A Wounded Fawn: Hell Hath Plenty Of Fury

It’s tempting to say that the fables and fairytales we’re told as children have been sanitized (and there is some evidence that the original stories by the Brothers Grimm were, well…really grim), but if you stop and think about it, there is some heavy shit in those stories. It’s just that as kids the gruesome can be as entertaining as the relatively innocuous can be frightening. So when the Big Bad Wolf wears the grandmother’s skin to deceive Red Riding Hood, it isn’t necessarily met with horror by children. But present someone wearing someone else’s skin to an adult and it’s a whole different vibe. Gretel And Hansel knows this...that fables and fairytales are generally really fucking scary.

And that’s why I think A Wounded Fawn works as well as it does. It’s an interesting, surreal fable that nestles neatly in between Piercing and Fresh, while going to darker and stranger territory than either of them.

The film sets out its stall early, beginning in an high-end auction house, where a sculpture of the Erinyes is up for bidding. Lots of people representing very wealthy people, one hand holding their phones, the other gesturing to up their bids. The sculpture is finally sold to a woman named Kate for more than twice the opening bid, and we follow her home, as she sets the sculpture down and opens a bottle of wine. A knock on her door brings Bruce, the representative of another client from the auction. He wants to make Kate a backdoor deal for the sculpture, paying her twice her bid and throwing her a bonus on top of that. She asks for a percentage of his commission on top, and he winces, but agrees. She asks him why the additional effort, and he says that his client saw something beautiful, and wanted it. Kate does not live to see the sunrise.

Cut to Meredith, a museum curator out with some friends. She’s met a guy - handsome, charming, who has invited her on a weekend getaway. She’s looking forward to getting some for the first time in awhile, even if she doesn’t know much about him. He was at a recent antiquities auction for whom her museum had done some provenance work. His name is Bruce.

He sees something beautiful, and he wants it.

So right off the bat, you’ve got your dude who is obviously not what he seems and the woman that he takes somewhere for nefarious murder-type purposes. And, like in Piercing and more recently Fresh, things do not go like he planned. Which is, in and of itself, not that surprising. There’s definitely an audience for films where someone takes a woman to a secluded location and then tortures her for an hour and a half before killing her, but those aren’t really my kind of film. So the reversal of expectation is in and of itself expected. But where Piercing and Fresh were both battles of will between the protagonist and antagonist, as well as studies of weak, fragile men who commit violence against women, this film almost immediately gets weird with it, showing us everything that follows from Bruce’s perspective. And it’s kind of a doozy. Like I said, the film really is giving you an idea of what’s going to happen by beginning with an image of the Furies, and this is mythology given teeth. Kate was not his first, not by a long shot, and what follows is a long night of retribution that dives into imagery that is equal parts classic Greek mythology and surrealist art. We aren’t sure where it’s going to go, but it isn’t going to be anyplace good.

Part of what makes the film work is the degree to which it is stylized. It’s shot on film, which in addition to the grain and texture gives it a slightly retro feel. Much like Piercing, this looks like a solid remaster of a much older film, and the only real concessions to modernity are mentions of ridesharing services and smartphones. Otherwise, this could easily be a giallo-inflected horror film from the late 70s or early 80s given a loving restoration. Warm lighting and appropriately bloody, gooey practical effects add to this feeling and lend the film an immediacy that underlies even its most surreal turns. The performances are solid, and though the dialogue’s a little purple (much moreso as the film gets stranger), it’s not to the point of distracting and even makes sense given the nods to classic mythology. It also benefits a lot from a very crisp editing style and cinematography that favors alternating longer takes with vivid stills and quick close-ups, almost like punctuation marks, which creates tension even if it does rely a little too heavily on at least one type of shot.

It's not clear how much of what is happening is supernatural and how much could be explained by the hallucinations of someone who is badly injured, but I think that’s sort of the point – the most practical explanation is that we’re watching someone finally have a reckoning with the life they’ve lived up to this point in a way that combines memory and art and myth into a nightmare fugue, another is that the myths are all real and this person’s time has come in the ways of old. The conclusion does land on one particular explanation, but only at the very end, with a long final take that reminds me of a more blackly comic version of the ending of Pearl. But in this sense it reminds me of the better parts of As Above, So Below, harnessing classics and myth to tell a horror story.

That said, there are some definite flaws. The second half of the film goes a little slack with an extended pursuit sequence that consists of someone just sort of running through the woods and seeing things, which feels a lot less interesting after the close tension of the film’s first half, It also use some of the same jumpscare-adjacent shots a little too often, and there’s one sequence involving a wood-burning stove that ends up just being silly, but it ends well, and the strange turn it takes works in its favor. Not a complete success, but its ambition is impressive and it has a strong, consistent vision that makes me want to see more takes on myth in horror. Fables and fairytales and myths are intended to be instructive, and scaring the shit out of people is certainly one way to teach them that their bad deeds will lead to a bad end.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

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
 

The Black Phone: Escape Room

Maybe it makes me kind of a film snob (okay, it definitely makes me kind of a film snob), but I have general aversion to big-budget, mass-marketed horror films. Which isn’t to say that all indie horror is good (far from it) or that films with large budgets are all bad, but films with a certain level of star power, coming from certain directors or distributors, getting a certain amount of publicity push, tend to get my hackles up. In general, I don’t like franchising and I don’t like films that insult their audience’s intelligence. And since I think of horror as a valuable way to tell stories that can push buttons, take us places we wouldn’t otherwise go, I like those things even less in horror film. 

So I gotta say, I went into The Black Phone with reservations. It was produced by Blumhouse, who have, to my mind, a mixed track record - they’ve put out some reasonably good (or at least non-mainstream) stuff, but also a lot of the slick, glossy dreck that gets franchised and spun off to death. Multiplex thrill rides. The director made Sinister, a film that had a lot going for it right up to the point that it totally derailed in the name of franchisability. So it didn’t really look promising. The premise didn’t help either, though we’ll get to that.

But on top of my film snobbery, I have a perverse streak. And so the more I saw ads for this thing come up, the more I simultaneously though “ugh, no thanks” and “you know, I really should check this out to see if it’s bad as I think it’s going to be.” Like, I don’t especially like to shit on films, even though I recognize that’s some of my most animated writing, but sometimes I feel the urge to see if my prejudices bear out, or if they’re just prejudices.

And in this case, well, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. There are things about it which I deeply dislike and I think drag it down, but there are also some real strengths that kept me from dismissing it entirely.

It’s 1978, and we’re in Denver, Colorado. We meet Finney, and his sister Gwen. They’re trying very hard not to make any noise around their dad. He works the night shift, and when he’s not working the night shift, he’s deep into his vodka and orange juice. So every day is walking on eggshells, and coordinating whose turn it is to take care of him. On top of that, Finney gets bullied a lot. Things aren’t easy for them, and haven’t been since their mother passed away. Things are tense at home, and things are tense at school, especially since kids started disappearing. Police have no leads, just black balloons at the site of some of the disappearances. And then one day, walking home, Finney stops to help a man who drops some groceries outside his van. 

One flourish of black balloons, and Finney wakes up in a soundproof basement.

So, the premise here is, well, kind of high-concept. There are a number of moving parts here. You’ve got this mysterious masked figure who’s been abducting adolescent boys from around north Denver, boys who vanish without a trace, never to be seen again. You’ve also got an old rotary phone in Finney’s basement prison, one that isn’t connected to anything, but rings anyway (and there are…voices…on the other end). And Gwen is…maybe psychic? That sort of feels like a lot to buy into all at once. This was another big part of my skepticism going in. But honestly, it ends up being less of a problem than I thought it would be. Oh, sure, when I stop to think closely about it, it all threatens to fall apart (police are not getting a warrant based on a little girl’s dreams), but in the moment it was only slightly distracting. 

