Bedlam, Episode One: By The Way, Did We Mention It Was Haunted?

Boy, is there a dearth of scary stuff on television. It doesn't even need to be gory or adult or anything like that. Just something spooky, you know, something to give you a few good frights. Much of what I've seen in the last few years has been courtesy of BBC America - The League of Gentlemen, Afterlife, the occasional episode of Doctor Who (holy shit, "Blink") and Torchwood (holy shit, "Countrycide", "Children of Earth"). So seeing that they were going to premiere Bedlam - what appeared to be a series about a straight-up haunted building - I was all "woo-hoo!" and setting the DVR. The premise seemed a little goofy - former asylum turned into luxury apartments and haunted by the ghosts of patients who died there - but the ghosts looked cool and the setup allowed for both episodic and continuous storylines. So hey, let's check this out, episode by episode.

So the first episode opens with Kate Bettany trying to sell potential occupants on units in her father's newest development, Bedlam Heights Luxury Flats. Apparently, the building has been in Kate's family for generations, since the days when the Bettany family ran the asylum. What they were thinking, calling the development BEDLAM Heights, positioning it alongside the most notorious example of early insane asylums, well, it's TV so fuck it. But seriously, you wouldn't put up condos on the site of a former German P.O.W. camp and call it "Stalag Gardens" or anything. So no wonder Kate's having trouble filling the units.

Kate lives in the building along with her friends Ryan McAllister and Molly Lucas. Molly kind of has a thing for Ryan, but it's tough to tell whether or not Ryan's gay - he might be, but he's not saying. Then there's Kate's friend Zoe, who doesn't live there and isn't really liked by anyone else. They're all trying to get Kate to go out with them for her birthday. Warren (Kate's dad) comes by as she's finishing up for the day and gives her a lovely antique ring for her birthday. "Where'd you get this, Dad?" "I found it in one of the walls." Gee, thanks, Dad. Nothing says "I love my daughter" more than the personal effects of a long-dead mental patient.

Kate puts on the ring, and a hollow-eyed apparition in a patient's gown appears behind her, and water starts running down the walls. Uh-oh.

Rounding the cast of characters is Jed, Kate's cousin. He's muscular, full-lipped, brooding, tormented, and can not only see ghosts, but can also see how they died. He and Kate are just this side of estranged, mostly because Jed's been in and out of mental hospitals himself as a result of his "gift." He's the black sheep of the family. He's back because he keeps getting text messages on his phone that say "help Kate" or "save Kate" or "Kate in danger" or variations thereof. Jed sees the apparition and knows why Kate needs saving, even while Kate rolls her eyes at him and misses death by that much.

I'm not convinced by this first episode. Part of it seems to be the show's attempt to be both a Melrose Place-style relationship drama and a ghost story. The relationships are inchoate, muddled. More goes unsaid than said, and nobody seems like they really connect. Maybe this is by design, but it's tough to tell who these people actually are to each other, so there's not much reason for me to care about what happens to them. The ghost part is equally problematic, because even though the ghosts themselves are effective, their every appearance is telegraphed by a HUGE! MUSICAL! STING! as if we're not going to know there's a ghost on screen otherwise. It's distracting and robs the show of any suspense or tension it could have. This is too bad, because there's a lot of potential here, and Jed's introduction demonstrates that they can handle ghosts subtly too, they just don't. I'd like to think that some of this is down to this being the first episode, but ghosts don't need all of the fanfare. They can just be there in the background and be way more chilling than if someone kept yelling in our ear "THERE ARE GHOSTS! THIS PLACE IS HAUNTED!" Dude, I know, it's why I'm watching in the first place.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix

The Role of Intent Part One: What He Was Really Saying Was…

So I've been short on time to work on the blog lately. Unfortunate (and a little frustrating, and so I'm thinking about ways to expand what I write so that it's not weeks between entries), but it happens. One of the things I hadn't had time to do was address a recent comment on my reconsideration of Srpski Film. Someone by the name Anonymous was nice enough to write…

