Para Entrar A Vivir: The Model Home

Watching this, I was reminded of one of the first apartments my wife and I looked at after we got married. It was a basement apartment in a grotty-but-not-dangerous part of town. It was accessible from a door that opened directly onto the street, and wasn't secured with anything more than a standard lock and a deadbolt - no lobby, no security cameras, no buzzer to let people in. The door to the apartment itself was worse - cheap wood with a knob that showed evidence of repeated jimmying and splinters and gouges around the doorframe where kicking had done what jimmying couldn't. Things were not off to a good start.

The apartment itself was dark, low-ceilinged and cramped. Windows were narrow and near the ceiling. The walls were bare brick that had been painted over. The closet doors were pulled off their tracks, with laundry spilling out. About the time the current occupant wandered out of the bedroom wearing only a pair of boxers, it was all over. Our consensus? "Let's not live someplace like where the fat guy died in Seven." It's been a watchword ever since.

Looking for a place to live is sort of a horror all its own. You're essentially putting your trust in a stranger when it comes to the one place that's supposed to be a center of safety and security. Violate that, and you touch something deep and primal when it comes to fear. The call is coming from inside the house. Nowhere is safe.

Para Entrar A Vivir (To Let) does a very good job of exploring the horror of home.

We open on a dimly lit apartment, dilapidated. Something's not right. Flies buzz, maggots crawl around plates, and somewhere, a baby cries. A young woman pads quietly down the hall. Whispers in voiceover say "everything is perfect. Perfect. Perfect on one and two. Children on two. Everything is perfect." What does it mean? Empty mannequin faces and limbs litter the hallways. Without answers, we cut to sunlight, cheery music, and Clara and Mario.

Clara and Mario are a young couple, expecting their first child soon. They've been living with Mario's family and it's getting sort of old. Clara's getting tired of looking at apartments, and her pregnancy's not exactly going smoothly. She's either puking or exhausted, or exhausted from puking. Mario picks her up from work so they can go look at yet another place. It looks perfect - 3 bedrooms, 1 and a half bath, full kitchen, lots of light. Shit, I'd rent it. It's a long drive, and Clara's tired. She takes a nap while Mario drives.

Clara wakes to thunder, lightning, and rain lashing the car. They're in an unfamiliar neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. It's what could gently be called a "neighborhood in transition", which is just another way of saying "it's still shitty, but we're laying our money down that that's going to change." Buildings falling down or already rubble, graffiti on the walls, industrial facilities for a skyline. Abandoned cars sitting stripped on blocks, and almost nobody in sight. Where are they? What have they done? Clara's worried, but Mario's trying to be optimistic.

The apartment building imposes itself on the sky, old but solid. It's being renovated, the real estate agent says, this area will be unrecognizable in a years' time. The apartment itself is what could be called a fixer-upper. Big, lots of character, lots of untapped potential. The real estate agent is confident, she's talking like the apartment is already theirs.

Oddly, there's a picture of them already in the bedroom. And one of Mario's old pairs of sneakers under a dresser. Almost like they were meant to be here all along.

This is a short film, so from here the rollercoaster starts a pretty fast downward plunge. This works in its favor, because the brevity and punchiness keeps vibrant the running and shouty bits that typically get old very quickly over the course of a feature-length movie. Obviously there is something Very Not Right about the building and the people in it, but it takes the rest of the movie to get all of the answers. There are chases, false starts, setbacks, near-misses, and a fair amount of blood involved. Everyone concerned is trapped in this majestic old building as a horrible parody of domestic bliss imposes itself on the proceedings like a beautiful bowl of fruit infested with worms. 

It's not necessarily an innovative movie, and it does have its missteps, but ultimately it is executed well enough to leave you wound up for the protagonists and asking the time-old question posed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - "who will survive, and what will be left of them?" Like that movie the caricature of domesticity adds to the horror of just surviving unimaginable events, but rather than a piercing near-hysteric crescendo, here it is a resounding chord - the protagonists are the new residents in this little community where everything goes on as normal, even if not everyone involved is alive, completely human, or free of restraints, and it echoes into each corner. It doesn't stab, it suffocates. No matter how much we want to, sometimes leaving home is hard.

