Enemy: Things Unsaid

Too many scary movies over-explain themselves. Often this makes them less scary than they could be, because the unknown is pretty much the bedrock of scary in all its forms. Sometimes it works, the sudden reveal, the introduction of new information, but often it just makes the unknown more known and robs it of its power. Like, this is one way we teach children to deal with their nightmares - to face them, see them for what they are, to understand them and thus make them less scary. If you’re trying to scare people, deny them understanding.

Enemy reveals almost…almost…nothing, and it makes for a deeply uneasy film.

It opens with a title card: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered,” and this made me roll my eyes a little bit because it’s got more than a whiff of freshman dorm room bong-rip philosophy to it, at least as an opener to a film. But it isn’t necessarily wrong - the different between disorder and order can certainly be a matter of scale and distance, of perspective. And it’s pretty key to understanding what follows.

From the title card, we move to the interior of a car, where a man is listening to a voicemail message from his mother. She enjoyed the visit to his new apartment, though she can’t understand how he can live like that - the passive-aggression wrapped in a tissue of maternal concern. This is Adam Bell, and he’s a history professor. He lectures a class on the ways dictatorships have historically controlled their populations, beginning with Rome’s bread and circuses. Adam teaches, goes home, eats dinner, has sex with his girlfriend, gets up, goes to school, teaches, goes home, eats dinner, and so on. Adam lectures on the cyclical nature of history, on the patterns made by events.

One day, a colleague asks him if he’s seen a particular film. Adam doesn’t really…go to the movies, but asks his colleague for a recommendation. The colleague recommends a film, and Adam watches it.

And in one scene, Adam spots someone who looks exactly like him.

Adam is an only child.

On one level then, this is a story about what happens when someone meets someone like them in every way, with their own life, one very different from their own. It begins as a story of obsession and the confusions of shared identity, what it would be like to walk into someone else’s life uncontested and make it your own, however briefly. Indeed, Adam has a double - not just a twin, an actual double, and he’s a moderately successful actor, and not necessarily an especially nice guy. There’s something existential about it - if they’re just like you, and you’re just like them, where do they end and you begin? There’s also a thriller here, about what happens when someone decides they want your life instead of theirs, or in addition to theirs. And that’d be fine, it works really well on that level, largely because it skips the “how is this possible” stuff (which would invariably be a letdown) and gets right to the “and now this is happening” stuff.

But that’s not the whole film. It’s the framework on which the story hangs, but how the story is told adds something else entirely to it. The film is suffused with a yellowish cast throughout, as if we’re glimpsing the world through the lingering remnants of a dust storm, and everyone is stilted, cold, removed from each other. Conversations are halting, unnatural, pauses conveying yawning gulfs between the people talking. It reminds me a lot of the distant, detached feeling in much of David Lynch’s work, keeping us at arm’s length the whole time, making everything feel slightly unreal and off-kilter. The editing is sudden and sharp, scenes and shots cut from one to the other like half-remembered recollections, and around the edges of the story there are hints that there’s much more going on here. Things don’t add up, offhand comments make you pause, recurring nightmare images punctuate each act. We aren’t getting the whole story - there’s more to this than is immediately apparent, and the film ends abruptly on a note that calls everything into question without really providing any closure at all. It feels like we’ve just watched a nightmare which itself is just a façade papering over an even bigger nightmare, and the denial of any explanation for the things we’ve only glimpsed in fragments lingers like a cold lump in the pit of your stomach.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix

Leaving D.C.: Who You Are When Nobody Else Is Looking

Human beings are, for better or worse, fundamentally social creatures. Living and working in groups enables us to accomplish things we’d have a hard time with by ourselves, and community provides us with emotional support and reassurance. The need to belong is a powerful one. It’s a big part of why solitary confinement is such a debilitating form of punishment. And so there’s a tradition in horror of stories about people driven mad by their isolation; people who, without the grounding influence of others in their life, lose touch with reality. Introduce supernatural elements as well, and thus doubt - am I seeing ghosts or am I losing it from sheer loneliness? - and well, we’re off to the races.

Leaving D. C. is a nicely minimal found-footage film in which isolation is probably more malevolent than any spirits.

This is the story of Mark Klein. Mark’s a technical writer by trade, and he’s in the process of moving from Washington D.C. to Anole, West Virginia. He’s bought a really nice old house out there, far away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. He’s full-on in the middle of nowhere, 35 minutes by car from the nearest town of any size at all. He’s documenting his move with a small camcorder, for the sake of a support group for obsessive-compulsive disorder that he belongs to back in D.C.. The idea, then, is that they’re a source of community for him, they’re interested in his well-being, and so he’s keeping them apprised of this big step in his life. As he points out, for as much as people talk about getting out of the big city and away from its attendant headaches, few actually do.

He gets to the house, records a little tour, invites anyone from the group (but especially one person) out to visit him. There’s plenty of room in the house for guests, after all. And then comes the afternoon where he’s out hiking and finds a cat’s skull nailed to a tree, with the letter “B” carved above it. It’s odd, and a little unsettling. And then there’s the sounds that wake him up in the middle of the night, sounds from outside of his bedroom window. Chopping sounds. A flute. A woman moaning.

His is the only house for miles.