I think, overall, the film’s biggest problem is probably the writing, especially with the kids, of which there are a number. As someone who was actually a kid in the period this movie takes place, I don’t remember anyone actually talking like this. It all sounds very much like dialogue,, and the actors playing the kids have trouble selling it, so it all feels very artificial. This is less of an issue with the adult dialogue, and it becomes less of a problem overall once Finney’s been abducted, but it’s still there and makes it harder to really get into the film. You’re being constantly reminded that this is just a movie. The performances range from adequate to excellent, and if they suffer it’s mostly from the aforementioned dialogue. But even apart from its artificiality, there’s also a tendency to cram in exposition or overexplain. Which is odd, because there are some places where it uses flashback effectively, so a scene where a character just says a whole bunch of stuff to another character that is clearly meant for the audience (because the person they’re talking to already knows all of it), it stands out even more. 

Again, it’s just a movie. If anything, it suggests that the filmmakers thought the audience wouldn’t be able to piece it together on their own. Oh, was that too hard to follow? Here, I’ll tell you what you just saw, and I’ll speak slowly and use small words. Fuck that. It’s also hard to get invested because in some ways, you have a pretty good idea of what the broad strokes are going to be (of course Finney’s going to get abducted, of course he’ll spend most of the movie trying to escape and failing) and the problem is that there aren’t really any surprises in that regard. There’s no attempt to twist or subvert our expectations, so at its worst, it sort of becomes an exercise in waiting for the climax (which itself throws in an unnecessarily convoluted twist that stops the momentum short). I kept waiting for the story to surprise me, and it didn’t, at least not until the climax. But it wasn’t really a jaw-dropper, more of a “oh, that’s kind of a cool way to handle it.”

So yes, it had a lot of weaknesses. But like I said at the start, I can’t dismiss it outright because it does some things very well. It gets the period details pretty right in ways that feel realistic and unfussy. It doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to it taking place in the 1970s. It looks right and feels right in that regard. I’d have to say that generally, the visuals are a real strength of this film. It takes place in a world that feels sort of brown and overcast (the 70s did have a lot of wood paneling), and there are some really nice moments of visual flair - abductions told in rapid fadeouts, well-placed flashbacks that sometimes turn into dream-logic insights, not dissimilar to moments in Audition, which is not a comparison I thought I’d be making. Lighting (especially in Finney’s interactions with the abductor) is on point, and Finney’s conversations on the titular phone are staged almost theatrically in a way that embodies the disembodied voices to good effect.  So it looks good and even if the writing and performance is obvious, the cinematic storytelling isn’t. And however ridiculous the things people say to each other, the characters don’t themselves feel ridiculous. This is especially important concerning the abductor, who doesn’t play like a monster or a villain so much as a deeply troubled, stunted man who is constantly reliving some awful psychodrama. And the climax has sort of a puzzle or escape room feel to it that wasn’t obvious to me at all ahead of time, so when it all came together it felt nice to see how all of these disparate things had a purpose that wasn’t obvious from jump. But then the end ran too long because the filmmakers threw in a totally superfluous twist right at the end, one that I suspect created the need for the scene that followed it, where a character literally explains what we just saw. 

And this is the problem with mass-market horror, I think. On the one hand, you want to make a good film, but  on the other hand, you need to make a film that’s going to put enough butts in seats to generate a profit, and that can mean making a film for people who don’t really appreciate nuance, or even pay attention. So everything becomes kind of loud, kind of obvious. I had the same problem with the director’s previous film - it started strong and then crashed in the third act with the introduction of elements that were clearly meant to make it into a franchise. And here, as then, we have what could have been a really good horror film undone by the need to make it justify its budget. I wish I were wrong sometimes, and this is one of those times.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Barbarian: There Goes The Neighborhood

My biggest complaint about Hellhole last week was its complete and utter absence of surprise. It tells exactly the story you think it’s going to tell in exactly the way you think it’s going to tell it (until the very end, but that almost sabotages the film rather than helping it), and I think the only reason I wasn’t able to anticipate actual lines of dialogue was that it was subtitled from the original Polish, and cliches often get lost in translation.

So this week I have Barbarian, which…it doesn’t exactly have the opposite problem, but it doesn’t not have the opposite problem. Basically, it’s an ambitious effort that does a number of things well in a novel fashion, but isn’t quite a slam-dunk because some of its more audacious moments don’t quite land.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview, for a position working as a researcher on a documentary film. She gets in late at night, and she’s confirming details for the AirBnB she’s rented. She texts them that she’s there, they give her the code to the key safe, all good. She parks in front of the house - a cute little one-bedroom place - and opens up the key safe, only to find it empty. Then it starts to rain. Locked out of the house in a strange city in the middle of the night, in the middle of a rain storm, the night before her big interview. So she goes back out to her car to try and get it sorted out, when she sees a light go on in the house. She runs up and starts pounding on the door, and a man opens it up. His name’s Keith, and he booked the same house for the same night on HomeAway. They’ve been double-booked. So that’s awkward.

So it’s just Tess…a young woman in a strange house in a strange city in the middle of the night, finding herself face-to-face with a stranger who just happens to be there already. He seems friendly.

He asks Tess, “do I look like some kind of monster?”

It’s hard to talk about this one in much detail,  because the less you know about it going in, the better. Seriously, don’t even look at the IMDB listing before you watch it if you can help it. It’s a film that takes a couple of sharp narrative turns that contribute as much to a sense of overall uneasiness as the events of the story itself. They aren’t twists, exactly - in some ways this is actually a very straightforward story told in an off-kilter way. But the off-kilter narrative approach works to the extent that it wrong-foots the viewer, denies us the comfort that comes with the familiarity of a certain kind of story. You think you know how this is going to go, but you don’t, not really.

That said, just like it’s really a pretty straightforward story, it’s also got some pretty conventional beats to it, at least at first. It even lays it on a little thick at first with lots of ominous music and startles accompanied by sharp musical stings, but about halfway through the first act it starts to settle into a good sense of restraint. Once the initial obviousness is out of their system, .the filmmakers know when to let a setting or a detail or a reveal do all the work without overplaying it, and Tess is smarter than your typical horror-movie protagonist, acting exactly like a woman in a rented house with a strange man would reasonably act, even to the point of upending one particular horror cliché to a degree that got a laugh from me. And the story itself is told in crisp fashion, with very little wasted time or energy. Little moments convey a lot. It’s one of those stories where the details all slot together into a larger narrative mechanism, where little things end up being important later in a way that doesn’t feel contrived. The shot gets held long enough that you know this is going to mean something later, but it’s not usually clear exactly what, so when the payoff comes it’s satisfying. There are a couple of beats you’ll see coming, but they aren’t large ones, and there are just as many that will surprise.

It’s got a well-considered visual sense too. It’s shot mostly in shades of deep shadow and gloom, with dimly lit interiors to the house, nights that are solid black except for the sparsest of streetlights throwing the smallest pools of light, overcast days and long, dark corridors, with a soundtrack of deep synthesizer swells and prickly high frequencies…except when it isn’t that at all. About all I can really say is that it’s a film of contrasts, many of which work to drive a sense of discomfort and foreboding through sharp tonal shifts in the filmmaking. And most of these work, though not all. They’re jarring, but not too confusing. Where I think they’re the least effective is around the characters. Most of the performances are suitably restrained and grounded, but there’s at least one that is overly broad, to the degree that this character feels dropped in from another movie. It’s easily the film’s biggest liability, and I think that’s because the character sort of brings that other movie into this one, in a way that undercuts the dread and uneasiness managed by the first act. You get the sense that it’s trying to mix horror and comedy the way something like Us did (and did much more effectively), but where Us punctuated horror with stabs of comedy in a way that elicited nervous, otherwise-I’m-going-to-scream laughter, this film sort of shifts gears into comedy and backgrounds the horror instead, and that loses some of the film’s biggest strengths. The character is pretty well-realized and a more grounded take on it could fit really nicely into this film, but as it is it’s pretty distracting. One of the narrative turns could have benefited from being a little more fleshed out too, it communicates something economically (this film’s mostly pretty good about showing instead of telling) but I think going a little bit more into it could have restored some of the unease lost during the second act. And as the film goes on, it’s also a little on-the-nose with its messaging about suburbia and urban decay and the dangers of being part of a minority group in the face of institutional indifference. Not that that’s a bad note to hit, not at all, but it’s a little obvious in that respect and though not enough to ruin the movie, it was a little distracting.