IMDB entry

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Shutter Island: On Being Sane In Insane Places

Almost forty years ago, a psychologist undertook a field experiment with some of his grad students. He had them check themselves into mental hospitals, based solely on the claim that they "heard voices." Once admitted, no amount of apparent improvement would get the hospital staff to see them as anything but mentally ill. Legitimate complaints about treatment were labeled "acting out", claims of being or doing better were chalked up to "denial." Once you're mentally ill, it seems to suggest, you have relinquished your right to be taken seriously.

Conversely, to the extent that lay definitions of mental illness include the distorted perception of reality (often, though not exclusively, found in schizophrenia), there's this sense that the mentally ill don't perceive the world as it actually is, that what they see and hear and think is not really there. So what is happening might not actually be happening, but then again it might. But even if it is, nobody will ever believe you. It's bad enough being all alone out in the woods/closed-up resort hotel/abandoned hospital and getting menaced by a thing, but what if the thing is right in front of you the whole time and nobody believes it? Even the smallest things become menacing. You don't know who's in on it and who isn't. You're not even sure there's actually an "it" for anyone to be in on. There's no safety at all, not even in groups.

Shutter Island capitalizes on this absence of safety to fine effect throughout, building a menacing construct out of multiple genres in the process.

It's 1954, and U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are called to apprehend an escapee from a mental hospital situated on the titular island. It's a hospital for the criminally insane, where the worst and most dangerous cases are sent for treatment. Everything seems off from the beginning - the patient ostensibly escaped from a locked room and traversed hostile, rocky terrain barefoot. The doctors and nurses are all less than forthcoming about the patient's history, and the primary care psychiatrist just happened to leave for a week or so on vacation the day Daniels and Aule arrive. The agents have to surrender their firearms to the hospital's resident police force, and the chief psychiatrists - Drs. Cawley and Naehring - refuse to turn over records that might help them. The patients they interview are evasive at best. So something is definitely Not Right Here. In what to me was a pleasantly surprising bit of atypical behavior, Daniels basically says "fuck it, this is getting us nowhere, let's go home." Unfortunately, the gloomy weather they've endured since they got there has turned into a full-bore hurricane battering the island. The ferry won't be coming, there's no other way off, and the whole hospital has gone into lockdown.

Daniels and Aule are stuck, so there's nothing left to do but continue to investigate, pursue leads. But Teddy's starting to get migraines, and he wakes up every night in a cold sweat, nightmares of his time in the Army and the traumatic death of his wife and children torturing him. Digging into the hospital's history finds that they're partially government funded, with money coming from HUAC. Dr. Cawley spent some time in the O.S.S., and Dr. Naehring? Well, he came over from Germany, but he's vague about the specific time frame. Stories of unorthodox experiments and terrible surgeries performed in the island's lighthouse - oh sure, it's just supposed to be a sewage treatment plant…but then why the electrified barbed wire fence? All the while, the storm rages outside.

Shutter Island takes what it needs from film noir, gothic horror, and more contemporary stylistic exercises like The Cell to create an environment that feels unnatural and oppressive, even in broadest daylight. The film takes place during a time in American history when paranoia and suspicion are at a peak, and all kinds of terrible things were actually done in the name of stopping the Communist menace. Lives were indeed ruined and people permanently broken during this time. Moreover, it predates many of the advances in research and treatment ethics that are part and parcel of psychology today. World War II is over, but the ghosts of what happened to men who fought continue to haunt them in their civilian life. The idea of trust or even truth is a shaky one in this climate, and it suffuses the film. Even the most innocuous interactions feel like they have hidden meanings. Daniels and Aule really are in hostile territory here. 

On top of that, the whole island is a monument to the gothic style - jagged peaks, an old lighthouse, rocky cliffs, crumbling graveyards, and historically ornate buildings dating back to the Civil War. At the top of the bluffs, overlooking everything is Ward C - the worst and most dangerous of the worst and most dangerous, segregated from the rest of the population in a heavily secured Civil War fortress. People go into Ward C and never come back out again. As unsettling as the exterior is, the interiors are no less disturbing. Daniels is wrestling with a lot of trauma, and his nightmares are juxtapositions of his past and present in jarring ways, presented with an attention to color, lighting and detail that makes his interior world - no matter how hellish - a lusher and more, well, real experience than his relatively drab 1950s exterior life. Stylistic reappropriation can suck pretty badly when handled poorly, but here, it all contributes to the sense that pretty much anything we can usually count on to ground our perceptions is fair game. It's jarring, but in a way that makes sense given the story.

This movie is one in which we feel like we've been immersed in someone's waking nightmare. Nowhere is safe, nobody is trustworthy,  nothing is certain. Nurses and patients alike whisper behind our back. People vanish from locked rooms and return just as easily, with little comment from anyone. Sidelong glances, innocuous comments fill us with dread. Bodies at Dachau accuse us in our sleep. Lovers crumble to ash in our hands. Outside, the air thickens with unease. A storm is coming.

IMDB entry

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The Nothing Men: Time in Purgatory

purgatory

1) a condition or place in which the souls of those dying penitent are purified from venial sins, or undergo the temporal punishment that, after the guilt of mortal sin has been remitted, still remains to be endured by the sinner.

2) any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation, or the like.

3) serving to cleanse, purify, or expiate.

I think part of the reason I'm not a huge fan of gore films is that there's rarely any tension. You have a pretty good idea of what you're going to get going in. There will be people killed, there will be sharp implements (with the occasional blunt one for variety) employed, and there's going to be a lot of red stuff and squishy bits. It's certainty to a fault, and I tend to find uncertainty scarier. But I've already covered this ground ad nauseam in my discussion of the Saw films, so no need to run that particular dead horse through an unmistakably lethal but highly unlikely and overly complex death trap again.

So, uncertainty makes for tension, long story short. Tension is the bow drawn back, the roller coaster at the top of the hill, the silence after the unforgivable thing has been said. In my opinion, you can scare the shit out of people without spilling a drop of blood on screen. All you need is secrets. All you need is the sudden reversal. All you need is the twist. All you need is uncertainty.

The Nothing Men is, largely, a masterful exercise in tension and uncertainty.

Six men in a machine shop. The company's closing a bunch of their facilities, and for bureaucratic reasons unclear to non-Australians like me, the men have to remain at the site for a specific amount of time. Otherwise, they forfeit their severance packages. The machines and tools and materials have all been stripped away. The shop is a shell. But the men remain, doing nothing all day but drinking beer and playing cards and talking shit. Serving out the remainder of their time. 

The silence and stillness is a bit of a problem, though. The sort of ball-busting that's common among work colleagues starts to get a little loud when it echoes off empty walls with no sounds of work to muffle it. There's nothing to distract them from little slights and long-held grudges. One man has an unfaithful wife. One has a promiscuous daughter. One is a shy virgin, perpetually frustrated and unable to talk to women. One is a committed stoner with a limited grasp of the circumstances. One is a bookworm among blue-collar men. One is carrying on a fling with a woman who runs a lunch truck that comes by the shop. Without actual work. the shop is a pressure cooker. Sit there, do nothing, and spend all of your time talking to men who know enough about you to hurt you, but not well enough to care if they do. Everyone has secrets.

And this is before they find out about the new guy. Rumor has it he was at another location and after two days, everyone got fired for infractions - drinking on the job, gambling on the job, leaving the premises during work hours. Rumor has it this new guy is a spy, sent to rat out employees so the company doesn't have to pay their severance. It wouldn't be the shittiest thing a manufacturing concern ever did. And then the new guy arrives. The six men begin to plan.

The better part of The Nothing Men is a slow accumulation of dread, as information about these people trickles out. Why does the bookworm have trouble sleeping and a Zoloft prescription? Why does the shy virgin watch the lunch truck woman through the window? Why does the new guy go home for lunch every day and sit quietly on his sofa, staring at the cross above the fireplace? Resentment and paranoia thickens like storm clouds, and the violence inherent in these men, in this situation, escapes in sudden spurts, thwarted as soon as it has begun. Shots are composed and static, empty spaces as lyrical in places as the occupied ones. The silence is oppressive, and the voices breaking it do nothing to soothe us. The more we learn, the less sure we are, the less comfortable we are watching this tightly compressed limbo fall apart. Something will have to give, and it could come from any direction.

Which, ultimately, it does. Some of it from places you'd expect, but more often places you wouldn't. This movie is expert at the non-obvious choice. Still, as the story of these men unfolds, there are new horrors with each revelation, with every turn of circumstance toward the increasingly cruel. Comparatively little blood is shed, but every word wounds. In end, everyone pays the price for their flaws, for their sins, and for their secrets. Judgment is dealt. Suffering turns to punishment, punishment to purification, and in the end, a blue unblinking sky, and a single gunshot.

IMDB entry

Shuttle: A Ride Down The Lost Highway

It's a whole different world out there at night. I don't mean casual club-going hours, I mean like 2 and 3am, when everything shuts down. Businesses closed, parking lots empty, or maybe just a few lights on for the cleaning crew, the third shift workers, the people still at the office. An ocean of darkness dotted with islands and oases of light. Sooner or later, most of us find ourselves out there for one reason or another, maybe willingly, maybe not. Usually it's okay, but sometimes the world at night makes us nervous. It's too still, too quiet. As the author Poppy Brite once wrote: "Night time is the hardest time to be alive. 4am knows all my secrets."

Shuttle is an elegantly constructed nightmare and morality tale about what waits for us in the darkness. Seriously, this movie stayed with me for days.

It's the simplest of premises: Friends Mel and Jules are returning from vacation, and end up on the last flight in. They can't get a cab, and are trying to grab one of the last shuttle service runs for the evening so they don't end up stuck at the airport overnight. They're being followed by a couple of guys who are trying to get their attention, being attractive women and all. Maybe if this were sunny Cancun it'd be flattering, but it's late, late at night at the airport, and they just want to get home, so it's a little creepy. There are a couple of shuttle buses willing to take them, but at the last minute, one of them offers to take them for a reduced rate. Mel and Jules hop on, thinking they're avoiding a potential assault from two otherwise harmless-looking frat boys and getting a deal on transportation in the bargain. At the last minute, the two guys - Matt and Seth - jump on, and these four, plus a driver and another passenger, head into the darkness.

So things are a little tense as Matt and Seth try to hit on Mel and Jules, but what none of them seem to notice until it's too late is that the shuttle driver isn't taking them in the right direction. He's headed for the abandoned outskirts of the city.

He has no intention of taking them home.

In theory, at least, we risk this every day. Any time you get onto the last bus home, the last shuttle from the airport, take that late-night gypsy cab, you're doing so on the assumption that the driver is going to take you where you need to go. What if they don't? What if they approach your exit and keep right on going? What happens next?

In this case, what happens next is a long trip further into darkness. At first, the driver's demands seem pretty much like larceny - empty wallets of cash and credit cards, etc. But over time, as the shuttle winds further and further into deserted warehouse districts, his demands become more and more bizarre. And as in most any hostage situation, the dynamic between the hostages gets more and more complicated - some want to comply in hopes of staying alive, some want to overpower the driver. They're pitted against each other as much as they are the driver. They try to get help, but the driver does a good job of keeping a tight leash on all of the passengers. This isn't some disgruntled driver who finally snapped - this is a pro. He has done this before. He has planned for every contingency. 

Shuttle does an excellent job of using the ordinariness of the situation as something claustrophobic and demoralizing - why run for help? There's nobody for miles because they're all home warm in their beds. Call the police? The first thing he did was destroy your cell phones. Just do as he asks, no matter how strange, and maybe it'll all end up okay. This is the city, after all. Not gang territory, not the deep wilderness, just a manufacturing district. Just one of the stretches of darkness between oases of civilization and light.

It'll come as no surprise when I say that it doesn't all end up okay, but just how not-okay it's going to end up is where much of the power of this movie resides. The situation is bad, really bad, and it unfolds as slowly and inexorably as the shuttle itself moving through the streets. Every bizarre thing the driver does has a very specific and frighteningly mundane purpose, one which isn't at all obvious until the very end of the movie. A series of disconnected events and apparently irrational decisions come together, and events take a turn, then another turn, then a sudden reversal, then a negation of that reversal, and then a deeper, stranger turn into hazy nightmare territory of a type usually mined by David Lynch. As an even deeper darkness is suggested in the final act of the movie, it's almost an afterthought to the reality of the protagonists' situation, and the only thing more devastating than its conclusion is the small gesture of humanity that accompanies it, its thoughtfulness somehow making the whole even more obscene.

IMDB entry

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The Descent: But Wait, It Gets Worse

One theory of the enjoyment of scary movies has it that we enjoy them because they allow us to vicariously experience events that make our everyday hassles trivial. Call it a special case of downward comparison - we come out of a scary movie thinking "sure, I had a huge fight with my spouse and work sucks and my bad ankle is acting up again, but at least I haven't had my face peeled off and sewn back onto my head upside down." That, plus the little adrenaline rush we get from being proximal to dangerous experiences without being in danger ourselves. I dunno, maybe there's something to it, but I'm not sure it ends there. Anyway, the point is that we all have things we have to deal with in our lives, and one way we deal with them is to look at how much worse someone else has it, whether it's a scary movie, a reality TV show about some "Real Housewives" somewhere, or any number of medical oddities shows.

One of the things I like about The Descent is that it goes through a few different layers of worse, and it makes the title work both literally and metaphorically as a result.

The movie begins with a group of women white-water rafting. They appear to be having a total blast, and in lesser hands, this fun would SOON TURN DEADLY, getting stranded, crazy hillfolk, Deliverance with T&A and a Final Girl emerging triumphant. That would have sucked. Instead, the women paddle up to their cars, where friends and family are waiting. It's just a fun weekend out, and sure, any minute things could turn bad, but they don't. At least not in any of the obvious ways. There are a couple of uncomfortably meaningful looks between Juno, the group's nominal leader, and Paul, who is married to Sarah, one of the other women in the group. Something is amiss, and as Sarah, Paul, and their young daughter get in the car to go home, the tension is obvious, as is the implication: Paul's been cheating on Sarah. Sharp words are exchanged, the beginnings of one of those conversations you absolutely have to have but don't want to because your daughter is sitting in the back seat. So they start to argue and they rear-end a pipe truck and BAM its cargo slams into their car, narrow metal rods spearing Paul and the daughter.

BOOM. DEAD. It's like the movie is saying "Happy now, bitches?" Things are going to get worse, yes, but not when and where and how we should expect.

Flash forward to some time later. Sarah's been struggling. She has nightmares. She takes pills. She doesn't sleep well. But she's coming along on another outing with Juno, three other friends from the rafting trip, and a new thrill-seeking friend of Juno's who the others don't know all that well. They hole up in a cabin, drink, catch up, tiptoe carefully around the dead child and unfaithful husband in the room, and Juno fills them in on the adventure. They're going caving in the Appalachians, in a documented system. Something new and exciting. This is definitely a step up from rafting for the group, and Juno, alpha female, assures all of them that she's got maps of the system and she's filed a travel plan. It's going to be a great adventure, she says. They hike up to the entrance point and rope down into the system. And here's where it gets worse again, because now you have all of these people, still thinking about the terrible tragedy that befell Sarah - a tragedy for which Juno was at least partly responsible - and now they're in a cramped space, where light is scarce, safety is even more scarce, and everyone has to rely on everyone else, and then the cave-in occurs.

BOOM. TRAPPED. Things just got worse.

Now they have nowhere to go but down. That's true both of the way out, and of their circumstances, because now we have an emotionally and psychologically volatile situation pushed forward by the need to survive. Suffice it to say, the women push further and further on, losing gear and injuring themselves along the way, wondering why all of the caving gear they find is roughly 80 years old. Wondering what the paintings on the cave walls mean. By the time certain truths come to light, it's too late. It's not really Lord of the Flies, but it has the steady drumbeat towards atavism, shot in murky shadow, flickering torchlight, sickly green nightvision, stone and mud and blood. They go ever downward, further and further downward, civilization stripped away in the cold, unsparing way that nature has of making specific things more important than manners or polite lies or really anything but the animal need to be the one left standing.

This is a claustrophobic movie in a few different ways. What's unspoken between Sarah and Juno hovers over every interaction, every conversation. It's never not there. The caves are dark, sometimes mere cracks between rocks through which the women have to push themselves. Every setback takes something away from them, every misstep costs them time and the chance of their survival. Someone has made a very, very bad mistake (not to reveal more than I already have, but it keeps…getting…worse) and now there is nowhere to go but down. The further down they go, the further they descend, the darker it gets, literally and metaphorically. Sarah has the sort of problems we watch scary movies to escape, but they are swallowed whole by the earth and our darkest impulses.

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Session 9: Spirit Of Place

On a trip with my family to Lexington and Concord, my father and I stood on the field where American revolutionaries made a stand against the British. As we looked out, he said to me "can you imagine standing here at sunrise, scared out of your mind, knowing that British troops were marching toward you?" In that moment, we were there and felt something like what we imagine the volunteers who helped build the United States felt. It was something larger than the moment itself.

People use the word "haunted" all the time without an explicitly supernatural meaning - even if you don't believe in ghosts, it's not hard to see how the history of some places might hang over them, our understanding of what happened there superimposed on the place in front of us like an overlay. Why else would a musician like Trent Reznor rent the house on Cielo Drive where the Manson family committed one of their most gruesome murders? Why else would you keep bomb-pitted ruins standing around the memorial to the Murrah Building bombing? Why else leave Dachau standing? Even if you don't believe in ghosts, our understanding of a place gives it power, evokes memory and history and understanding.

In Session 9, this juxtaposition between past and present creates a place where ghosts - supernatural or otherwise - live, and uses that ambiguity to tremendous effect.

Gordon Fleming runs a small asbestos abatement company. He and his wife have a brand new baby girl, but money is tight. He keeps getting outbid on jobs - he's a man of integrity, wants to do the work right, but that means losing work to people who are willing to do it quicker and cheaper. This is his life's work - he learned from his father, and as one of his coworkers puts it, "fiber is his life." This is what Gordon knows how to do, and he's fiercely proud - he doesn't want to work for someone else, he wants to run his crew and make sure the work is done right. But something has to give because integrity and pride don't put food on the table or pay the doctor bills when his daughter is sick. So when he finds out about a job cleaning up an old mental hospital, he puts in a bid to do the work in a week - maybe half to a third of the time anyone else is offering. It's going to be punishing as hell, but Gordon has men to pay and mouths to feed.

The building has been more or less abandoned for decades, occasionally visited by junkies, vandals, or the homeless. It lies in ruin, much of the old equipment sitting, rusted, where it was left when the hospital was vacated. Time stopped here, but everything continued to rot. The place is full of asbestos - in the insulation, in the floor tile - and extensive safety measures will have to be taken. Clean suits, decontamination, negative air pressure. Gordon brings in four more guys for the job. They have mere days to do the work of weeks, everyone is feeling the pressure here. It doesn't help that most of the crew members have pasts together - buried grudges, hidden resentment. They haven't even started work and already everyone is stretched tight.

The hospital doesn't help - it's creepy as hell, piles of old, abandoned equipment, patient's personal effects, Inexplicable things like a room plastered in photographs and children's drawings. Hidden stashes of coins. And in the basement, a room full of files, and recordings of therapy sessions with patients. Work competes with the distractions the hospital has to offer, and one by one the men start to lose focus. And then one of them disappears. And then everything falls apart.

Session 9 is, as scary movies go, pretty understated. It might be more appropriate to call it an unsettling movie, rather than a scary one. Part of this is because, really, the location does a lot of heavy lifting. The movie was filmed at the abandoned Danvers State Hospital, and set redressing was minimal. This is how the place actually looked when they shot - frozen in time as the elements crept in.  Much of the movie is spent not only getting to know the men on the crew (as well as their flaws and tangled histories), but also watching them as they move deeper and deeper into the hospital, in the physical and metaphorical senses. All we need from the location is the occasional meaningful shot - a tree collapsed over a numbered gravestone, a shadow moving across a beam of light, a wheelchair sitting mutely in a hallway - to convey a sense of dread as pervasive and ultimately deadly as the asbestos the crew have come to remove. They dig through layers of construction when they work, and dig through layers of history when they don't - old records reveal the earliest commitments for the disorder of "mortified pride", then the period where the lobotomy held sway, then talk therapy. We learn the anguish of those committed for no good reason, of therapies gone wrong, of lives spent in small rooms behind wardroom doors. All we have to do is make the connections, to do the math, to experience the horror of understanding.

Over the course of the movie, story layers upon story, history layers upon history, the past layers upon the present, and voices become more and more important - remembered conversations, simple questions, the recorded accounts of a patient named Mary - they start off innocuous enough, but as events play out, and the strain of where these men are and what they are doing begins to claim lives, those conversations and simple questions become disturbing in their implications, the recordings of Mary's voice pitch closer and closer to anguish and hysteria, and in the end, this place where the past and present mingle, those voices are silenced. The people who most desperately want to be heard cannot be, and those who most want to go home can never do so again. The past makes the hospital a prison, and it's ultimately just a matter of which set of ghosts you think was responsible for the whole thing.

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Well, Shut My Mouth.

So it wasn't all that long ago that I said that Srpski Film was, oh, what were the words I used?

Oh yeah, "never going to see a commercial release in the United States."

It turns out that I was wrong.

Oh, sure, it's going to be the censored version England got (which trims about 4 minutes from the total run time, most of it - though not all of it - from where you'd think), but even so, it's going to be straight-up NC-17, at the very least. And the hell of it is that those cuts - thought totally understandable - are going to cut into one of the bigger themes of the movie, one of the larger points it makes. Bringing it that much closer to  the spectacle its detractors accuse it of being.

But hey, how about that fourth Scream film, huh? I wonder what the rules are now?