Somos Lo Que Hay: Death of a Watch Repairman

I am constantly surprised by how scary ostensibly respectable movies and moviemakers can be (The Sixth Sense messed my shit up), but lately I've also been more and more surprised by how ostensibly scary movies (or movies dealing with traditional horror subject matter) are not so much scary as exercises in how horror tropes can be applied to non-horror ideas. Monsters was a good case in point - I mean, you've got "Monsters" right there in the title, the setting is a post-alien infestation Mexico, and it's mostly about two people coming together despite their differences and surveying the radically changed landscape, both geographical and emotional. One of the biggest complaints about it was that it was barely a monster movie.

Likewise, Somos Lo Que Hay (We Are What We Are) is a pretty good cannibal movie, as movies about the limitations of modern masculinity go.

The movie opens with an older man walking/stumbling down the sidewalk somewhere in Mexico. He doesn't look well, he doesn't act well. He comes to the display window of a women's clothing shop and stares longingly at the mannequins. He presses his fingers against the glass, wanting something on the other side desperately. The look on his face is yearning and fear. He knows his time is coming. He begins vomiting blood and collapses in the middle of the sidewalk. People step around the body, blood is scrubbed away. This could be the opening to any movie about the tragedy of a family brought low by poverty and their struggle to survive.

And sure enough, what follows tells that story - a small watch repair business at an open-air market, unpaid debts, unfinished work, too much time with the whores. A mother, arguing sons, a daughter too smart for her station. All we're missing is the scene where they find out the family patriarch is dead. The daughter (Sabina) brings the news, the women wail, and the sons argue about how to continue in his absence. Underlying all of this, however, is a sense of anxiety and urgency, not grief or resignation. It's not that beloved Papa is gone, it's that he's left them all in the lurch somehow and they resent it. There is much talk about "getting something for tonight", which turns into talk of "getting someone for tonight."

This is a family of cannibals, and the man responsible for securing their food is now dead.

The rest of the film takes place over the course of a night, as the mother (Patricia), hotheaded, impulsive son Julian, levelheaded son Alfredo and Sabina all take their turns at trying to do what their father can no longer do.  The movie doesn't really focus on their intended victims too much - they're more there to illustrate things about the family themselves than to give us someone with whom to identify. The cannibalism itself also plays only a minor role - it could be anything urgent. Money to pay the rent, regular food, medicine for one of the children. Here, it just happens to be human flesh. What's important is what this need and how it gets filled tells us about the people tasked to provide for their families. This is a movie about the role of men, how they succeed, how they fail, and how they are constrained by cultural expectations.

Pretty much every man in this movie is a failure in one way or another - the father is supposed to be the family provider, but wastes all of the money he makes on prostitutes and dies leaving them in debt. Upon his death, one of the sons is called upon to become "the leader" - but who? Julian is too hotheaded and impulsive, solving everything with his fists, getting distracted by his dick. He's machismo incarnate. Alfredo is calmer, more methodical, but resents that his mother seems to love him less than the others, and possibly because he is gay. The detectives trying to track them down are inept and more worried about career advancement and image than actually making arrests. Sabina, probably the most clearheaded and competent member of the family, can't take the lead because she's not a man. Patricia rages at her dead husband and the mess he's left, and carries on doing what she must to keep the family safe. Men are the leaders, this movie says, but women are the ones doing the work, whether it's figuring out how to secure the family's next meal, or preparing the body when they do. Whatever men are supposed to be able to do, they are no longer capable of doing it, just of posturing in the appropriate ways.

We also get a clear sense throughout that it is this pressure, these expectations in the absence of any real preparation or qualification to fulfill them, that leaves men feeling hemmed in and trapped. The movie is filled with visual references to containment - the father presses his hand up against the glass of the display window, a motion echoed in Alfredo tracing a line through condensation on a window in their house. When the father dies, it is shot from above, neatly outlined by the frame of an overhead walkway. Even in death, he is boxed in.

Scenes are framed in doorways, in windows, in boxes, all clearly delineating the limits of their world - nobody can know what they do, they have to walk carefully, making sure not to cross any lines that might give them away. There are small boxes stacked up along the wall in their house, possibly filled with the ashes of previous victims - even in death, there are boxes. The furthest we get away from that is Alfredo's attempt to lure a man from a gay nightclub - the screen is filled with a crush of bodies, Alfredo is finally free of the square and straight lines, surrounded by a crush of other men. The world is viewed through windows - you can see what's out there, but you are separate from it. It is forever on the other side.

The movie ends as the sun rises and the events of the night before come to some resolution - who still lives, who does not. In the course of one night, one man's failure has changed his family irrevocably. Throughout the worst of the crisis, there is talk of completing "the ritual", every clock in the house is set for midnight, when the ritual must be completed. But, like what it takes to be a man, it is never made clear what the ritual is or why it is important. Just that it be done a certain way, because it's always been done that way.  Do not question, do not deviate. Just go through the motions, even as your world crumbles around your ears.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Reconsidered: Srpski Film

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

I am aware that I'm about to go to bat for one of the most divisive films in recent memory.

Very few who have seen Srpski Film (A Serbian Film) have come away from it without being convinced that it's either a powerful, uncompromising piece of allegory or a morally bankrupt exploitation film. There are also the people who claim they found it tedious, boring, or even funny, that it really wasn't that shocking. At best, I'd argue that they didn't attend to and invest in the narrative, or are presenting a front to keep people from knowing how upset they were. At worst, they're dead inside. Seriously, as dark as my sense of humor is capable of being, I don't want to meet the person who found this movie funny.

I am aware that I'm about to attempt to defend the indefensible.

This movie is never going to see a commercial release in the United States. It hasn't seen a wide DVD release yet - according to Amazon, the only copies available are Region 2 discs, and those have been censored. It's not available yet on Netflix, and I'll be surprised if it ever is. Horrible, horrible ideas and images are presented in this movie. This movie is the embodiment of "they're not actually going to show that, are they?" in film, and yes they do. Every time. This is the movie I cannot un-see. If enjoying horror movies is enough to have others think you a deviant, then just sitting through this (even absent enjoyment) would, by the same logic, be enough to get you arrested.

Nevertheless, I contend that Srpski Film is not exploitation. It is a powerful piece of art, made with a priori artistic intent.

Kill Theory: Words Get Shouted, Things Get Broken

After my last post on My Little Eye, it occurred to me that there are quite a few "people forced to play a deadly game" movies floating around. Some of them are pretty good, some of them are pretty bad, and some of them are part of the Saw franchise. Accompanying the basic premise (people, isolated location, do a thing or you/somebody else/everyone dies) is usually some half-baked psychology - how badly do you want to keep living, what will you do when faced with your worst fear, how far will you go for money/survival, yadda yadda yadda. It's half-baked because you don't need to put people in some convoluted trap house to find that sort of thing out. Hell, just sit a couple of people in different rooms and have them play out the Prisoner's Dilemma if you want to see what people are capable of doing and for far lower stakes. Narratively, it gives the filmmakers a pretext upon which to hang the events of the movie, the framework for the icky stuff to follow. Contextually, it gives the evil mastermind types some justification for the atrocities they perpetrate. They can tell themselves they're investigating the depths of humanity, but they aren't. They're just sadists - no, wait - they're pretentious sadists.

If you're going to take this "the real monster is humanity" route in your movie, your best bet is to underplay it, to let believable characters with plausible motivations act naturalistically. If you're going to try and convince me that people are capable of monstrous deeds under sufficient pressure, then make the protagonists recognizably human. Show, don't tell. My Little Eye, for its faults, did a very good job of this. Kill Theory runs so far from this approach to storytelling that it can't find its way back.

The movie opens with one of the least plausible conversations between a psychiatrist and patient ever. The patient survived a mountaineering accident, cutting himself loose from his three best friends to keep himself alive while they plummeted to their deaths. In case that wasn't apparent from their conversation, we're treated to superimposed news clippings telling us pretty much the same thing.  The patient believes that anyone else would do the same thing he did in a similar situation (hence the title KILL THEORY and no awards for subtlety). The psychiatrist all but says "I think you're wrong about that, and the state says you're not a danger any longer but I'm writing another book and you're going to be good for a few chapters, so I'm not signing off on your release unless you agree to another year of treatment," cementing the patient as someone with unresolved issues and the psychiatrist as an unethical asshole.

The entire conversation was totally unnecessary except to tell us "hey, a crazy dude who is being irresponsibly released is probably going to make a bunch of people choose between themselves and their friends in some kind of weird survival game to prove some point to an asshole psychiatrist." In case we thought we were watching a tender coming-of-age story entitled KILL THEORY.

Cut to our van load of teen meat headed into the woods for a long weekend of pre-college graduation debauchery. There's seven of them - egotistical rich boy Brent and his vampish girlfriend Amber, nominal decent guy Michael and his equally decent girlfriend Jennifer, ethnic goofball Carlos and his Maryann-ish girlfriend Nicole, along with girlfriendless nice-guy fifth wheel Freddy. They are walking clichés, head to toe. All they talk about is drinking, sex, sex after drinking and drinking before having sex. Many, many uses of the word "bro." They're staying at one of Brent's fathers' many summer homes, well stocked with beer, liquor, and a trashy stepsister named Alex. Alex rides a Harley and lets Freddy know up front that she won't be giving him any pity fucks. So, you know, classy.

With that one exception, they're children of privilege, living it up because they can, enjoying the world like it's there all for them. There's lots of talk about how they're good friends and there for each other, but it's pretty obvious Brent is an asshole, there's some relationship issues, and Freddy is, from go, a ticking time bomb of frustration and insecurity. The characters are defined completely by a trait or two each, and they're all mostly unsympathetic. Ten minutes in, the first thought that popped into my head was "I cannot wait to see each one of these characters die", which doesn't bode well if you're going to try and evoke horror through identification with the characters in the midst of their plight. At this point, it's just a shooting gallery of jerks.

Moreover, it's a shooting gallery of jerks who seem more than capable of turning on each other without any outside assistance. They're in a house in the middle of rural nowhere, there's a lot of booze, a lot of buried resentment, and at least a couple of guns and other sharp, pointy shit floating around. This is the sort of thing that breeds the very scenario the filmmakers are looking to examine. The crazed mental patient is just as superfluous to the narrative as the opening scene introducing him.

But there he is, gravelly-voiced dude tormenting them and making them turn on each other - the specifics aren't especially important, because it's not what happens in movies like these, it's between whom it happens. Lock a bunch of people into a situation like this, and it's the relationships that are going to drive the tension, not any outside threat or inventively graphic methods of execution. So if the people aren't well-drawn and we don't care about them, and there's really not much to them beyond one or two character traits, what we get when things go bad is a lot of yelling (to indicate strong emotions like fear, anger, and grief) and stuff getting broken - windows, dishes, bottles, electronics, you name it - lots of loud noise and crashing to indicate that Bad Things Are Happening and we should Be Upset. But it's no substitute for empathy, and none of these people seem to really be all that loyal to each other to start, so what we're left with is a very noisy set of death scenes, punctuated by either whispering or yelling. We don't want the torture to end as a release, we just want it to end so everyone will just shut up.

At the end of it, we are left knowing nothing more about the human condition than the point that if you take a bunch of self-centered people with screwed-up priorities and you put them into a situation which encourages them to be self-centered and screwed up, they're going to do self-centered, screwed-up things. This is a revelation to exactly nobody. What should be tense and horrifying isn't because tension requires that we care and being horrified requires that we don't want bad things to happen to the protagonists. Behavior should be identifiably, plausibly human for us to recognize our own flaws and be frightened for the protagonists, and frightened of our own weaknesses. When it isn't, it's just a pantomime of human interaction, interrupted by flashing neon signs telling us "THIS IS BAD" or "PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS WHEN THEIR LIFE IS ON THE LINE," overplaying the situation at every turn. It's unpleasant caricatures of people and loud noises bookended by pretentious bullshit about the "primal core" and "closure." It isn't a horror film, it's an opera about the cast of Jersey Shore being starred in a snuff film, written by that one high school student who's weird and wears all black and shit. No, wait, I might watch that.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon.com
Available on Netflix

My Little Eye: The Camera Obscura

"The camera obscura (Latin; 'camera' is a 'vaulted chamber/room' + 'obscura' means 'dark'= 'darkened chamber/room') is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen." - Wikipedia

We have kind of a weird relationship with cameras. New inventions have a tendency to inspire discomfort or even outright panic when first introduced. The camera obscura, the "magic lantern" slide projector, moving pictures, talking moving pictures, television - all have been blamed for one kind of problem or another in their time. There's a sense of being watched or captured somehow, and anything that functions as a proxy for seeing can have this effect. Hell, one of the biggest villains in recent film history was nothing but a giant flaming eyeball. Make of that what you will. Being watched freaks us out. Watching someone else be watched, however, is entertainment.

These ideas pervade My Little Eye, and I think they help redeem the movie on the few occasions it drops the ball. There are some shortcomings - this is a movie about an Internet-based broadcast, and it's pretty much impossible to talk about the Internet in a movie without dating things right away or without revealing how little the writer actually knows about how the tubes actually work. There are some dubious story choices that are forgivable in the moment but leave kind of a doubt-flavored aftertaste. Still, these are small marks against a well-acted exercise in paranoia.

We learn pretty much everything we need to about the setup over the opening credits: Five people have applied to be on a reality show-style webcast, in which the challenge is to live in a house together in isolation for six months, at the end of which they will receive a million dollars (so 200k each), provided that nobody leaves during the six months. No phone, no internet, no visits from anyone, just the occasional package of supplies dropped off. The five contestants are even plucked straight from reality-show central casting. For guys, there's Matt (the modest All-American one), Rex (the sarcastic bad boy with a shady past), and Danny (the shy, awkward-but-means-well one). For girls, there's Charlie (the brazen hussy), and Emma (the bookish, thoughtful one).

This makes for a nice little riff on characterization -  the protagonists are clichéd, but they would be anyway, to get cast on a reality show. Or at the very least, the protagonists are good at living up to clichés in their audition tapes. We're watching actors and actresses portray fictional caricatures of people who are themselves knowingly participating in their own caricaturing for the sake of being watched - we're sort of both audiences, for the movie and the webcast within the movie, and this leads to some nice creepy viewer-implicating moments when everything starts going south.

When the movie proper opens, though, they've already been living in the house for awhile. We don't know exactly how long, but it's long enough for them to start getting bored and restless and to drop a lot of the pose. They've stopped being polite and started being real. Past events are alluded to without ever being explored further, the arguments feel well-worn, there's a routine. We're left to figure out the relationships for ourselves, stripped of artificial exposition. They've gotten to the point that the omnipresent cameras no longer bother them, either - Charlie even flashes the one in her bedroom from time to time. They've resigned themselves to the little indignities because there's a lot of money at stake and it hangs on all of them being able to stick out the stay in the house until the end of the 6 months. All of their little tensions and discomforts are laid bare for us, and it's obvious that it's getting harder and harder to stick it out. Even the most innocuous activities become tortuous if they're your only option. It doesn't help that they're headed into winter, and the house (of the old, creaky country variety, of course) isn't heated very well. And they're running low on food.

The thought that this is the production company trying to gin up some tension and drama for ratings does not escape them, and they're just cranky enough to thumb their noses at the production crew for this cheap manipulation. As a response, their next supply drop contains nothing but bricks and a letter telling one of them that there's been a death in the family. This is cheap, the contestants say - how hard are you going to tighten the screws?

The next one contains a gun.

From this point, we are treated to a series of turns and blind alleys, red herrings as to the nature of their confinement and the objects they receive (or the ones that mysteriously show up in the middle of the night, inside the house). All under the watchful eye of cameras that become increasingly harder to avoid. As the tension mounts, the conceit that we are watching live feed footage is abandoned for an increasingly omnipotent perspective - at one point, you realize that there would have to be a camera mounted inside a showerhead. At another, a camera appears to be attached to a pen, scratching out words in a journal. We move from a conventional audience to an all-seeing beast. The house is an inverted camera obscura in which interior events are projected out. The house is itself an eye turned inward. The movie begins as a crazy quilt of video sources - grainy video, nightvision, cleaner digital video - and the sound is equally collaged. Voices are sometimes clear, sometimes muffled, distorted and lossy. We are spies at the mercy of our equipment. The soundtrack is mostly whirs and clicks and hums, spikes of white noise and distortion, and all of this mechanical artifice falls away as the residents of the house get closer and closer to the truth.

By the end, we are watching as a conventional movie audience would, fully part of their situation. Secrets come to light, relationships fracture, and it's all too late, because by the time they figure out what's really going on, they're in it, just as we're no longer afforded the distance of security camera footage. We're in it too, which makes the end that much more brutal and unsparing when it comes. We think we know how bad it is, but we really don't. Not until we're watching someone squirm on a cold, hard floor like we might an insect. Seeing is powerful, being seen is not.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon.com
Available on Netflix

Well, Howdy.

I'd like to take a minute to say hello to the folks who've come over and checked out this thing of mine via the Film Club feature over at Final Girl, (as well as anyone else who has clicked through to here from someone elses' blog). Here are a few other posts you might give a look to - these are either ones that seem to be popular or that I just think came out like I wanted them to. Thanks for coming by!

Cthulhu

Hostel

Martyrs

Srpski Film (A Serbian Film)

On Sequels, and the Narrative Problem of the Franchise (commentary)

On Torture Porn (commentary)

The Difference Between Horror Movies and Thrillers (commentary)


I also apologize for the relative quiet lately - right in the middle of writing my next post (and sketching out another long one) I got waylaid by a cold and spent most of my free time asleep. More coming soon.

The House of the Devil: Something Evil, Seen Imperfectly

As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the album Opus Eponymous by the band Ghost. They're a contemporary group, but with a vintage "devil's music" schtick - their sound is vintage Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath, their cover art is something you might see on a Hammer movie poster, and they wear hooded robes on a stage wreathed in smoke and candlelight. It's just this side of cheesy, and not my usual fare, but there's something about the combination of late 60s/early 70s hard rock and theatrical mysticism that appeals to me. It's a combination of things intended to evoke a particular era in music and the culture, and it captures a very specific aesthetic very well.

In some ways, it's the perfect soundtrack to The House of the Devil.

What we're talking about here is a pretty faithful modern attempt at an early 80s horror film, let's get that out of the way right off the bat. From the title card suggesting that what we're about to see is based on actual events, to the freeze-framed credits with static titles, to the diffusely lurid title of the movie itself, to the orange foam earphone covers on the Walkman headphones, to the expertly feathered wings of the protagonist's friend, it's pretty damn period-correct. This illusion of a movie out of time is disrupted only by the sort of minutiae noticed primarily by people who really, really need a hobby, and a lone car alarm early on announcing modernity like the dude who came into the theater late and won't just sit the fuck down.

So aesthetically, it's an 80s horror movie. It's also nominally a horror movie about the 80s, playing on the "satanic panic" that had parents wondering if things like heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons were gateways for devil worship. Satanists! In YOUR community! That sort of thing. It's an honest homage to an aesthetic and a time in our culture without being too cutesy or smirky-ironic about it. Nobody calls attention to the 80s-ness of it all, that's just how it is.

The House of the Devil opens with a slow, menacing zoom from behind on a young woman who is looking out of a window. She turns around not to scream or reveal some horribly mangled visage, but to tell a prospective landlady that she loves the place and will take it. The young woman is a college student named Samantha, and as we see shortly after the opening, she's delighted to get her own apartment for good reason - her dorm roommate is a slob who spends most of her time having noisy sex with her boyfriend. The only problem is that she needs $300 for the first month's rent, and she has maybe $85 in her checking account. The rent is due by next Monday. What is Samantha to do?

Oh hey, there's a notice on one of the campus bulletin boards offering a babysitting job for the weekend. It's easy money, what could be bad?

Well, how about getting the job from Mr. Ulman - an older man whose entire demeanor screams "I AM MADE ENTIRELY OUT OF RED FLAGS AND WARNING SIGNS" to start? And did he mention that she won't be babysitting a child, but rather his elderly mother? And that it's worth up to $400 to him for her to do so? And that mother's actually quite spry, but she's very paranoid and is not to be disturbed? And he has a wife who looks like Norma Desmond's younger, creepier sister?

And that this is all happening during a full lunar eclipse?

What could be bad?

We know almost right away that the babysitting job is bad news - it'd be bad news even if this weren't a horror movie, because Mr. Ulman is in speech and mannerism awkward, evasive, and just, well, the words "bodies" and "crawlspace" come to mind. He's the guy in the van with the candy. It doesn't require horror-movie logic to see the bad idea here. Even Samantha and her friend Megan see it to some extent, but Samantha needs the money and what are the odds it'll really be bad? Megan agrees to come back at midnight to pick her up. Until then, all Samantha has to do is pass the time. It's an exercise in watching the victim sit unawares as the monster slowly sneaks up behind them.

So yes, we know right away the babysitting job is bad news, but the movie makes a point of slow-playing the horrible inevitable for a really, really long time. It's a movie of quiet (very little music except at strategic points) in a mostly-dark old house. It feels like being in a strange person's home late at night feels. It's the disquiet of a familiar context (a home) in an unfamiliar form (not your home). All of the little shadows and quirks you ignore in your own house become menacing. Only in this instance, it's even worse than you imagine.  Little things start to add up (or not add up) - why are there a bunch of photos of another family posing in front of the house? Why are they in a trash bag in an upstairs closet? Why isn't Megan returning her calls? Why is there a bunch of hair in the bathtub? Why is she feeling…so…sleepy?

It's a really slow burn (very little resembling "action" occurs until about a third of the way in), but once it lights up, it burns bright and hot, rushing chaotically to a very still, clean, quiet conclusion. This is absolutely fine - it's incredibly refreshing in contrast to frenetic editing intended to stimulate anxiety instead of being actually scary (I'm looking at you, The Sick House), but problematically, the movie tends more toward slow than burn - although the lack of music makes what little there is effective (in one sequence, Samantha dances around the house to "One Thing Leads To Another" by the Fixx, and it's claustrophobic instead of fun, like you want to tell her to take the headphones off because she isn't safe), there are a couple of moments where brief music stings might have actually helped make a revelation stand out as being important. I'm not usually a fan of music telegraphing the scary bits, but here the absence of it keeps some small details from standing out like they should to be effective. Part of sustaining rising tension without action is slowly ratcheting everything up, here the tension tends to dissipate.

Likewise, the visuals can be problematic as well as effective - the house is old and not very well-lit, so much of the action takes place in a tangle of light and shadows. This is mostly cool and atmospheric, but in at least one case a very important detail is difficult to take in because of the poor lighting and not enough time spent holding the shot. The meaning of what we've seen is lost because it's gone too quickly and its lighting and location in the frame leaves us struggling to figure out what we just saw. It's the perfect place for a period-appropriate fast zoom and a music sting, but again, the moment trails away. 

The climax suffers from similar problems, though less so - it's for the most part really intense and old-school scary - but once the shock of what's happening passes, the ensuing action feels slightly dislocated in time and space, like we're not watching everything come to a head (as it should be) as much as a bunch of stuff happening all at once. It's not nearly as problematic in the end as in other parts of the movie, but again, it tries too hard to keep from being over-the-top. I admire the filmmaker's restraint and their success at creating both a historical mood and an atmosphere of dread, but I would have liked some old-fashioned shock, too. A little lurid and over-the-top, like hooded robes and fog machines, goes a long way toward evoking an atmosphere.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix

Seventh Moon: The Innocents Abroad

Looking at my tags so far, it occurs to me that "travel abroad is a bad idea" is right up there as one of the most frequently used ones. This is probably not by accident. As a species, we tend to prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, and this probably has an adaptive function: If we've encountered it before and it didn't have us for breakfast, then it's probably safer than something we haven't encountered before. It's a known quantity. Take us out of familiar environs, and all of a sudden we're surrounded by unknown quantities. Who do you trust? Where can you find safety? Where are you? Can you get out again? And there are all sorts of ways to evoke this sense of dislocation and unease - foreign countries are just one of the easiest. You can also take a bunch of city folk out of the city and put them in the country. They might as well be in a foreign country at that point, and with the added fillip of rural areas suggesting older, more primitive ways of doing things. In a Western horror movie, finding yourself in a rural part of a foreign country is sort of a double whammy. For Americans abroad, this is like being doubly removed from "civilization," with all that that entails.

This idea of dislocation, of not belonging here, runs throughout Seventh Moon.

Melissa and Yul are on their honeymoon in Yul's native China - they're in the process of traveling deeper into the country to meet Yul's family and are seeing the sights on their way there. The movie opens with them in a city, shopping and participating in the festival of the Seventh Moon, a time of year roughly akin to All Hallow's Eve. They burn paper offerings to the dead, who rise and walk the land on the night of the seventh moon. These offerings symbolically appease the dead, much like the candy skeletons of Dia de los Muertos or, now that I think about it, Halloween candy. Huh. That never occurred to me before.

(So if candy given to costumed children on Halloween is meant to represent gifts to monsters and the risen dead, then what the hell is going on with Easter candy?)

So, anyway. Seventh Moon. Yul and Melissa spend the day partying and drinking, and by the time they rejoin their tour guide, Mister Ping, they're pretty well lit. Yul, though Chinese, acts more like your average Western frat boy than an Asian stereotype. It's good to see, but it also reinforces this idea of dislocation - it's not really his home anymore, either. His apparently poor Cantonese reinforces this - he doesn't even really speak the language anymore. He's gotten Ping a garish commemorative t-shirt from the festival and babbles embarrassingly about this t-shirt representing the bond they share now. It's a very bro moment, and painfully out of place in this country. Melissa gives Ping a nice bottle of wine, and there's a little arguing around it - Yul wanted to keep the wine for themselves, but Melissa thought it was more appropriate than the t-shirt. Again, divisions - Melissa, as a Westerner, is very out place here, but she has a better handle on niceties than Yul. There's some tension there, and of some of it seems to be wrapped up in ethnicity. Here, they're very aware of being a mixed-race couple and there's some sharpness around that, something brittle and unresolved. 

Ping drives them out into the country to where Yul's family lives, and in doing so, gets lost. Of course he does. It wouldn't be a city-folks-in-the-country movie if someone didn't get lost.  The roads are poorly marked, it's dark, the maps aren't very good. Ping apologizes profusely and stops outside of a small village. He tells the couple to wait while he goes into the village to get directions.

An hour later, he hasn't returned, and so Yul and Melissa head into the village to look for him. What they find is a village with all of the doors locked tight, chained shut, and doors painted with blood. An assortment of live animals are penned up and tied to stakes in the village square. Nobody opens their doors, nobody offers to help. Out here, they take the Festival of the Seventh Moon a little more literally. The dead are expected to walk, and expected to require real sacrifice.

There's not much more to the story than that, and I think that's unfortunate because the filmmakers could have done more with the ideas of cultural, social, and ethnic dislocation - they hint at it, but don't really use it - and the effect of a well-developed visual sense for the movie is undermined by some pacing issues and story choices. The movie looks great and uses color well - the opening is vivid and intense, with lots of light and bright colors in the city, and as the movie goes from day to night (and at the same time from urban to rural), the color drains away until all we're left with is mostly the monochrome of night, interrupted by patches of dull red illuminated fitfully by candles and flashlights. Menacing shapes are chalk white against the darkness. It's a complete transition from one state to another. The camerawork throughout is unsteady, as if filmed using handheld cameras, but we're never given a camera as a direct reference point - nobody's explicitly filming this like in Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project, but there's also not the formal distancing of fixed or dollied cameras either. The thought that kept running through my mind as I watched this was that it felt like this movie was shot from a second-person perspective. Which, as part of an aesthetic of dislocation, is great.

Still, we don't quite get the ride all of this leads us to anticipate. There are some problems keeping the tension up throughout - instead of the situation becoming progressively worse and worse, it feels like some stuff happens, people react, and then more stuff happens. Taken individually, some of the scenes in this movie are nice and tense or spooky, but moving from one scene to another without a clear sense of escalation or pressure dissipates a lot of the intensity each discrete scene might earn. The overall effect is inert, but not like a drugged or dreamlike inertness. There's a feeling of sitting around until the next thing happens.

There's also what felt to me like a poor story choice about two thirds of the way through that takes the characters out of their way (and out of the action) to restate something that's pretty easy to figure out early on. It's sort of like making a movie in which a bunch of people return to an abandoned hospital that was once the hunting ground of a serial killer, those people start getting picked off, and then two-thirds of the way through, the survivors are dragged into a room to be told by someone that this abandoned hospital was once the hunting ground of a serial killer, and a serial killer has lured them there tonight to be his prey. Not only have we as viewers figured that out, but the protagonists in the movie have pretty clearly figured it out too by this point in the movie. Nobody is learning anything new here, and it stops the momentum dead.

It's too bad, because you've got all of these different pieces coming together - people who aren't familiar at all with where they are, people who think they're familiar with it but aren't, a Western couple imposing their own logic and expectations on an Eastern culture, an urban couple imposing their own logic on a rural culture - it's a great example of people thinking they know everything and discovering over the course of a single night how little they actually know about the world in which they live. But it's hard to get invested - our fear doesn't rise with theirs, we are not shocked at turns of events. We're just sitting there, passive witnesses to one couple's horrible mistakes, ending with a shrug.

IMDB entry
Purchase on Amazon
Available on Netflix