The film is structured as a series of dispatches - the updates he’s sending back to his friends in the support group. This gives it a pretty snappy, economical pace - segments end with Mark shutting off the camera, and so there’s that sense of curiosity and dread at what new development there’s going to be when the camera comes back on. And the supernatural elements develop slowly but steadily - the unnerving discovery at the tree, the mysterious sounds, and so on - but they’re also developing in parallel with the story of Mark, and how he’s handling living so far away from anyone else. With a couple of exceptions, the film is just Mark, talking to the camera, and that’s a lot to hang a film on, but it works. Mark Klein seems very much like a real person -he’s kind of a dull guy, preoccupied with details and instructions and the right way to do things, like a technical writer would be. He’s very much a dad-jeans-and-phone-on-a-belt-holster kind of guy. There are occasional references to the medication he’s on to manage his OCD, but it never tips over into cliché or full-blown pathology. What ultimately matters is that Mark is the kind of guy who expects the world (and the people in it) to behave in ways he believes they should. That’s not necessarily OCD, that’s a pretty common expression of a certain type of masculinity.

And that’s really where the strongest parts of this story are - in watching Mark as he deals with events as they unfold, more and more of who he is becomes apparent. The story is told as much by what goes unsaid (or how things are said) as it does by what’s actually said. He’s a mild-mannered enough guy on the surface, but right behind that there are reserves of tightly-wound resentment or antagonism. When he talks about how so many people talk about leaving D.C., but he actually did it, he sounds almost accusatory, as if he’s railing against some unseen critic. There’s a definite edge in his voice when he points out that two specific people only wrote “Best Wishes” in his farewell card. Some of his updates are intended for one person and one person only, culminating in a visit from that person that does nothing to help his composure. I got the sense as I watched this film that if we were to see the support group’s side of the story, it’d be one where everyone said “oh great, yet another ‘update’ from Mark.” The frequency of the updates, and the trivia with which many of them are occupied, feel like fumbling attempts at maintaining a connection that might be more valued by one party than the other.

So we have this awkward, lonely man, alone in the country with his jealousies and insecurities, and the inexplicable starts happening. And it really is inexplicable for the most part -it’s possible that everything happening to him is the work of locals fucking with him, but it doesn’t feel likely. Local law enforcement is unhelpful to say the least (though not without cause - some city person moves out to the country and freaks out when it’s not like the city, you’re not going to take them very seriously), and so Mark becomes increasingly more and more unbalanced the less he’s able to explain what’s happening, his frustration curdling into rage and provocation of whatever’s out there in the rural dark.

Although I don’t think it’s derivative, this film does bring a few other films to mind, entirely to its credit. Its juxtaposition of  psychological disintegration and supernatural phenomena is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, and it’s as naturalistic in its found-footage conceit as that film. This is one of those cases where a near-nonexistent budget works because it means the footage is actually being captured on a consumer-grade camcorder by the protagonist, and so there’s very little to pull you out of the story. It feels like you really are watching someone’s home movies. It develops its supernatural elements in small, incidental things for the most part, and so it has the same unsettling feel that there’s some horrible secret just out of sight that Resolution has. None of it is flashy, but most of it is effectively strange, and nothing is over-explained. Its treatment of masculinity as embodied by rationality (and technology), contrasted with a femininity represented by nature and the unknown, and what happens when male entitlement reacts badly to female power reminds me a lot of Paranormal Activity (another found-footage film that knew how to use the transition from one vignette to the next).

At no point does it feel like it’s trying to ape any of those films, it just shares their virtues. On the other hand, I think its biggest flaw is that it’s over much too quickly. It ends very abruptly, at what feels like should be the transition from the second to third act, and so as a result doesn’t have the power those other films do. It charts a path for things to escalate and  introduces a visual and sonic vocabulary to communicate that escalation, but then sort of ends just as shit is starting to get real. It has being unsettling all wrapped up, but I would have liked to see it escalate to balls-out scary, and I think it could have, pretty easily, within the constraints it had set for itself.

There’s a saying that the measure of a person is who they are when nobody’s looking. To an extent, we perform or put on personae around other people. That’s just part of being a social creature. So if you want insights into someone’s character, you pay attention to how they act when they aren’t concerned with how they’re coming across. Mark’s all on his own out in the country, as if he desired solitude or escape from the big city, but he’s sending constant updates back to the one group of people with whom we know he shares a connection. It’s pretty clear that there’s something supernatural going on, but there’s no indication that it’s malevolent. Mark reacts the way he does because he just can’t handle things not being exactly the way he wants them to be. His entitlement and rigidity in the face of the inexplicable brings all of his ugliness to the surface. Nobody’s looking, and this is who he is.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Ritual: Not Actually About A Ritual

One really important element in scary movies is that of human frailty. There are a bunch of ways it can figure in, from being the centerpiece of some theatrical villain’s cack-handed attempt at a social experiment, to providing a moment of betrayal at the worst possible moment, to being something overcome over the course of the film, or something not overcome, leading to a grim end. It’s like any other ingredient in a story. Sometimes it’s deployed well and adds to the final product, and sometimes it’s all you can taste.

The Ritual is one of those times when it’s all you can taste, and boy is it bland.

The film opens on five friends out at the pub, discussing an upcoming trip. They’re debating where they want to go, and more than once a location is shot down because they’re getting too old for that particular type of fun. They’re old college buddies, uneasily settling into the idea that they can’t party like they used to and still unsure of what takes its place. Two of them - Rob and Luke - head down the street to a corner shop so Rob can grab a bottle of something, because Rob’s not done partying yet. The back-and-forth continues between them before they realize that this shop is in the middle of being robbed. Luke ducks behind some shelves, Rob isn’t so lucky. The robbers demand his wallet, his watch. He doesn’t want to give them the watch. They threaten him. Luke looks down at the bottle of booze he’s holding, weighs his chances at clocking the robbers before they notice him.

Luke does nothing, and Rob gets beaten to death.

Flash forward six months later, and the four remaining friends - Luke, Dom, Hutch, and Phil - are on a hiking holiday in rural Sweden. It’s what Rob would have wanted. Not so much what they wanted - they’re city boys, it’s cold and rainy and windy, and sleeping in tents sucks. But they’re doing it for Rob. Something hangs between them all - Rob’s absence, and the reason for it. So there’s tension, discomfort, maybe some lingering resentment and guilt. There’s also weather and a long, long hike to their lodge, and to top it all off, Dom takes a spill and fucks up his knee. So they decide to go off-trail, to cut through forest in order to get back to warm beds, cold drinks, and thick steaks sooner rather than later.

Now, this is a terrible idea under any circumstances - none of them are really outdoorsy, and trails are there for a reason - and soon enough our protagonists find themselves really fucking lost in the woods. Night falls, and the rain starts to come down even harder. That’s when they stumble on a cabin. Oh, sure, it looks like nobody’s used it in ages, and there are runes carved in the trees outside, which is weird, and there’s a creepy pagan effigy in the attic, which is even weirder, but it’s shelter for the night. So they bed down for the night. None of them sleep well at all.

And when they wake, they find Phil, still in the throes of a nightmare, naked and praying to the effigy in his sleep.

So we have four friends, a grudge hanging between them, out of their depth in nature, faced with some really, really weird shit. On the surface, then, it plays like a distaff version of The Descent. You have a bunch of people out in the untamed wilds who are going to need to cooperate to survive, but there are things between them that will make that difficult. And like The Descent, as their situation gets worse, hints of something worse than nature’s monumental indifference start to creep in. The thing is, in The Descent all of the stuff that happened before gets backgrounded in favor of the immediate problems, only rearing its head in the climax. It’s not about what came before, but what came before informs how everything turns out, and this is really effective. The Ritual, on the other hand, is entirely about what came before. It gets brought up in a heated argument early on, Luke has repeated nightmares that he’s back in the corner shop, and it’s really on-the-nose to begin with, and the nightmare becomes a motif repeated what feels like three or four times throughout the film. And it’s like I know, I was there at the beginning of the movie.

As a result, the whole film feels less like a story about people who’ve already suffered one horror plunged into another, and more like a referendum on what Luke did (or rather didn’t do) that fateful night in the corner shop. By hammering us over the head with the inciting tragedy repeatedly over the film’s run time, it becomes entirely a story about whether or not Luke chickens out again. Everyone else becomes a prop in what is now Luke’s redemption/condemnation arc, and anything that happens in the film becomes something that exists to get us to that moment instead of being an absorbing story. It’s easy for this conceit to overpower everything else in the film, because the rest of the film isn’t especially strong stuff on its own. The four friends are barely sketched out (Dom’s the wimp, Hutch is the most competent, Phil is kind of there, and Luke let his friend die in case you didn’t know), and though they aren’t made out to be bad sorts, they don’t make much of an impression either. Their emotional range is from scared to angry for the most part, and the impact of what exactly happened the night Rob died on all of them is never really explored -- they keep yelling at each other about it, but that’s all they do. There’s no sense of how it affected each of them individually, and Luke seems less conflicted or traumatized by it than just sort of sullen and annoyed that people keep bringing it up.

And this ends up undercutting what the film does well. It’s well-established early on that these guys have very little business hiking in rural Sweden, even less business going off-trail, and the night in the weird cabin does do a good job of establishing just how out of their depth they are. If the filmmakers had focused on that aspect of the story, and let what we know about what happened between these four guys sort of hang in the air between them, it would have been a much stronger showing. In the early running, it gets over on lots of time spend in the forest at night, the yawning dark broken only by trees and fitful flashlights. There are a few ominous indicators that maybe they shouldn’t be out here, and there’s a lot to be wrung from an endless ocean of trees, the strange sounds of a forest at night, and maps and compasses that do no good at all, as The Blair Witch Project aptly demonstrated. But it doesn’t focus on that primal fear either. After that weird night in the cabin, the focus shifts to a mysterious creature out in the woods. So now when it isn’t about Luke letting Rob die (which he did, the film hastens to remind us), it’s about some unseen monster stalking them, so that initial unease gets replaced with a lot of sound effects and people vanishing into the forest.

For that matter, I spent about two-thirds of the film saying to myself “why did they call this film The Ritual?” and lo and behold, the third act is less a culmination of everything that came before and more the filmmakers realizing that they had to reconcile a weird cabin in the woods and an unseen monster with the title The Ritual, and that they were in danger of killing off all of their protagonists seriously short of a 90-minute runtime. So they stall for a bit with an exposition dump that amounts to a single character explaining everything to Luke while the whole film grinds to a halt. The climax, when things should be at their most horrifying, mostly takes place in shadows and firelight, but the feeling of contrivance means it comes across less atmospheric than out of a need to keep the monster as hidden as possible because it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. 

The whole thing ends with sort of a shrug. and feels less like something was survived or endured than it does like an awkward, exasperating night with some acquaintances just came to an end and now you’re annoyed because you know you’re going to have a hangover and you can’t find a cab. We’re reminded over and over again that Luke let someone die, and we are told that this is important, but at the end, it isn’t, not really. If you’re going to make it the point of the movie, that point should be sharp.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Hell House LLC: A Hit Wrapped In A Miss

Since I’ve returned to writing this thing on a regular basis, I’ve become very conscious of trying to mix things up a little. I tend to be discerning, insofar as I usually stick to films with premises or pedigrees that interest me, and I do have certain types of films that I like and dislike. I don’t make a point of watching and writing about stuff I am pretty sure I won’t like, because that isn’t fun for me and there are plenty of other outlets enthusiastic about those films. But a review of my most recent output reveals a lot of artsy, brainy, highbrow type stuff. Which I like, but I also kind of want to resist this becoming a space where I just write about the newest release from A24 every goddamn week.

I bring this up because the kind of films I like or don’t like was on my mind a lot while watching Hell House LLC. On paper, this is not something I’d be enthused about going into - it’s a found-footage film set in a haunted house attraction, and the last time I watched that particular intersection of subject matter, it fucking sucked. Plus, I’m just so tired of found-footage films. They’re so easy to make, and so difficult to make well.

But, I gotta say, even though this film’s writing is shaky in places, and it blows its ending in terms of narrative integrity, this is by and large a smartly executed film that honest-to-god scared me more than the overwhelming majority of stuff I write about here.

We open on the obligatory title card about how what we’re about to see is a documentary “about the mysterious events surrounding the 2009 Halloween haunted house tour tragedy.” Which is just…so clunky and vague. Which one? Was there only one “haunted house tour tragedy” in 2009? Not off to a good start. There’s some archival news footage, describing the opening night for Hell House, a haunted house run in an abandoned hotel in Abaddon (really?), New York. It isn’t clear from the footage shot by attendees what happened, but something awful apparently occurred in the basement of the hotel, only one of the cast and crew survived, and local law enforcement refused to say anything about it. And so now, sometime later, a documentary crew has come to Abaddon (sigh) New York, to speak to the only surviving member of the cast and crew and try to get to the bottom of it.

None of this is especially fresh or compelling or well-executed, and it’s exacerbated by being a found-footage narrative. Found-footage is supposed to feel raw and immediate and naturalistic, and so when the artifice is apparent - in how people talk or act, or in the quality of its special effects, or in the provenance of the footage - it becomes much more difficult to suspend disbelief than it might for other narrative approaches. As soon as it stops feeling like something someone actually captured on video, it loses its power. And this opening is supposed to feel like we’re watching a professionally assembled documentary and actual news footage from the time, but none of it does. The writing and dialogue don’t capture a journalist or documentarian’s voice well at all. I don’t believe this is an actual documentary or actual news footage. It’s a shaky start.

But once we get past the table-setting, once we get to the footage captured by the cast and crew in the weeks they spent setting up the location, it starts getting much, much better.

Here, we’re introduced to Paul, Alex, Tony, Andrew, and Sara. They’re in the business of setting up haunted houses, the kind that take over an entire building, through which paying guests are ushered. They’ve come out to Rockland County, New York - about 40 minutes outside of NYC - to set up this seasons’ event at the abandoned Abaddon Hotel. It’s more rustic than their usual location, but that’s part of the appeal - it’s got an authenticity you can’t fake. It’s going to be a bit of a challenge - they need to restore power to the place, and housing’s in short supply so once they’ve got electricity, they’ll be bunking in the hotel. The place has been abandoned for a very long time - a guest and her daughter went missing in the 1950s, and though the hotel was held blameless, the resulting bad press killed business, and then the disgraced owner killed himself. Everything’s pretty much where it was left when the place was shuttered. Lots of dust, lots of cobwebs, lots of genuine neglect.

Numbers scrawled on the walls, and a basement with symbols drawn all over the walls, stacks of Bibles.

The remains of a ritual.

The majority of the film is the footage shot by the team setting up the haunted house, documenting their stay in the hotel leading up to opening night, nested within a documentary context. And even if the expository writing is wooden and fake-sounding, the way the footage is handled feels much more realistic. Things aren’t always perfectly in frame, there’s lots of whipping the camera around…it looks like raw camera footage. The crew themselves aren’t especially developed as characters, nor do we get much of a sense of their personalities - mostly they’re variations on a theme of Bro. Alex is the head guy, Paul is the really obnoxious guy, Andrew and Tony are largely indistinguishable from each other, and Sara is a woman. They’re not especially abrasive (except for Paul, who is, true to form, a pig) though - they act pretty much like you’d expect a bunch of city folk to act having come out to the country to set up a haunted house. There’s a steady undertone of condescension toward the locale, but it doesn’t overwhelm their professionalism. They’ve got a job to do, one they’ve done before, and they don’t let horseplay get the better of them. There’s fighting at points, but it all feels pretty natural, and though they aren’t especially developed as people, neither do they tip over into caricature. It doesn’t really feel like acting.

What this film does well, it does by making a lot out of very little. The setting does a lot of the heavy lifting - it doesn’t look like a set made up to look like an abandoned hotel, it looks like an actually abandoned hotel in small-town New York. It’s not clean with artfully arranged bits of decay. It’s close, cramped. and you can feel the dirt and dust on everything. The power isn’t running, so a good chunk of it is lit with hanging work lights and flashlights, and since it’s all found-footage, it gets a lot of mileage out of shots that rely on a single perspective - look at something, then look away, and then look back, and the uneasiness inherent in walking around a dark corner with nothing but a flashlight. What this means is that it doesn’t take much to get under our skin, and making it a haunted house full of their props provides many opportunities for genuinely scary moments that don’t stretch plausibility. This film gets a lot of mileage out of putting mannequins where they shouldn’t be, and though that might sound reductive, in practice it really isn’t.

On top of this, the filmmakers show a good sense of restraint. Things that shouldn’t move do, and we get glimpses of figures where nobody should be, and things aren't over-explained - the hotel’s history is touched upon, but it’s not especially lurid, so the crew don’t really pay it much mind. There’s evidence of something more sinister in the basement, but again, the crew just remarks that it’s creepy and keeps going. Why would they look more into it? They’re there to set up a haunted house. People by and large act like people in this film - once things start getting really strange, someone points out that maybe they should leave, cancel the haunted house, but of course they can’t. This is one of the toughest narrative nuts to crack in found-footage films - there should come a time when it doesn’t make any sense to stick around, let alone keep filming. To the film’s credit, it’s handled pretty realistically here. They’re filming everything so they have a reference document for their next event, and so they have some bonus behind-the-scene footage for their website. That makes good sense within the world the film has created, and when the moment comes when they can’t leave, it actually feels natural  in that it isn't handled on-camera. We’re left to speculate why exactly they can’t call it off - apparently there’s some information Alex has been withholding from the rest of the crew, possibly about their finances -and that feels more natural to me than someone having a complete “we’ve come too far to turn back now” freak-out on camera. When it all goes to hell, we get glimpses, but only that - something went very wrong down in the basement, but we never get a clear shot through the crush of panicked people trying to get out. The recovered footage - the people, the setting, the presentation - has an authenticity that the framing material lacks, and is very effective.

It does fall down in other places, though. Apart from the wooden news story and documentary stuff and painfully on-the-nose town and hotel name, the spooky occult stuff in the basement looks more like the work of edgy teenagers than it does an actual ritual site, there’s some confusion as to who is where when at the climax (though that may be down to me being unable to tell some of the cast and crew apart) and the end, while providing a nicely spooky final beat, also disrupts the framing conceit of the documentary pretty seriously, enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Which is too bad, because it did a lot of things right - not everything, but a lot.

More than anything. this film reminds me of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, in that it’s set in semi-rural New York and surrounds supremely unsettling found footage with an equally unconvincing framing narrative, but it’s not quite as uneven as that film, and trades the disturbing for good straight-up meat-and-potatoes scary. It’s been a hot second since a film actually had me on edge or make me jump, and this one accomplished it handily. That’s worth noting, I just wished they’d stuck the landing.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Endless: You Can Come Home Again, And You Will

Every now and then I’ll run across a movie while writing this thing that barely qualifies as a scary movie. I’m pretty ecumenical about what I consider “scary movies,” - to me it’s about the emotional experience (I’ve seen slasher films that were a fraction as horrifying as, say, Dancer In The Dark), not signifiers or clichés or specific directors or studios or what-have-you. What I really like are the ones that seems like one thing for most of their runtime, and then turn into something else entirely when you least expect it. Where everything’s normal, until it isn’t.

At its beginning, The Endless is damn near an indie drama, a touching story about the difficulty of family, the ways we repeat patterns in our lives, and what a struggle honest communication can be. And then…well, it doesn’t stop being about that, but it also opens up into something stranger.

Ten years ago, Aaron bundled up his younger brother Justin, and they fled from the UFO cult their family belonged to, just ahead of something ominously referred to as “The Ascension.” But life outside the cult has been tough - they’re barely scraping by, and no matter how much Aaron tells him that they’re better on the outside, Justin doesn’t remember any of the weird shit. He just remembers being happier than he is now. And then one day, a package arrives in the mail. It’s beaten up, with stamps on it from all over the place. It took a long time to find them.

Inside is a videotape, with people they know from back home. They’re just about to start The Ascension, and want Aaron and Justin to know they’re always welcome back.

This sets off a tug-of-war between them - their relationship is believably fractious, Aaron is controlling and insists he knows best, even when it’s apparent that he doesn’t, and Justin resents being yanked out of his home without his say-so all those years ago. Their lives are miserable and desperate, and Justin wants nothing more than to go back someplace where they ate fresh food, sang songs, and were surrounded by people who loved them. To go back to when he was happy. And because Aaron is his brother, and loves him, he relents and agrees to make the trip back to Camp Arcadia for one day, so Justin can see for himself the madness they escaped.

So Aaron and Justin make the long drive out into the boondocks, and when they get there, everyone’s happy to see them, and they all look great - clean air and healthy living mean they don’t look any different than they did when Aaron and Justin left.

Ten years ago.

What follows, as Aaron and Justin spend time at the camp, taps into a lot of what makes cults seductive. Everyone is friendly, welcoming, patient and kind and understanding. This is what makes cults attractive, an uncritical, unconditional (at first) acceptance of the lost and lonely and aimless. Sometimes the price (and there’s always a price) for that welcoming and approval is tolerable, sometimes it’s not, but they never start off scary, so there’s a tension there. There’s also tension in the way Aaron and Justin respond to the people at Camp Arcadia. Their life outside the cult  is neatly shorthanded as poverty and desperation - they clean houses (and not especially nice ones) for a living, they live on packaged ramen, and early on, Aaron gets angry at Justin for using what little money they had to buy an old camcorder instead of the new car battery they actually need to maintain what precarious livelihood they have. Their exchanges are sharp, shot through with the kind of impatience and barely-hidden grudges that you only find between people who have known each other too well for too long. When they return to the camp, Aaron maintains his skeptical distance but Justin jumps right in like the little kid he was when they left - he’s eating fresh food, singing songs, playing games, and the people there are happy to see him. He has all of the things his life outside is lacking, and so we feel like we’re watching Aaron lose Justin to the thing he worked so hard to escape, and that thing is a cult, so there’s sadness and dread throughout.

On top of that, everything begins to feel progressively stranger and more off-kilter as they travel to and arrive at Camp Arcadia. The sunlight is a little too harsh, the cinematography feels a little curved or bent around the edges, like a very subtle fisheye effect, and everything in the camp seems a bit off, even as cults go. Mysterious notes pop up everywhere, everyone looks (and dresses) the same as they did when Aaron and Justin left a decade before, a silent man jogs out of camp every day but never seems to return, and the camp is surrounded by strange geological and meteorological phenomena. As the film moves on, there’s an increasing emphasis on cryptic images - videotapes, paintings, photographs, some innocuous, some ominous, sometimes appearing from thin air. Dwellings glimpsed from afar that shake and thud, screams coming from inside. The longer they stay, the more unreal everything feels.

Cults and homecomings alike, it’s always smiles and games and warmth to start, but the other shoe has to drop, and we spend a decent chunk of the film waiting to the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t, not in the way we think it will. Not everything (or everyone) is as it seems, and yes, there is something very wrong in Camp Arcadia, but Camp Arcadia is a symptom, not the disease, and as the cosmic horror of what’s happening out in the wilderness reveals itself. a wry, deadpan sense of humor helps leaven things a little. It all dovetails nicely into a moral of sorts, into closure that emphasizes the need for and value in breaking the circle. We keep coming back to the same places we were before, to the same struggles and grievances, again and again.

IMDB entry
Available from Amazon
Available on Netflix

13 Sins: No Drama, No Games

I was having a conversation recently with a friend about movies, and we worked our way around to what people mean when they say a film is “pretentious.” In my experience, it’s thrown out pretty casually, when the person finds a film oblique or opaque or ambiguous. In this mode, it’s maybe a half-step above “quit seeing things that aren’t really in the movie” and the idea that directorial intent determines the true, objective meaning of a film on the list of Dumb Ways To Talk About Movies.

But it got me to thinking about what pretense IS, in this context. Like, I can be all smart and shit and say “this isn’t really pretentious, it just went over their head and that angers and confuses them” but that’s a pretty dickish take too, and maybe if I’m going to be a dick about terms, I should make an attempt to define them. What I settled on, for myself at least, is that in this specific context, a pretentious film is one that is didactic and presumes that the audience is ignorant of what is really an easily observed idea, treating it as a huge revelation.

And that got me to thinking about “game” movies. It’s a particular type of scary movie where a single person or group of people have been selected to play some kind of game, one with escalating stakes that promises a considerable prize in exchange for what ends up being considerable moral compromise. Invariably, the point of the film (usually articulated by the antagonist) is that people will do things they don’t think they’re capable of if the stakes are high enough, which, no shit. There are countless examples of this, both in the behavioral sciences and in real-life situations. This is not news to any but the most absolutely sheltered. The Saw films are prototypical examples of the game film, but certainly not the only ones. Kill Theory, 13 Tzameti, Would You Rather, The Task and My Little Eye come to mind as well. Some of these are better than others, but in general I’m not much of a fan of game films. They tend to insult the intelligence of their audience.

I’m not a fan of game films, and 13 Sins is not helping that one single bit.

The film opens in Australia, as a distinguished academic is taking the podium at an event presumably celebrating his retirement. He looks wary, distressed. It’s the look you see on someone who may be in the later stages of dementia, and he opens with a slightly off-color joke. That gets some laughs, but he follows it with an outright filthy limerick that gets no laughs at all. Up to this point then, we could be watching the public disintegration of a once-great mind, and the woman who introduced him comes up to usher him away from the podium, but then - tearfully, apologizing the whole while - he cuts her finger off. The room erupts into mayhem and the man is shot by police.

Cut to our actual protagonist, Elliott Brindle, as his fiancée prepares him for a meeting with his boss. There’s a lot riding on this: Their wedding is coming up, she’s pregnant, he’s solely responsible for the care of his developmentally disabled brother. He’s praying for a promotion, because money is tight.

Naturally, he is instead fired.

Not only is he fired, but he also finds out in short order that his father - his awful, abusive, racist father - can no longer afford his place in assisted living, and will have to move in with Elliott, Elliott’s utterly dependent brother, and Elliott’s fiancée, who did I mention is Black? Because she is. All of this occurs in the first ten minutes or so of the film, quick cuts from one awful thing to another. Elliott, desperate, finds himself on an empty road at night, at a red light. There’s a fly buzzing around inside the car. He has no idea how he’s going to handle any of this, and then he gets a phone call. A genial voice on the other end of the line tells Elliott that he’s been selected to be a contestant in a very exclusive game, once which could make him a millionaire. This genial voice knows a lot - frankly, an upsetting amount - about Elliott and his current woes, and tells him that all Elliott needs to do is complete 13 tasks, each rewarding an increasingly larger amount of money.  To begin, all Elliott needs to do is kill the fly that is currently buzzing around inside his car. He does, and immediately gets an alert from his bank that money has been deposited to his account.

Then the voice tells him to eat the fly.

This begins a chain of events in which Elliott is yanked to and fro by the voice at the other end of the phone, coerced into doing increasingly worse (and increasingly more improbable) things for larger and larger amounts of money. The basic premise isn’t a bad one - I think the idea that we don’t really know ourselves until we’re put to the wall is a reasonable one to explore, and explorations of extreme desperation can be powerful, but it’s so much better when we’re shown, rather than told, and this film is just nothing but telling from start to finish, and is so tonally inconsistent that it’s jarring.

The problems begin with Elliott, and his situation. It’s been said that comedy is the worst day ever of someone else’s life, and this film seems to take that to heart. Our introduction to Elliott is basically “boy, I sure hope nothing goes wrong today!” followed by everything going wrong. There’s no tension because he’s entirely framed in terms of how precarious his situation is. It’s not just his job, it’s his upcoming wedding, it’s his child, it’s his dependent brother, it’s his dependent father, all of this is piled in one after the other with an immediacy that feels less tense than just absurd. His boss is a caricature villain, like a refugee from a dinner theater production of In The Company Of Men, and his father is nothing but verbose invective and contempt. It’s two-dimensional, like an EC Comics story come to life, but not in a good way.

And that’s where the comedy of the worst day of someone else’s life comes in - it’s so absurd that as the film moves on, the tone ends up being a queasy mix of comic goofiness and cruelty. At one point Elliott is ordered to steal a one-of-a-kind nativity scene (made by blind children, no less - everything is pitched at a level of ridiculous) and destroy it, and the whole thing is played as slapstick, rather than the act of a desperate man at war with his own conscience. Elliott himself is drawn as a pathetic milquetoast, and his situation is so cartoonishly dire that it feels less like we’re watching a basically decent person struggle with a moral quandary than it does a bug having its wings pulled off by an especially malicious child.

There’s no real dilemma or tension because there’s no real choice - his desperation is pitched so high so soon that there’s no question he’s going to keep taking the deal, he’s so meek and wishy-washy that we’re invited to laugh at him, rather than sympathize with him, and the challenges he’s put through become so sadistic so quickly that the only tension is seeing what awful direction he’s going to get yanked in next. It’s like something out of a Farrelly Brothers movie right up to the point that people start losing limbs and dying, at which point we’re kind of in Saw territory. The two don’t mix.

This is all undergirded by a weird, muddled take on transformation. We’re never really shown who’s running Elliott through all of this (which is probably smart), and their motives are never really articulated. There are some feints toward the supernatural (that are never really pursued), but also toward the idea this is some game for the wealthy and powerful, who are watching him be put through his paces, via the spies and cameras they have everywhere, but then at other times it’s described as an exercise in moving Elliott away from his old self.

As the film moves on, Elliott starts acting more liberated, or confident (or evil) the more challenges he completes, which is a weird message to send. The film begins with him being a basically goodhearted guy who is mocked for his decency, with a lot of dialogue about how much of a pathetic doormat he is and always has been. So there are a couple of things this film could be communicating: One is that the atrocities he’s committing are in fact a vehicle for self-actualization, which reads like the filmmakers didn’t know Fight Club was a black comedy, or - and this is  reinforced by messages he receives that he’s still “too close to [his] old self,” - we’re being hit over the head with the idea that given enough desperation, anyone can do monstrous things. Which, as I pointed out at the beginning, is not an especially novel or insightful point. So either “we are all capable of being bad,” which no shit, or “being bad should be celebrated,’ which fuck you.

Thematically, this film is a mess, but narratively, it’s a disaster. The writing is obvious, ham-handed, and sounds nothing like how people actually talk. There are odd details stuck in throughout that are never explained or resolved (an ostrich makes an appearance for no apparent reason, a bus driven by a mysterious masked stranger is  never commented upon) and it’s hard to tell how much of that is by design and how much of it is shoddy storytelling. Is it supposed to make the whole thing seem quirky? Why would you try to strike that tone in a film about a desperate man debasing himself? Was it supposed to be explained elsewhere and got edited out? Maybe, there are all kinds of logical holes in this film - we’re expected to believe that after a number of law enforcement officials witness him commit acts of vandalism and serious injury, nobody would continue pursuing him simply because no paperwork was ever filed. Elliott irrevocably ruins his rehearsal dinner and his fiancée’s reaction is “mildly puzzled.” Elliott’s brother is developmentally disabled and requires medication, except he doesn’t always take it to no apparent effect, and even though he can’t live on his own, nobody’s supervising him and his level of functioning varies as the plot dictates. In general, people are who they need to be to move the plot along, not fleshed-out human beings.

Finally, the ending is kind of anticlimactic and… not necessarily obvious, but the “twists” don’t make a lot of sense, so there’s little shock. The people you think are going to be bad guys early on turn out to be bad guys, it seems to take place in a world where all kinds of people play this game run by a shadowy, omnipotent group without anyone ever finding out, and as is true for the rest of the film, people don’t act like people, they act like they need to for the film to end. And after what seems to be about 36 hours of depravity, destruction, and multiple murder, the most Elliott can seem to muster is sort of “whew, what a day.” There do not appear to be any consequences or any real stain on his soul. It’s muddled, and doesn’t open up into anything larger or carry any real sort of weight.

And that’s probably the biggest failing this film has. “Game” movies often purport to serve as moral lessons, but there’s nothing here that really resonates or to which the audience can connect. It’s almost singular in how it undermines dramatic tension by making the situation ridiculous, the decent protagonist an object of derision, and the entire exercise pointless and consequence-free in the end. There’s no drama, there’s no game, just an entirely unnecessary film.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

A Dark Song: The Great Work

There are a couple of books I remember from my adolescence - Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish. They’re basically the story of what happens when an arms dealer contracts a black magician to perform a ritual that sets loose the whole host of Hell upon Earth for a single day (spoilers: it does not…go well). I haven’t read them in years, but what struck me at the time and stayed with ever since was their treatment of the occult.

See, in most popular media, depictions of the occult usually boil down to candles, pentagrams, robes, and maybe a naked woman if it’s going for extra-lurid. And sometimes this works - I have kind of a soft spot especially for music that runs with that kind of grindhouse Satanic aesthetic - but as a representation of occult tradition and practice, it’s shallow and limited. It’s effective as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all that far. The occult (what little I know about it) isn’t just candles and pentagrams and chanting; it’s scholarship, it’s devotion, it’s discipline. It’s a practice as deep and involved as the sciences or arts with which it commingles. Those books by Blish were the first time I saw black magic depicted as an actual practice, with underlying principles, systems and vocabulary. They felt like a glimpse into a larger world.

A Dark Song is an equally serious take on magic, as well as an understated, solemn examination of the costs exerted by a long and difficult journey.

The film opens with a quote from the book of Psalms -“For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” - before introducing us to Sophia. She’s touring a large house in the Welsh countryside that she’s interested in renting for an extended period of time. It’s very important that some of the rooms face east or west, and she’s willing to pay up-front to rent it for a year, and to pay extra for the agent's discretion.

Having secured the house, Sophia shows it to a man named Joseph Solomon. Mr. Solomon has made the trip from London to take a look at the house with Sophia. He hasn’t agreed to anything yet, and he’s testing Sophia, trying to see if she’s lying about her intentions.

As it transpires, Joseph Solomon is a magician, and Sophia wants his help to perform the Abramelin operation, a grueling year-plus process that, if successful, will put Sophia into conversation with the angel set to watch over her, to ask that angel for a specific favor. But to summon angels, one must first invoke demons and bind them, to constrain their influence upon the petitioner.

In Solomon’s words, they will unshackle this house from reality, and things both light and dark will find their way in.

The majority of the film is the ritual, investing it with depth and depicting it as the ordeal it is. This isn’t some candles, symbols and chanting, this is months of preparation - fasting, total abstinence, study in multiple languages of symbols and systems, grueling rites undertaken multiple times to purge Sophia spiritually and physically. Each room in the house serves a different function in the ritual, they are moved through systematically, consecrated to specific purposes. This will take the better part of a year, spent in total isolation. The entire house is ringed with salt, to cut it free from the world. Solomon is equal parts priest, drill sergeant, and dominant, and there’s a constant undercurrent of ordeal as a path to transcendence and purification throughout.

And this leads to the effect these conditions are going to have. These are two people completely shut into a big house in the middle of nowhere for several months, pushing themselves to the limit physically and psychologically. Naturally, the cracks are going to show eventually - Sophia is impatient for results, and as it transpires, she hasn’t been completely honest with Solomon about her intentions. Solomon is both exacting and damaged. He has seen some shit, and begins the process by detoxing from the alcohol he relies on to “deal with the horror.” He insists on adherence to ritual, to protocol, to practice at every step, and his reaction to Sophia’s dissembling is interesting - it isn’t as much one of anger or betrayal as frustration and fear. Intent and drive are critical for the ritual to work, he explains, and any falsity of purpose corrupts it. It is the reaction you would expect from a nuclear engineer who watches someone mishandle a fuel rod. But ultimately, for all his knowledge and desire to keep himself and Sophia safe with a minimum of moral judgment, Solomon himself is just a man, broken and traumatized. So human frailty in multiple forms conspire to corrupt the ritual, and when the cracks open up, things from outside of our world begin to creep in.

Like a lot of the stuff I’ve been reviewing lately, this one’s best described as “stately” - it relies on lots of long quiet moments suddenly interrupted, wide shots of landscapes dominated by looming clouds and very small figures moving across them. The score is largely cello, percussion and some chimes employed to great effect throughout. It’s not as impeccably shot as, say, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House or Hereditary, but it’s generally well-composed and well-acted, and generally gets over on its pace, its focus on the two characters, and the way at every turn the gravity of their situation is impressed upon us. It’s very much a slow burn - the first act is largely about preparing the ritual, the second is occupied with interpersonal tension, and things don’t really kick off in a big way until the very end. It’s initially very small things that seem to suggest greater forces at work, and then things get a little weirder, then a little weirder, and then things really start going bad. This isn’t a film occupied with hysterics or running around screaming - Sophia may not always be honest about her intent, but her drive is never in doubt - as much as it is the slow realization of a first-time drug trip. The shit’s not working until it is, and then, well, strap in.

It drags a little toward the back half - there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Sophia and Joseph that starts to feel repetitive, and there’s a bit toward the end, just before it gets really weird that should pay off a really important part from earlier and doesn’t, but what’s interesting is where it all ends up pointing. This isn’t a film satisfied with glib clichés about messing with powers beyond your control, and so it ends up delivering in ways that aren’t always obvious or spelled-out, ending in a way that isn’t necessarily what you’d expect going in, but makes perfect sense. It’s a really weird set of comparisons to make, but this film strikes me as kind of a mix of Martyrs (albeit much less graphically violent), The Babadook, and The Trip, and to me that’s an interesting intersection for a film to stake out. Rituals and ordeals are transformative work, and that’s the point finally and elegantly made here.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon