Honeydew: Very Little Meat And A Whole Lot Of Filler

Horror is, in my opinion, a genre that benefits strongly from the short story. It certainly isn’t impossible to do long-form horror well, but the longer the story the bigger the risk that you’re going to overexplain or bog it down. Short stories get in, set up a situation, and then take it to some fucked-up place, getting out while the shock still lingers. And I notice something similar in film - one of the most common weaknesses of horror films that I’ve observed over the many years I’ve been flinging my opinion out into the void is a tendency to drag in the middle or to whiff the ending, and I think that’s in part because sustaining feelings of tension or dread or unease or whatever for that long is tough. And for my part, I haven’t spent nearly as much time watching short films as I could be. I’m going to try and rectify that, though it’s tough since they rarely appear on streaming services.

But Honeydew is a great example of this exact problem. It starts off pretty strong, but then it drags into an absolute crawl at the end. It’s the poster child for full-length horror films that would have been better off as a short.

It opens on still shots of woodlands, a lone barn, sprawling wheat fields, steam rising from the ground. There’s an old woman grinding seed into flour. There’s a loaf of bread in an oven. A young woman eats, and scratchy religious music plays on an old tape recorder. It’s nicely cryptic. Then there is a funeral, a few mourners gathered around a simple wooden cross. It all creates a burgeoning sense of rural unease. A poacher skins an animal, wanders into a nearby barn, and discovers something he shouldn’t have.

And now we’re watching an informational film about sordico, a fungal infestation of wheat. It’s being watched by a botany student named Rylie, She and her boyfriend Sam are driving through the country, headed for some kind of getaway. And as is often the case, they make a wrong turn. And as is often also the case, they lose cell reception and their GPS stops working. So they camp for the night, only to be woken up by someone who says they’re on his land. He gives them directions to get where they’re going and tells them he’ll be back in awhile to make sure they’re gone. So they pack up and head out again and what do you know, they happen across a farmhouse! Do we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next? Is that farmhouse going to hide a terrible secret?

Yes we do, and of course it will.

I know, I sound dismissive, but I think it’s because the opening of the film showed a bit of restraint - it created a sense of unease without spelling everything out in the first ten minutes, using just isolated images juxtaposed against each other. And it’s mostly good about showing instead of telling. Sam and Rylie have a somewhat strained relationship, but it’s communicated through small things. The farmhouse is home to the old woman we saw earlier making flour. And she’s nice enough, but she’s also pretty strange right off the rip. There’s maybe a little too much silence between the things she says, an oddness. There’s her very strange son who communicates only in grunts, and his face is bandaged for some reason. He really enjoys old Popeye cartoons. We know that there’s something not right here (if only because we know we’re watching a horror movie), but exactly how it’s all going to go down isn’t immediately obvious. Should they stay? Of course not. Do they stay? Of course they do. So, dumb protagonist behavior aside, it’s a strong opening.

But after that, it starts to go downhill.  It’s hurt most by an almost complete lack of tension, because it’s only got one pace – slow. Which, at first, is fine. The evocative opening and the unhurried pace initially give the film time to build some atmosphere, but then it never tightens up or takes off. It just keeps going at that same slow, methodical pace, and so even though the setting’s good and the performances are suitably restrained and everything gradually unfolds into something that gets stranger and stranger, it starts to feel lethargic and aimless. It is never a good sign when I doze off in the middle of a film and let me tell you, that is exactly what I did. It feels like someone took a short film and stretched it out to almost two hours without actually adding anything, and pretty much the entire second act feels like the film is waiting around until it hits a certain running time before it moves on to something like a climax. And when it does reach a climax, it…continues to sort of plod along and then the whole thing just sort of stops. There’s no tension, no stakes, just a bunch of things happening with entirely too much time in between each thing, and then the third act explains what’s going on and the film ends.

And it’s too bad, because I think the filmmakers have some chops. The cinematography is suitably moody – rural vistas, dimly lit basements, shabby country squalor – and the soundtrack is mostly spooky minimalism, all thumps and clatters and wordless chanting. The editing is a standout, it’s almost percussive in a way and makes use of split-screen to mostly good effect.  I really think all the best bits could have been compressed into no more than an hour, and probably less and it would have worked a lot better. It would have gotten in, set up a situation, dropped in the protagonists and snapped the trap shut before they had time to realize what was going on. As it is, there good things about it, there are a number of good moments, but overall the whole thing just feels inert.

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Lovely, Dark, And Deep: Nature Abhors A Vacuum

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

- Robert Frost

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

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

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

It says “I owe this land a body.”

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

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

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

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

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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.

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God Told Me To: Deus Ex Machina

A deus ex machina is a plot device in which an improbable or unlikely occurrence resolves a difficult plot point, and is literally translated “god from the machine.” Usually it’s considered a bad thing, a lazy way of resolving a part of a story, the sort of thing that happens when someone writes themselves into a corner. And I’m sympathetic to that - the best stories to me are the ones where you don’t see the resolution coming but in retrospect was in front of you the entire time. You know, the polar opposite of High Tension.

God Told Me To manages to take the idea of the deus ex machina in a couple of different directions. It’s a down-the-rabbit-hole movie that in its increasing weirdness provides an improbable explanation for a series of events. But it also deals with the idea of god in relation to the machine that is the social structure and power dynamics of modern society.

It opens on a bustling day in 1970s New York City. People are going about their business, crowding the sidewalks and hailing cabs and all of the other things a shitload of people in a sprawling city do. And then a shot rings out. Someone falls. And then another shot, and another person hit. And another, and another. People scatter, panicked, and the police are called in. Eventually they locate the sniper, perched on top of a water tower, and Detective Peter Nicholas climbs the water tower against everyone else’s orders to try and reason with the shooter. All Nicholas manages to get out of him is that “God told me to,” before the sniper jumps to his death.

This is tragic, of course, but it’s also the big city. Mentally unstable people lashing out violently aren’t really anything new in that respect. But then Peter is called to the scene of another crime - a series of mass stabbings at a supermarket. And then a police officer opens fire on the crowd at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. And then a man murders his wife and children, sitting placidly waiting for the police to arrive. They all say the same thing…

“God told me to.”

Needless to say, Peter immediately becomes obsessed with figuring out exactly what is happening. One delusional person acting out violently? That’s one thing, but when people from different walks of life all get up one day and start killing on the behest of what appears to be God, that’s something else entirely. And Peter Nicholas is a religious man - a devout Catholic in a place and time where faith doesn’t have the heft that it might once have. For him, this isn’t just about the mystery of what is driving apparently random people to kill, it’s also about the mystery of faith, about God’s will, and what it means when God doesn’t just let good people die, but seems to be taking a more proactive role in the process. Peter is tormented by this, and there are already signs that he’s got some baggage that he needs to work on. He was an orphan, raised in a Catholic boys’ home, and although he is separated from his wife (who is as secular as he is religious) and seeing another woman, he can’t bring himself to divorce her. There’s more guilt and regret between them than enmity, and well…the church frowns on divorce.

And this is the machine - the institutions of power upon which the city is built. New York City in the 1970s is a place beset by multiple ills – the immediate fallout from the social upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s, institutional corruption, a failing infrastructure and a restless population. Cynicism abounds as people mock Peter for his faith, and urban decay and crime both thrive as well. It’s a city in turmoil, and the Catholic church is an extremely powerful part of the city’s power structure, and the realization that maybe people like the archbishop and the mayor and other wealthy citizens know more about this than they’re letting on emerges gradually over the course of the film. For Nicholas it’s a journey toward discovery and understanding, and it’s safe to say he’s not discovering anything good. The rot runs deeper than he could ever know.

It's definitely a film of its time - there are some attitudes that are unfortunate by modern standards, but it holds up surprisingly well in a number of ways. The filmmakers had almost no budget and shot guerilla-style, so the whole thing has a raw immediacy to it. This also means minimal effects work and a reliance on colored lighting and quick cuts to get the point across, but this adds to the feeling of urgency rather than seeming cheap. There are some moments of body horror where the effects they do use are work well, and it all takes the film to some pretty unexpected places.

It’s not often that a low-budget horror film also traffics in big ideas, but this one is a film about an unseen force spurring people to kill while also being about faith in the face of its absence from society as a whole, institutions that serve only themselves (everyone in this film acknowledges the church’s power but very few are believers). It’s simultaneously a fable about the corrupting influence of power, and a down-the-rabbit-hole investigative film and the sort of it-could-be-anybody exercise in paranoia of predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and successors like Fallen. I was pleasantly surprised at how much there was to unpack.

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The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

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

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

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

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

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

Almost like talismans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Consecration: But Now I See

It just occurred to me as I started to write this how many movies I’ve seen that take place in monasteries or convents. Something about the somber surroundings, the isolation, the presumed holiness or sanctity…it’s fertile ground for creepiness to be sure, but also has the problem of any well-worn location - the more a location lends itself to a particular type of story, the easier it is to just tell that particular type of story, and the easier it is to tell that type of story, the less likely it is any other type of story will ever get told. It’s why we have so many movies telling the same stories about old Nazi bunkers from World War II, or the same stories about abandoned mental hospitals. So yeah, stories in monasteries and convents will probably feature an unusually secretive or zealous religious order who are hiding some terrible secret, and someone coming in from the outside to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. I’ve seen that done well, and I’ve seen it done really badly.

Consecration - a brooding, careful, deliberate story that’s equal parts mystery and supernatural horror - doesn’t really break the mold much but it largely does what it does well, save a narrative choice toward the end that brings all of the momentum to a screeching halt for the sake of overexplaining something that you’ve pretty much already figured out.

We meet Grace Farlo as she’s walking down the street, with a voiceover monologue telling us that her brother always believed she had a guardian angel, while she believed in nothing. But now, she says as a white-habited nun approaches her, she’s not so sure. Flash back to some indeterminate amount of time before, and Grace is receiving the news that her brother Michael - who became a priest - has been found dead at convent in a remote corner of Scotland. Initial findings suggest that he murdered another visiting priest before taking his own life. Needless to say, Grace has a difficult time believing any of it went down like that, and travels to the convent in question to find out what actually happened. The convent is home to an especially - some would say fanatically - devout order of nuns, an order dedicated to the protection of a very important holy relic. As Grace approaches the convent, the Mother Superior recites their litany: “There is only one God…

…and his shadow.”

So on one level it’s your basic “person investigates unwholesome goings-on at a convent that hides a mysterious secret” story, as is almost inevitable with the location. And Grace is very much a woman of reason and science among the especially devout, so you have that element of attempting to explain the inexplicable through reason versus faith. The bones of the story are nothing new in that respect, but for the most part, it’s the execution that saves it. Sight is a consistent through-line - Grace is an ophthalmologist, one of the nuns has gouged out her eye because believes she saw the devil, and visions of the past and future play an important narrative role. And it’s a movie, so what we see is important to how we experience and understand the story. It’s assembled with care, and it keeps us guessing for about the first half of the film with a mixture of flashbacks, hallucinatory visions, and what might (or might not) be nightmare sequences, in a process that gradually reveals more and more about what actually happened here and why. It makes good use of disparate images and moments that hint at connections without making them obvious right off the bat, all set in an atmosphere of gloom, overcast rural Scotland, old convents and older ruins, all drab and gray with the white-habited nuns standing out almost like ghosts. The expected story beats are punctuated by a number of arresting visuals and striking moments throughout, and the cumulative effect is one that keeps us guessing as the film gradually builds to a revelation.

Which, unfortunately, is probably connected to the film’s biggest weakness. It’s not a bad revelation, and it’s all set up well by the creepily devout nuns, the pleasant, affable representative from the Vatican who, along with the sisters, has another agenda (because of course), and there are visual touches here and there, and small asides that broadly hint at nefarious goings-on without ever really giving things away ahead of time. Now, attentive viewers will probably figure out the twist sooner than it’s revealed, and that’s down to familiarity with the genre and the setting as much as anything. It’s a solid execution of a formula, but…it’s still a formula. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. The problem is what ends up serving as sort of a false ending on the heels of the big revelation. Once the truth has been revealed, the film stops its momentum dead to show us exactly how everything happened start to finish, and we don’t need all of it to get the point across. The problem is not revisiting key scenes with new information or context, that’s a perfectly respectable narrative device, and a big part of playing fair in any film with a twist (still looking at you, High Tension). The problem is that it pretty much revisits all of them, well after we get the point. It’s just gilding and regilding and regilding the lily and it brings everything to a halt in doing so. Any surprise evoked by the big reveal just evaporates, right when you want to bring the whole thing to a crescendo. Maybe a brisker montage would have worked, maybe intercutting all of it with the revelation itself, but as it stands it just kills the mood dead and does the actual end - a nice bit of circularity that pays off an early startling moment - a disservice by making it feel like an afterthought, something appended as an “oh yeah” after somebody finishes telling you what it was you just watched.

I don’t know that it would have been a transcendent bit of film, it’s still pretty beholden to narrative convention, the performances are good and it’s very well-shot, but it could have still packed a punch. In a film with the amount of subtext this one had about sight and belief, I guess I just wish they hadn’t been so literal about showing us everything.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Hermana Muerte: I Saw The Light

As far as I’m concerned, prequels are worse than sequels, and heaven knows I don’t like sequels. Horror thrives on mystery, and prequels and sequels alike tend to dismantle that mystery. Sequels tend to belabor what worked so well in the original films, but now we’re expecting it, so its power is lost. Prequels, on the other hand, strip away the unknown from the original film. I don’t want origin stories for my monsters, I want them to be unknowable and terrifying. I want them to be facts of the world, irreducible.

Well, most of the time. There are always exceptions. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking that I wouldn’t mind seeing a Lovecraftian take on Breaking Bad, about a man who turns to dark rituals out of desperation and gradually loses everything. I’d watch that. But back to the matter at hand. Hermana Muerte (Sister Death) works as a prequel to the very good demonic possession film Veronica for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a fully realized story about an incidental character from Veronica, and second, because it’s put together with skill. That said, while it’s well-constructed, I found it an easier film to appreciate than to fully like or engage with.

The film begins in Spain, in 1939, with scratchy, home-movie footage of a little girl in a small village. She’s clutching a cross and staring ecstatically into the sky. People crowd around her as she appears to witness something, to see something only she can see. She kneels, arms spread wide in supplication or in a reenactment of the crucifixion. It’s hard to say. Ten years later, a young woman in a novice’s habit walks up to a convent, bleached white under the midday sun. It’s the little girl, all grown up. Her name is Narcisa, and after years of being locally celebrated as “The Holy Child,” she’s come here to take her final vows. Before the civil war, it was a cloistered convent, but what sisters were able to make it back have re-opened it as a school for underprivileged girls. Narcisa will be teaching classes as a replacement for Sister Ines. The sisters are…evasive…about her departure.

All seems about as well as it can - the girls learn lessons alongside performing chores around the convent, the better to provide them with skills that will be useful to them once they reach adulthood and have to find employment - or a husband. But there are little things - children’s balls that come rolling down the hallway with no girls in sight. Games of Hangman that appear on the walls. Loud banging and weeping in empty hallways.

Girls that have disappeared, never to be seen again.

The thematic spine of this movie is the way people and nations have to grapple with their past and the things that haunt them. Narcisa experienced an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary as a child, and has been wracked by doubt ever since, even as she became something of a local celebrity. Was it a vision sent from God, or the Devil? Why won’t God send her a sign that what she saw was divine? She prays, she fasts, she mortifies her flesh, still nothing. Some of the sisters see her taking the vows as a good thing, the “Holy Child” dedicating herself to God, but others believe she’s a charlatan, or worse. It seems like part of Narcisa wants to run away from all of it, the pressure, the expectations, the resentment, the burden of being her, but wherever she goes, there she is. Likewise, the sisters of the convent are still wrestling with the fallout from the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Spain. The way the convent was ransacked, the sisters who were lost, the ones who left and never came back. The war is over, but its reminders are all around them. Bullet holes pock the convent’s entrance, and the Mother Superior says that no amount of lime will ever cover them. Everyone and everywhere is scarred. The convent’s bloody history is written into its walls, sunken deep into its stone, and the sisters really, really don’t want to talk about it.

And dark secrets are the spine of the majority of ghost movies. This one is no different, following pretty standard narrative beats - lots of little things like chairs tipping over by themselves, footsteps when there’s nobody there, mysterious noises, somebody’s mementos left forgotten in the back of a closet, pictures missing from a photo album, the usual. And, of course, all of this leads Narcisa to start asking questions and digging into things nobody wants exhumed. The first act is slow, maybe even a bit meandering as Narcisa keeps experiencing things she can’t explain when she’s awake and oddly specific nightmares when she’s asleep. At the same time she’s getting a sense of how the convent and school work, but it’s all very gradual and understated. Things start to cohere a little more in the second act as Narcisa learns more – there’s a ghostly girl that all the students are afraid of and that the sisters (of course) insist doesn’t exist. They’re very, very keen on drumming that nonsense out of the girls’ heads and very upset when Narcisa take the girls seriously…just like Sister Ines did. Of course, Narcisa is going to continue sticking her nose where the sisters don’t want her to, out of a sense of guilt and a need to make good on her legacy as the local miracle. There are, of course, consequences, setting us up for a third act that does a good job of making up for a relatively static two-thirds as everything sort of goes off at once. Narcisa recapitulates her childhood with visions that are far less ecstatic and much more revelatory, past and present come together, like a piece of paper folded over in half, and all becomes clear, and there is a great and bloody atonement for the sins of the past. Just because you refuse to acknowledge something, that doesn’t make it go away.

Ultimately, this is pretty frustrating film for me, as it’s very well-made, but it ended up leaving me sort of cold. It has its startling moments (and the climax does a lot of the work here) but a lot of it isn’t anything especially novel early on, either narratively or visually, so it maybe doesn’t have the impact it could. More so than Veronica, it hews to very classic storytelling techniques and imagery, and though I like it when filmmakers appreciate the classics, in this case it feels like I’ve seen a lot of this before. That is, when I can see at all – part of the problem with filming inside a convent is the lack of lighting, so a number of scenes are dark enough that it’s difficult to make out what’s supposed to be happening and I think some moments that were meant to be revelatory or shocking got lost. But this eases up as the film goes on, as if more and more light is being let in as the truth becomes known, and there are shots that somehow manage to be beautiful and bloody at the same time. It’s not uneven, but it does take a little while to really get going, and the evenness sometimes feels static.

To its credit, it’s not a prequel to Veronica in any kind of franchise origin story way. The degree to which it intersects with that film is that this is the story of an incidental character from Veronica, a character I described as “the obligatory creepy nun,’ and it’s a story entirely her own, with no attachment to the story it precedes. This is the story of the obligatory creepy nun in her youth, before she was the imposing figure who had seen some shit (and relinquished her sight as a result). As in Veronica, eclipses play an important role, and the whole thing ends with Narcisa recapitulating her childhood before we move to the present and meet Veronica and her classmates, unaware of what is yet to come for them. It all fits together neatly, and it’s a film where nothing is gratuitous, but I wish it inspired more than a polite clap.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

The Pond: Stagnant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Asvins: Foregone Conclusions

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I’ll put on a movie to write about and within the first few minutes get the sense that it’s going to be a turkey and probably not worth my time. Usually, I’ll just stop films like this and watch something else instead. Asvins does not get off to a strong start at all, in any way, shape or form, but this time I decided I’d try to stick with one of those films instead of dismissing it immediately and seeing how it went. As it turns out, I was not at all rewarded for my efforts. It’s an incoherent mess that somehow manages to be both obtuse and obvious at the same time

Varun and his brother Arjun are vloggers who’ve decided to explore an especially creepy mansion in a remote part of England as a way to capitalize on the trend in dark tourism (visiting places where tragedies happened) and to hopefully raise their profile, go viral, all of the usual content-creator things. They’ve brought along their younger brother Rahul, who’s just found out he’s going to Germany to study audio engineering, Arjun’s wife Ritu, and Varun’s girlfriend Grace. They’re headed for an old abandoned estate that’s only accessible during low tide. It used to belong to Aarthi Rajagopal, a renowned archaeologist.

One night, 15 people were murdered there, and Aarthi apparently tortured herself to death. So it’s got a history.

So the premise is five people going into a huge abandoned building with a dark past to record what they find there, and sure enough, what they find there is very bad. This is the same basic premise as about 85% of all other found-footage horror films. But, to its credit, it ends up being about something beyond the initial premise, which is good because the initial premise is sort of run through in the first fifteen minutes, and the film is just shy of two hours long. And this is really the first of the film’s big problems - it plays like someone took the narrative beats, cut them up, threw them in the air and arranged them as they landed. It takes a surprisingly long time for the film to actually get started as it is. There’s a title card along the lines of the events depicted being fictional and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental. Also, no animals were harmed. Then there are multiple cards thanking multiple people, presumably for collectively funding the film. Then there are the credits for multiple production and distribution companies. And then there’s a long animated sequence in which we learn some folklore, one which both manages to give away anything that was going to be a surprise and at the same time isn’t strictly necessary since the story will be belabored extensively over the entire second half of the film. It’s very easy to come away from all of this feeling like you already know how the movie is going to go, and yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes. Then we jump into events in the current day, with what plays out like the climax of a found-footage 101 film, people running around a deserted location screaming and getting picked off by a series of jump scares.

And that’s all before the opening title. Then we bounce back to the events that lead up to those moments, in which everything (mansion belonging to an archaeologist, 15 people found murdered there, the archaeologist killed herself) is explained even though it had already been explained during the opening sequence. So we get a fairly generic found-footage film as about the first half of the movie, but one that starts at the end. And then the second half of the film sort of serves to show what was going on before, during, and after the first half, but not in a way that is necessarily easy to follow.

But all of that is okay, because we will be reminded constantly of what’s happening. This is a film that apparently assumes we have the attention span of a goldfish because we get almost all of the necessary information fed to us repeatedly through dialogue, through conveniently discovered recordings the archaeologist made in which she repeats everything we’ve already learned as well as a bunch of important points literally being written on notes tacked to a wall, which are then cut to multiple times. You know most of how the first act is going to go in the first five or ten minutes, and even have a general idea of how the rest of the film is going to go by the time you’re ten minutes into the second half and the rest is just sitting there and letting what is basically a foregone conclusion spool out. And at almost two hours long, it gets pretty tedious.

So what is happening and how we get to the end are pretty easy to figure out well in advance, but how it gets there still doesn’t follow much of a clear through-line. The film is divided up into chapters, all with titles having to do with two deaths, two lives, two worlds, two minds, and combinations thereof. Twins and two different worlds play into the story, but there’s all this stuff about people having two minds, one is stronger than the other but one of them is also a demon, I think? It doesn’t add much to the story, and on top of that, the second half of the film is littered with portentous voiceover about darkness and light and minds and worlds and demons too and none of it is especially illuminating  The action shifts in ways that I think are supposed to represent different worlds, but it isn’t clear which one is which or what’s actually happening at any given point. Is someone real or a ghost? Are they really them or a shapeshifting demon? Is this the real world or the spirit world? Is this the past or the future? For most of the film, it’s anybody’s guess and though things get a little more coherent toward the end, it’s not enough, as we get into curses and demons and people being bound together and because a demon’s controlling someone you can control the demon through the person you’re controlling, all for an ending that ends up being cliched and confusing in equal parts.

The performances don’t help any - I won’t ding the dialogue, as clumsy as it is, because that could very well be down to translation. But most of the performances are from the Scooby-Doo school of acting, all yelping and screaming and making extraneous noises in ways that don’t so much suggest emotion as bad attempts to perform emotion, lots of mugging  and melodrama at odds with the pitch of the scene otherwise. There are maybe three genuinely creepy moments in the whole thing, and that’s not nearly enough to save it.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Matriarch: A Mother’s Sacrifice

Motherhood is supposed to be this sacred, supremely benevolent thing. It’s warmth, nurturance, love, fertility, growth, a thing to be celebrated and valorized. Motherhood is supposed to be sacred, but all too often it isn’t. Motherhood can also be greedy and selfish and narcissistic, manipulative and self-serving. And there’s something profane about that, a massive violation of trust and care. It’s no wonder that motherhood distorted and disfigured comes up so much in horror. It’s one of those things that literally and metaphorically hits us where we live. Some things are supposed to be safe. Some places are supposed to be safe, and some people are supposed to be safe.

And when they aren’t, you get a film like Matriarch, a powerful, supremely uneasy tale of motherhood turned poisonous and sour.

Laura is an advertising executive in London, and we meet her as she’s getting ready for work. She’s coring the rotten section out of a peach and slicing up the rest into her cereal. She eats her breakfast and then promptly goes into the bathroom, shoving her fingers down her throat to vomit it all back up. She chases this with a few swigs of vodka and some snorts from a bottle of nasal spray. She gets into the office a little late, apologizes to her boss, she still has a cold. The same cold, her boss observes, that she’s had for a few months now. But Laura’s got it together. There’s a big pitch meeting coming up and Laura’s ready. Or, at least, she will be. It’s a quick study - she’s obviously running from something - the bulimia, the alcoholism, relentlessly driving herself forward. She’s brittle, pulled tight against her skin. There’s a desperation to her, brought into stark detail that night when she invites an old flame over and the cocaine comes out. It’s an all-nighter, with Laura still doing lines alone as the sun comes up. She’s trying to outrun herself, but ends up clutching at her chest and keeling over on her bathroom floor instead. As everything fades, she has a vision of a hand reaching out of an expanse of dark water…

…and she wakes back up. She should be dead, she knows that, but she isn’t. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her, how she didn’t die, or why dark, brackish fluid is seeping out of her. She needs answers, and that means going someplace she never thought she’d revisit, and seeing someone she’d sworn she would never see again. She’s going home to the small village where she was raised, and she’s going to see her mother. The reunion is polite, and her mother is the picture of health, looking to be in her late forties or early fifties.

But her mother is eighty years old.

This is a film that hits the ground running, in terms of its style and narrative. It takes place in a world that is drab throughout, a place drained of color and icily remote. The big city is all cold fluorescents and sleek, modern design, and the village has its own foreboding, a collection of old buildings and sheep paddocks, clusters of houses sunken into a maze of hedgerows taller than a person and a black, black marsh on the outside of town. It’s very much in the fine English tradition of villages with old, old secrets, observed in details that are modest, but sharp. It’s a place that is ugly and warped without being cartoonish about it. And when it’s not the inner emotional violence of Laura’s life away from home or the weirdness of the village itself, above and beyond all of that it’s Celia, Laura’s mother. Her toxic, manipulative mother, all of Laura’s anger and self-loathing explained by Celia’s immediate descent into a litany of denial and minimization and guilt trips and passive aggressive jabs. Her mood turns on a dime from mock-concern to wheedling to self-absorption to an inability (or refusal) to remember the past as Laura remembers it. Their dialogue is full of repressed anger that’s starting to spill through the seams, old resentments, old regrets, the cathartic venom of people finally saying things they’ve always wanted to say, soundtracked by woozy, discordant ambience. And it’s not just Celia, it’s the villagers as well, so bitter at Laura’s return but so interested in keeping her there. There’s never really a quiet moment in the film,  and since it’s very clear very early on that there’s something Not Right about this place, it’s a film threaded through with unease and discomfort.

And all of that is before Laura really starts to dig into what’s happening to her and what seems to be happening in the village. There are secrets, of course, and they run deep, old, and dark, culminating in a revelation that blasphemes the sanctities of religion and motherhood through vivid imagery and body horror. A bargain has been made, and the cost is coming due again. Motherhood is supposed to be about helping a child to grow and flourish, but for narcissists like Celia, it’s entirely about them instead and how they can use motherhood, capture it, feed upon it. It’s a story told in earthily visceral fashion.  

That said, the biggest problem with the film is that although a lot of the dialogue works, there are points where it does become stagey and affected. Conversations sometimes end up on the verge of becoming monologues, and some of the performances are broader than they should be. This threatens to overwhelm the film when things really start to heat up in the final act, but it rights itself in the end for something that’s equal parts horrifying and emotionally exhausting. It might not be quite as intense in its emotional violence as Hereditary or as carefully staged (few films are, though), but for as wrung out as I was by the end of this, it’s the closest touchpoint I can find. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Tumbbad: Money - The Cause Of (And Solution To) All Of Life’s Problems

Myths, fables, and fairytales are fertile ground for horror. They’re often instructional stories, intended to provide an explanation for how something came to be or to teach important moral lessons. And one way to teach important moral lessons is to scare the shit out of your audience. But over time, they get sanitized, turned into something harmlessly entertaining that we can tell our children without giving them nightmares. I’m not saying that we should be trying to traumatize our children, but it doesn’t take much to scratch off the bright, colorful sheen of a story like Hansel and Gretel and reveal something far grimmer underneath.

This is the wavelength on which Tumbbad operates. It’s an evocative dark fantasy about the corrosive effects of greed, and as someone not especially conversant in Indian mythology, it’s got some really haunting moments that aren’t like anything else I’ve seen.

It begins with the goddess of prosperity, from whom all food and riches flow, giving birth to 160 million gods at the birth of the universe. Beloved above all others was her firstborn, Hastar. But Hastar was greedy, and wanted all of the food and riches for himself. He took all of the gold, but was stopped before he could take all of the food. The goddess refused to let him be destroyed for his sin, but decreed that no temple would even be built to Hastar. He would be a forgotten god. And so his name faded from memory, the subject of no worship, no praise, no stories.

Until someone in the village of Tumbbad found the old stories, found his name, and dedicated a temple to Hastar.

This prologue gives way to India in 1918, and a woman who is mistress to a wealthy old man named Sarkar. She has endured Sarkar’s attention for many years because she has two children to feed, and Sarkar has promised her a gold coin, worth enough to take care of her and her children. He dangles the promise of it like a carrot, assuring her that one day, someday, it would be hers. But that day keeps on failing to come, and in the meantime, she has another responsibility. There is an old, old woman. A woman who must be fed and kept placated. A woman who is kept chained in a room, in the depths of a crumbling, decaying castle, in what used to be a village called Tumbbad.

A woman who has been alive - if that’s what you can call it - for a very, very long time. A woman with the secret to Sarkar’s wealth.

One night, an accident leaves Sarkar’s mistress with only one remaining son and no desire to take care of this very old woman anymore. Her surviving son, Vinayak, is a curious, restless sort, unsatisfied with their meager living, sure that Sarkar will never give up that gold coin to his mother. But when Sarkar dies, the gold coin is indeed hers. And the first thing Vinayak wants to know is where they can find more. But his mother makes him promise to never, ever return to Tumbbad. But as an adult, he does, with the inevitability of fate. There’s something there, and it makes Vinayak - otherwise scraping by as an errand boy to a shady local businessman - a rich man. His fortunes improve, he becomes an important local figure, he marries, he starts a family. All the while concealing the terrible cost, the terrible risks he must take to ensure his prosperity.

(Come to think of it, this film has a bit in common with Incantation in that respect. Though Incantation is much more a straight-up horror film, they both feature old, forbidden gods, cursed villages, and the idea that blessings and curses are sort of two sides of the same coin.)

It’s a story based in folklore, so the imagery isn’t your stock-standard horror fare, with a number of striking set pieces and a strong sense of atmosphere throughout. It’s a story of forgotten gods, cursed villages, and the terrible things people are willing to do for money. Tumbbad is a crumbling ruin, perpetually drenched in rainfall, the castle at its center a tangle of stone chambers with dirt floors illuminated fitfully by torchlight. The visuals do a lot of the work here, consistently strong and drawing on traditions you don’t see a lot of in the West. There’s always the danger of exoticizing things, but one of the things I appreciate about horror from other countries is the novelty, to me at least, of the imagery and cultural assumptions driving the films. I don’t know how rooted in actual Hindu mythology the story is, but it works well, putting a fresh and surprising spin on ideas that are themselves not necessarily new. So there’s a fairytale aspect to it, but the fairytale in its original, non-sanitized form, where the moral is taught in blood and sacrifice and fire.

It's a story that spans a period of almost 30 years, from a mother’s duty and a childhood tragedy to a father’s debt and its cost being everything, all set to the backdrop of an India in the process of gaining its independence. It’s a world in flux, and we see things changing right in front of us. The old ways being bulldozed and paved over by the new. Vinayak isn’t especially sympathetic - from a very young age he’s obsessed with the existence of a treasure rumored to lie under Tumbbad and it warps him into a man comfortable with corruption. You get the sense that the promise of this treasure has this effect on anyone it touches - Sarkar holds it over Vinayak’ mother’s head for years, and Vinayak grows into a complacent man contemptuous of Indian independence and social change. And Pandurang, Vinayak’s oldest son, never really stands a chance in this regard. He is his father’s son, and his ambition exceeds even that of his father, as the young and headstrong so often do. The more money you have, the easier it is to see it as the solution to everything and Pandurang learns this far too early.

It tells its story economically, with an effective use of montage and repeated sequences to indicate the passage of time, and it's moody as hell, full of rainswept vistas, crowded villages and torchlit ruins, and places far stranger than that. For most of its running time, it’s located very much in the real world, concerned with Vinayak’s meteoric rise in an India that’s in the middle of tremendous change. But this makes the moment where it taps into something more mysterious and otherworldly that much more effective. It’s a world where bribes and backroom deals are just a car ride away from something much older and darker. And when it is concerned with the older, darker parts of India, the visual effects are surprisingly solid given how ambitious they are. The story plays fair as well - even the most unsympathetic characters never descend to the level of two-dimensional villainy. They’re driven by very human flaws, and seem to be aware of just how precarious their situation is. Vinayak’s wife doesn’t know what he has to do to keep the family in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, and though she’s curious, she doesn’t press that hard, as if part of her really doesn’t want to know.

There are, perhaps, some pacing issues, insofar as the film starts strong and then bogs down a little in the middle as the focus shifts from the nightmarish secrets hidden in cursed villages to the life of a man who doesn’t seem to have any problem with wealth, but then, as we get just the briefest glimpse of what he has to do to get it, it all becomes much clearer and things begin to pick back up from there. A long time ago, the people of Tumbbad did something forbidden, and the results are both a curse and a blessing for anyone who dares to brave its depths.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Zhou: Family Obligations

Parent-child relationships show up a lot in horror movies. I mean, they also show up in dramas and comedies and martial arts films about the important of kindness and connection (seriously, go see Everything Everywhere All At Once if you haven’t yet, it’s great), but if you’re trying to evoke anxiety or dread or fear, putting a parent’s child in danger is a pretty effective way to do that. Every now and then you’ll get a film like The Omen or The Brood or Hereditary where the parent-child relationship is the horror, but even then it’s poking at the same nerve, just with a differently-shaped needle. 

One of the ways this plays out is by examining the lengths to which a parent will go to protect their child, and Zhou (Incantation) is a reasonably solid addition to that particular piece of the puzzle. It’s a little jumbled to start with, but it finds its way home in the end.

We begin with a collection of what appear to be home movies shot on phone cameras, and a voiceover asking us whether or not we believe in blessings - in the idea that our intentions can actually change outcomes, whether it’s wishing someone a happy birthday or safe travels, things like that. The voice argues that intentions do change outcomes, that our wishes have an effect. The voice belongs to Ronan Li, and she’s making a video because her daughter Dodo is very sick, and she’s trying to reach as many people as possible, to ask for our blessings, our good wishes. Her daughter is being harmed by the result of a mistake Ronan made six years ago, a mistake that resulted in a curse. If we watch the video, our good wishes can help Dodo get better, but there’s a catch: Watching the video might be dangerous to us, so we need to protect ourselves by fixing a holy symbol in our memory and reciting a protective chant.

The curse has a very long reach.

What follows is something that isn’t found-footage, exactly. It’s more like a mockumentary where the framing device is that we’re watching a video made by Ronan as…a warning? A plea for help? Both?...and the story is largely (though not exclusively) presented as footage collected from different sources - camcorders, phones, laptops, surveillance cameras, etc. In that sense it’s reminiscent of films like Noroi or Occult, presented as curated footage that documents something supernatural. It’s a little distracting when it breaks the conceit to show something from a conventional third-person perspective, but in general the storytelling is strong enough that it doesn’t become too disruptive, and it becomes a critical piece of the story by the end. When the film proper opens, Ronan has undergone inpatient treatment at a mental hospital after suffering severe trauma following a trip that she took with her boyfriend Dom and Dom’s cousin Yuan. They ran a paranormal investigation show called Ghost Busters (no relation to the New York-based Ghostbusters, presumably) and they were investigating a legend from the village where Dom grew up about a tunnel that must never be entered. We don’t find out right away exactly what happened, but whatever it was, Ronan took years to get over it, but she’s doing a lot better now, has a job and a home, and we join her as she’s regaining custody of Dodo, who has spent the last few years in foster care. 

So Ronan and Dodo get settled in, and right away things get weird. The film starts off strong with the curse’s evidence presented in striking fashion, going briskly from tragic coincidence to something more inexplicable over the course of the first two acts, but once the table is set, the decision to tell the story in what is largely a non-linear fashion dilutes the potential impact somewhat. There are roughly three timelines here - there’s the present, as Ronan is making the video, there’s the recent past, as she’s regained custody of Dodo and the proximal events that led up to the present, and there’s what happened six years before to incite all of this in the trip to the village. Part of the problem is that the time-jumps sometimes dilute the tension, another is that it’s not always immediately clear which timeline we’re watching right away. The end result is that the first two acts can be kind of confusing at times, which threatens to take us out of the movie. 

Which is unfortunate, because the moments in the first two acts when it does work, work very well. The film gets a lot out of very small things - unexplained noises, objects falling over, things suddenly changing position, Dodo talking to people who aren’t there, stuff like that. None of it is especially novel, but it’s all executed well in the moment, and the idea that this is curated footage, not raw footage, makes the staging easier to believe. The segments at home are shot through the limited field of view and limited light of a camcorder, so they benefit from the inherent spookiness of a house in the middle of the night, the single light source barely holding its own against the shadows and what horrible revelations might lurk there. It's pretty strongly diegetic - the film doesn’t really use music apart from some ambient stings and chanting, but that’s about it. Moreover, unlike a lot of found-footage or quasi-found-footage films, it pays attention to the limits of its sources and knows when and how to use silent action effectively - there are segments where no sound is available but we get everything we need from the footage, and it’s more effective for it. The filmmakers also avoid the usual viewfinder-vision cliché and accomplish some very striking and impressive effects sequences without ever breaking the conceit. The cinematography is suitably all over the place, depending on the source, but the film generally gets a lot of mileage out of dark, grungy spaces fitfully lit from a very restricted field of view. And the segments from six years before work well too - the village they visit feels strange right from the get-go, and little bits of business in the background, barely glimpsed, do nothing to alleviate that. Whatever they stumbled into feels wrong, and their insistence on pushing further builds a lot of dread because it’s clear whatever is going to happen, it isn’t going to be good. The film keeps coming back to whatever happened that night throughout the film, getting closer and closer to the awful truth, saving the worst right before the very end. I think if there’d been a more consistent use of title cards or another way to signify which part of the story we were in at any given moment, it wouldn’t have been quite so confusing.

But this is much less of a problem in the third act, when we’ve got a pretty good idea (though not good enough, as the ending reveals) of what’s going on and what Ronan is faced with, and it feels much more cohesive. At this point, as things get worse and worse and it’s clear that they’re not going to get better, the supernatural elements are supplemented by Ronan’s harrowing experience as a mother watching her child get sicker and sicker and being helpless to do anything about it. She’s trying to do what’s best for her daughter, but the right thing is sometimes the hardest thing, and you agonize right along with her. I’m reminded in some ways of The Exorcist, and Chris’ fruitless attempts to determine what’s wrong with Regan, while Regan clearly suffers. The ordering of things makes much more sense here, so even though there’s still bouncing back and forth in time, it’s easier to follow and so the dread that’s been there intermittently (though strongly for all of that) throughout really starts to build and sustain itself as the final pieces of the story fall into place.

It’s a movie about what a mother will do to ensure that her child is safe, healthy, and happy, the sacrifices that a mother will make to stand between her child and the predations of an implacable curse, and in this I see nods to Ringu and Dark Water in ways that riff on them without being blatant imitations, there’s even sort of a William Castle vibe to it in some ways that would absolutely spoil the film but give it  a nice punch in an ending that might be a trifle overlong, but comes good on what it’s promised the whole time and leaves you with something indelible, as simultaneously inexplicable and awful as the end of The Blair Witch Project. Between the people of the village, and Ronan, the film says that there are some things you do because you’re family, things that only your family can be responsible for, things that make you family whether you want to be or not, and things that family requires of you, and in this film they all exact a terrible cost.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix