Three Short Films By Curry Barker: Between Life And Death

Last month, I watched a short film called Milk & Serial, and it was good enough to get me rethinking my general dismissiveness toward YouTube as a source of original horror filmmaking. It was a sharp, vicious little piece of found-footage horror featuring some surprisingly strong performances, and it looks like a lot of it was the work of a young man named Curry Barker, who wrote, directed, edited, and co-starred in it. My interest was piqued, and since watching it I’d been meaning to check out some of his other work. He does sketch comedy, but he’s made a few other short films as well, so I thought I’d take a look at three of them this week. Some of them are stronger than others, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

There are a few elements that tie these three films - Enigma, Warnings, and The Chair - together. They’re all about the space between life and death, and a vein of deadpan absurdity runs through all of them to one degree or another, as all three feature protagonists who are having difficulty grappling with some element of adult life. Whether it’s responsibility, or the need for human contact, or the need to be fully present in a relationship, all of these films have at their center men whose world is unraveling around them, and who face their circumstances with varying levels of exasperation. They’re less terrified and more puzzled and annoyed, but not to a degree that’s overtly comic. There are definite moments of wry black humor, but I don’t know that I’d call any of these comedies. These are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and none of them are what you’d call heroic.

They’re all small productions, and two of them are very much just Barker and some of his regular collaborators shooting in one or two locations, but there’s a real sense of restraint and a willingness to build tension through small moments, carefully composed shots and impressionistic editing. There’s a refreshing lack of jump-scares or the usual premises, and it’s clear that Barker knows if you set things up correctly, then even a little detail - like a note, or a blurry figure in the background - can go a long way toward setting the mood.

Enigma

This film opens on squalor. A young man is kneeled over his toilet, vomiting, while empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, and other garbage lies scattered all over the place. This is Adam, and he’s having trouble being a functional adult. He doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to, orders food in a lot, and is falling out of touch with his friends and family. He has regrets, he wonders where his life went wrong, and all the while he’s scrolling through his phone, looking at all of his friends on social media as they party and figure out how they’re going to kill themselves before the world ends, in slightly less than a week.

This is a melancholy story, told from the point of view of a sad guy for whom even the end of the world isn’t enough motivation to get out and live. Adam sort of wanders through the last days on Earth, making excuses for why he can’t go out, remaining a prisoner of his own self-doubt and guilt. It strikes a good balance between the enormity of what’s coming (a countdown to the end is cleverly inserted as bits of background scenery) and the way life goes on regardless – people keep delivering pizzas, people keep working behind a register, while others get out and make the best of what’s left. Some think it’s more of the same catastrophizing that’s been with us for decades, some think it’s a hoax to cull the population and make purveyors of assisted suicide rich, others are just vibing, whatever comes will come. As is often the case with stories like these, the end of the world is an opportunity to examine how we live and the importance of human connection. So in that sense there isn’t anything really all that unusual here, and it’s the least scary of the three, but there are nice moments of deadpan humor alongside pathos that serve the story well and keep us empathetic. I wouldn’t call it a black comedy…more of a dark gray comedy?

Warnings

It’s a late night at the end of what was probably a pretty wild Halloween party, and Sean’s walking out to his car, discussing how he almost got hit in the street by another car. When he reaches his car, he notices a note stuck to the window above the driver’s side door handle…

“I am begging you to stop.”

Needless to say, Sean gets freaked out and tries to ask his friends Kendal and Regan what’s happening, but they have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s a little confused, a little disoriented, and when he goes back out to his car, he finds another note, this time on the inside of his car. And he’s starting to hear voices.

This one is a creepy little psychological horror film centering on Sean’s attempts to understand what’s going on as the world around him gets stranger and stranger. It does a lot with very little, relying on the conceit of the notes and the way that everything becomes increasingly more disjointed the more Sean tries to understand what’s happening.  There’s nicely paced uneasiness throughout, combined with little bits of visual wit that creates this nicely discordant note – it’s funny and strange at the same time, and the aftertaste from the strange lingers a little longer than the funny does. There are some nightmare sequences (or are they?) that give everything a little bite as well, and the filmmakers do a good job of keeping us guessing about where it’s all going. It’s maybe a little slight, but definitely falls in horror territory and has its share of unsettling moments.

The Chair

Reese is out running some errands - getting dinner and flowers for his girlfriend Julie to celebrate their six-month anniversary - when he notices a chair sitting on the sidewalk. It looks to be in good shape, so he decides to grab it and take it home with him. As soon as Julie sees it, she hates it. It doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. It’s creepy. It makes her nervous. It feels evil, and she wants Reese to get it out of the house. So, in a fit of pique, Reese stubbornly sits down in the chair…

..and the next thing he knows, he’s back on the street where he picked up the chair in the moments before he puts it in the car. And somehow an entire week has gone by.

This one is more ambitious than the other two, and also the most effective as a horror film. It’s a bigger production with a cast outside of the usual ensemble, shot in a wider aspect ratio than the others. It’s a disorienting story that starts off being about a diffusely creepy chair, but soon reveals itself as a story about the unreliability of memory and what it must be like when it starts to fail. Abrupt, fragmented editing keeps us as off-balance as the protagonist, and real events wind around hallucinatory reverie, offering a few different explanations for what’s going on, but to its credit, the film doesn’t commit to one explanation over the other. There’s a cohesive visual vocabulary, which suggests there is some underlying logic to what’s happening, but it’s ultimately elusive. We know enough to know something is going on, but not enough to see it clearly, which is a wonderfully unsettling feeling. There’s also some really nice use of composition alongside the editing, it’s probably the least humorous of the bunch, and even though the end sort of fell flat for me, it was an enjoyably uneasy experience and probably makes the clearest argument yet for Barker having the sort of filmmaking chops that you’d like to see get more of a budget and wider distribution.

I have to admit, as much as I know intellectually that filmmaking technology has gotten better and more affordable over time, it’s been tough for me to take the leap to recognizing that there’s some really good work being made by young (don’t say it) auteurs (oh dammit, you said it) on a platform that I’m used to thinking of as sort of a video junk drawer. The Philippou brothers made the move from YouTube to the big screen, and I think if there’s any justice in the world, filmmakers like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker will be next, because they’re sure as hell making stuff that’s fresher and scarier than yet another Conjuring sequel.

Enigma: IMDB | YouTube
Warnings: IMDB | YouTube
The Chair: IMDB | YouTube

Milk & Serial: J/K Bro, It’s Just A Prank

I don’t think this is any kind of huge revelation or anything, but some of the best horror films being made right now are not coming out of the studio system. Which makes sense – studios are in the business of making profitable films, and when you’re in the business of making profitable films, you aren’t going to want to take chances. You want product that’s going to bring in an audience. Has this lead to a glut of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and (ugh) franchises? Yes. A lot of slick, glossy exercises in jump scares. And there’s an audience for that, but I’m not it. So in an environment where there are actual alternatives to the studio system and consumer-grade cameras and editing software are getting better, you get people willing to take chances and pursue their vision and actually getting it out there in front of eyeballs like mine, and it’s refreshing.

Milk & Serial is a great example of this. It’s a sharp, nasty, unnerving bit of short horror that does a really good job of working within its limitations and making its apparent amateurishness an asset.. And it’s on YouTube, of all places!

The whole thing picks up in medias res, as a dude nicknamed Seven is setting up some kind of a prank as part of his buddy Milk’s birthday party. Milk and Seven have a YouTube channel called “Prank Bros,” where they are…well, two bros, pulling pranks. It’s a pretty involved stunt, using bullet squibs and an actual handgun firing blanks. Seven’s invited some rando to Milk’s birthday party, someone he knows from, well, somewhere else, and Milk isn’t happy about it. While they’re arguing about it, there’s commotion from the living room and they run in just in time to see this rando holding a gun on their friend Naomi. He fires and Naomi goes down. And then, once the initial shock has passed, she pops back up and they all start singing “Happy Birthday.” Those kinds of pranks.

The party is brought down a little when someone knocks on the door to complain about the noise. Nobody recognizes him, and after they placate him he goes away, only to be discovered hanging around outside.

The next day they find him sitting in their living room.

It’s a little more than an hour long, clearly shot on a shoestring budget, and it ends up being really impressive – it doesn’t have much to work with, but it tells a story that doesn’t need much to work well. It’s a story told through the cameras that Milk and Seven use to film their pranks, which are consumer-grade camcorders, there are phone cameras, there are even spy glasses at once point – it creates the feeling that everything these two guys do is recorded to be turned into content. At the same time, it’s pretty clear pretty quick that this isn’t strictly raw footage. So calling it a found-footage film (which is how it’s marketed) sort of does it a disservice. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem too bound to the conceit, and the ways it breaks plausibility are fairly easy to overlook in favor of what it does well. It looks like jittery cinema verite, shot by the kind of frat-bro assholes you’d expect to do a prank show on YouTube, giving it a nastiness and immediacy that fits the narrative perfectly. It really does feel like you’re watching something that’s going to end up being evidence in a manslaughter trial or something similar, and still manages to fit in some nice camerawork, using focus to dramatic effect in a couple of places and benefitting from an abrupt, clipped editing style that jumps between perspectives with a suddenness that communicates tension and unease even at relatively mundane moments.

On top of that, the type of story it is, told the way it is gives it some thematic heft. It is nominally a film about a prank that goes wrong, and it does a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. It’s almost a nesting doll of a story, and setting things up that way means that it’s very much a story about the line between truth and fiction. Where do the pranks stop and real events begin? What even is real in this context? It’s true for both the audience and for characters in the story as well – we’re watching a story that looks just like something you might find on some random YouTube channel, and we’re watching it on YouTube, so there’s a lot of reflexivity to it. Meanwhile, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is for the characters in the film to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a setup for yet another prank until it’s too late. It ends up going some very dark places, and it works in that regard because the performances are strong and naturalistic - which they really need to be for a found-footage movie -  and in at least one case, sincerely unnerving. So you get what looks at least initially like something you might actually find on YouTube (and you’re…watching it on YouTube), you get a sense of how it’s going to unwind…until it doesn’t unwind that way and you realize that something really, really bad is going on.

Some time back, I wrote about a film called I’m Just Fucking With You, which largely squandered the opportunity to be a horror film that digs into the inherent viciousness and cruelty of pranks. This film doesn’t squander it, instead it faces it head-on and then blows right past it in something that reminds me of nothing so much as Creep and the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S – it’s persistently uncomfortable in the best way and is a great example of how budget doesn’t dictate quality.

Between the Adams family, analog horror like Local 58, Kane Parsons’ work on The Backrooms, and people like Kyle Edward Ball and the Phillipou brothers getting feature-length films distributed off the back of their own work on YouTube, this is a really good moment for indie horror, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube 

Longlegs: Bad Vibes

What makes a horror film scary? I feel like this is a question that maybe isn’t wrestled with as much as it should be, given the amount of dreck that stops at “murder a lot of people in as messy a fashion as possible” and calls it a day. But to be fair, it’s not always easy to quantify what makes something really scary. Often it comes down to, for lack of a better word, vibes.

And sure, vibes don’t come out of nowhere, they’re a product of things like performance and mood and cinematography, but they’re ineffable in the sense that either you’ve got the vision and the way to see it realized or you don’t. If you don’t have a vision, the best you’re going to do is something competently produced that might get a few jolts out of people, but isn’t really scary. Vibes can go a long way toward making up for flaws, because unless it’s really egregious, I won’t remember bad filmmaking choices, but the creepy, haunting, unnerving stuff will stay with me for ages.

Longlegs - a bleak, deeply unnerving marriage between police procedural and occult nightmare - does fumble things a little, but as a vision it is so fully and confidently realized that you’re mostly too busy trying to crawl out of your skin to notice them in the moment. It is all about the vibes.

It’s the story of FBI agent Lee Harker. She’s withdrawn, odd to the point of being off-putting, but she’s also shown an unusual amount of insight into difficult cases. And right now, her insight is very much needed, because the FBI have a serial killer on their hands…well, that’s not exactly right. They have a number of crime scenes, where entire families have been brutally murdered, typically by the father. What’s giving law enforcement trouble is that at every scene, they find a letter written in some kind of code that they aren’t able to crack. No other physical evidence that anyone else has been there, just the letters.

And each letter is signed “Longlegs.” 

As it turns out, Harker can decode these letters. She doesn’t know how, but she can. And she can tell where the killer’s been, or about to be. On paper, this shouldn’t work as well as it does, because on paper it’s a movie about a mysterious serial killer who shares what appears to be a psychic link with a detective. I fucking haaaaaaaaaaate shit like that. Hate hate hate hate hate. But here, it works. And I think it works because even though it’s the corniest kind of story you can tell, the way it’s told transforms it into something warped and sinister. So it’s almost like you’re watching a cursed version of a mediocre thriller. A lot of this is accomplished through performances that are uniformly a little…off. Everything’s a little stilted, everyone’s a little distant and strange. There’s a medical examiner who’s almost creepier than the actual serial killer, and it’s not because the medical examiner is evil or the serial killer in disguise…that’s just how the actor played him. Everyone in the film is like that to one degree or another, and that alone contributes to the feeling that you aren’t so much watching a movie as you are having a nightmare in which you’re watching a movie.

The visuals are equally unsettling - the film is set in 1990s Oregon, and everything is gray and cloudy and damp, with traces of snow clinging here and there. Interiors are often dimly lit as well, though not to the point of being unreadable. This is a world where there’s just not a lot of light, and we move from the institutional strangeness of FBI headquarters (if you’re at all familiar with the very good game Control, it’s definitely giving The Oldest House in places) to crime scenes that suggest awful, awful things without ever really tipping their hands entirely, to the cramped, stifling home of Harker’s mother, a woman damaged by some past tragedy to the point of hoarding and agoraphobia. Even Harker’s own home, which should feel warm and cozy, just feels like a place where something awful is just waiting around the corner all of the time. It’s the unease of places that you know aren’t normal, of homes that aren’t home-like, of innocuous spaces late at night, when they should be empty but aren’t. This is not a film where anywhere ever feels safe. There are flashbacks to crime scenes smeared with blood, bodies under blankets and location markers, again giving us glimpses that only fuel our imaginations, all punctuated with title cards in stark black and red. There are very few shots with more than one person in the frame at once (and sometimes shots where the tops of heads are out of frame, which is especially disconcerting), creating a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, emphasizing the alien feel of the entire thing. It’s something of a slow burn, punctuated with sudden moments of terrible violence, arresting, surreal imagery, and grainy flashbacks to the 1970s that shrink the aspect ratio to a square, like home movies that you’re pretty sure nobody was ever meant to see.

So the vibes are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and doing it admirably. That said, there are some places where it trips a little, mostly in the third act. It spends the first two setting up this really unsettling world, but there are some elements of the story that are maybe a little too easy to see coming from very early on, and others that really get sprung on the audience in the last act in what does amount to a bit of an exposition dump, albeit one that manages to sustain the atmosphere of the first two acts. There’s an element that’s important to how the killer is doing what he’s doing that gets introduced in the second act, but because the whole film feels so fucking weird already, its importance doesn’t really come across and when it’s brought back in the third act, it does feel like it’s coming out of nowhere. Finally, there’s one particular twist that was just convenient enough to leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, even though it was, once again, revealed in fine, striking fashion; something hidden and in plain sight the entire time.

The overall effect is, as I’ve said, like you’re watching a film with elements that you recognize and a story that you’re pretty sure you should be able to follow, but feels wrong somehow, as if whatever evil lurks in the story has managed to infect the film itself. It’s been getting a lot of (simplistic) comparisons to The Silence Of The Lambs, and if you’re looking for that kind of macabre crime procedural, this is not going to scratch that particular itch. But if you’re willing to immerse yourself in its nightmare logic, it’s one that will stay with you.

IMDB entry

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 

The Ninth Configuration: You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Work Here, But It Helps

One of the most common ways that horror comments on the human condition is by locating real tragedies and concerns in the language and imagery of horror. Literal monsters stand in for metaphorical ones. This is not an especially earth-shattering observation, I know. Mostly I bring it up because every now and then I’ll run into a film that borrows a lot of the language and imagery of horror to tell a story about the human condition. Which sounds like I’m just saying the same thing, but it’s sort of taking the trappings and conventions of horror films, gestures universally associated with horror, and locating something that isn’t horror at all within them. The film Monsters comes to mind, basically the story of two people getting to know each other as they journey across a stretch of Mexico made hazardous by the intrusion of extraterrestrial life. The monsters from outer space are just part of the environment, not at all the point. It’s sort of an eversion of the horror film.

All of that, because I think that best describes The Ninth Configuration. It’s a film with a horror setting, a premise ripe with horror potential, written and directed by the author who brought us The Exorcist, an absolute classic of the genre. But for all of that, it’s less horror and more drama about what it takes to cope with horrors.

It’s another gray, overcast day in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. A guard stands a lonely watch in a poncho, manning a checkpoint at the entrance to a large, foreboding, gothic-looking castle up the road. He admits an official vehicle, and goes back to standing there. The car winds up the road and into the courtyard of the castle, where a number of men run around in a mixture of costumes and pajamas. It’s a lot of hectic activity and one or two officers fruitlessly attempting to contain it. It looks like a madhouse, because…well, it is. One of a series of hidden, secret installations set up by the military to study soldiers who’ve come back from Vietnam suffering psychotic breaks. So far, every therapeutic approach they’ve tried hasn’t really worked, and so the Army has sent one of their top psychiatrists, Col. Hudson Kane, to take over supervising treatment.

Kane has some…unconventional…ideas about treatment.

For most of its running time, this film feels like an example of postwar absurdism in the vein of Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow, operating from the idea that war and the institutions that wage war are themselves absurd, themselves insane, and so are in no position to judge those driven insane by waging war. As a matter of fact, madness seems to be the only sane response. It’s an idea that’s probably at its most mainstream in the television series adapted from the novel and film M.A.S.H., a long-running institution on television from the early 1970s to early 1980s. And the patients here are very much in the antic, borderline-comic vein of that show. Nammack thinks he’s a superhero, Fromme thinks he’s a doctor (and not actually a doctor, as Kane discovers to his dismay), Reno is working on adaptations of Shakespeare performed by dogs, Fairbanks has multiple personalities, Bennish thinks he’s from Venus, and Cutshaw - an astronaut who decompensated as he was preparing to go to the moon - doesn’t seem to be delusional, just very angry and reluctant to be serious about anything or engage anyone honestly. 

They are depicted as clearly delusional and/or unstable. But at the same time, the purportedly sane ones don’t fare much better. Fell, the acting psychiatrist, seems to be treating the whole situation as absurdly as the patients do, though it seems clear in his case that it’s out of a resignation to the insanity of the entire war, and Kane’s intense calm and unflappability, as the film goes on, seems to be hiding even deeper cracks. Perhaps the only thing worse that someone who’s lost it is someone who’s lost it and desperately trying to hide it. And it’s definitely laid out like a horror movie. It’s a gothic-looking castle in the foggy mountains of the Pacific Northwest, housing a bunch of deranged veterans, playing out their delusions to the bemusement of the regular military staff and the weary patience of the doctors. There’s very much this idea that the inmates are running the asylum, and so when Kane proposes to try something different, to indulge them, to let them act out their fantasies without the staff intervening, this is where the film takes a turn, as you’d expect. But it’s not the turn you think. 

There’s an obvious way for this film to go, what it seems like it’s leading up to, and a lot of that is in the horror-movie trappings, the repeated shots of the castle in the nighttime, rain pounding down on gargoyles and hooded statuary, as if a mad scientist is about to create horrid, unnatural life, ironically juxtaposed with jaunty music. Conversations are as often as not conducted in voiceover, accompanied by shots of empty rooms, statues and wall decorations. A picture of Bela Lugosi as Dracula serves as a silent comment on the accommodations, and scenes inside Kane’s office look out on the rest of the castle, the space outside his doorway a hive of chaos. There’s a mixture of sinister and frenetic that seems to promise something bloody and awful, but in the third act there’s a revelation, one that reframes the film as one about whether or not salvation is possible. Honestly, it works. The tensest scene in the whole film is an extended (painful, hard-to-watch) moment outside of the hospital where you’re waiting for violence to break out, at this point it’s almost inevitable, but hoping it won’t, because in some way there are souls in the balance here. Not in any supernatural sense, just in the sense of someone desperately needing to be shown that people can act selflessly and what it’s going to cost to do just that.

The film is quite literally like a long, dark night of the soul, and when the sun finally comes out and the curtain is raised on what we’ve just seen, it feels like something has lifted, like sins have been forgiven, as they have historically been forgiven. It’s comic, it’s tragic, it’s uncomfortable, it’s like very, very few other films I’ve ever seen.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Red Krokodil: Life Sucks And Then You Die

I’ve taken the opportunity to do something a little bit different this October. During a time when more people are watching (hopefully) good horror films, I’ve been making a point of watching the sorts of horror films I normally avoid, for whatever reason. So far I’ve covered a film made by someone who makes horror films for megaplexes, a film from a genre I don’t really like, and a film that I started to watch once and abandoned after about 15 minutes because the acting and dialogue really sucked. And to wrap up this loosely-themed spooky season, I’m tackling underground horror, also sometimes called “extreme horror.” These are films, usually made very much on the cheap, that are intended to be so shocking or upsetting or transgressive that they’ll never receive any kind of wide release.

My window into this world is a company called Unearthed Films, whose stock in trade is almost entirely underground horror. They specialize in limited-run DVD and Blu-Ray editions of things like the August Underground and Guinea Pig films, something called the “Vomit Gore Trilogy,” and a collector’s edition-quality release of A Serbian Film. If you’re unfamiliar with these titles, the links I’ve provided are safe to click, but this is real “if you know, you know” territory. If you don’t, I wouldn’t go looking – I’m not really sure you’ll be better off for having done so. None of it is illegal, strictly speaking, but these are definitely the kind of films that get banned or seized by customs occasionally. I don’t watch films like this for the same reason I don’t really like slasher films. In general, they aren’t about people as much as they are pretexts for putting a lot of really unpleasant stuff on film or video to titillate fans of graphic violence and people whose sensibilities are so numbed that nothing else affects them. They’re just cinematic endurance tests, and that doesn’t interest me.

Which brings me to Red Krokodil. It’s part of Unearthed’s catalog, the subject matter is right in the wheelhouse, and most importantly, it’s one of the rare films of this kind to actually show up on a mass-market streaming service. As committed as I am to the bit, I’m not spending additional money just to watch something called Slow Torture Puke Chamber. It’s not as sensationalistic as it could have been, and it does seem to aspire to something more than just gross-out, but it just doesn’t get there.

It opens with a crawl describing the drug of the title. Krokodil (Russian for “crocodile”) is a homebrew heroin substitute, a morphine analogue made by combining cough medicine that contains codeine with a bunch of gnarly solvents like benzene and hydrochloric acid, as well as red phosphorous, medicated eyedrops, iodine, and a bunch of other shit never intended for human consumption. It first showed up in Russia, where poverty and draconian drug laws made it a last-ditch solution for heroin addicts. It’s made entirely from over-the-counter ingredients, so pretty much anyone can make it. And its effects are short-lived and the withdrawal exceptionally painful, so batches get cooked up in haste, under less-than-laboratory conditions. The result is where it gets its name, an injectable drug so full of impurities that skin around the injection sites quickly takes on a gray-green, scaly quality, as ulceration and necrosis set in. Trust me, you do not want to do an image search. You will see things far worse than anything in this film.

It's followed by an exterior shot of a Russian city, bombed-out ruins covered by some kind of haze or fog. And in this city lives a man, alone in a tiny apartment. His kitchen counter is covered with chemicals, a small pot bubbling on the stove with something black and tarry in it. The man is filthy, unshaven, his hair lank and greasy, and he’s clad only in bloodied bandages around his hands, elbows, and knees, and a pair of stained undershorts that are almost more holes than fabric. He inspects himself in the bathroom mirror, and notices a new set of lesions spreading from behind his ear. He pokes at them carefully before returning to his work.

There really isn’t a story to this film, and certainly no plot. It’s less about the horror of the titular drug (which is plenty horrific in real life) and more about using it as a vehicle for a recurring motif – holes as disintegration, but also as something through which something more can be glimpsed. There are holes in the body, holes in the walls and doors, shattered windows. Sometimes blood comes through, sometimes light, sometimes a view to another place, sometimes monsters. Though, to be honest, this really makes it sound more cohesive and illustrative than it really is. Mostly it’s just aimless footage of a filthy man lolling around an even more filthy apartment alternating with occasional reveries in nature (which, to be fair, do provide some respite from the squalid claustrophobia of the apartment) and hallucinations which range from dread-provoking to just sort of puzzling. Sometimes he just sort of lies there, sometimes he has nightmares, sometimes he’s in pain. He cooks up and shoots up, and occasionally looks out the window. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of narrative to it, even implied. The dream and nightmare imagery is either so innocuous or oblique that it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to take away from it. It’s either meaningless, or so intensely personal and specific that it might as well be meaningless, since we’re never given any kind of insight into the man’s experience. Interspersed throughout is a voiceover monologue about, I dunno, life, the universe, childhood, the flesh…it’s the sort of obtuse portentous rambling you’d expect from a stereotypical student film, a lot of stuff that probably sounded deep as shit to the person who wrote it but just comes off as self-important nonsense.

The technical execution isn’t bad, I’ll give it that. The music and sound design are both pretty good, establishing an emotional tone that probably could have done all the heavy lifting without the monologue. The cinematography in the outdoor sequences is competent, and the interiors (as gross as they are) make good use of harsh white light filtering in through the windows, as if it is perpetually daytime outside the apartment and perpetually nighttime inside. There’s some allusion to a nuclear war having occurred or occurring, and the light that streams in does convey the feeling of someone caught in the glare of the blast. It’s not a gratuitously gory or disgusting movie, much to my surprise – I could think of a much more lurid story featuring this drug than what we got – but it’s still not for the squeamish. It’s still a film about the effects of a drug that starts eating your flesh away as a matter of course, and the restraint means that the moments we do get have an impact. I wonder how much of the restraint was a function of budget, since the practical effects are few and far between, but again, what’s there is pretty effective.

It's not hard to watch in the sense of pain and suffering, but it’s certainly hard to look at, between the overall squalor and the occasional bits of body horror. It could have leaned into the latter a lot more than it does, and I’ll at least give it props for that, but it doesn’t really use it in the service of anything especially compelling or even easy to follow – it’s a lot of moments strung together, some of which work in isolation, but most of which don’t, and even at just under 90 minutes it still manages to feel interminable as a result. Finally, it ends on a note that was probably supposed to be really powerful, revelatory and transcendent, but mostly just elicited an eyeroll from me. Yes, we get it, life is pain and loss feels like the end of the world, this is in no way an obvious or hackneyed idea and nobody has ever made this observation before.

I suppose that underground horror is a lot like above-ground horror, in that it’s occasionally capable of something interesting (I still maintain that A Serbian Film, as unpleasant as it is, has artistic merit), but a lot of it won’t be. It’s easy to mistake naked atrocity for substance and justify it as exploration of humanity’s dark side, but that requires acknowledging the humanity in the first place, and though this wasn’t as sensationalistic as it could have been, it wasn’t really about humanity either. It was a lot of degradation and disintegration that ultimately didn’t mean much.

So that’s four films that represent things I don’t like. I’ll admit that Malignant, though not very scary, was surprisingly enjoyable. And Terrifier, though ultimately just more people getting fed into a metaphorical (this time, at least) woodchipper, did have more visual flair and style than I thought it would. But Bite really was as bad as I thought it was in its first 15 minutes, and whatever people who enjoy extreme horror get out of it, it’s nothing that I really need to experience for myself. So I’m going to keep trusting my instincts. Now, back to the stuff I’m actually looking forward to checking out.

IMDB entry
Available from Tubi
 

Malignant: Out Of My Head

It’s probably safe to call me a member of the No Fun Club when it comes to horror films. I don’t especially like horror comedies, and I like my horror to be bleak and unsettling and not especially interested in entertainment. I get that, and I’ll own it. This is mostly because the whole reason I started writing this a really long time ago was because I felt (and still feel) like horror isn’t extended enough respect as cinema. And so, as a result, I tend to be very much into Very Serious Horror That Is Not Fun At All, Because Entertainment Is Bad.

And that’s probably not fair. And I realize this because although I didn’t find Malignant frightening, let alone bleak or unsettling or whatever, it was so much fucking fun to watch that I can’t dismiss it. It’s a love letter to earlier eras of horror film crafted with thought and vision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It opens on a shot of an old, gothic-looking building, looming over a stormy night. A title reads “Simion Research Hospital, 1993.” Inside, Dr. Florence Weaver is recording a report about a patient named Gabriel to tape (we know it’s videotape because it’s got that viewfinder overlay with a blinking red light in the corner, like you don’t actually see on videotape unless it’s in the movies). And then, as you’d expect, someone interrupts to tell her that Gabriel has gotten loose. There’s a lot of hurrying down corridors lit in lurid, flashing colors, as this other person exposits that Gabriel isn’t affected at all by electricity, that he’s almost drinking it up, and there’s a trail of bodies along the corridor. Something’s been cornered inside a room, almost feral. Finally it’s subdued and strapped into a chair. That’s when Dr. Weaver says “it’s time…to cut out the cancer.”

On that note, we jump to the present day, and a young woman named Madison. She’s visibly pregnant, and very tired. She’s been working extra shifts to save up money for after the baby comes. Her husband, Derek, is lounging on the bed watching television, presumably tired after his arrival from Abusive Creep School. Madison is really concerned about this pregnancy after suffering a number of miscarriages, and Derek starts off unsympathetic, before moving pretty quickly to cruel, and from there he gets rough, pushing his pregnant wife into a wall. She hits her head hard enough to leave blood behind. When Derek walks out, she locks the door behind her and lies down on the bed, where she has a horrible nightmare about a mysterious figure getting into the house and stabbing Derek to death.

And when she wakes up and walks out of the room, Derek’s lying there, dead. Just like she saw it happen.

So what we’ve got here is Madison and her sister Sydney trying to convince the police that she didn’t kill her husband, and that’s she’s having visions of more murders as they’re happening. And, as you’d expect, the pair of detectives assigned to the case aren’t believing her. If this sounds like something you’ve seen before, maybe more than once, that’s probably not an accident, because this film is an homage to a whole range of things. It’s got elements of 1980s slasher films as well as the weirder, grungier stuff Stuart Gordon was doing back then, along with giallo, proto-slasher films like Black Christmas, and thrillers like Eyes Of Laura Mars. It’s not self-consciously retro, it’s got the effects budget of a more modern horror film, but everything else about it screams one flavor of 80s schlock or another.

And it works. It works because those flavors are note-perfect. This is a film from a reality much like our own, but one where there’s a mysterious gap in the dictionary where the word “subtle” should be. I really thought that the opening scene would end with an off-screen voice calling “cut” and establishing the protagonist as an actor in B-grade horror movies, but no, that’s just the vibe. From jump, it’s ridiculous. Performances are consistently over-the-top, the dialogue is immediately overheated and mostly consists of pure exposition of the “you know you haven’t been the same since [insert long string of events here]” variety and lots of stating the obvious (during a firefight, someone actually says “they’re shooting at us” without any irony whatsoever.) You’ve got the stock wisecracking police detectives, and a crime scene technician whose sole defining features are that she is 1) mousy and single, and 2) clearly hot for one of the detectives. And everything is played completely straight, without a single ounce of self-consciousness or winking at the camera. Which is exactly how you do something like this.

Almost all of the scene-to-scene beats are predictable, which is a big part of why I didn’t find the film scary, the rhythms are so familiar that they’re almost comforting. But they’re all executed with a great sense of visual style - a shot that follows Madison through her own house from a top-down cutaway view, the doors and walls stretched impossibly high comes to mind, as does the way the killer is presented as an entirely black shape as if he’s a living silhouette, all black leather and a stylish gold dagger like he stepped right out of an Argento film. There are plenty of Dutch angles, everything is slathered in the most lurid reds and blues you can find, and there’s sinister music painted over every scene. With the exception of a few sedate exteriors, everywhere in this film is shadowy, covered in cobwebs, foggy, and with light pouring in from one angle or another. It’s like the cinematographer was instructed to make everything look like a nightmare sequence from one of the early Elm Street films. Much like the dialogue and performances, it’s all so earnestly overblown that it comes out the other side as art.

And it’s all paced with a wonderfully delirious sense of escalation. By and large it seems like the story of a young woman who has some kind of mysterious psychic link to a killer, and it continues along in that vein until the last act, when everything gets more grisly before going utterly apeshit. It gets much weirder and much bloodier than everything preceding it without getting any more serious in tone, blending the giallo-style flashbacks that reveal exactly how everything really happened with some classic body horror. Like everything else about this film, it swings for the fences and I found my jaw in my lap at how melodramatic and audacious the whole thing ended up being. As much as I’m partial to grim, unsettling, straight-faced horror, I have to admit I was absolutely delighted to take this ride. I guess I needed a reminder that I don’t need to always treat this like some kind of intellectual crusade, that it’s okay to loosen up and get out of my head sometimes, and I’m glad this film provided it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available from Amazon 

Resurrection: The Mother And Child Reunion

"No, I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away"

                    -“Mother And Child Reunion,” Paul Simon

There’s this old joke…

Q: Why did the Vietnam veteran cross the road?
A: You wouldn’t know! You weren’t there!

And as much as it might lean into the cliché of veterans of that war being especially vocal about how their plight was not really understood, there’s also truth to it. If you did not directly experience a trauma, there’s no way you can understand what it was like. It is something than can only be understood through the experience itself. And so from the outside, a lot of what trauma survivors do might not make a lot of sense. This extends to abuse as well, often a source of trauma. “Why didn’t you just leave?” is the question asked by someone who wasn’t there.

And it’s this truth that lies at the heart of Resurrection, which is a harrowing story of abuse, trauma, guilt, and the way none of it ever really goes away.

It opens on a conversation between two people. We only see one of them in the shot, and she’s relating to the other the way she is being treated by her partner, who devalues and belittles her on a regular basis. The voice of the person off-camera is calm, measured, asking her questions about how these things make her feel, contextualizing these behaviors, As she responds, her face cycles through uncertainty, shame, confusion, and anger. At first, you think this is our protagonist, and she’s at therapy.

But that’s not the case - the voice off-screen belongs to our protagonist. Her name is Margaret Ballion, and she isn’t a therapist, she works at a biotech company, and she’s talking to her co-worker Gwyn, who is beginning to realize that her relationship isn’t a healthy one. Margaret, as we learn following through her day, is efficient, motivated, and highly independent. She’s presenting data at work, she’s going for a run, she’s waking up her teenage daughter Abbie, she’s having sex with a married coworker. She loves her daughter, she runs, she’s insightful about abuse, and she keeps other close relationships at arm’s length. It’s not a life for everyone, but Margaret seems to thrive in it.

At least, she does until she spots a familiar face at a conference. His name is David, and she hasn’t seen him in a very, very long time. And that’s when the memories start. And the nightmares.

What this film does best is beautifully capture the feeling when someone reencounters their abuser and how all of the growth, all of the change, all of the progress just melts away and you’re back to being that small, helpless thing again. Margaret already seems like she’s keeping everyone (except her daughter) distant. So you sort of know that she’s been through some shit before you actually know any particulars. In some ways, she’s not that different from the protagonist to Matriarch, albeit finding much more adaptive ways to cope. There’s that sense of running, and running is part of her life. And when she reencounters David, all of that crisp efficiency in work, in sex, in life, it all starts to crumble almost immediately. Is the life she’s built for herself over the last couple of decades really that fragile, or was David just that awful? It’s kind of both, really. The spiral is quick and painful to watch, in no small part because Margaret immediately locks down and tries to deal with it all by herself. A lot of this is about control - abusers exert it, and their survivors spend years, maybe the rest of their life trying to reclaim it. For all of her good insight and advice to Gwyn, Margaret’s a classic example of someone who can’t see for themselves what they see for others and the results are tragic.

The setting and visuals are an important part of how the story gets told. It takes place mostly in modern structures, lots of glass, concrete, everything sleek and polished, with one example standing out as an exception, a place seedier and uglier amidst everything else. In that moment, it feels like you’re visiting the monster in its den. The score is dominated by urgent strings, suggesting something pulling tight enough to snap and the pull of a treacherous undercurrent. But even more important than the sights and sounds are the performances, which are uniformly strong - the opening scene, where Gwyn’s experience is written all over her face, sets the tone. David’s sadism is starkly apparent without an ounce of scenery-chewing. This is a man who knows the control he has, how complete it is, and how easily he can reassert it. He knows exactly where Margaret’s soft spots are, and he uses that leverage quietly, but directly and mercilessly. Abbie is a believable teenage girl, someone who has lived with a mother who’s maybe a touch too protective, but not so much that she can’t speak her mind. Margaret, who seems so self-possessed and self-assured at the beginning, disintegrates over the course of the film without it ever tipping over into melodrama. The wideness in her eyes, the nervousness in her voice, even something as simple as messy hair registers as something meaningful, and the first act ends with Margaret finally revealing everything in a monologue about her time with David. It’s a long unbroken shot that goes on and on and on and on, and at the end of it, a light has gone out in her eyes. You almost need to come up for air once it’s over.

It’s not an especially violent film (until it is, and then whoo boy), a lot is suggested or happens offscreen, and that’s for the good. It reinforces the idea that once you’re in someone’s head like David is, you don’t have to shout or beat someone to get them to do what you want. Just get them where they’re vulnerable, and you’ve got them forever. There’s research into classical conditioning that suggests that old responses aren’t ever totally extinguished, that they can reassert themselves, and that’s very much what happens here. All it takes is for that one person to reenter someone’s life, and they’re right back where they were. Everything Margaret’s built begins to disintegrate, and since we spend the whole film with her, it becomes sort of difficult to know how much of this we should trust. Not in a schlocky way, the film plays pretty fair and there are little blink-and-you-miss-it bits of ambiguity that the film doesn’t bother to resolve. Which is good, a little uncertainty helps films like these, and it never really lands on one side or another. Like, if you wanted to read this as a story of mistaken identity leading someone to spiral into delusion, you could. Or you could take it as face value, the film isn’t telling you what to think. Like last week’s film and so many before that, the idea that a mother will do anything for her child is not a new one or one that always goes happy places.

There is the fairly obvious idea that if Margaret had just come clean about her past when shit started going down, then none of this would have happened. And yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t take into consideration the shame, the need to take of it yourself, the need to prove that you aren’t that person anymore, that fear that nobody will believe you, all of which are pretty common consequences to abuse. It doesn’t go the obvious route for a conclusion, though I didn’t find the end quite as “bonkers” or “batshit insane” as some others did. To me, it seemed like a logical conclusion to what came before, given how David treated Margaret. Nor did I see the ending as “unrealistically happy” like another critic did. These are all the kinds of responses you would expect from someone who has never been subjected to what Margaret had to live with. You wouldn’t know - you weren’t there.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

We’re All Going To The World’s Fair: Whoever’s Watching

Scary movies about malevolent technology can be a risky proposition. Something that seems absolutely contemporary when it comes out can feel hilariously dated maybe a year or two later, and this is especially true of anything having to do with the Internet. If the writer or director isn’t familiar with Internet culture, it becomes very apparent very quickly and then you’re just watching it for the irony because it’s almost impossible to take seriously.

So I think that We’re All Going To The World’s Fair works as well as it does because it’s not a film that posits the Internet as some kind of malevolent entity as much as it is just a fact of everyday life, but one with very specific consequences. It’s not a film about technology, it’s a film about the effect of technology on people. It’s a film about loneliness and the difficulties of connection in an age of social media, draped in the trappings of a horror film.

It opens on a teenage girl’s bedroom. Not an especially unusual one - it’s cozy, decorated with fairy lights, tidy but not overly so. And very quickly, we realize our point of view is this girl’s webcam. Her name is Casey, and she’s making a video, possibly to share on YouTube. She’s looking at us, and we’re looking back at her, except she’s not really looking at us, she’s looking at an audience, the audience she assumes will be watching this. She tells us (or rather, whoever will be watching) that she’s going to take “the World’s Fair Challenge.” This involves drawing a small amount of blood and repeating over and over “I want to go to the world’s fair, I want to go to the world’s fair.” See, when you do this, you become part of a community centered around all of the people who have taken this challenge, and begin experiencing strange transformations shortly afterward. They share videos documenting their transformations and experiences. But it’s okay, she’s got her stuffed lemur Poe to keep her safe through whatever happens next.

And soon enough, she begins to feel alienated, separated from her body. Like something else is beginning to inhabit it, and all she can do is watch.

The specifics are a little murky here, it’s described as “an online horror game,” but it isn’t really presented as such - it’s closer to something between a TikTok challenge, an ARG, and urban legends as old as Bloody Mary and as relatively recent as Ben Drowned. Possibly it’s a collective form of storytelling. But this is really nitpicking, because it’s really just the pretext for everything that comes after. This film takes place in a world that seems profoundly empty. It’s a world of houses separated by wide swaths of land, highways passing through stretches of strip malls and the shells of abandoned big-box stores, cars speeding by on their way to someplace else, anyplace else. Casey wanders this bleak landscape, apparently unburdened by school or friends. Her father exists only as a voice shouting angrily from offscreen and as a set of headlights pulling up into the driveway as Casey finishes the dinner she made for herself, seated alone at a dining-room table. Her life is on her computer, where she makes videos that she uploads for people to respond to, as she responds to their videos. It’s easy to imagine this being a world of people inside, alone, staring into glowing screens, looking for some kind of contact. In the very rare instance that there’s more than one person in a frame, the other is inevitably obscured - a shadowy figure walking by in the background, or a crowd of people seen only as a faceless blur. In this world, Casey is an island, unmoored and adrift.

Really, it’s a story about lonely people broadcasting their experiences to whoever’s watching, a careful look at the dissonant confluence of intimacy and performance that is social media. Casey’s videos catch the attention of someone who runs a channel about the challenge, what he refers to as “endgame-level content,” and their conversations are the only instances we have of Casey actually talking to another human being. In lesser hands, this would be a simple Internet-predator story, the challenge being some kind of snare for unwitting minors. But, thank goodness, it’s nothing that obvious or cliched. It really does seem like Casey is experiencing some kind of transformation, something like possession. But it also seems like she’s struggling with feelings that maybe she can’t even really articulate, a sense of loss for something she doesn’t know she’s missing. So the question becomes whether we’re watching her being slowly consumed by some kind of supernatural force, or if she’s an isolated, unstable girl experiencing some kind of catharsis. Is this really happening to her? I mean, something is definitely happening to her, but what? How much of this is real, and how much is performance? How much of Casey is Casey, and how much of it is the game? How much of any of us is real, and how much is performance?

I know that I’m describing in a way that makes it sound pretty cerebral, and that’s because it is. And maybe that’s the kiss of death to a certain kind of horror fan who’d sum it up as “dumb” and “boring” and “slow.” But if they can’t give themselves over to a story, can’t empathize with the characters, and just sit there like a baby bird, waiting to have jump-scares and “brutal kills” regurgitated into their waiting eye-mouths, that’s their fucking problem. There are definitely some very tense, uncomfortable moments of psychological horror, even some body horror, and there’s a real undercurrent of dread throughout. Whatever the reason, it’s clear Casey isn’t safe. But more than anything else it inhabits the world we live in, locates the uneasiness in the way anyone can share themselves with anyone else who’s tuning in without any guarantee of reciprocity or actual connection. You cast these bottles with messages in them out into the dark, and you have no idea who’s reading them, or if anyone is. There’s horror in that.

In some ways it feels like a film that’s going to hit hardest for a particular age range, one of which I am a part - people old enough to remember a time before the Internet, especially as it is today, but young enough to have been an active participant in its earliest years, familiar with those liminal forms of intimacy that could define so much of early Internet culture in a way that feels like just another part of the landscape today. It’s not as harrowing or bleak as, say, Downloading Nancy, but it occupies some of the same space - how much do we really know about each other, what is the difference between knowing someone online and knowing them in real life, what is performance and what is identity when the line between them is so blurred. It’s not scary in the jump-out-and-yell-“boo” sense, but it’s certainly unsettling at points and deeply haunting and melancholy in its end.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

The Empty Man: Image And Substance

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long”

        - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Marketing is a hell of a thing. I get that you need to on some level convince audiences to come see your movie, and part of doing that is trying to convince them that it’s going to be good. I don’t think I’m offering any penetrating insight on that front, but goddamn is it annoying when the marketing for a film frames it as one type of film when it’s really another. Maybe I’m still feeling burned by discovering the hard way almost thirty years ago that Muriel’s Wedding was not, in fact, a romantic comedy about a young woman’s love for Abba, but The Empty Man is marketed as yet another movie about a bunch of kids who mess with a Bloody Mary-style urban legend and get more than they bargained for. And it’s not that.

Well, it’s not not that, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a brooding, unsettling journey into something much bigger and darker than that, and it’s a lot smarter than its ostensible premise might lead you to believe.

The film opens on four friends taking a hiking vacation in Bhutan. They’re trekking through remote villages and up into the mountains. It’s slow going, and just when they’ve gotten far away from the nearest village, one of them takes a tumble down a crevasse. He’s not okay, and there’s a huge snowstorm coming in. They find shelter in an abandoned house and things…start to get strange. They don’t end well.

An indeterminate amount of time later, in Webster Mills, Missouri, James Lasombra is living the life of a man whose wife and child are gone. Long hours at his store selling security equipment, an especially depressing birthday dinner by himself at a Mexican chain restaurant, rattling around inside a house too big for one person. It isn’t clear right away what happened to them, but whatever it was, there’s a lot of tiptoeing around it between him and Nora, his neighbor. As it turns out, Nora’s daughter has gotten involved with some new-age self-help group and has apparently discovered the secret to transcendence. You know, like you do when you’re young. And then she disappears. Local law enforcement isn’t rushing to do anything, though, because Nora’s daughter is 18 and appears to have packed up and taken a bunch of her clothes and possessions. Nothing about this says foul play, and she’s old enough to make her own decisions. But Nora feels like something’s wrong, and James - who used to be a police officer- agrees to do some digging.

Starting with the phrase “The Empty Man made me do it,” written in blood on the mirror.

For a film that’s supposed to be about a bunch of teens running afoul of an urban legend, it’s pretty audacious in its construction. The prologue in Bhutan is about the length of a short movie on its own - to the point that I paused to check that I had the right film - and it puts some pieces into place that the film takes its sweet time to pay off. In fact, that’s probably one of the film’s bigger strengths, that it’s not afraid to take its time. It rarely feels like it’s dragging or spinning its wheels, but it is a very deliberately paced movie, very careful and spare. There’s not a lot of dialogue, mostly short, economical conversations that don’t get too stagey, and the performances are consistently on the low-key side of believable. It uses a lot of shots with little to no dialogue to communicate details - the sequence where James spends his birthday by himself in a Mexican restaurant is a great example. It’ s both comic and deeply sad and works as an economical sketch of what his life is like, even sneaking in some details that become more important later. There are a lot of little character touches like this, and the film is especially good about doing exposition through glimpsed details and asides, the kind of exchanges people with a shared past actually have, fragmentary flashbacks that feel like shards of past intruding on the present. It's exposition inferred rather than laid out plain and contrived.

It’s also not what you’d call a loud movie, in the sense that it doesn’t really go for jump-scares or melodrama. There are moments of violence, but they’re largely brief and sudden, otherwise unaccompanied by any fanfare, over as quickly as they begin. The score is mostly cold ambience, like a winter wind and the cracking of icicles, and it’s a shadowy film - there are a lot of single light sources creating oases in the middle of darkness, people moving in and out of light. It’s less concerned with scary moments than it is a constant, sinister hum, a feeling that something isn’t quite right. This isn’t a movie that jumps up and screams in your face, this is a movie that sneaks up from behind you, leans over and whispers terrible things in your ear. The quiet, spare, approach and deliberate pacing mean it gradually unspools, taking a winding path where gradual recollection and revelation play out against a landscape that feels like a trip down a rabbit hole - we’re in Bhutan, then we’re in Missouri, a hiking trip goes wrong, then a bunch of kids start going missing, there’s an urban legend involved, and that somehow opens up into something else entirely, like James wandering impossibly deeper and deeper into the bowels of an old building downtown, these strange secrets stretching farther than anyone would expect. And it just keeps twisting and spiraling into some pretty unexpected places - there are nods to postmodernism, Tibetan mysticism, cosmic horror, and it hangs together well, self-assured and quietly chilling.

On the downside, the deliberate pacing extends even to the end, which could have been tighter - it’s long enough from the big reveal to its culmination that by the time it gets where it’s going, a lot of the impact has been lost and it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else. In that sense, it kind of ends not with a bang, but a whimper. But the ride to get there is surprisingly good - smart and restrained and atmospheric as all get-out. I often find myself watching otherwise disappointing movies and thinking how much better their basic premise could have been in better hands. This time I came away feeling like I’d seen what could have been a really tired, obvious premise done really really well, like a gourmet version of a White Castle slider. The marketing promises junk food, but you get cuisine.

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Odishon: Everyone Is Lonely

Loneliness is corrosive. We’re a social species, for whom community is historically an important part of our survival. And even though it might not be as critical to our continued physical survival as it might once have been, depriving someone of that can impact their mental health negatively, and it can become a vicious cycle - the more disconnected we become, the harder it is to reconnect. It’s easy to forget yourself, forget your humanity even, over a long enough stretch of time isolated from everyone else.

And Odishon (Audition) knows this very well. It’s a masterfully made, absolutely harrowing story about loneliness and how it distorts and misshapes us.

It’s been seven years since Shigeharu Aoyama lost his wife Ryoko to a terminal illness. It’s just him and his son Shigehiko, who is now a teenager. Shigeharu does alright for himself in television production, but even his son sees that he’s lost some of the spring in his step, that he looks tired. It’s the time-honored romantic comedy cliché of the child urging their widowed parent to get back up on the horse, to start looking for love again. Shigehiko’s even got a girlfriend of his own, who comes over for study dates and is impressed with his knowledge of dinosaurs. Even his secretary is about to get married. It’s time for Dad to get back out there.

But it’s tough to meet people the older you get. Shigeharu doesn’t want an arranged marriage, he wants something romantic. He wants to meet someone and fall in love, and that’s not the kind of thing you can just make happen, especially as a busy professional. And one night, out at a bar after work, his friend Yasuhisa hits on an idea. See, Yasuhisa works in film, and it wouldn’t be that difficult for him to arrange a casting call for a movie ostensibly in production. Shigeharu will sit in on the auditions, he’ll be able to look over their resumes, get their contact information. Thirty women, see if there are any he likes. He can follow up with them later, and what do you know, it turns out the funding for the film’s been withdrawn. Tough break…but how about having dinner with me? One comic montage later, complete with actresses doing everything from baton-twirling routines to stripping down nude, one quiet, shy young woman stands out to Shigeharu. Her name’s Asami. She’s very quiet, very demure. She trained in classical ballet for 12 years but her hopes of a career were cut short when she injured her hip. Now she gets by working at a friend’s bar three nights a week. Shigeharu is almost immediately smitten.

Yasuhisa isn’t so sure, though. He thinks there’s something…off…about her.

There’s a lot going on here. It’s got the premise of a romantic comedy, but almost right from the start there’s something more astringent about it. Once they agree to their ruse, Shigeharu and Yasuhisa exhibit the conspiratorial chumminess of less overtly misogynistic versions of characters from In The Company Of Men. There are glimmers of conscience and concern, but it doesn’t stop them from going through with what is basically the presentation of thirty women as commodities, as if Shigeharu is selecting a new car, or a pet, or the fish he wants for dinner. And once Shigeharu falls for Asami, he’s as giddy as a schoolboy, which makes sense, since the idea of having a series of women paraded before you so you can pick out your favorite is a deeply juvenile one, It illustrates the idea that in some ways, some men never really grow up, that when it comes to sex and love, Shigeharu isn’t much more mature than his son. He’s happy, he’s got a new lease on life, he’s excited again, and it all seems sincere. There isn’t really any maliciousness or cruelty to him, it really is the headiness of new love, but the lie it’s predicated upon is never really far away. He’s a man who puts his needs first, and doesn’t really give the implications of that much thought.

And then there’s Asami. She is very much someone who seems fine at first glance, but the longer you look and the deeper you look, the clearer it becomes that there’s something very wrong. She’s demure, but demure to the point of utter stillness, almost dissociated (which would make sense given what we will eventually learn about her). Her background doesn’t check out at all - not her employment references, not anything. She’s a total blank. As Yasuhisa observers, he cannot find anyone who actually knows her. There are allusions to a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family, revealed to be much more and much worse in startling, upsetting flashbacks. She says things like “love only me,” to which Shigeharu readily agrees, not yet realizing how literal she’s being. Asami’s been through a lot from a very young age, and it’s had a profound impact on how she views things like love and connection, abandonment and pain.

The characterization is solid - nobody here really feels two-dimensional. Shigeharu is believable as a man who’s been grieving for a long time, and finds himself excited by the prospect of new love, enough so that he’s willing to overlook some of his qualms at the blatantly unethical way he’s pursuing it. Yasuhisa gives him the idea in the first place, but he also recognizes that his friend isn’t thinking straight and tries to counsel him to be cautious, so both of them are neither wholly unsympathetic nor wholly sympathetic. Like far too many men, they’re otherwise decent people with some pretty serious blind spots when it comes to how they treat women. Asami, from the outside, is just disconcerting enough in speech and manner to be noticeable, but not so much that someone like Shigeharu couldn’t disregard it (and there are some suggestions late in the film that he’s remembered some of their interactions very selectively), and it’s easy to believe her as someone bent into something monstrous by profound abuse and neglect. Shigeharu’s son is your basic heterosexual teenage boy, as interested in dinosaurs as he is in girls, but he doesn’t seem predatory about it. He wants his dad to be happy, he’s starting to discover attraction himself, and that all seems about right.

So it’s a film that’s very much about loneliness. This isn’t even subtextual - at one point, Yasuhisa observes that “everyone is lonely in Japan,” and it sort sets the thesis for everything else. Yes, Asami’s clearly been warped by a childhood filled with abuse to the point that she has real trouble connecting to others, but Shigeharu’s own relative loneliness causes him to ignore his better judgment and disregard some very clear red flags in the things Asami says and how she behaves. That lack of connection estranges people from their sense of self and their good judgment. But it also highlights the idea that there’s lonely, and then there’s lonely. Next to Asami’s utter isolation and disconnection - not just from humanity, but from empathy and healthy boundaries - Shigeharu’s loneliness is very relative. He has a son, coworkers, friends…his loneliness seems more like self-pity compared to the desolation that is Asami’s life and the shape it’s forced her into. We’re introduced to her sitting in her room, staring out the window into the rain, and it’s immediately evocative of someone whose emptiness is total.

And all of this is in service of a story that’s told in an audacious fashion. The film plays a lot with narrative in a few different ways, all to good effect. It begins as a romantic comedy (if you think about it, looking for a spouse under the pretext of auditions for the leading role in a film feels a lot like a rom-com waiting to happen. If you stop to consider it, the implications are appalling, but that’s not unusual for romantic comedies) stem to stern - it’s got the lighthearted, breezy pop soundtrack, a yearning secretary, a no-nonsense housekeeper, and a son urging his dad to get back out there. And then at the end of the first act, the penny drops for the audience in a single scene, as unnerving as it is simple in construction. Now we know for sure that something isn’t right (well, we did anyway, since we’re watching a horror movie), but the film more or less continues as a romantic comedy, even as discordant notes increasingly creep in - as we learn more about Asami (or rather, learn how much we don’t know), as Yasuhisa becomes increasingly concerned by this and urges Shigeharu not to rush into things, while Shigeharu blithely ignores his friend, so strong is his attraction to Asami. The second act has more than a bit of the feeling that Shigeharu is walking toward the edge of a cliff, whistling and looking at the clouds. But it’s still grounded in romantic comedy, where his absentmindedness and willingness to take risks or ignore what’s staring him in the face would read as the dizzy recklessness of new love. But knowing what we know, it reads vert differently, like someone headed toward his doom.

It also plays with narrative visually as well, making inventive use of cutaways to convey beats economically, and flashbacks that mix up time and place - putting the adult versions of characters in situations where they were children and vice versa, and revelations that do the same, turning someone’s process of putting two and two together into a visual recombination of people and places and conversations we’ve already seen that simultaneously suggest the unreliability of memory, the logic of nightmares, and the delusions that accompany extreme ordeal, the wish to be anywhere but here. It jumbles a lot of things up in a way that defies linear storytelling, but it communicates truths nonetheless - there are points where Shigeharu, in terms of the plot, can’t be where he’s shown to be or seeing the things he’s seeing, but nonetheless, it carries the weight of truth. It’s like he’s starting to realize exactly what he’s gotten himself into, as well as having some revelations about his own past behavior, his realizations playing out in front of him and us. He’s almost serving as a proxy for us, showing us the things that have happened even though he wasn’t actually there and things that he did long before the events of this film. And even apart from the inventive use of flashback and dreamlike, hallucinatory revelation, there are a number of moments that are masterfully composed, some haunting, some unsettling, some beautiful, using light and space and the positioning of characters and objects to communicate the emotional states of characters without any words, or to underline exactly how creepy everything is getting.

And then in the third act, it all comes crashing down on him, and he is very much there, and so are we, and has so often been the case in the film up to this point, we are not allowed to look away as Shigeharu learns exactly how much of a mistake he’s made and what the costs are going to be. It’s excruciating to watch, and somehow doesn’t feel at odds with what’s come before - when Asami said he should love nobody except her, that’s exactly what she meant. Other people have told her that they would love her in the past, but they lied. And what Asami has learned is that while other people lie, pain never does. It plays fair in that regard - the film tells us that there’s something off about her, Yasuhisa knows there’s something off about her, it’s clear to us that there’s something off about her, but Shigeharu doesn’t listen, and now this is happening, with the dread inevitability that’s been building the entire time, This film is considered to be a classic of Japanese horror, and there is a very good reason for that.

IMDB entry
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