As weird as it sounds, I’d like to see the filmmakers tackle something a little closer to conventional horror, because there’s evidence here that they have the chops to pull that off with style. What we have here is sort of a mixed bag, but in an interesting way. When it works, it works quite well and has some audacity to it, which is nice to see. Not all of the audacity works to its benefit, but I’d rather see a film screw up trying to do something interesting than screw up by bungling the obvious and predictable.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
 

Alien: (Not) Not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre In Space

I’ve been thinking about Alien ever since I wrote about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre a few weeks back, since it’s been described - by its director, even - as an attempt to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in space. When I originally considered this, I didn’t think that it was a comparison that really tracked, but having watched Alien again (for the umpteenth time), it really does have a lot of that film’s strengths, along with drawing from some other horror traditions.

(As a side note, a lot of what got this film made was the success of the first Star Wars film, which suggested that science fiction could be successful with a mass audience. Which is kind of nuts, to imagine someone taking their kid to see this thinking “oh, I bet it will be like Star Wars,” because it’s still a motherfucker of a movie - tense and economical, not like anything before or since.)

It opens on the cold quiet of space, and a terse summary of our location - the commercial refinery vessel Nostromo, crew of 7, hauling thousands of tons of mineral ore. The camera glides through the ship’s interior in a way that recalls haunted house movies - empty corridors, empty rooms, lots of silence. We wait for the silence to be broken, and it’s held just long enough before consoles come to life, filling screens with data and the bridge of the ship with electronic chatter, light spilling onto emergency helmets as if they’re conducting the conversation. And then the slow zoom down a long corridor, to a room where the crew wake slowly and silently from a long, cold sleep.  

It’s apparent right away that the crew of the Nostromo - Dallas, Ash, Parker, Brett, Kane, Ripley and Lambert - are sick of each other’s company and ready to be home. Parker immediately starts complaining about how he doesn’t get a full share (even though that’s what he contracted for) and you get the sense it’s a conversation that this crew has had (or has heard Parker monologue about) a lot. They are not friends, and nobody needs to say that. It’s apparent in the tones of their voices, the looks on their faces. Nothing here is telegraphed, it’s communicated naturally. Their moods don’t improve when they find out they’ve been brought out of cold sleep early, very far away from home. The ship’s computer has picked up a repeating signal, and they’re contractually obligated to investigate it. It might be an SOS.

Or it might be a warning.

I mean, it’s right there in the title. Even if it weren’t for the (ugh) franchising of this film and the insistence on spinning it into a whole “universe” with its own canon and mythology and all of the sort of over-explaining nonsense (that might be fine for films like the sequel, Aliens, which is a good action film in its own right, it’s just not a horror film) that has led to dramatically diminishing returns, even if it weren’t for all the kind of pop-culture nonsense that tends to ruin horror in my opinion, even if it weren’t for all that and you’d never heard of this film before now, you still have an idea of what’s going to happen. Yes, there’s something on the inhospitable planet from which the signal originates, and it gets aboard. You could have a film called Alien without any aliens, but it’d probably be ill-advised. 

So the real key here, I think, is not what happens, but how. And as far as that goes, Alien is very well-executed and has a lot of the virtues I associate with good horror in general, even today. The people feel like actual people, with distinct personalities and relationships, and their interactions don’t feel stagey at all - it really does feel like we’ve sort of been dropped into this group of people in medias res, and although we don’t learn a lot about them and there’s hardly any exposition around them as people, you don’t need it because it’s all in how they act toward each other and how they talk - the way Brett gives Parker a time estimate for some repairs and Parker inflates it when he communicates it to Ripley, the tightness in Lambert’s voice when someone points out that her calculations don’t put them anywhere near Earth, the way Dallas sounds resigned and helpless instead of authoritative when he says “I just run the ship.” They’re actual people, not archetypes or caricatures. A lot of this is apparently down to much of the dialogue being improvised, and it helps a lot. It’s also helped by this - like Star Wars - being set in a world where technology isn’t sleek and glossy, it’s beaten up and grungy and lived-in. grounding it even though we’re in the far future. Video communications are noisy and distorted and low-resolution, equipment is clumsy and cobbled-together. There’s no utopian vision here, just a bunch of tired working stiffs who want to go home already.

This rawness is part of the DNA it shares with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but so is its pacing. This is a film that isn’t afraid to have long stretches where nothing happens in terms of action, and like that film, the long stretches of silence and nothing (or, rather, atmosphere-building, since even in the absence of action, there’s a definite mood being established) are punctuated with sharp, intense bursts of action that are over almost before we’ve had time to process what we’ve just seen beyond that it was very bad and unsettling. And like that film, this movie doesn’t really rely on gore (with one notable exception) - it’s another case where you think it’s gorier than it really is because the worst is left to your imagination. Quick cuts between different close-up perspectives do a lot of the work in this area. 

And it draws on other traditions as well - it makes good use of haunted-house techniques like having something terrible unfold in the background behind unsuspecting protagonists, monster-movie techniques like having an animal pop out where you think the monster will be, only to have the animal’s reaction signal the monster’s appearance, and the slow, methodical stalking techniques associated with slasher films, which were also beginning to develop as a genre around the same time. For that matter, a setting where a bunch of people who do not like or trust each other, stuck in a dangerous environment with a deadly creature set a great precedent for the remake of The Thing, another excellent horror film about an alien. It’s also not one-note - like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there are twists where expectations are upended and safety snatched away. As the tagline for that film had it, “who will survive, and what will be left of them?” 

It’s been often imitated, but never duplicated, because the key to Alien isn’t the alien, and the science fiction setting isn’t incidental by any means, but it’s also not the most important part. It’s the believability of the people and the inexplicability of their peril, and their antagonists’ utter indifference, told in lulls and bursts of tension which eventually blur into a single panicky fugue where horrors are glimpsed only briefly against a bigger crisis, that this film retains its power. Some of the effects have definitely not aged well (and are, frankly, downright silly to modern eyes), but in its pace, characterization, and art direction, and what it chooses not to tell us as well as what it does, it’s still one of the best for a reason.

IMDB entry

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The Autopsy Of Jane Doe: Blood Will Tell, If You’ll Let It

One of the more pleasant side effects of coming back from a long hiatus is having a backlog of movies that I’m interested in or have heard good things about to work through. I’ve got a running list of things I want to see and plenty of stuff on deck on three different streaming services, but it’s nice to approach this from the perspective of “which one do I want to do today?” instead of “well, what’s out there right now?” The downside is that a lot of these films have also had time to build up my expectations, either based on the strength of their premise or critical reception. As fair as I try to be, it’s hard when hype  whatever the source- gets in the way. I mean, it isn’t the worst thing in the world when a scary movie isn’t as good as I was hoping for.

I bring this up because I had high hopes going in for The Autopsy Of Jane Doe, but even though it starts strong, it ends up whiffing, in what feels to me like a lack of confidence in what it has done up to that point.

We open on a crime scene in rural Grantham, VA, with an investigation in progress. Law enforcement and forensic personnel traipse in and out, cataloging evidence, documenting the scene. It’s done quietly and competently, without tiresome banter or much in the way of cliché. A family appears to have turned on each other (in violent fashion - guns, knives, smears and gouts of blood everywhere), and normally this would be the engine that drives the movie - why did these people kill each other? Why does it look like they were trying to break out of their own home? - but it isn’t.

Someone tells the sheriff that he needs to come down to the basement, where there’s another body, partially unearthed in the basement’s dirt floor. No identification, no prints in the system. This a problem for the sheriff, who can construct a plausible narrative for the press regarding the rest of the crime, shocking though it is in this small town. But this unidentified body, this Jane Doe, well, he needs to find out how she fits in, and quickly.

Enter Tommy and Austin Tilden, father and son, third and fourth generation coroners. In sharp contrast to the crime scene, they’re blaring rock-n-roll as they perform an autopsy. It’s nicely jarring, but doesn’t feel flippant. They have a job to do, and it’s nice to listen to music while you work. It’s the last body of the night, and Tommy’s instructing Austin in the subtleties of determining cause of death. It’s not always the obvious thing, and you need to do the whole investigation before you draw a conclusion. We get a sense of their dynamic, and there are a few balls up in the air - a tragedy they’ve been dealing with for the last couple of years, Austin wants to move away but can’t quite bring himself to leave his dad alone, Austin keeps putting work ahead of his life, that sort of thing.

And then in comes the sheriff with the Jane Doe from the crime scene. He needs a cause of death tonight so he knows what to tell the local press in the morning.

So Austin and Tommy get to work - the deceased is female, in her early twenties (appears to be in her early twenties, notes Tommy), no external signs of trauma or obvious fatal injuries. And then they open the deceased’s eyes, which are cloudy, which you’d expect from someone who had been dead for several days. Except this body doesn’t look more than a couple of hours old. Hasn’t even settled into rigor mortis yet.

And, as it transpires, her wrists and ankles have been smashed. And her tongue severed.

And this is the part of the premise that really drew me to this film and really is the film at its strongest- two people, in a basement morgue, in the middle of the night, doing an autopsy that gets stranger and stranger as it goes on - moving from things that are unusual to things that are outright medically impossible to things that suggest very specific explanations for what they’re finding, unearthing more and more horrible things as they do their job. The idea that you could tell a horror story through discovery, through evidence, with each new revelation worse than the last, adding another piece to the puzzle, I mean…that has “Absolutely My Shit” written all over it.

And that really is how it all starts off. It’s mostly quiet, and full of lots of long, still shots and sudden cuts between them, and this does a nice job of building unease. The music and sound design are largely spare, and sudden shifts between quiet and diegetic sound are used effectively to contribute to the overall tension without signposting it too obviously. It really does start strong - two people in a well-lit room discovering increasingly unsettling things about this body which resist explanation. If the film had stuck with its strengths, it could have found a way to make small details disturbing, to mine shock from discovery and tighten the screws in anticipation of an explosive payoff.

But it doesn’t have the courage of those convictions -  it’s when things start to escalate and move away from that scenario that the film starts to falter, as it begins to externalize the threat in ways that feel a little muddled, both narratively and cinematically Tommy and Austin are largely believable (and nicely competent when shit starts getting weird) as people - they’re father and son and still dealing with a family tragedy of their own, and I like that it never descends into histrionics or some horrible unspeakable family secrets - it’s all at a human scale, inferred and talked around rather than exposited for the most part, which makes the conversation where it’s all laid out for us feel just that much more formulaic.

And that’s what it comes down to - there’s a real shift to the formulaic here after a certain point. Some of it is obvious early on (one particular detail in the first 15 minutes or so basically screamed “this will mean something later on,” and it did, which bummed me out), and the film does ratchet up the spooky a little too much, too fast, but not irretrievably so. After a given point, however, the filmmakers made a choice to shift the story from one about discovery to one about an external threat, and there’s very little about that external threat that doesn’t fall victim to cliché. When the focus is strictly on what the body can tell Tommy and Austin, it’s gripping. When the focus shifts to something more explicitly supernatural, it becomes a story about explanations and solutions, and there’s flickering light and smoke and rote spookiness. It all feels a little pasted in, a little predictable, a little stock,  to the point that the end feels downright glib, which is wildly at variance from the tone at the film’s beginning.

Which is too bad, because the premise is not one you see every day, and it starts off with a lot of promise. If it’d had the courage to stay slow, and spare, and still, and careful, and keep everything but the autopsy itself at a human scale and not get too obvious, it would have been something really special. There’s a lot of horror to be drawn from letting a mysterious body speak for itself, but before it really had a chance to do so, someone barged in and started shouting over it.

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Asmodexia: Revelations

Demonic possession movies do a good, solid line as horror films go. They’re sort of the utility players, never really falling out of favor but never really dominating the slate in any given year. I don’t know that I’m a sucker for them as a type, but I have to admit, I’ve liked a lot of the ones I’ve seen since I started writing this thing, and The Last Exorcism and Ahi Va El Diablo come immediately to mind as two of my favorite horror films. There’s often a real disease or illness subtext to them - The Rite presented us with possession as chronic illness, The Taking of Deborah Logan presented it as degenerative illness, and in most possession films, it ends up being the real cause behind what initially seems to be some sort of mental or physical malady. I guess this is appropriate since one of the earliest explanations for what we now call mental illness was possession by evil spirits. It’s a link forged in history and culture.

So the brief for Asmodexia suggests that its hook is possession as communicable illness. At first I was leery, because that could end up being yet another hackneyed riff on zombie films, of which I am most definitely tired. Much to my delight, it is not that at all. It’s a slow, careful crawl toward dread and the horror of revelation.

The film opens with closeups on a VCR, a videotape marked “Luna,” footage of a mysteriously traumatic childbirth, and a man screaming to a terrified woman, forcing her to look at the child who has just been born. It isn’t at all clear what has just happened, and then we flash-forward to 15 years later. Which, at first, made me sigh, because I am tired of pointless flashback-and-“years later” constructions.

Except that it’s “15 years later...3 days before the resurrection.” Huh.

The body of the film is three basic stories - an old man (the one from the flashback) and his granddaughter, a woman confined to a mental hospital, and two police officers investigating a series of mysterious deaths. All of them take place in and around Barcelona while, in the background, strange things are happening. It’s an unseasonably hot December, it’s coming up on the end of the Mayan calendar, Christian sects throughout Spain are engaging in all kinds of ritualistic behavior, and all over the country, more and more people are exhibiting the signs of what anyone else would call demonic possession. It’s apocalyptic in every sense of the word - the old man and his granddaughter wander from place to place, performing exorcisms as they go, almost like plague doctors treating an epidemic. The woman in the hospital watches as the order of the hospital crumbles around her as more and more of the patients succumb to the supernatural infection. The detectives, always one step behind the old man and his granddaughter, are trying to figure out what the pattern is behind these deaths, just one step behind the chaos beginning to embrace the world. Everything is falling apart.

It’s initially a difficult sell - the structure is clear enough, but the film starts very slowly and is at first a little hard to follow. It’s very elliptical, mostly made up of long, static shots with little interrupting them, or conversations between two people in isolation from everything else. These scenes are broken up largely with dissolves, so it feels like we’re shifting between three different movies without necessarily there being a lot of continuity from moment to moment. It takes a little bit to locate everyone in the story, so the first act especially feels like it jumps around a lot, especially given how little context it has at first with the opening flashback. There’s also sort of an overuse of dramatic music stings and ominous ambient music over what seem like otherwise innocuous scenes - I get that the filmmakers are trying to create an atmosphere of unease, but it’s a little ham-handed in places, and doesn’t always feel like the sound is being contrasted with the image in a meaningful way.

But none of that is really, ultimately, that much of a problem because this is a film that rewards patience and careful attention. It’s not at all immediately apparent how everything and everyone fits together, and so the beginning of the film is a little confusing, but things do cohere - there are connections between the people in these three storylines, and they aren’t always what or how you’d think. Really, the film is a process of revelation - what these people have in common, what they are in the process of doing, what has happened in the past, and what is happening now. It would be a cliché to say that nothing is what it seems, but the appeal of this film is the way it goes about fitting all the pieces together. Even for a movie about possession, everything’s a bit off around the edges, like it’s not following the demonic-possession playbook exactly, and what may seem like quirks at first begin to make sense the longer you watch. The tableaux broken up by dissolves, the weird clashes between sound and image, and a story that seems a little off on the details all contribute to this feeling of dreamlike wrongness. It isn’t really until the last 15 minutes or so that the full implications of everything you’ve seen really begin to click into place, and so the cold, sick, sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach is a strong payoff of everything that came before. It’s the slowest and quietest and coldest of burns. I’ve talked before about the “horror of revelation,” that moment when the awful truth begins to make sense and comprehension is terrifying, and this film is an excellent example of that horror at work.

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Oculus: Past Is Prologue

One of the more annoying narrative devices to show up a lot in horror film is the opening flashback. It’s usually a short, tense scene that ends with someone dying, usually though not always punctuated by someone else screaming, and then a title indicating that now it’s 15 years later or some shit like that. You can trace this at least as far back as Halloween, and I've discovered, having watched a fair number of films in the course of writing this thing, that this construction shows up a lot, and frankly it’s sort of tiresome. Like, yes, we know something bad has happened here or that the place has a terrible history or whatever - it’s a horror film, we didn't expect everything to be okay. Honestly, I think more horror films could benefit from the surprise evoked when we have no idea where the threat is going to be coming from instead of telegraphing it in the first ten minutes. Sometimes it’s used well, to set up reversed expectations or to misdirect, but just as often it’s a quick scare to say “oooohhhh! Bad things on the way!” That’s lazy and cheap.

But that’s a lot of words to basically say “flashbacks bad” when I’m about to turn around and talk about Oculus, which, although suffering from being less subtle than it could in places, is a deft exercise in examining the past’s effects on the present.

We meet siblings Kaylie and Tim Russell when they are very young, and something bad has happened. Their father has done something terrible, and little Tim - not more than ten years old - shoots his father to death. This is all revealed in a flashback, presented as a dream that now-adult Tim, 11 years later, has as a resident of a mental hospital. In this dream, he finally saw himself - not his father - holding the gun, and this is judged to be progress. He’s finally accepted his role in what happened, and he’s being released. Not really groundbreaking stuff, but it does set up much of the film’s thesis going forward - the intrusion of past on the present, the unreliability of memory, and the vagaries of perception.

Upon release, Tim reconnects with Kaylie, who grew up in foster care while Tim was hospitalized. She’s engaged and has a great job at an auction house. She’s delighted to see Tim, and any awkwardness he worried about dissipates quickly. Kaylie’s glad to see him out, wants to help him get set up on his own, and the sooner the better. See, she needs his help.

Everything that happened, Kaylie explains, happened because of an antique mirror their father had hanging in his home office. This mirror - called the Lasser Glass, after its first owner - has a long and bizarre history. The people who own it tend to die in very, very strange ways. Kaylie’s used her contacts in the world of antiques and estates to track the mirror, and she’s finally managed to secure it. She needs Tim’s help to destroy it, once and for all. She’s brought the mirror back to their family home, and she’s set up elaborate recording equipment and failsafes. She’s intent on proving that the mirror has supernatural qualities, that it was responsible for the death of their parents, and then she wants to destroy it, once and for all.

As far as Tim’s concerned, he’s just gotten out of the hospital to discover that his sister is barking mad.

What follows is an exercise in temporal, perceptual, and narrative unreliability. The film is about a cursed mirror, and so it reflects (ha-ha) distortions of both perception (we are not as we see ourselves in the mirror) and memory (we do not remember things as they happened). By placing the protagonists back in their childhood home, it enables the film to superimpose past experience upon present events, which works both as a narrative device and as an instantiation of the mirror's power - past and present blur both for us and for the protagonists, what they see (and so what we see) is not what is, and as the movie progresses the lines between these two things blur further and further until the end is almost a complete superimposition of one over the other. As viewers, we are as lost and unsure of what is real and what is illusion as the protagonists are, and only become aware of the terrible truth when it is too late. The use of recording devices gives us a perceptual counterpoint - we see the characters do something, and then see a playback that indicates something else entirely. We’re also subject to the unreliability associated with cinema - we see everything one way in one shot, and then in the next it has changed. We end up as wrong-footed by the depiction of events as the protagonists are by their experience of them.

In addition to the narration, the characterization is also nicely unreliable - none of these people are really fleshed out all that much, but you expect Tim to be the unstable one, having just been released from a mental hospital, but it becomes clear very quickly that he's the more stable of the two. Kaylie, having had to deal with the trauma of what happened when she was a child without any sort of professional help, has grown up to be someone who, on the surface, looks happy and accomplished, but it is a pretty skin stretched tight over the bones of obsession. Her entire life has led to this point.  Likewise, in the past, what could have been a stock-standard story of “one parent goes nuts, terrorizes the other” is complicated by an instability that seems to have nothing to do with the supernatural. Yes, their parents could be falling under the spell of an evil mirror, sure, or they could just be snapping from the stress of a recent relocation and starting a new business. Nothing is as it seems, textually, subtextually, or metatextually.

From a technical standpoint, Oculus shares a lot of the same strengths as the director's previous film Absentia - the juxtaposition of the supernatural with human failings like guilt and denial, a restrained and assured compositional style that doesn't telegraph every single scary moment - but the jump from indie filmmaking to something more mainstream means that some of the subtlety that hallmarked that film is lost. Music stings are a little intrusive, dialogue (especially in the beginning) is a little too baldly expository, the evil nature of the mirror is underscored a little too neatly (do we really need all of the whispering to tell us that the mirror is evil?) and all of this maybe makes the film a little more conventional than it should be. It feels at points as if the audience is being underestimated - not outright condescended to, but there were more than a few moments where things could have been even more underplayed and it would have still been really effective, if not moreso. It's a much less…crowded…film than the short with which it shares a title, confirming my hunch in its case that the short’s story was solid but needed more time to be told. This feature-length film borrows a lot of story conceits from the short, and giving them more time and room to breathe helps the premise tremendously.

The whole experience is one of characters and audience alike being immersed in the madness of the mirror, leaving you with the lingering feeling that even what you saw on the screen may not "really" be what happened, that there is some reality beyond the construct of the film, and we aren't getting the full story, which - shortcomings and disappointing conventionalities aside - is a hell of a trick for a piece of fiction to pull off.
I'm not one for sequels, but given the idea that the mirror is the character here, with a long and bloody history, and both this film and the preceding short are blissfully free of fussy mythology, I actually wouldn't mind seeing more tales of the Lasser Glass, especially if it remains as remote, sinister, and implacable as it does here.

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Europa Report: Out Of The Blue, Into The Black

People sometimes talk about horror films being “chilling,” which is a nice way to somaticize the experience of being frightened. There’s a shudder, a sense of discomfort and abandonment. We don’t call it “being left out in the cold” for nothing. The cold is threatening to our survival, as the dark is threatening to our survival. But there are chills and then there are chills. There’s the sudden shudder that sweeps your body, sure, but there’s also the slow, creeping cold. The kind that sneaks up on you a bit at a time and sinks into your bones, until you realize that all warmth is gone.

Europa Report, set against the blackness of space, is an understated, well-executed example of the monolithic, all-consuming chill.

We are told that what we are watching is declassified footage from the first manned space mission to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Data taken from the moon suggested the presence of water underneath its icy crust, and patches of high temperature. And where there’s water, there might be (or once have been) life. Oh, sure, they could send out another probe, or they could send experts capable of doing things a probe can’t in order to make the most of what is basically a one-shot mission due to its cost. So a crew of six astronauts boards the privately-financed Europa One to make the long, cold trek into the dark. It’s not clear what happened to the mission, but the footage has only been recently declassified, and the talking-head interviews with the mission director and one of the astronauts suggests that something went very wrong.

In fact, the first footage we see is mostly crew members asking what they’re going to do about something that just happened. Someone is missing, and they’re talking about what they should tell his family. It’s elliptical, but it’s very apparent that someone is missing. And they aren't even to Europa yet.