"Not to be too critical, but you guys are all pretty much way off the mark. You are all trying to see this movie through what you have heard on CNN and you should understand that the director and people in Serbia didn't watch CNN and their view of their country is way different than yours. The closest you got to what the movie is about is your statement '...that this is the sort of film Serbia produces'. It is a film within a film critiquing the Serbian film industry, its tight connection to the Serbian government and the modern propaganda that it serves. The painting on the wall is the last supper before the battle of kosovo [sic] (14th century). The scene is intended to show how cinema is used for propaganda purposes to stain Serbia's reputation and loosen its grip on Kosovo. The guys that made the film are tired of what they call 'Red Cross' movies and that is the meaning behind the speech Vukmir makes about the victim being the priciest sell."

…which was nice of them, I thought. Who knows how long I would have gone completely misunderstanding the film? It's a good thing Anonymous came along to set me straight.

However, since this blog is one guy, and not "guys", and this guy gets busy sometimes, it took me awhile to read the comment. And while I was in the process of formulating a response (which I wanted to do before I published the comment, so the exchange could go up at once), Anonymous was nice enough to clarify…

"So I see that you censor posts that are not agreeable to your (misinformed) viewpoint. Doesn't matter because the true interpretation of this movie is out more and more on the net and your little piece here looks laughable next to it."

Well, damn. It turns out that I was misinformed, and my "little piece" was laughable. I was wrong about a movie.  Which is funny, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never claimed to be any sort of authority, let alone  "right" about movies.

And so I've been thinking about authorial intent. Specifically, how thoroughly unimportant it is.

Trying to pin down what a movie is "about" is a tricky thing. Sure, there's the plot - in that sense, Srpski Film is about a former porn star who takes one last job to make enough money to support his family and ends up getting tangled up in something very bad. But at the end of the day, a plot is just a sequence of events. When was the last time a synopsis scared the hell out of you? With a few tweaks, I also just described part of one of the storylines in Boogie Nights and the general plot of Wonderland, neither one of which are generally considered horror movies. Shift the role of the porn star from the foreground to a background role as the protagonist's girlfriend and you've got Sexy Beast, which although an awesome movie, is by no means horror.

So there's got to be something else there that gives the movie some emotional freight, something to which we can respond both rationally (we understand what is happening) and then emotionally (it makes us feel a certain way, given a particular context). Much of the experience of a movie isn't the events themselves as much as how the events are expressed, and that's a slipperier thing than just a straight synopsis. There are specific choices in visual, aural, and verbal content that can make the most horrible thing feel mundane, and the most mundane thing feel absolutely horrible. The plot engages us rationally, imagery engages us emotionally. If you want to get people to feel something, you need to use imagery to speak past their capacity for rational comprehension and get in their head, speak to their gut, get reaction instead of response.

(Alternatively, you can use imagery that's really, really specific to you and nobody else, and then you're Matthew Barney or, to a lesser extent, David Lynch.)

So if you're trying to freak an audience the fuck out, you're going use the sort of imagery that's most likely to elicit that, and that varies from culture to culture. You're going to need imagery that speaks directly to the hopes and fears and values of an audience for whom these things are at least in part a product of their time and place. Culture's like the water in which a fish swims, (or like the Force) - it's all around us, in us and outside of us. We are products of our culture.

Think about some of the landmark films in U.S. horror - the giant insects and lizards of the post-WWII era, products of this newfangled "radiation" thing, the mindless body-snatching alien stand-ins for Communists during the Cold War, the crazed hippies of The Last House on the Left, a product of the Sixties and post-Vietnam rage. Would Them! have been so scary to countries for whom radiation wasn't an issue? It would have been scary, yes, because giant ants are fucking terrifying, but it wouldn't have that it-could-happen-here frisson that it had here. Would Invasion of the Body Snatchers have been as scary in the Soviet Union? Probably not. The Last House on the Left remake might have freaked some people out, but the original was off in uncharted territory, in part because it fed on anxieties about youth culture and its perceived threat to respectable suburban types. If you want to communicate something to an audience, speak to them in a language they'll understand.

Which brings me back to Srpski Film (yet again) and what films are "about."

So in my extended piece on this particular movie, I contended that it worked as a story about the victimization of people living under a totalitarian regime, the role of surveillance in their lives, how this victimization affects subsequent generations, and how these pressures and legacies can reduce people to beasts or break them outright. I thought I made a decent case for this perspective, but Anonymous disagreed. His/her contention was that the movie was really and truly about the frustration Serbian filmmakers experience in trying to make art in a country where the state still exerts strict control over film production and distribution. And that's definitely something I've read in interviews with director Srdjan Spasojevic. So I can believe that's where he was coming from. But saying that the movie has one true interpretation ignores all of the history from which its imagery was drawn. It privileges what's being said over how it's being said, when you can't really extricate one from the other. It's as much about totalitarianism as it is about trying to make art as it is about a former porn star getting back in the game one last time.

"But how can a movie be about anything apart from what the director makes it?" asks the complete and total strawman I've made up for this bit. Well, how we say something imparts as much meaning as what we say or why we say it. We communicate in the languages with which we're most familiar, and I think that's as true of culture and the imagery we derive from it as anything else. It's called A Serbian Film because it's in Serbian - not just the spoken dialogue, but the imagery as well. There's a legacy of totalitarianism, of people trying to get by under surveillance and omnipresent control that is evident in the imagery of the film, the metaphorical language of the film.

Even if Spasojevic made Srpski Film about the plight of the Serbian filmmaker (and I have no doubt that's what inspired him, but was that really the central thesis?), how he chose to tell that story adds an entirely separate layer of meaning to the film, and that's a good thing. Personally, I think that when directors set out to make a movie with a really specific message, they usually product something shitty and didactic. Srpski Film doesn't do that. It doesn't beat you over the head with "this is terrible and you should feel terrible and wonder how this could possibly happen in a just world," it just says "yeah, this is happening and you're watching it. What are you going to do?"

At the end of the day, what the viewer gets from the film probably matters most. Not what the director was trying to say, not what someone else thinks the director was trying to say. A good film is "about" many things, and I think it's a mistake to constrain our interpretations.

Next time: What happens when intent is inferred from content, and the upcoming sequel to The Human Centipede.

Dark Mirror: Paranoia Begins At Home

One of my favorite scary movies of all time is Rosemary's Baby. It's both a sharp commentary on women's roles in the late 60s and a supremely atmospheric exercise in tension and paranoia. Mia Farrow's character is childlike and helpless, not because that's her nature, but because that's the only response she has based on how people treat her. No matter how much she tries to assert herself, she is patronized - as a woman, as a pregnant woman, as a pregnant woman who doesn't possess her husband's sophistication.  It is impossible for her to be taken seriously, even as shit gets weirder and weirder. Nobody else seems to notice, so is it all in her head? Can she even know her own mind any more? She lives in a gorgeous, historic apartment building in New York City, but it's a prison where everyone else seems to be her warden - for good reason, as it turns out. It's a druggy, oppressive parody of domesticity with something horrible at its center.

Now, Dark Mirror is not Rosemary's Baby by any stretch. But, given its constraints. it's the one of the few movies I've seen that makes home and domesticity as horrifying as strange, abandoned places are. It's also one of the few putative haunted house movies I've seen where the house is somehow more menacing in broad daylight than at night.

The first thing we see is a woman sleeping in bed with a child. She wakes, raises a bloody hand to her face. Oh dear. Smash cut to many days before.

The woman is Deborah, the child is her son Ian, and they, along with husband/father Jim, have moved from Seattle to (presumably) Los Angeles for Jim's work. They're looking at houses, and we come in as they're looking at the one into which they're going to move. It's a charming place - lots of original details, plenty of light, cute little neighborhood. There's something about the house that captures Deborah's attention - perhaps the quality of the light as it comes through the windows. She loves it and wants to make an offer right there. It's nicely handled - it's not a creepy automaton sort of moment like it could have been. It seems a little impulsive, but we get the sense that Deborah's dealing with a lot around the move.

As it transpires, she wasn't a huge fan of the idea, and she's not adjusting all that well to it. Jim's distant, spending a lot of time at work. She's stuck at home with Ian, who is kind of an annoying little shit. She has a career as a photographer, and is trying to set up a home studio to do commercial product work. Ian makes it difficult for her to work (seriously, this kid is really irritating and in a completely believable way), and she's having trouble picking up freelancing gigs. People don't take her seriously. It's a lovely home, and she can't get away from it.

It's a lovely home, and Deborah starts taking pictures of it. What else does she have to do? There's something curious in the bathroom - two mirrors, set up side-by-side, with another large mirror on the opposite wall. Deborah stretches into infinity here, and decides to take a picture of one of the small mirror - an antique mirror in a gold frame. The flash rattles around the room, and just for a second, we get a glimpse of something vast on the other side of that mirror. Just for a second. But that does it. Something's out, and people start dying.

Dark Mirror's strength is also its weakness - it avoids histrionics and laying everything out for the viewer. At its best, it keeps you guessing and doesn't provide tidy explanations for what happens (after all, how often do any of us know everything about a situation? Leaving things hanging is underrated, I think). Even things that would, in any other movie, be accompanied by music stings and sudden close-ups are allowed to breathe and settle in the air. It's both natural and surreal by turns. The downside to this approach is that it also lets some of the tension dissipate, so the pacing feels off and rather than a rising climax, we get a sequence of events that just sort of get weirder and weirder as things go on. As effective as the twisting sense of confinement and frustration is in the first half, there needs to be more sense of escalation in the second half to really bring it home.

Don't get me wrong - despite the flaws in pacing and action, this is a smart, understated film that avoids a lot of cliches. It's beautifully shot, making the most of light and reflective surfaces to convey what could easily come off as cheap and hokey. Any way you look at it - from either side of the glass - it's a story of an unhappy woman trapped by obligations, expectations, and the times in which she lives. The house is haunting her.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Netflix

From Within: Teen Suicide (Don't Do It)

Okay, so adolescence sucks. This is news to exactly nobody. It's a time of massive physical, social, and intellectual upheaval, when your body rebels against you, your mind is opened to entirely new ways of thinking about the world, and the people around you - some of whom you've known your entire life - take on new, strange meanings. Being a teenager in a small, tightly knit community is possibly even worse. You don't get to decide which secrets are yours to keep and which are community property. If you're the slightest bit different, people come down on you hard. The people who've known you your whole life have no intention of letting you become anyone else, for good or ill.

From Within isn't a movie about the horrors of adolescence, but it isn't not about them either. It's what happens when an already scary time finds new ways to be scary.

We open with a young couple - a boy and a girl - sitting on a pier at the edge of a lake. The boy reads something from a book, and then apologizes to the girl before blowing his own brains out. Getting things off to a bang, as it were. The girl, promptly and thoroughly traumatized, runs back to town, only to end up a short time later with a pair of scissors jammed into her neck by her own hand. It's a small town, a folksy, all-American town. A good, old-fashioned American town full of God-fearing Christians (except for those weirdos we don't talk about), shocked by two suicides so close together.

Among those upset are Lindsay and her friend Claire. They both go to the local high school and attend the local church like most everyone else in town (everyone except that one family with the house outside of town). Lindsay's a nice girl, she's sweet and friendly, and the pastor's son seems to have a thing for her. Still, Lindsay has her own problems - Mom's a drunk who clings to her faith as tightly as the bottle, and Mom's boyfriend Roy is an ex-con who shares Mom's devotion to the Lord but manages an aura of greasy creepiness to go along with it. Lindsay's sad, yes, but she's also got her hands full. It's tough enough to just be a kid in a small town without bringing down other people's grief on top of it. The town searches for answers, and of course there are rumors, rumors drawing on long-standing town grudges and unpleasant past events nobody wants to talk about. But that's typical for a small town - nobody ever forgets anything.

Then another girl is found dead, her wrists slashed with broken glass. A girl whose final minutes were spent running from an apparition who looked just like her. As if she were haunting herself.

On balance, From Within is a ghost story that makes as many smart choices as it does poor ones. The setting works - the whole town feels like it's balanced on the edge of an early fall evening, like Halloween is coming. The church is an omnipresent force, communicating a sense of constraint without falling into cultishness, and most (most) of the characters are nicely underplayed - I kept waiting for hysterics and melodrama and for the most part, they never came. Lindsay feels like an actual kid instead of some self-aware parody of adolescence. Even the inevitable "terrible secret" has some room to breathe and doesn't necessarily drive the action. There are moments of bitchy dark humor and it's nicely scary, with an ending that avoids sentimentality. On the other hand, some character progression and events feel rushed, throwing off the sort of rhythm absolutely necessary for a good ghost story. More to the point, the creators sacrificed an opportunity to tell a really good horror story about adolescence for a really easy horror story for adolescents.

Much of the action in this movie revolves around Lindsay's evolving friendship with Aiden - a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. He's all broody and tormented and dark and shit. It was Aiden's little brother who killed himself at the beginning of the movie, and he gets his ass kicked at school because his family has weirdo non-Christian beliefs in a town where everyone goes to the same megachurch. So there's kind of this Romeo & Juliet (or, you know, Twilight) thing going on where the whole thing started as the inevitable next step in some feud and who cares. Take the broody pagans out of it (along with some of the worst dialogue in the script) and you could have a story about what happens when you grow up in a small town with the weight of everyone's expectations on you, and how that weight pushes children in the throes of adolescence into odd shapes, stunted by all of the growth they have to do and no room in which to do it. Some turn to drugs, some turn to casual sex, some turn to alcohol, some turn to weird clothes and music, why wouldn't some turn to messing with forces beyond their control?

The bones of the movie are there, the directorial instincts are generally good, but the obviousness is disappointing. This could have been a story about teenagers, with remote adults disconnected from everything until it's all far too late and people start dying. It could have been a story about how the upheaval of puberty makes it hard to tell when you're crossing a line, about the secrets we keep from our families, ourselves, and each other as we grow. Because at its worst, adolescence is practically a nightmare anyway - why not make it literal?

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix

Four Boxes: Bait And Switch

I'm not especially picky when it comes to the movies on which I'm willing to take a chance.  Some movies are going to be a pre-sold commodity for me because of the director or what I'm able to glean from a trailer. Then there's all the ones about which I know next to nothing - the Netflix Instant queue is great for these, because for every two or three direct-to-video hack jobs, there's one hidden gem. If I'm a little judicious, I don't run into too many stinkers - usually if the premise sounds interesting to me (not too hackneyed or hackneyed in a way I like) and it's got more than one or two stars, I'll give it a shot. At the very least, I'll run into something flawed with potential, or a good idea brought low by poor execution.

Four Boxes is none of these.

Part of the problem starts right out of the (hahaha) box. Here's the premise of the movie:

Trevor and Rob are enterprising young men who run an eBay business specializing in the liquidation of unclaimed estate property. They look for recent deaths in the obituary section and check to see whether or not the deceased has any next of kin. If not, they basically clean out the property and auction the person's possessions on eBay. Ghoulish? Yes. Sleazy? Kind of. Truth be told, one of the few successful things about this movie is how well it portrays the sheer awfulness of the kind of people who'd make a living doing this (the name of the business? "Go Time." So, you know, nice). Their most recent score is a bland McMansion in the middle of some unnamed suburban development. The previous occupant left behind what appeared to be a life of bleak desperation. No furniture to speak of, just mattresses and a lot of boxes and Tupperware bins containing all of his stuff.

Upon investigation, it emerges that there were some not-quite-right things about the previous occupant. He appeared to be suicidal, certainly depressed, mourning the loss of a wife who apparently hung herself in the basement. Photo albums full of defaced pictures, faced cut out or scratched through. Cryptic notes and codes. Odd collections of objects. Rob discovers that the tenant was following a mysterious website called "fourboxes.tv", ostensibly a voyeuristic webcam site where the original occupant (a hot girl) had moved out and not removed or switched off the webcams. As a result the current tenant was under surveillance without their knowledge. As it transpires, the new tenant is up to no good.

So, you've got two guys going through the personal effects of a deeply disturbed man who was obsessed with an equally disturbing website. On this basis, I was happy to say "okay, let's give it a shot."

But that's…the premise. The execution reads more like this:

Trevor and Rob are shiftless, obnoxious manchildren who speak in appropriated slang slathered with a layer of irony so thick that their voices practically come equipped with air quotes. They see their efforts to resell the property of dead people as a way to get rich, something they can eventually franchise. They are stunted in their lives and relationships, incapable of honest communication. Trevor is slightly more mature, but this just means that he's more sleazy than anything else, and Rob is, in many ways, infantile. Think of Dante and Randal from Clerks with absolutely no charm or redeeming qualities. These, ladies and gentlemen, are our heroes. Their arrival at the house is followed by a desultory examination of the deceased's effects, complete with contemptuous mockery of the man's life and how he must have arrived at the end of his rope. They toss keepsakes and mementoes around, parodying the grief he must have felt.

Into this modern exercise in grave desecration steps Amber, Rob's fiancée (and Trevor's ex-girlfriend). She's equally as horrible as they are, just as prone to completely empty, inauthentic conversation, punctuated with terrible songs played on an acoustic guitar. These three are our protagonists, and they are so disconnected from any sort of empathy as to border on the autistic. Thirty minutes into the movie, I looked at my wife and said "I cannot wait for these people to die." So yeah, it's going to be very difficult to identify with these three. They're as empty and soulless as the suburban sprawl outside their window.

The titular website is equally inert. We're supposed to be watching somebody engaging in scary, dangerous behavior remotely, but it's almost impossible to make out anything on the webcam footage. Everything has been treated with what appears to be a heavy posterization filter, so we get still-frame sequences of muddy color to which the protagonists react with, well, mild interest. The surveilled occupant appears to be a man who walks around his apartment in a gas mask with a towel over his head like a hood. Rob calls him "Havoc." Why? Who the fuck cares? 

Nobody comments on Havoc's strange getup, and there's never really any progressive sense of danger from the website. Every now and then one of the characters looks at it, registers that they're looking at it, maybe invites over one of the others to look at it, and that's pretty much it. Even in the house of a disturbed dead man, watching footage of someone who might be a killer over the Internet, they're more occupied with themselves than anything or anyone else. They come up with cute names for the people they see on the camera footage, and when Amber points out that maybe they should call the police because it looks like Havoc has imprisoned someone, Rob scoffs, saying that nothing on the Internet is real, and even if it is, it's someone else's job to do that. The incident is soon forgotten. 

This is pretty much all the movie is, until close to the end. Inert sequences of three awful people sitting around talking about nothing in the most annoying way possible, and reacting to a possible real-world atrocity like they would an embarrassing video on YouTube. There's nothing scary about Havoc or his potential plans - there's some nonsense about him being a terrorist, building bombs to put in people's tailpipes, and he apparently kills people with a leaf blower, but that's about it. The closest thing the movie has to a climax is preemptively negated by a plot reveal that is probably supposed to shock the viewer, but doesn't because it's just as detached and hackneyed as the original story, making some kind of heavy-handed point at best, and at worst coming off as something the creators did because they had the attention span of a crack-addicted squirrel. This twist is upended yet again, but by that point there's absolutely no reason to care, and all of the arty match cuts and slow dissolves in the world won't give the ending impact. Somebody either thought they were being artistic, or maybe just "artistic", as an ironic comment on artistry in the age of webcams and YouTube.

And out of everything about this movie, I think that's probably the worst part - it refuses to commit to its premise, almost as if that level of sincerity is a bad thing, as worthy of derision as the sad testament to a sick man's last days. It sabotages its own story at every turn, by giving us nobody to care about, by refusing the buildup of any tension or sense of fear, by throwing in twists which not only negate everything that came before, but seem almost contemptuous of the audience, revealing the fraud of the filmmaking process (oh yeah, I get it - what we SEE isn't always what IS, wow, that's "deep", man…) and letting the entire enterpise slowly collapse like a balloon losing air. We're told that we're going to get a story, and what we get instead is the message that wanting a story or expecting to feel something in response to what we're watching is for losers, and this movie doesn't earn that. It's a trite, self-indulgent, piece of shit.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Netflix

Fun With Google 2

So what search terms come up this week?

Okay...

artwork naked "women on crosses"

i wish you'd get human centipeded

...what?

Gaze into the search engine abyss, it gazes into you also.

The Broken: Through The Looking Glass

One of the reasons I think scary movies are capable of being art is that at their best, they do an excellent job of committing to an aesthetic. Horror movies are capable of creating worlds like no other, from Saw's world of sumptuous velvets and rusty gears to Halloween's pools of shadow interrupted by splashes of expressionless white faces, to Night of the Living Dead's stark, grainy, pointillism. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reminds me of nothing so much as some of Pieter Breugel's paintings, but good luck getting anyone else to listen to you once the words "chainsaw massacre" hit the air. The color palette in The Abandoned makes the world feel sick somehow, and the bright, clean lines of The Shining only make the horrors superimposed on them that much worse. Sometimes the aesthetic refers to a specific historical period, as in The House of the Devil or The Devil's Rejects, in terms of events, and circumstances as well as our understanding of film from that time period. This way you've got the world, how we understand the world, and how we understand films made about and in that world adding to the experience of the story itself. Plus, you know, blood and tits.

Even with all of that, I can't remember the last time I saw a movie that committed to its premise so fully in its aesthetic as The Broken does.

Gina McVey is a radiologist in London. Hers seems like a nice life in the city, with a boyfriend on the cusp of turning into something really serious. We see the two of them at a surprise birthday dinner for her father, with her brother and his girlfriend also in attendance. People are happy and laughing. In the middle of the merriment, a mirror on the dining room wall just…shatters. Out of nowhere, no fall, nothing thrown. It just collapses into hundreds of shards.

How often do we think about mirrors, really?  We need them to help us groom ourselves, to make us into the people we present to the world. They are flat, cool, silvery pieces of glass, and we take for granted that we are facing ourselves in them.

The next day, Gina McVey, while standing on the streets of London, watches herself drive by in her car. Not someone who looks like her - her. Not a car like hers - her car, down to the license plate.

How often do we think about mirrors, really?

The Broken is as simple, clean, and coolly presented a horror film as you could ask for. London is laid out in shades of blue and gray, as if glimpsed by reflection in still water. Dialogue is quiet and spare, space and silence fills most of the movie, and the pace is deliberate. The events play out slowly, measured, like the steady drip of water, music swelling to a sharp, piercing edge at new revelations. Small things are as important as larger things, not all of them telegraphed. There are mirrors, x-rays, cameras. Images and reflections, seeing and being seen keeps everything stretched tight with the paranoia you'd associate with Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives. It's not so much the terror of people not being who they appear to be as being nothing but their appearance - there's something empty and hungry about that, something horrible.

This is the sort of movie that demands patience and careful attention to get the most out of it. The pace means dread rising to terror rather than sharp scares (at least until things start to escalate), and if you don't know exactly what it is you're seeing and why it's important, it's not going to have the impact it should. Small things go wrong, but have much larger implications. You need to do the math to be rewarded, which is totally fine by me. This is the stuff of my nightmares, the innocuous event carrying horrible meaning. My one objection then is that the story attempts one last twist at the end, and it feels unearned because it relies on an experience of previous events that hasn't been drawn clearly enough for us to understand it. It makes the story a little too complicated (when it hasn't been up to this point) and robs the conclusion of some of its power. That said, the trip there is an exercise in premise embodied - this movie is composed of mirror glass. It's cool, slick, precise, and offers up nothing but what we see, silently and without judgment. But when everything comes apart - when the mirror breaks, it breaks hard and sharp, adding red to the palette in drips and pools.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix