Haute Tension: Final* Girl

It’s years in the rear-view mirror by now, but one of the through-lines for what got me writing about horror movies for fun was the New French Extremity. It’s not a label anyone really uses anymore, which is probably for the better, since - at least in terms of horror films - the whole thing sort of fizzled out quickly. To the extent it ever was a movement (which is debatable), it produced some excellent films, and some absolute turkeys.

Haute Tension (High Tension) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of New French Extremity, but I have to say, it’s much closer to the turkey end of the continuum. What we basically have is an effective, if workmanlike, slasher film that starts off strong before being marred by a slack third act and what has to be one of the most head-clutchingly ridiculous twists I’ve ever seen in a film.

We begin at what is presumably the end. There’s a woman sitting on an examination table in a hospital gown. Through the gap in the gown, we can see that her back is striped with deep cuts and abrasions, some severe enough to need stapling shut. There’s a camera recording her as she mumbles something about nothing keeping “us” apart again. Then we flash back to this same woman, running through some woods, covered in blood. Something bad has happened, but we have to go back to the beginning to understand it. Marie (the young woman from the introduction) and her friend Alex are college students, off to Alex’s family home in the country to study for exams, far away from the distractions of the city. No booze, no parties, no boys. Lots of winding country roads, and they pass by a truck driver parked on the shoulder in a rusty cargo van. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s got someone else in the truck with him, in the act of fellating him. But Marie and Alex have driven on by this point. And they’re long gone by the time the truck driver tosses what turns out to be a severed head out the window. It’s a striking moment, I’ll give it that.

Meanwhile, Marie and Alex arrive at Alex’s house, and after meeting her folks and her little brother, Marie repairs to her guest suite to get some rest. It’s late at night, it’s been a long day, and it’s been a long drive.

It’s late at night, and there’s a knock on the door.

So I’d say it sets its stall out early, but in a way that really effectively builds the tension of the title. We’re introduced to Marie and Alex, take some time to get to know them and their whole deal, and then this sudden, shocking segment with the truck driver gets dropped into the story like a time bomb before returning to these young women on the road. Something very bad is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen yet, and now that we know this lunatic is out there, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Marie and Alex and Alex’s family are all blissfully unaware of what’s headed straight for them. In some ways, it reminds me of how the original Halloween teased Michael Myers through the better part of the film, always just slightly out of frame or out of focus or partially hidden behind scenery. The longer he’s out there, the worse it gets.

And I’ll say this, when this film works, its stock in trade is definitely tension. Once night falls, it doesn’t really take long for things to pop off. And once they do. they don’t really let up. We don’t really know anything about any of these people apart from Maria and Alex both being sort of party girls and Alex’s family seeming nice enough. But at least for the first couple of acts, sheer momentum gets the film over in the absence of much emotional investment in any of the characters. Once the action starts, it doesn’t really slow down. It’s a violent film (as slashers often are), but the violent segments are a mixture of off-camera restraint and almost confrontationally detailed. We don’t always see what’s happening, but what we do see is more than enough. There’s a lot of blood in this movie, spattering and pooling and spraying, and a lot of people in visible distress, and if it doesn’t always linger on the violence it does linger on their suffering and pain. It’s a grubby film as well – a lot of it is shot in sort of a sickly yellow that makes everything look sort of stained or used, at least outside of the farmhouse setting, and the killer is oily, sweaty, and grimy in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his nails, as bestial as his introduction would have you think. He doesn’t talk much, mostly just grunts as he brutalizes everything in his path. Crisp editing helps to keep the action moving, Marie trying to avoid this sudden menace in the confines of a fairly cozy farmhouse, so for the first couple of acts, it’s a film in almost constant motion. But that’s the first couple of acts. The third is where everything falls apart.

First, the film, despite being a French production, is dubbed into English, and although it isn’t too distracting at first (there is the odd verbosity you get when you’re trying to fit dialogue in one language to the speech patterns of another), as the film goes on more and more of the dialogue is in French and subtitled in English, and any attempt to make dubbed dialogue fit the actors’ speech goes right out the window.. It doesn’t seem like a stylistic choice, as much as someone just stopped doing their job. Why it wasn’t all in French and subtitled from the get-go is a mystery. I don’t know that it would have saved the film, but it would have seemed like less of a rush job. And for all of the tension of the beginning of the film, once the action moves away from the farmhouse the pace grows looser and looser until we’re left with a not-especially-exciting “chase scene” that consists of two cars driving at a sensible speed through the woods, capped by increasingly ludicrous levels of violence - cartoonish in a way that earlier moments weren’t - and false endings. It goes from claustrophobic and…well, tense…to something much more bland and formulaic.

But the worst of it has to be a reveal in the third act that makes very little sense in term of literally everything that came before. I don’t mind twists, for the most part. But a good twist relies on the film playing fair with the audience up to the moment it’s revealed, so that rewatching it (or even getting the flashback that spells it all out) gives you the opportunity to put the pieces together yourself, to see how the truth was staring at you the whole time. Clever use of misdirection and new context goes a long way, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s not just that there’s no opportunity to figure it out, or even anything we could observe that might suggest that not everything is as it seems. We actually see things throughout the film that actively contradict it. You can use clever staging of shots to hide things in plain sight, but this film doesn’t bother. It just…I guess for lack of a better term, it just straight-up lies about everything we’ve just seen, for no apparent reason. It adds nothing to the film except sort of a cheap “gotcha” moment. The end result is the feeling that the filmmakers had about an hour’s worth of a decently suspenseful if not especially substantive movie and realized they needed to come up with another thirty minutes, so they just sort of winged it. And it shows. In the sloppy dubbing, in a climax that wanders aimlessly, in a last-minute revelation that makes absolutely no sense, it fucking shows.

This is a film that gets mentioned as one of the biggest of the New French Extremity (for what little that’s worth), but it’s easily one of its biggest disappointments. It doesn’t have Martyrs’ well-crafted story, or Inside’s claustrophobic, confrontational tone. It’s closer to something like Frontier(s), with its reliance on blood and screaming and active contempt for storytelling. I was spoiled for the big twist going in (part of why I’ve taken so long to write about it) and I was still surprised at how half-assed it was. The more I think about this film, the angrier I get.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Deep Fear: Not As Deep As It Thinks

Trying to make a movie - any kind, really - that is “about” something is, in my opinion, generally a losing proposition. Mostly because all films are about something insofar as they’re a product of a particular time and place in a particular culture, rely on a particular level of technology (which feeds into an aesthetic), as well as the experiences and worldviews of the director and cast in terms of the choices they make. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, thematic narrative is an emergent property of the filmmaking process. So when someone consciously decides that they’re going to make a film that addresses a specific theme or issue, they run the risk of making it didactic, hectoring, and obvious. Not always, but usually the ones that work the best in my experience address whatever it is in terms of someone’s experience, through the circumstances of their life. There’s a difference between telling a story that leads to the viewer saying “that’s fucked up” and making your entire film 90 minutes of you telling the audience “well, actually, this is fucked up.” It really does come back to “show, don’t tell” most of the time. 

And this is one of the problems with Deep Fear, though not the only one. It’s only fitfully effective, lacks structure, and in its attempts to say something about a larger issue, can’t quite overcome its clichés. 

It doesn’t get off to a promising start, with one of those prologues that tells us what we already know, that there’s something bad down in the tunnels below Paris. A graffiti artist is listening to music on a cassette Walkman circa 1989, but it just happens that he can fast-forward exactly to the start of the next song. As someone who actually used that technology, that is…not really a thing. Right off the bat, it seems like plausibility is not going to be a concern. Soon enough, there are strange noises coming from the end of a tunnel, artist gets dragged off. 

Fast-forward about four years or so, and three friends are sitting in a bar, shooting the shit over drinks. Henry is celebrating his last weekend as a civilian before reporting for military service. Max and Sonia are there for moral support. Well, Sonia does nip off to the restroom to meet an acquaintance who sells her a little baggie of something to keep the party going and clues her in to something fun he’s going to be doing tomorrow night if she and her friends want in .And this is how Henry, Max, and Sonia meet up with Sonia’s friend Ramy for a night of exploration. See, Ramy knows a way into the Paris catacombs, the ancient tunnel system running under the span of the city, once used for the disposal of the dead, now an enormous labyrinth ripe for exploration and the sort of things you do away from the prying eyes of the law. 

There are all kinds of things down there.

Apart from the on-the-nose prologue, it takes awhile to set things up, spending a lot of time with the characters Which is fine, but it doesn’t do much to develop the characters themselves. Henry is kind of a bro, Max is a dorky hypochondriac (we know he’s a dork because he wears glasses), and Sonia is…not white. That’s kind of it. So we’re given the opportunity to learn about them, but there’s nothing to learn. There’s a nightmare sequence that underlines Sonia’s otherness in a way that feels shoehorned in, and kind of unnecessary given what happens later. Ramy is their guide, and otherwise kind of a nonentity. There are a few other characters, but they’re even less than that. None of them are especially obnoxious, but nor is there enough to really feel much of a connection to them either. 

Once they get down into catacombs, things pick up a bit with the blind claustrophobia of the setting. There are lots of tight squeezes, uncharted areas, and unstable tunnels, and the precariousness is pretty well-realized. It’s by no means of the same caliber as The Descent, but it’s reminiscent, especially in terms of needing to manage your way through increasingly smaller spaces and worrying about collapses, not knowing if there’s another exit somewhere. There’s good potential here, and a run-in with some neo-Nazi skinheads sets up the opportunity for real tension (as well as making the earlier nightmare sequence less necessary than it already was), but though it provides the impetus for everything that happens in the third act, it’s sort of forgotten almost immediately until it becomes relevant again, but when it does, it’s not in any meaningful way. It’s a very fitful film in this way - it has promise that goes undeveloped, tension that dissipates when its cause is sort of abandoned for the next thing, and the third act starts by developing something interesting before discarding it for a pretty stock-standard “people get picked off one by one by implacable monster” thing. The nature of the monster, without spoiling it here (don’t even read the IMDB entry for this one, really, the brief blurb gives too much away), isn’t especially imaginative either. It’s something we’ve seen before, and ultimately it doesn’t amount to much beyond people getting fed into a metaphorical meat grinder, with an ending that makes a fairly on-the-nose statement about the immigrant experience in France. 

It's interesting to think about alongside As Above, So Below, though - that film used the premise better but had an utterly ridiculous protagonist. This film had the better protagonists (or at least more believable as people) but didn’t use the premise all that well. There’s also a touch of Creep (the somewhat icky 2004 one) in the idea of the ghosts of war continuing to lurk under the surface of the cities wounded by it, and though it isn’t as invested in humiliating its protagonists as that film, it’s not really doing anything with the idea either. It sort of feels like the filmmakers had a generically solid idea for a monster movie set in the Paris catacombs, but decided it needed to “mean something” and so they made character and narrative choices that amount to “treating people badly because they’re different from you is bad.” Which isn’t exactly earth-shaking as revelations go. Fairly shallow for a film set so far below ground.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

The Deep House: Keen Insight Into The Obvious

Imagination is a powerful thing, and there’s a school of thought that says that nothing you put up on a screen can be as frightening as what the audience imagines is happening. Suggestion’s a powerful tool, understatement is a powerful tool, inference is a powerful tool. On the other hand, it’s possible to hint and tease too much and never pay things off. In the words of Stephen King, “sometimes you have to put on the mask and go ooga-booga.” And scary movies can live or die on this. You can set up a ton of atmosphere and dread through suggestion and then the instant you reveal whatever it is, its shortcomings undo all the goodwill you’ve built up. Monster movies are especially vulnerable to this, since it’s so hard to do a good, convincing monster. But for that matter, a movie like Skinamarink, in all of its opacity and unwillingness to really go ooga-booga, plays a dangerous game. I think it succeeded, but it’s certainly a polarizing film and I think that’s part of the reason why. It relies almost entirely on inference.

The Deep House definitely has the opposite problem. It’s a haunted-house story with a mostly-effective new spin on things, but a lot of what it does well is undone by an irritating inability to trust its audience.

We open on blocky, low-res camera footage of two people hiking through a forest toward a large abandoned building somewhere in Ukraine. They’re Ben and Tina, a couple of urban explorers who run a YouTube channel where they document all of the abandoned places they visit. They met in grad school, Ben’s from England, and Tina’s the daughter of French immigrants who landed in Illinois. The YouTube channel was Ben’s idea. On the one hand, it’s because he likes the idea of getting out there and seeing the histories of forgotten places for himself, instead of through the dry expanse of academia. But on the other, he really wants to go viral. He wants millions of views. He wants to be Internet famous, whether he admits it to himself or not. Tina doesn’t really share his passion either for urban exploration or Internet fame. She’s come to enjoy the exploration part, but she mostly tolerates it, for his sake. So she gamely traipses through the abandoned ruins of a hospital in Eastern Europe while Ben jump-scares her for clicks.

The hospital ends up being sort of a bust, but they’ve got something big planned - Ben’s gotten a line on a lake in France that’s isolated and out of the way and has the ruins of an entire village on the lake bed. Never mind abandoned hospitals and factories and whatnot. This is something nobody’s ever explored before, totally undiscovered. So they secure a bunch of diving gear, an underwater camera drone, and plane tickets to France. Tina practices holding her breath underwater.

And when they finally get to this little village in France near where the lake is supposed to be, they find instead a thriving tourist spot, lots of families out on the lake swimming, boating, just having a day by the water. Not at all undiscovered. Tina relaxes a little, suggests they just play tourist for a bit, drink some wine, chill out. Ben sulks. This isn’t how you go viral. But he warms to the idea that they’ll just have a nice little vacation…until a local tells him about a remote branch of the lake deep in the woods, off any road or trail.

One with a single, perfectly preserved house at the bottom.

It is not spoiling anything to say that the house is more than it appears to be, after all, we came here for a horror movie. And yes, it’s basically a haunted-house story, but setting everything underwater does add something to what could have been, on dry land, a pretty stock haunted-house story. This kind of story thrives on atmosphere, and setting the whole thing underwater (and it was shot practically, no cheap CG effects here) means there’s a gloom and murk to it that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The light is fitful, and floating, drifting objects help give it a feeling that’s simultaneously otherworldly and kind of oppressive. There’s also a ticking-clock urgency to it, since they’re diving deep. They have a limited amount of air and will need time to decompress on their way back to the surface. Combined with making their way through what ends up being a sprawling, fairly labyrinthine house that only has one way in or out, and there’s a tight simmering tension to the whole thing.

There’s also a definite, though lower-key, tension to the dynamic between the protagonists. Ben’s a bit unlikable, not especially respectful of Tina’s feelings and overly focused on making his channel a hit. It’s not to the point of obsession or unrealistic, he just comes across as shallow and opportunistic enough that he’s kind of a dick and he’ll probably get them in trouble. Tina cares about him, but you get the sense that she puts up with a lot and has for some time. She wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t make it easy. This isn’t dysfunction on the level of Dani and Christian from Midsommar by any means, but there’s a definite tetchiness that comes up. It’s really played out in asides and sidelong looks and in the way she slips back into French when she says something she doesn’t want Ben to be aware of. It’s easy to infer.

But that’s really the biggest problem with this film - it does do inference and environmental storytelling pretty well, but it’s also unwilling to rely on that to carry the story. It cannot let what we see speak for itself. Once they dive and begin exploring the house, the amount they talk to each other strains credulity, given how limited their air supply is. And this is only made worse by the fact that most of what they’re saying is just describing things both we and they can see for themselves. As they’re swimming through especially murky water, Ben will say “the water’s murky here.” Like, no shit. “There’s a door here.” Yes, we can see that. So can you, so can Tina. So can anyone looking at your footage. It’s almost like the filmmakers didn’t think we could understand what was going on right in front of our faces, so they had to have the characters tell us what we were seeing, and for most of the film it’s pretty grating and works very much against its strengths.

And yes, the alternative would be a film largely devoid of dialogue, but I really do think it could have done with more silence. And it’s not like it would have been an entirely silent film. But it feels like that person who just talks incessantly because they’re uncomfortable with silence. And in the final act it gets worse, with a denouement that just spells out exactly what’s happened in this house, and it’s to the story’s detriment. The important parts have already been figured out by an attentive viewer, and the details they fill in don’t really add anything. It gives us just enough to imagine the worst, and then shows it to us anyway, in case we didn’t get it the first time.

It all serves to mar a film with some really good atmosphere, a nice sense of mounting dread as further exploration of the house reveals an increasingly discomfiting history (spelled out nicely through detail and environmental storytelling in ways that don’t require the protagonists to tell us what we’re seeing even though they do anyway), and a suitably bleak ending.  I don’t know what it is about horror that makes so many filmmakers feel like they have to spoon-feed their audience, but fuck it gets tiresome.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Sorgoi Prakov: The Atrocity Exhibition

So last week I had a skillfully executed mockumentary that never reached the level of intensity that it could have, and I guess by way of contrast, this week I ended up watching a found-footage film that makes a number of mistakes and probably ends up being a little too intense for its own good. I swear I didn’t plan it that way.

Well, that might be a little too glib of a comparison to make - Sorgoi Prakov isn’t exactly found-footage (well, at least it’s framed in a way that beggars belief on that front), but it’s definitely a first-person perspective on one man’s spiral toward rock bottom and whatever lies beyond that. It has its moments though, even if it suffers from poor narrative and pacing choices.

We open cold on what purports to be footage that is labeled property of French law enforcement. It’s footage of a filthy, near-feral man (who for some reason has a video camera strapped to his head) assaulting a family in their home. This cuts to a title card explaining that this is the footage shot by one Sorgoi Prakov, documenting his “descent into darkness.” I really hate it when found-footage films do this. Don’t tell us up front that something bad is going to happen, just let the damn story play out in a way that we aren’t braced to expect. And if that wasn’t annoying enough, that title card is followed by opening credits that are intended to be those of the fictional producers of a documentary titled “My European Dream.” And then if that wasn’t enough, that title card morphs into a scary version (skulls and all) with the title “My European Nightmare.” It’s a jarring combination of artifice and verisimilitude, and it does nothing to help the movie.

With that particular grab-bag of filmic cliches out of the way, we are introduced to Sorgoi Prakov. He’s from a small (fictional) Eastern European country, where he works as a cameraman for the state television service. He’s come to Paris as the starting point for a journey that will see him visiting every capital in Western Europe (on a route shaped like a giant heart), as he documents his travels in search of the “European Dream.” Hence the title. It is strictly a one-man operation - he has two small video cameras, one directional microphone, and a laptop for editing and uploading his video to a streaming video site. One camera and the mic are mounted on a rig that he wears on his head, the camera on one side of his head and the microphone on the other. He has the other camera attached to a Steadicam rig that he also wears, so he can capture footage of what he sees as well as footage of him seeing it. It’s almost tempting to call it a parody of the ridiculous lengths some found-footage films go to in order to try and rationalize having footage that is too neat and tidy to come from a hand-held camera, but here it works to make Sorgoi stand out like a sore thumb. He looks more than a little ridiculous as he walks the streets of Paris, occasionally conducting man-on-the-street interviews.

So we have someone from a small Eastern European country come to the big city to make a documentary. We have seen this before, and though it would be reductive to call this “Borat if it were a horror film,” there is definitely a bit of that flavor to it. Sorgoi is presented very much as a naif, a fool, a man entirely out of his depth in Paris. He's come here to make a documentary about the "European dream," but it becomes apparent very quickly that he doesn't have much of a plan. Mostly he makes attempts to visit tourist destinations and gets waylaid almost immediately by the more predatory side of Paris' nightlife. Like any big city, it's going to eat up people who aren't looking out for themselves.

And that's exactly what happens. Sorgoi gets too drunk, gets too high, and loses his credit card. His producers aren't returning his calls. And so after maybe two days in Paris, he’s already down to the cash in his wallet.

Like I said, he didn’t have much of a plan.

From there, it's just a matter of time before the money runs out and his circumstances become increasingly and inexorably more desperate. He's a long way from home, doesn't know the language, doesn't know the culture, doesn't know the city, he's utterly at the mercy of others and it's in this that the film is at its most effective. There are multiple points where it's clear to the viewer that things are about to go very badly, while Sorgoi himself seems blithely unaware. He’s an obvious foreigner roaming the streets of Paris with a bunch of electronics strapped to him like some kind of performance artist or clown. His situation is precarious to begin with, and every new setback, every bad decision, every time circumstances don't break his way, it gets even worse. There's a steadily mounting dread there, a question of how much worse it's going to get before it's all over.

The answer is much, much worse. Sorgoi is a largely sympathetic (if not pathetic) figure at first, and his footage rapidly devolves into a series of victimizations, self-destructive behavior, and evidence of his declining fortunes and increasing debasement. And for the first half or so of the film, it works really well - we’re watching an apparently well-intentioned (if not especially well-prepared) man on a slide toward rock bottom. After a couple of attempted muggings and one delirious night out, full of too much vodka and too many pills, Sorgoi’s composure begins to falter as he realizes how quickly he’s running out of options. It’s hard to watch because it’s a situation that isn’t entirely outside of what we can imagine. There are no monsters here, just a man stranded far from home with no way to get back and nowhere to sleep. His attempts to put a brave face on all of it just makes it that much harder, though he isn’t by any means perfect - he’s maybe a bit of a pig, and he does stupid, foolish things when he’s drunk, which becomes more and more frequent the worse things become. I don’t know that you can say anyone deserves what’s happening to him, but you can also see why it’s happening to him.

And then, at what seems to be the tipping point, when you think he's hit absolute rock bottom, there is the suggestion (deftly underplayed, I think) that maybe he wasn't that stable to begin with. That maybe his trip to Paris wasn't for the purposes of an officially sanctioned documentary. And what follows is someone who plunges completely into the abyss, someone who finds rock bottom and keeps digging. In some ways it's communicated effectively, with the footage we're watching become increasingly more fragmented, as a reflection of his rapidly disintegrating mental state, ultimately breaking down into frequent blackouts, electronic buzzing, and a signal so glitchy that it dissolves into noise. In that sense it's effective, but the back half of the movie exchanges a slow, desperate decline for a constant barrage of grotesquery that eventually becomes numbing. Individual sequences are striking in isolation, but there's just so much of it and it gets so horrible, and Sorgoi is so visibly losing what humanity he has left that it's harder to care than it is in the beginning, when, despite his naivete and ineptitude and occasional boorishness, he was still recognizable as a person caught in increasingly worsening circumstances. His transformation into something more feral feels believable in relation to who he was before, it isn't jarring, but the way it plays out threatens to turn the character into a more generically monstrous figure. We're just sort of left to watch things get worse and worse and worse, and it’s so relentless and there’s so little breathing room, so few reminders of Sorgoi’s humanity, that it's hard to feel much about it one way or the other.

It's not that there’s much wrong with the way it develops, and fortunately for every deeply unpleasant thing we're forced to watch, there are two even more unpleasant things left to suggestion, but there’s just so much of it that it kind of loses any meaning. There isn't enough connection between the Sorgoi we knew and what he's become, either, so apart from watching the obvious physical and mental decline of this character, we're left with kind of a generic maniac, and though what that maniac gets up to is extremely upsetting, there isn't the horror we'd feel at what this man has become, because there's nothing left of him at the end.

And maybe that's kind of the point, but as it is, it just sort of becomes a series of atrocities that go on and on until they stop. So yeah, it’s sort of like Borat, but Borat by way of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. And if that seems like kind of a queasy combination, well...yep.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Some Thoughts About Cheap Shock

(Note: I get pretty spoilery about the films Martyrs and Frontiere(s) in this post, and if you haven't yet seen Martyrs, close this tab immediately and go watch it first.)

So while I'm assembling part 2 of my survey of the entire extant Hellraiser franchise (those posts take longer because they're, like, three times as long as a regular one), I'm also trying to keep an eye on new stuff coming out, which lead me to a trailer for a Turkish film called Baskin (which looks really promising). That film is not the point of this short post as much as the comparisons it garnered were. So it's getting compared to Martyrs and the New French Extremity in general. Which definitely gets it a slot on my to-check-out list.

But it also got me thinking that within the canon of the New French Extremity (which, let's face it, sort of ended up fizzling out, at least as horror went), there's a great opportunity to think about the use of graphic imagery by examining two films - Martyrs, and Frontiere(s). The first is, I think, easily one of the best horror films of the 21st century so far, and the second is, I think, a pretty big disappointment. Both deal in graphic violence and helpless people experiencing prolonged suffering in close detail. And, as a result, both have been criticized as trafficking in cheap shocks, as is often the case when a filmmaker - especially a genre filmmaker - uses graphic imagery. It's dismissed as an attempt at cheap heat, getting attention by being outrageous instead of doing something substantive. 

And so here's the thing - by comparing these two films, I think we can usefully distinguish between graphic violence as a substitute for good storytelling, and graphic violence as a tool for good storytelling.

Martyrs is, at its heart, a movie strongly concerned with ideas of suffering, transcendence, and sacrifice. Lucie begins the film escaping from unseen tormentors, at whose hands she suffered. As it transpires, her tormentors were using suffering as a tool to hasten transcendence, to follow the examples of history's martyrs to try and find out what lies beyond death. Martyrs sacrifice themselves for a higher purpose, and in their suffering they are offered a glimpse of the divine. And when Lucie catches up to her tormentors, we see that she continues to suffer, haunted by the specter of a woman she failed to free before she fled. As martyrs do, she mortifies her own flesh in penance for her sin. And when Lucie's tormentors catch up to her, Anna steps in and takes her place - Anna sacrifices herself, and we are walked through the stages of Anna's martyrdom - the beatings, the starvation, the flaying - on her way to transcendence. She suffers in Lucie's place, she martyrs herself, and she sees what lies beyond (or perhaps not - her final words, whatever they are, might very well have been a lie intended to deny the people who tortured her any satisfaction). All of this - Lucie's inner torment, her revenge, and Anna's martyrdom - is presented graphically, yes, but it is at every point contextualized. We see this because we need to see this - we need to see the cost exacted on Lucie, on Anna, just as audiences for the medieval passion plays of which Martyrs feels like a modernization needed to see the ugly details of Christ's sacrifice, to truly know what the cost was. How do you tell a story about martyrdom without knowing what the martyr endured? Here, then, the graphic violence was a tool for good storytelling, one with textual and metatextual justification.

By contrast, Frontiere(s) is largely a series of bloody scenes attached loosely by a common set of characters. It's about a group of criminals (why their criminality is important isn't really articulated beyond "we have to get out of Paris, like, now," nor are the actual riots they were escaping) who flee a rioting city for an isolated country inn, apparently run not by cannibals, not by neo-Nazis, but by neo-Nazi cannibals. I pondered the ridiculousness of this in my original post, and time hasn't really given me any additional insight beyond "well, if one of these two things is bad, then both together must be really bad." It's like the narrative equivalent of an amplifier that goes to eleven. Once they all get to the inn, they're captured and tortured and/or killed for food. It's mostly just moving characters from point to point, where different bloody set pieces occur, and if there's a thematic reading to be had, I didn't really see it. I suppose it suggests notions of racial superiority leading to a level of dehumanization that literally makes other people into cattle, maybe you could make an argument for widening class divides that sees a poor rural class resorting to cannibalism to survive - to literally consume city dwellers whose excesses are figuratively consuming them - but these are not things clearly articulated in the film. I am mostly just looking at the elements - racial purity, a rural setting with urban characters, and cannibalism - and thinking of some things that might emerge. The violence in Frontiere(s) signifies nothing other than "this is what happens when helpless people run into neo-Nazi cannibals." There's a lot of blood, and a lot of screaming (which seems to be the director's thing) but there isn't really much of a "why" to it beyond "because they were there, and because this is what bad people do." The antagonists are caricatured because their extremity justifies the extremity of their actions, and the extremity of their actions exists free of context. All of the blood and pain and people hung on hooks, butchered, are there because they are. They are spectacle. They are the cheap shock for which even films like Martyrs are criticized. 

So I think it's a useful heuristic - does the violence in a film illustrate, elaborate upon, or articulate something about the characters or the human condition? Or are the characters designed and arranged in such a way as to rationalize instances of violence? Anna and Lucie's relationship, their history, they tell a story before a single drop of blood is shed, but the four young criminals of Frontiere(s) are only people to the extent that it gets them to the inn for the bloodshed to occur.

Does the violence help tell a story, or is the story a framework for violence? I think there's a difference, and mistaking the former for the latter is a problem in how people read horror film.

The Divide: I Don’t Know What We’re Yelling About

I don’t see the point of film criticism (if I can be so presumptuous as to call what I do criticism) as being to say “that was good” or “that sucked.” It’s dull and reductive and heaven knows there’s enough of that kind surrounding horror movies. I mean, for fuck’s sake, when people write straight-faced reviews that base their opinion of a film on the quality of the “kills” or the gore or the amount of nudity, it’s, well, depressing. But there certainly is an evaluative component to it, a tendency to a broader valenced judgment. I like some movies and dislike others, I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I usually come away from a film with a sense of “I like it” or “I don’t like it” predicated on how well it succeeds at some things or fails at others. Sometimes I’ll be indifferent, but not often. I can count the number of movies I’ve watched and thought “I have nothing to say about this” since I started doing this thing on one hand.

But it’s rare that I’ve watched a movie that I generally disliked, but which managed to stick with me after I watched it. So, I have a lot of things I don’t like about The Divide, and I cannot say in all honesty that it’s all that good, but there are some things it did which have haunted me, so I can’t just dismiss it out of hand. I’m sort of wrestling with it.

We open close on a woman’s eyes, in which an inferno is reflected. A single tear rolls down her cheek, and the shot reverses to show a city ending in nuclear fire. The apocalypse has come, and the residents of a single apartment building are trying to flee the destruction. They head for the basement, where eight manage to find shelter along with the building’s cantankerous superintendent.

It becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that the super doesn’t really want them down there. He’d been preparing the basement for just such an eventuality - an ad hoc survival shelter to wait out a nuclear strike. And now he has eight uninvited guests. They’re a collection of types - a motley crew in the studied way afforded by most disaster movies. You’ve got Eva, who has “Final Girl” written all over her, her boyfriend Sam and their neighbor Adrien, who are cut cleanly from the cloth of “well-meaning, but ineffectual”, Marilyn, who is a Mom, and her daughter Wendi, who is a Little Kid. There’s Delvin, who is the stern, level-headed authority figure, and Josh and Bobby, who are pretty much unreconstructed scumbags from the moment they’re on screen. And then there’s the super, Mickey, who is irascible and paranoid and kind of xenophobic. 

And this is the first problem with the movie - with the exception of Mickey, who is probably the most caricatured to start but is the only one with anything resembling any sort of personal history throughout - every one of these people is exactly what they appear to be, and they don’t so much change as disintegrate over the course of the film. They’re the sum of their traits and nothing more. The entire film is essentially one long, slow descent away from humanity, so we’re sort of handed a bunch of archetypes only to watch them become even less than what they were to start.

It’s a long, slow, descent, and a loud one, too. It starts off at a pitch of shrill panic and then sort of stays there. Most of the film basically has two volume settings, loud and louder. Not all of it, to be fair, but the quiet moments don't seem to be placed with regard to anything like mood or pace or rhythm. Sometimes it's quiet and...most of the time it isn't. Things happen, except when they don’t. Characters rarely communicate in anything other than shouting and cursing and screaming, and it’s grating. If you’re doing to try and tell the story of a group of people trapped together and descending into madness, you need some sort of trajectory, and if characterization isn’t going to provide it, then the mood should. It’s hard to ramp up tension when everything’s already dialed in tight. Crescendos can’t start at maximum volume.

Its tone-deafness is matched by a lack of narrative direction. It's not so much the story of society breaking down as it is the story of a bunch of hastily-assembled pieces of society refusing to cohere, the same way you can't just construct a vase by stacking shards of pottery on top of each other. These are not people who get along to begin with, so we aren't really seeing anything valuable lost, and there's nothing surprising or revealing about the events as they transpire. The people you think are going to be assholes turn out to be assholes, the people you think are going to be weak turn out to be weak. The only question is how long does it take them to lose their humanity (not long at all) and how far do they fall (pretty fucking far). There's no tension to speak of, it's just two hours of wallowing in misery and then it ends on the only possible note it can, and guess what, it's not a positive one. That said, in the final act, as everything falls apart, it goes to some really interesting places to depict the inhabitants’ slide into depravity. The grimy industrial setting does some of the heavy lifting here, the makeshift nature of their resources does too, as does the flickering, yellowed lighting, and the rest falls to some unconventional, almost absurd imagery that give the last half-hour or so a fevered, claustrophobic feeling that really communicates a descent into madness. Bad shit comes bubbling up out of people’s brains as they become less and less human, and it makes you feel queasy and uncomfortable. I’ve still got images from the end of the movie stuck in my head almost a week later, and that doesn’t happen very often. To its credit, it makes the utterly bleak ending - a panorama of a world completely ruined - almost refreshing. The air is toxic with radioactive dust, and it’s still fresher than what you’ve been breathing for the majority of the movie. It’s not a small accomplishment.

In addition, the film does tease certain things beyond the obvious - what's happening on the outside suggests a larger mystery that's never really explored, and the early signs of radiation sickness among the characters suggest an even more miserable end than what we got somehow, but it’s a problem that these things are never really foregrounded. No, all of the damage here is due to human venality, weakness, and greed. At its most surreally grotesque, it does afford an experience that can come close to being compelling, but stacked against the film’s other shortcomings they end up being just flashes, fleeting moments buried in the cinematic equivalent of a 16-year-old shouting "EVERYTHING SUCKS!" for two hours straight.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Amazon Instant Video

Unavailable from Netflix Instant (Available on DVD)

Le Village Des Ombres: The Less-Than-Shocking Truth

I go on and on and on a lot about the need for coherence and clarity in storytelling, and a lot of my complaints lately over the last couple of months have been centered on movies that seem to cobble together set-pieces or imagery intended to frighten without really providing a reason for why they're there or why they happen the way they do, as if just assembling a bunch of scary stuff automatically makes something a horror movie and justifies its existence.

(Of course, when these movies do decent enough business to justify their existence to the people who bankrolled it, well, that's sort of depressing to me. Not so much from the money end - money wants more money and makes decisions that it thinks will bring it more money. Business is a necessary evil of art if you want that art to have an audience or make a living for the artist. No, what bums me out is that there's enough of an audience with low enough standards for those movies to do the business they do. "You'll like it if you're a fan of that sort of thing" is some bullshit.)

But I'm not here to spend the entire post on an exhortation to higher standards. I'm not even here to talk about the need for more coherent horror movies, because Le Village Des Ombres (The Village of Shadows) is, much to its credit, clear and coherent in the story it's trying to tell. Unfortunately, it also serves as a lesson in the insufficiency of a clear story - without intensity, without surprise, even the most elegant storytelling falls flat.

The film opens on a flashback to World War II, and a group of Nazi soldiers is stuck in a house in a small French village and some weird shit is going on. It's hard to tell what's happening, but some of the soldiers have died, and there's some mysterious force behind a door, and there's some shooting, and then all of the soldiers are dead. It's not the most promising opening, in my opinion, because as a flashback all it tells us is that something bad happened in this village a long time ago, and since this is nominally a horror movie titled The Village of Shadows, that's sort of a given. Flashbacks work best when they offer information that seems like it communicates one thing only to mean something else entirely in context, or to pique interest by showing us something that doesn't quite make sense, and is revealed gradually. This flashback doesn't do either. It says "a bad thing happened a long time ago" which, no shit. 

So World War II, dead Nazis, something spooky. Flash forward 60 years or so to two carloads of young adults on a road trip (I am starting to get sick of people on a road trip) to a summer home in a small French village. Dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN! (Yeah, that seems a little cheap, but that's sort of what the music in this movie does - it's almost entirely ominous, minor-key strings slathered over every fucking scene, sometimes to the point of being distracting.) There's, like, nine people in the two cars, and we don't really get a strong sense of who all of them are. There's bookish Mathias, Lucas, to whose family home they are traveling, Hugo, his girlfriend Marion, Marion's sister Emma, headstrong David, David's spooky girlfriend Lila, and Bastien and Juliette, whose chief defining characteristic seems to be that they're the goofy young horny couple. By and large, they're just sort of there in the beginning. 

It's not a promising start, but after a little back-and-forth by the protagonists (and some hilariously awful funk/rap by…Bastien, I think), things start getting pleasingly weird. The car driven by Hugo pulls ahead of the car driven by David, even though Hugo doesn't know where they're going, and then mere minutes later, David has to bring his car to a screeching halt when he almost runs into Hugo's car, sitting deserted at the side of the road, doors hanging open. It's nicely disorienting because we don't see what happens to the people in Hugo's car and it's too short a time since they passed for everything to be so deserted. Needless to say, David, Emma, Lucas, Mathias, and Lila get out and try to track their missing friends, their search leading them to the village of Ruiflec - the very village they were trying to reach to begin with. 

Naturally, it's the village from the flashback.

After coming on a little too strong in the beginning, the movie settles into a more self-assured groove with the arrival of our protagonists in the titular village. It becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that something is not right in this place - the village is deserted, and there are cryptic drawings scattered everywhere. It occurs to the protagonists that none of them really know Lucas all that well, and it was his idea to come here. The discovery of Marion - one of the passengers in the other car - makes things even more confusing, as she talks like they've been there for hours when they just found her minutes after entering the village. Time and space, they discover, are out of joint here - leaving the village proves to be impossible as paths lead back to their beginning, ways out return them to the house. The cryptic drawings become prophetic, and people begin disappearing one by one. Something is stalking them. All of this is intercut with scenes of Emma, elsewhere, getting some unspecified bad news, and one side of a conversation with an unknown man in a car. It's not clear if these cutaways are related or where they occur in time, but restraint makes them less confusing and more curious - their reveals are paced well enough to deepen the mystery surrounding these people, rather than distracting from it.

In fact, one of the biggest strengths of Le Village Des Ombres is its pacing. It's not a sudden-scares kind of movie. It gradually drip-feeds information to the audience - weird occurrences, flashbacks, misdirection - at a rate fast enough to keep us guessing, but slowly enough that we spend a long time wondering what it all means. Why can't they leave? Why do the drawings depict events that happened seconds before the drawing was discovered? What happened between Emma & Marion? Who is the dude in the car? What's with the weird ledger in the town hall? Why is the library filled with copies of a single book? Everything coheres in the end, but it takes its sweet time getting there, answers inevitably leading to more questions until the very end. That's a good thing. 

All of this makes the film's shortcomings stand out in stark relief. This is a really dark movie (if you couldn't guess from the title). Not thematically dark, actually, cinematographically dark, and this makes it a little difficult to really set up as much of a mood as it could. Being dark isn't the same thing as being spooky, and the different flashbacks (of which there are more than a few, all executed more deftly and effectively than the opening) utilize different cinematographic approaches to create different moods. This suggests that they could have handled the present-day stuff in a defter manner as well. Several key moments feel muddled and confused, simply because it's hard to see what's actually happening.

These same undermining tendencies extend to the narrative as well. Although the overarching mystery of the story is kept going for a good long while, and doesn't leave any loose ends, some of the reveals along the way feel like they should have had more impact or have been more startling than they were. That the film takes its time is good and effective, but for the time that it took to set up some pieces of the story, you feel like they should mean more or inspire stronger feelings in us than they do in the end, and you sort of wonder if some parts of the story couldn't have been better communicated through dialogue instead of flashback, so we'd know what we need to know about the character without being lead to believe that we're going to be let in on some earthshaking secret. What's supposed to be shocking or horrifying, as a result, sometimes feels a little pedestrian instead. And for all the right pacing choices made throughout, the film's ending feels a little abrupt and obvious, in part because we've been lead to expect something far stranger than what we get, but also because the sense of restraint the rest of the movie has abandons it in the conclusion. The point is made, the story is over, but the movie keeps going. The end isn't really a surprise because it was all spelled out pretty clearly in the final act, but then instead of ending on the important revelation (one with more emotional freight than anything else in the film) it continues to a scene that resolves some of what we've seen in flashback, only doing so to make the pretty-obvious implications of the conclusion even more explicit without really extending or elaborating on them. It over-explains what was already a pretty clear-cut ending.

I wish it had been a stronger effort, because it does do something a lot of the movies I've watched lately fail to do - it has a specific premise, with a clear through-line on the story, and everything we see serves that story. There aren't any scary bits tacked on without regard for the narrative and internal logic, everything seems planned out and the product of a specific set of events, and what at first seem like narrative interruptions or detours do serve a purpose - the structure of this film is tight and solid, but it doesn't have quite the intensity, emotional punch or sense of profound surprise in its twists and reveals that it needs to be really good. It's not dull, just…ultimately nothing new, and there are just enough glimpses of something better to make that a disappointment. It's exactly the kind of movie that's likely to get one of those "you'll like it if you're a fan of that sort of movie" endorsements, with all that implies.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Unavailable on Amazon Instant Video

Unavailable on Netflix Instant 

Frontiere(s): Going One Step Too Far

One of my pet peeves in horror movie criticism is objection to what the characters actually do in the film. I see it on film review sites coming from people who should know better (or maybe I just wish knew better), and in the teeming cesspit that is any discussion thread for any horror movie on IMDB. "The characters are stupid" is, to my mind, rarely if ever a legitimate complaint. "That would never really happen" is also not a legitimate complaint, especially coming from enthusiasts of the slasher genre, for obvious reasons (really? Are we going to quibble plausibility in the fifth fucking film to star an unkillable hulk in a hockey mask? Really?).

I prefer to go into a movie assuming that it's going to have its own internal logic - how else do you suspend disbelief for any movie featuring the supernatural? I have a problem when movies violate their own internal logic - when something happens without any roots in what came before - but as long is the movie is internally consistent, I'm fine. I also go into a horror movie accepting the idea that the characters are going to do stupid things. Sometimes because people are just stupid, and sometimes because being in a terrible situation makes otherwise sane and rational people do insane and irrational things. This particular form of lazy criticism is usually followed by a disquisition on how they, the commenter, would have handled it. It's usually some variably baroque variation on "I'd kick the monster's ass." Detailed badassery is sometimes included. The wish-fulfillment practically oozes from your monitor. "Why didn't they just…" and "that would never happen" are lazy substitutes for serious consideration.

That said, "that would never happen" is one of my key criticisms of Frontiere(s). There's really no better way to put it.

Frontiere(s) opens during the Paris riots of 2005, as four small-time criminals are attempting to flee the city. One of them, Yasmine, is pregnant. The movie opens with her in voiceover, contemplating bringing a child into a world like this. The movie opens cold, fast, and furious. The shit is burning down, and they are the rats trying to escape it. There's a lot of running and yelling. The four of them are going to have to split up, but they agree to meet at an inn in a rural, isolated area and regroup there. How they know about this place isn't really clear, and this won't be the last time we're not really clear on something, but the movie hurries forward.

The first two get there, and they're treated to a nice meal and the promise of some action from a couple of attractive women who work there. As said getting down is being gotten, one of the women pulls off her shirt, and from the the back, the viewer can see something the protagonist can't - the giant National Socialist emblem tattooed on her back. Oh, shit, this inn is run by Nazis! And Yasmine - who's pretty damn Arab - is headed there! What will happen?

Well, the first thing that happens is that the two guys who arrived first get knocked out, strung up and bled like pigs. See, they aren't just Nazis…they're Nazi cannibals.

Because either just plain Nazis or just plain cannibals wouldn't have been horrible enough?

See, here's another thing I don't like - when the threat is more threat than you really need to be threatening. After a certain point, you're just piling on the adjectives. Case in point and brief tangent: The book Gerald's Game by Stephen King. I like King's body of work generally, but they aren't all home runs. In Gerald's Game, a woman and her husband are at a remote cabin in the woods for a married-couple type getaway, and decide to indulge in some kinky (handcuffs and roleplaying) sex. Well, the husband (the titular Gerald) gets a little carried away and starts playing entirely too roughly for his wife's comfort. Though handcuffed to the bed, she manages to get a good kick to the gut in. Ill-considered though this was, what comes next isn't retribution - he has a heart attack and keels over. So now here she is, naked, handcuffed to the bed, and she realizes the front door is unlocked. That's some serious "oh, shit" right there.

Then King introduces the antagonist - a mentally retarded man who lives in the area. This could be really bad - combine the needs and body of an adult with the mind of a child, and bad things can happen. But wait! He's not just mentally retarded, he's a mentally retarded cannibal! Basically Ed Gein with a subnormal IQ. But wait! He's not just a mentally retarded cannibal, he's a mentally retarded cannibal with the bone-deforming disease acromegaly!

Steve-O, you had me at "handcuffed to the bed, naked, and the front door is open." Why pile the rest of this crap on?

I have the same problem with Frontiere(s). You don't need for Nazis to be cannibals, and you don't need cannibals to be Nazis. Either is scary on its  own. It feels like overkill, like the story equivalent of all the running and yelling at the opening of the movie.

So anyway Yasmine and the other guy get to the inn, and they discover in short order ("hey where are our friends?" "oh shit, at least one of them is dead in the basement along with a shitload of other butchered bodies!" Fuck!) that they're in a bad situation. They are captured, chained and caged.

But not slaughtered - not yet. See, the creepy German patriarch of the Nazi cannibal family has decided that he wants to spare Yasmine - black-haired, olive-skinned, Middle Easterny Yasmine - for "breeding stock." He wants her to pump out babies to begin the master race.

Hold right the fuck on a minute. He wants to mate his perfect Aryan boys to this Arab girl? That would never happen.  I don't mean "that's stupid", I mean that pretty much violates the one thing that defines Nazis - an obsession with racial purity. The whole point is to avoid miscegenation. This guy is bad at being a Nazi. There is now absolutely nothing useful about them being anything other than garden-variety cannibals. I didn't actually throw up my hands at this point, but I certainly performed the mental equivalent. They lost me.

The rest of the film is basically more running and screaming, but with buckets of blood being flung around. There's a daughter whose children are all deformed and feral, but after they're introduced early on they never really come up again. Violent standoffs occur, things burn, people are coated in gore, but there's no sense of import to it - there's no dynamic, the movie starts loud and fast and keeps being loud and fast, and maybe the filmmakers expected that running and screaming to compensate for the movie's shortcomings. The result is incoherent and dull - we're never really given an opportunity to see the protagonists as people, but we're supposed to sympathize with them (hence the baby, I guess?) and the rest of the movie isn't developed enough to make their role as pieces to be pushed around a board suitable for the story. There's a difference between crossing a line, crossing a boundary, and just blindly pushing forward. This movie just blindly pushes forward, piling on threat after threat, all of it ending up loud, empty and directionless, lost.

IMDB entry
Purchase on Amazon
Available from Netflix

Maléfique: Four Characters In Search of a Narrative

In any movie or TV show, a well-done narrative hums along like music. Its character may be familiar, eerie, dissonant, triumphant, staccato, or meditative, but regardless, there needs to be a rhythm and a logic to it. It doesn't need to be the rhythm or logic of everyday life, but it needs to be consistent with itself to have the required impact.

Maléfique's failure is that it feels less like a composition than the beginning of a decent tune followed by a lot of noodling.

It's a movie about four prisoners in a pretty medieval-looking French prison. Marcus is big, burly, and mid-transition between male and female. The specifics of his crime aren't known, but he's just sold out a bunch of people to leverage his own safety. Paquerette is a hebephrenic cannibal who will eat anything put in front of him (including, apparently, his little sister), Lassalle is a former man of letters who strangled his wife in a brief fit of insanity, and Carrère is the odd man out, a CEO who was caught embezzling from his own company.  They share meager space - two sets of bunkbeds, a sink, and a table for eating meals. Almost civilized. Days are spent passing the time, nights are spend in sleep and furtive bouts of sodomy. The sense of claustrophobia and stasis is palpable. Walk slow, because you're going nowhere fast.

Marcus wants to escape and take Paquerette (with whom he has a protective relationship) with him. He plans to make a run for it and scale the wall. Carrère is confident that he'll be out soon, once his bail is paid. Lassalle doesn't seem to care much one way or another. You could do a lot just with these four characters in the tiny space of their cell, and that's before introducing the pivotal element - a journal belonging to a former occupant of the cell, found behind a loose stone. The journal is very, very old, and is filled with diagrams, instructions, formulas, bizarre illustrations. It's a book of black magic.

As premises go, there's some promise here - you have four very different people kept essentially trapped together in a closed space with an otherwise innocuous object (a book) capable of very bad, dangerous things that violate the laws of nature. It's bad enough when you find yourself having to run from evil - what happens when there is nowhere to run? When you're locked in the room with the thing you're trying to escape? The book is basically a combined time bomb and chemistry experiment - the prisoners' desire to escape leads them to try and use the book to escape, but they have no idea what they're doing with it. All kinds of horrible shit could happen, and to some extent does.

There's this potential for great tension between the rigid, regimented environment of a prison and the possibility of a book of black magic - something that can break not just the rules of the prison, but the rules of reality itself. We don't really know what happened to the last owner, if he escaped or not, what form that escape took, or what it cost him. And since the prisoners don't know what they're doing (hell, only two of them are really literate), there should be a tremendous sense of fear and tension surrounding the book. The book should be when the song changes key and starts building to a crescendo, in other words.

Once the book comes into play, though, the film's narrative coherence starts to fall apart. Things happen, the book does one thing, then another, characters talk about the importance of choice even when no real choice is possible, the book gets thrown away for no reason (and reappears for even less reason), a character is introduced for one purpose and then disappears again, people who refused to read the book read it and use it, and then decide not to use it until they decide to use it again, and in the end the book leads some of them someplace, but not the place they thought, but not a place we could reasonably expect them go either, given what's happened already. In the end, these four prisoners and this very mysterious, very powerful book add up to a series of small anticlimaxes and a twist conclusion that is only a twist if you don't pay attention to a piece of dialogue that telegraphs it minutes before it actually happens.

Even if you have a device (like a book of black magic) that is meant to disrupt our expectations, that disruption still needs to make sense within the narrative. Reverse an assumption, show us how the character's expectations were wrong, show us how those expectations were right, but at a much larger cost - any of these would have worked. Instead, what we get here is a resolution that essentially communicates that none of what happened in the film up to this point was necessary, because none of it ended up having much relevance to the way things concluded. Our four prisoners end up lost, much as we would expect them to, but we are lost as well because we have no idea how we ended up where we did in the story. What starts off as a spooky little melody ends up in a jumble of disconnected notes.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon.com
Available on Netflix