It’s not an especially shocking beginning, but this isn't a movie that trades in quick scares, really. It’s measured, and unfolds in fragments that aren't entirely linear, as befits the nature of deep space communication. We’re seeing footage that took a long time to get back to Earth, and as it develops, the mission had problems with its communications array, so we get bursts from different perspectives, jumping back and forth in time as one disaster after another besets the mission. The atmosphere (ha-ha) is nicely understated- these characters are all pros, used to keeping their head in an emergency and working in dangerous conditions. An air of quiet competence surrounds them, even when things are going badly, and we know almost from the beginning that the mission hasn't gone off without a hitch, even if it takes some time to really get a sense of what’s happened. Personalities aren't especially fleshed out, but they don’t feel like stereotypes either. These are people who have gotten used to working with each other, for good or ill, and the dynamic emerges, like everything else, bit by bit and piece by piece.

In some ways, the mood reminds me of the front half of Alien, though the crew is far less contentious with each other, and the films is less an escalation into terror as it is a slow undertow of dread, as one thing goes wrong after another. It's a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that moves at a glacial pace, but never stops. It's not so much that nobody can hear you scream in space, as is it that it will take them months and years to hear it from where you are. It's a feeling of doom, abetted by the realistic scale of the whole mission and the relentlessness of an utterly hostile environment. 

The fragmentary nature of the narrative allows the filmmakers to play with our expectations a bit as well - it's worth keeping unspoiled, but there's a reveal in the third act that undermines a lot of our expectations for where everything is going, in a way that basically says "all bets are off" without really being a twist, per se. Basically the film, like the implacable dark of space itself, says that it doesn't matter what we want or what we expect - this is what's happening, this is why it happened that way, and this is the price we've paid for what we know now, as the narrative assembles itself and the last pieces fall into place, and the true cost makes itself known.

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The Silence Of The Lambs: Objects Of Desire

(Warning: If, by some chance, you haven’t seen this movie yet, well go correct that post-haste, and know that I’m going to be pretty casual about discussing the story throughout, so spoilers ahoy.)

I've lost count of the number of times I've watched The Silence Of The Lambs, lost count of the number of times I've read the novel on which it was based as well. I know this movie very well, at least in a story-and-dialogue sense. On the other hand, I've never actually sat down and watched it with sort of a critical perspective, and doing so for the purposes of this post, I noticed some things I've never noticed before. However many years and viewings later, I find myself still surprised by this film.

It’s a procedural, about FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling. She’s a focused, driven student. She wants to be of service, to do an important job very well, to prove herself even if it’s not immediately apparent to who. She begins the film running through the woods, but it’s a neat little inversion - she’s not a victim or Final Girl. She’s on an obstacle course, pushing herself as hard as possible, to make herself strong. Starling is pulled off the course and summoned to the office of Jack Crawford, head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science division. These are the people who profile serial killers, who tell the field agents for whom they should be searching. This is what Starling wants to do when she graduates. She wants to come to work for Crawford. With this in mind, Crawford has asked her to run an “errand” - to administer a behavioral questionnaire to a notorious serial killer named Hannibal Lecter. As it transpires, Lecter has no interest in the questionnaire, as much as he does in discussing Crawford’s current active case - the hunt for an entirely different serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill.” Lecter seems to know something about the killer, and about the case.

Which is interesting, given how long Lecter’s been locked away.

In lesser hands, this would be utterly cringeworthy, and iterations on exactly this premise have been exactly that cringeworthy in what are indeed lesser hands. Serial killer movies often come across as trite to the point of offensiveness, I think, and I think the thoughtfulness with which the filmmakers approached the subject goes a long way toward distinguishing this film from other treatments of the same topic. The larger budget and major-studio clout enabled them to work directly with the FBI, basing their killer on actual case files and giving the setting and the dialogue some procedural realism. The film is also played entirely with a straight face, with a certain quiet and somber gravity about it that makes it feel like something terrible happening in the world we inhabit, not some smirky showoff for a gimmicky murderer or excuse to run an improbably costumed hulk through an abattoir filled with indiscreet teens for ninety minutes. 

And maybe there’s a class argument to be made, here - that this movie is good because the studio gave it the money to be good, and recruited talented filmmakers and known talents, and paid for good sets and lots of research that poorer filmmakers just don’t have. Maybe all the shitty, awful serial killer films aren’t entirely the filmmaker’s fault if you need big-studio budgets to fully realize the idea. Because on paper, this could be a shitty, terrible movie. Money made it good, and that same money and the legitimacy it provides is probably why this film won a shitload of Academy Awards instead getting four stars from some blog writer who goes by the name “Doctor Morbid” or some shit as the height of its critical reception.

But that’s not really why I wanted to write about this film. This time, when I sat down to watch The Silence Of The Lambs, I think I put together for the first time some things that had sort of occurred to me on the periphery before, but had never really crystallized because I was just sort of watching it for the familiar experience of watching it, listening to the rhythms of the dialogue and the events, admiring the neat little narrative fillips. So some of this will probably occur to some of you as sort of a “no shit, Sherlock” sort of thing and yeah, you’re right. But this is what happens when you approach a familiar piece of art with new eyes.

First, women are pretty much entirely objects in this film. I mean certainly, there's the obvious ways, in terms of Buffalo Bill skinning women to make himself a girl suit in an effort at transformation (as if one can appropriate femininity by literally putting it on) and the way he, as a serial killer, depersonalizes Catherine in order to make it emotionally easier to starve, murder, and skin her. So yeah, for Buffalo Bill women (and womanhood) are actually objects, it’s not even metaphorical. But it's also embodied (ha) in the way that people treat Clarice throughout the film - there’s a brief but telling scene where Clarice and her friend Ardelia are jogging and a bunch of male students running the other way look back to check out their asses as they run. There’s asylum chief Chilton's comments to Starling about her looks and the way he hits on her. Sure, we’re not supposed to sympathize with him, we’re supposed to think he’s a creep, but it’s really the obviousness of his sexism - not the sexism itself - that distinguishes him from other male characters. Crawford and Lecter both employ Clarice as a tool, or pawn, or go-between. Clarice begins the film following Crawford’s orders and chasing down Lecter’s clues, and she develops agency over the course of the film as she takes more and more initiative, until ultimately it’s just her on her own, literally in the dark and surviving entirely by her own wits. Even Senator Ruth Martin - a powerful, capable woman - is ultimately there not for her own sake, but as a proxy. Her influence is invoked under false pretenses by the FBI to provide an incentive for Lecter, and Chilton subverts that to wield her authority in service of his own self-promotion, which Lecter in turn exploits. She is, at best, a figurehead throughout her negotiations with Chilton and Lecter, appearing, making pronouncements, and vanishing again into a cloud of government men. And then there’s poor Frederica Bimmel, and the unnamed girl in West Virginia, unseeing bodies examined and documented as evidence, as objects for inquiry.

Second, there's also a strong undercurrent of seeing and being seen running throughout this film. It’s something I think I’d noticed on casual viewing but this time it really hit me how many of the shots in this film are close-ups on faces. Most conversations are shot as alternating close-ups on the two people talking, so it's as if we're taking the point of view of each person in the conversation in turn, and it’s pretty rare to see more than one person in frame at a time. Almost all of Clarice’s conversations with people are shot this way, so we’re focused on her face to one degree or another, with the tightness of the shot sometimes heightening tension, sometimes giving us space to see her react. A lot of her conversations also occur across barriers or dividers - bars, plexiglass, even desks. There’s something in her way, something between her ability to see others and others seeing her. We see Catherine from Bill's point of view, and Bill from Catherine's, and there’s always distance between them, indicating the depersonalization otherwise indicated by Bill’s use of “it” to refer to Catherine. In West Virginia, we see Starling being stared at by a roomful of cops, with the perspective switching from just her to a multitude of eyes pressing down on her. Buffalo Bill performs for a video camera - sort of a desperate loneliness in that he has nobody else to see him, but he wants to be seen so badly. Even his closest interactions with women occur through the mediation of nightvision goggles - he’s always a step removed from the thing he wants most. Framing the majority of the shots this way makes the film very intimate and immediate- we’re seeing everything through the eyes of the people in the film. Lecter even comments on this, asking Clarice if she’s aware of eyes looking her over, appraising her. We first covet what we see every day.

And then finally, on top of all of this, there's what I’ve appreciated about this movie from the first time I ever saw it: Hannibal Lecter, playing the long game. From his earliest appearances in the film, he has an excellent idea of what's going on (after all, memory is what he has instead of a view, and he’s encountered Bill’s earliest work), and he spends most of the film's runtime amusing himself, waiting for everyone else to catch up. In his first meeting with Clarice, he alludes to her good bag and cheap shoes - accessories (often made of leather) that signify the feminine, and he notes the skin cream she uses. There's all of the other quick jabs - allusions to "Simplicity," his remark to Starling about how "you're so close to how you're going to catch him," his catty aside to Senator Martin about her suit. It’s easy to point to the obvious bits about Lecter - his dramatic “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” line, most egregiously abused - but it’s this hidden breadcrumb trail he leaves throughout the movie, purely for his own amusement, that contributes so strongly to one of the most chilling portrayals of villainy in the 20th century. It’s an expression of the same manic glee in his eyes when Clarice comes to him desperate, with time running out, the effortless shift from his animalistic savaging of a police officer to his appreciation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He’s not divided between man and monster, he’s fully at home with both. No real histrionics, no monologuing, just a glint in his eye at some private joke. It’s a pity the character became caricature, as sequels so often allow, but in this film Hannibal Lecter is a vivid monster: An aesthete with the blank, unfeeling eyes of a shark.

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Se7en: The Way That Leads Up To The Light

It's rare that I remember the first time I watch a film, no matter how good it is. It’s just not the sort of experience that typically makes an impression on me. I remember the first time I watched The Shining, because I remember being utterly terrified by the ads for it as a child, and when as a teenager I finally gathered the courage to watch it, it was on network television, constantly interrupted by commercials and weather alerts, and even with the constant disruption it still reached right back to the deep nightmare part of my brain.

I also remember the first time I ever watched Se7en. I’d been waiting for it to come out on video because I missed it in theaters and all of the ads made it look really interesting as far as theatrical serial killer movies went. So for a couple of weeks I made a habit of swinging by my neighborhood video place to see if they’d gotten a copy in yet. One night I was coming back from a double feature at a small arthouse theater and stopped at the video store on the way home. It must have been 10:30 or 11 at night, but they finally had a copy. Despite the fact that I’d been watching movies for the better part of the night, I took it home and put it on. I don’t think I was able to fall asleep until about 3 or 4am after watching it, so afraid I was of closing my eyes. It made an impression on me as a film that on first viewing felt palpably evil - it shook and disturbed me in a way that few films had before or have since.

It opens in quiet and stillness, with a detective at home gathering the tools of his trade for another day at work. His beat is the city - it’s never specified where, it’s always just “the city” - and he surveys a crime scene with a practiced, weary eye. He’s William Somerset, and he’s seven days away from retirement. Other cops don’t seem too broken up about his leaving - they think he thinks too much, asks pointless questions. Somerset thinks down into the situation, looks at the world beyond its surface details, and it seems like a career of doing this has made him tired and sad, and he just wants to be over.

But it isn’t over yet, and he has to meet his new partner, David Mills. Mills chose to be transferred to a job in the city from somewhere out in the suburbs, and he’s pretty much the spot-on cocky new cop, all wisecracks and assertions that he’s not just some rookie and Somerset is not trying to hear it at all. He has no patience for this guy, he just wants him to stay out of the way until his seven days tick down. But they’ve caught another case, and it’s, well, it’s a weird one. In a squalid basement apartment, a man sits dead at a table, his hands and feet bound. He’s a very large man, and by all accounts, he was force-fed at gunpoint until his throat swelled from the effort of swallowing and his stomach began to tear. Behind his refrigerator, written in grease, the word “gluttony.”

There are seven deadly sins, and this is the first.

What sticks with me most about Se7en is its palpable cruelty - not just in the murders themselves, which are awful - gruesome in their literal instantiation of the sins they illustrate, but also in the way that the antagonist deliberately extends suffering to people beyond his victims. The wife of one victim is forced to look through the crime scene photos, her husband’s mutilated body barely obscured by sticky notes, and her fresh grief and pain in the face of the necessary task is awful. Another man is made complicit in the death of another - what choice do you have when a gun is in your mouth? - and it’s clear from his anguished testimony that he’s broken by this experience. It's one of the few serial killer films (a genre of which I am not fond) that bothers to acknowledge the pain and damage that the murders cause to the living as well, and the murders, though theatrical, seem grounded in a particular purpose, which is another element I think so many lesser films miss, mistaking elaborate staging as the end, rather than a means. We barely ever see the antagonist on screen, but the damage he does runs throughout the film, making him monstrous through his deeds rather than any elaborate costume or gimmick.

And the city is…well, not a character of its own, but certainly an insistent note underneath the proceedings. The city is what gives birth to these atrocities and lesser atrocities every day. Somerset takes a cab ride and the view out the window is vague shapes, bodies moving in the rain and it seems like something out of a Francis Bacon painting. It is a dehumanizing place, almost always raining, shabby gray buildings blotting out the sky. Nobody in this movie is happy, courtesy and warmth are in scarce supply. It’s a bleak place where vicious things happen and the best you can hope for is that you don’t have to step on too many bodies in the course of a single day. It’s almost tiring to exist in this place for the course of the movie. It’s a dark place, and that’s how I remembered it from my previous viewings, but my memory of the film is faulty - I always remember it as being shot as a very dark, gloomy film until the denouement, when everything brightens up, but that's not how it is at all. Light plays a huge role in this film throughout - friendly interiors are warm and golden, whether it's a new home or an old library, crime scenes are sometimes pitch-dark and illuminated only by flashlight, sometimes they're lit by the sun pouring in through the windows, sometimes they're fitfully lit by neon. People die in the most squalid of basement apartments and porn shops, and people die in office high-rises and penthouses, and the light shining upon their deaths is as different as they and their ends are. Characters are framed in light - soft light, hard light, they are backlit. I mean yes, light is an integral part of filmmaking and film viewing, but this is a movie about terrible, terrible things told in sunshowers and sunrises and sunsets and early evening dusk and the harsh light of high noon. It’s amazing how fallible memory is, or maybe how powerfully this film communicates its idea that my memories of it are that it is darker visually than it actually is.

This visual subversion extends to the characters as well. Mills and Somerset seem like a riff on the standard odd-couple cop duo - the mismatch of the weary vet with the wisecracking hotshot who come together and understand each other in the end - but they really are prickly and assholish with each other, it's not cliche. Somerset is thoughtful, cerebral, and entirely too old for this shit. We know this not because he keeps saying it, but we know it in his weariness, his resignation, his desire to be shut of this case so he can just serve out his last seven days and retire to someplace far away. He's seen too much and he can't bear to see any more. He’s not especially nice or sympathetic, but that’s what years of facing the worst of humanity does to someone who thinks and feels deeply. It curdles them. Mills is every cop cliche - he's mouthy, raring to go, sees the cases in black and white terms, but it's not heroic, it's frustrating. You want to reach out and shake him when he reduces the killer to a "nutball" because Somerset is right - this is someone with purpose and method and dismissing things that could get you closer to him is seriously irresponsible. Somerset tackles the case by reviewing Milton, Dante, Chaucer, the ideas of sin and repentance. Mills stares blankly at the crime scene photos. For Somerset, it’s important to know the killer, and for Mills the whole story is the crime. As the movie wears on, there's movement - Somerset's energy is renewed and he takes an active interest, and Mills shows some humanity through the cop façade. Much of this occurs in a nice dinner scene between Somerset, Mills, and Mills’ wife Tracy. She humanizes them, connects them, and helps to provide an oasis from the horror. They take the first steps toward becoming actual partners without everything being resolved neatly. They still disagree with each other, they still rub each other the wrong way, but they’re united in their desire to put a stop to the person committing these horrible crimes.

And the killer is a nice subversion of the typical movie serial killer as well - in the end, he is revealed to be essentially a nonentity, a total mystery in everything but his motives. For as profoundly disturbed as his surroundings reveal him to be (yet another crime scene of sorts, lit mostly in reds), he is remarkably composed and understated. We are denied the history or back story endemic to the most clichéd film depictions of serial killers - everything about him is made manifest in the acts we have witnessed, the carnage - physical and psychological - he has caused. He gives it all to his single-minded act of devotion and leaves nothing for himself, or for us. And in the end, when everything opens up in light and space and bright blue sky, one final atrocity finishes the story - the long struggle up to the light, through squalor and glamor, from the basement apartment at the beginning to the rural purity at the end, all of it was exactly as was planned, as it all had been all along, as if it had been foreordained, as surely as Scripture.

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The Last Days On Mars: What Is This Quintessence Of Dust?

Science-fiction horror, like historical horror, is a tricky beast. You're already asking your audience to suspect disbelief on one axis (monsters exist), and at the same time you're asking them to suspend disbelief on a second (this is all occurring in a future yet to happen). If the viewer's too caught up by the implausibility of the setting, it makes it harder for them to invest in the story to a degree that they'll be scared when you want them to be. And, for that matter, I suspect that "aliens" occupy a different space in our head from "monsters" - they may be adjacent, but our expectations for how the protagonists interact with them may differ enough to make the experience a little confusing. The best way to approach it, then, is to try and minimize the degree to which the details establishing it as a science-fiction story make it feel fantastic (e.g., the truckers-in-space angle taken by Alien), and make your alien as indistinguishable from a monster as possible (e.g., the Lovecraftian nightmare at the center of The Thing).

(Speaking of, I re-watched the director's cut of Alien recently, and was watching some behind-the-scenes stuff, and hearing Ridley Scott describe it as his attempt to make "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in space" was illuminating. I don't know that he succeeded at doing that, but I suspect that taking that approach to the film IS a big part of what made it successful.)

So on these two counts, The Last Days On Mars does things right. I wouldn't put it in the same league as Alien or The Thing, not by a long shot. But it's a well-constructed, almost meditative film about, essentially, the failure of humanity - both as a species and as essential nature.

Sometime in the distant-enough future, mankind has sent people to Mars. Not once, but twice. The second mission is coming to a close after six months. They're on short time, with 19 hours and change remaining until the relief crew shows up and they get to board a ship home. They're trying to wrap things up and two crew members - a paramedic named Lane and a technician named Campbell - are driving a rover out to one of the research sites to pick up Kim, who is busy collecting core samples. They're in a hurry because there's a massive sandstorm coming and everyone needs to be back at base for a debriefing. Lane and Campbell are grousing because they know Kim is going to be a pain in the ass about it. Nobody seems to like Kim too much. Sure enough, she stalls for time and complains about not finding anything. She's abrasive, but there's a layer of frustration underneath it. Her research is coming up snake eyes - she's been on another planet for six months, just spinning her wheels.

Their arrival back at base sharpens this - there's a second scientist, Petrovic, who ducks out of the briefing by feeding the base commander a line about needing to repair a sensor. As it transpires, he's really trying to get back out to a dig site to collect some more samples - samples he intends to backdate, scooping Kim and securing for himself sole credit for discovering evidence of bacterial life on Mars. He is cheerfully unapologetic about this - he thinks it's funny - and we wonder just how well he's fooled everyone else. It's no wonder Kim is so angry. In fact, the whole situation is really dysfunctional - Brunel, the base commander, is largely ineffectual at keeping his crew in line, and there's a lot of hostility and free-floating resentment in the air, punctuated by frequent power outages and other equipment failure. The vehicles are falling apart. The base is falling apart. They are falling apart. They're less than 20 hours away from leaving, and not a moment too soon.

And then, as you might expect, something goes very wrong at the dig site. Petrovic has just discovered something really important in a core sample, but before he can communicate what it is, the entire ground around the sample site collapses into a sinkhole, taking Petrovic with it. Back at base, Kim - in open defiance of regulations - has gone through Petrovic's work and has figured out what he's up to. Before anything can be done about it, the technician who accompanied Petrovic calls in a mayday. After assessing the situation at the site, it's concluded that Petrovic must be dead because there's no way he could have survived the fall with his suit remaining uncompromised. Base doctor Dalby volunteers to stay behind while everyone else goes back to retrieve the gear needed to pull the body out of the sinkhole. Only when they return there's nobody there. No Dalby, and no Petrovic. The hole is empty, except that it's teeming with some sort of mold or fungus.

Back at base, there's a knock on the airlock door. Petrovic and Dalby - or, rather, what's left of them - have returned.

In the basics of its premise, The Last Days On Mars isn't much of a surprise - this is a story of contagion and transformation. To the extent that it succeeds, it does so by not overplaying things. Everything feels plausible, and it's helpful because we don't spend too much time on the science-fiction trappings as a result. Yes, they're on Mars, but it's never really played for spectacle - it's just there to highlight that this is a hostile environment, and there's a very low margin for error as a result. Early in the film, a massive sandstorm thunders across the landscape, but nobody is awed by it - it's just another hazard they've had to deal with for the last six months. It's helpful because being on another planet isn't really the point - the point is that everything is dangerous, and the sooner the specifics of why that is fade into the background, the sooner we can engage with what's happening in the present.

This sense of restraint is extended to the characterization as well. We don't get a lot of depth on all of these people - there's eight of them - but most of what we do learn we learn economically, through their actions and reactions, not exposition. You can infer a lot based on how people talk about other people, and how they respond to events. Dalby and Petrovic probably have a thing based on the vehemence of her reaction to Kim's criticism of him and to news of his assumed death, but it's never stated outright. Petrovic seems to be better liked by the crew in general than Kim, even though Kim isn't the one lying and falsifying records to snag credit for a major find, and you get the sense that Kim's the only one who sees through his bullshit and it's made her even angrier. Lane and Campbell seem to have a bit of history, but it doesn't seem to be romantic, Brunel seems tired, worn down by six months in this (literally and figuratively) toxic environment. Complex relationships are sketched in quickly and efficiently through acting choices. And just as our initial understanding of these people is established, much of it gets upended when the other shoe drops. We know just enough to be surprised, but it never feels like a convenient or plot-driven reversal. As one of the characters puts it early on before things go bad, crises are how you find out who people really are. The answers aren't always the ones we expect here, for good or ill.

Where this movie works especially well is in tension - when things go bad, they go bad quickly and then do not let up for the rest of the film. The pacing is relentless, but splitting the crew up early means that cuts can be made from frenetic action to quieter suspense and back again so that we aren't fatigued by non-stop running and yelling, but the sense of threat never dissipates. Everything is at a premium - air, power, fuel - and that scarcity makes every decision count, and every setback that much worse. The crew is extremely vulnerable - they're at the mercy of the environment and the threat that's overtaking them, and one injury can mean certain death one way or another. Every success comes at a cost, every failure pays a high price and you're just sympathetic enough for the most part that you want to see these people survive.

The heart of this movie, then, is how these people let each other (and themselves) down - physical frailty in the face of the environment is matched by psychological frailty. These people are selfish and weak, almost to a person - just as the base keeps breaking down, so do they. The question then becomes to what degree their failures as people are or are not liabilities in the face of this larger outside threat. Some of the least sympathetic people turn out to be the strongest, and some of the most sympathetic turn out to be the weakest at a tremendous price. One of the symptoms that plagues people infected by the alien bacterium is the gradual stripping away of humanity, of memories and experiences, and the characters wonder out loud if the people their teammates were aren't still trapped inside their bodies. Humanity fails itself, and so humanity recedes. In the end, everything - air, water, food, fuel, power, humanity - is a scarce resource, and decisions have to be made about what needs to be conserved and what can be expended. Crises strip away humanity and lay bare what lies beneath it.

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