party. It’s all clearly done entirely on the cheap, with realistically shaky camerawork covering the majority of sins, but it all feels pointless. We don’t have any investment in these people, there’s no tension and release, everything kind of goes by in a blur of blood and snarling faces and “Alpha team, move out!” style jargon, without any sense of revelation or discovery. It’s just a wall of images flung at us, a lot of running and yelling and more running and more yelling. And that’s…sort of it. It kind of reminds me of a store-brand take on Cloverfield, similar beats but without any attention to the characters and a tiny fraction of the budget.

Honestly, I sort of expected it to get weirder. Maybe it’s because I’ve put films like Possession and Mandy into my eyeballs lately, and I’m not sure what specifically I expected. Maybe some fourth-wall breaking, or time travel, The tagline is “but did it happen?” and that made me think that at some point this was going to be revealed as all being a film in progress, only for the threat to be terribly real or something. I dunno, but “they were camping near a top-secret research facility that’s just experienced an outbreak” doesn’t exactly strain the imagination. It does read like the kind of thing someone like Ryan would think strains the imagination, though.

There was potential here: Get rid of the documentary angle, make the threat something a little more minimal - ghostly people, perhaps, something visually striking in the dark without being too expensive to set up, and focus the footage more on a mix of the innocuous and the unsettling, shifting the proportions as the film moves on, and then pick one set of interiors (preferably not a horse farm, maybe even just a clearing somewhere that can be set-dressed to look like the site of a ritual) to source as the center of the threat, and save the majority of your effects budget for one really freaky-looking thing to be the big reveal. You could do something pretty damn good with that. But that’s not what they did. This film reads like it was made by someone very much like Ryan, who probably wrote it by saying “you know what else would be cool? If there were zombies too!” Oh wait, that’s right - the guy who played Ryan wrote the film. It all makes so much more sense now.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon