Horror Wednesday: Good Boy

Good Boy is a very good film regardless but laden with a whole other layer of emotional resonance if the viewer has a dog of their own. It’s impossible to watch Indy, the Duck Tolling Retriever star of the film, and not steal occasional glances to the dog curled up next to you and wonder about their interior life. Director and owner of Indy Ben Leonberg reminds us in the film itself that humans have lived with dogs for thousands of years, for companionship and protection – there is footage here of a documentary about cave paintings that include them. Their bravery and devotion have been celebrated in films countless times. Virginia Woolf’s beautiful Flush, a “biography” of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, the connection between dog and human transcends language, and it considers how the world would look through the specific sensory perception of Flush. 
Indy finds himself in a horror film though, a genius idea because it riffs on the supernatural – haunting presences, traumatic history inscribed on a house – by implying that the vastly superior senses of a dog would be able to pick up on things that remain hidden to humans. There is nothing truly supernatural in this film but what Indy can detect goes so far beyond human ability that it might as well be. As we get glimpses of what has previously happened in the family home in which Todd’s (Shane Jensen) grandfather has died (and his own dog, Bandit, has disappeared in), Indy collects his own traces of this history through his sense of smell, through his superior hearing. From the beginning, when he and Todd move into the house in the woods on a rainy night, Indy is hesitant to enter, clearly sensing that this is not a good place. But he follows Todd regardless, because that’s what dogs do for the owners they love.

As much as the unravelling of the history is horrifying, bits and pieces of the truth coming to light as Indy explores his new environment – proving again and again that true bravery is doing something even though you’re scared - and as Todd speaks on the phone to Vera, his sister, in increasingly frustrated and aggressive conversations, the true horror of Good Boy lies in how Todd changes. All the hints at the truth – Todd’s coughing, his doctor’s appointments, his sister’s worries about something coming back, the plasters on his hand after he has left Indy for almost a whole day – register with the viewer and begin to form a coherent story of catastrophic illness (an illness shared by his grandfather and perhaps many more members of his family – in a walk through a family graveyard, Todd darkly says that many of them have died young). Indy isn’t capable of this interpretation, because he’s a dog, but what he does perceive is Todd being haunted by something, a creature made of mud or tar, first hiding in corners, then coming close enough to touch. Vera asks Todd about Indy’s behaviour, if he has shown signs of being disconcerted, because she has read that dogs can sense illness. Good Boy finds a visual language for that heightened perception, a personification of illness as a dark spectre that will, in the end, win out. 

Todd doesn’t want to discuss his health with his sister, and he can’t talk about what is happening to him to Indy, because it is language beyond the dog’s understanding. This is one of the most difficult realities of living with a dog: not being able to explain things, like how you will return after a certain amount of time has elapsed when you leave, or why they need to go to the vet for injections, even if they are terrified of them.
There is no way to explain to Indy why Todd needs more space to rest, why he is becoming increasingly more erratic. All Indy wants to do is protect him, and there is no greater horror in this film than the moment when Todd exiles Indy outside, chained to a dog house in the pouring rain, where he is forced to watch him struggle without being able to help. In a way, it’s a kind of horror that The Babadook also relied on – what happens when the person someone depends on entirely is shifting and changing into something unrecognisable and potentially dangerous, and there is no outside entity to appeal to for help? 

2025, directed by Ben Leonberg, starring Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin.

Horror Wednesday: Weapons

 

There are two moments in Weapons that will stick in my mind for a while. They have nothing to do with finding broader themes in Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian, or assigning any kind of political positioning to it, an undertaking that seems doomed for a film that escapes simple interpretation. One is young Alex (Cary Christopher), the only remaining child in Justine’s (Julia Garner, again great after The Americans and Ozark and her films with Kitty Green) class after seventeen other kids have disappeared into the night, returning to his home that has been occupied, overtaken, by a witch who might or might not be his aunt (a spooky, great Amy Madigan). His parents, previously portrayed as loving and supportive if completely ignorant of the bullying Alex faces from the other children in his class, are now motionless, stunned. They are puppets, put on hold by a spell. Alex is tasked with feeding them soup, caring for them in a desperate attempt to keep them alive. The soup cans at home don’t have pull tabs, and so he learns how to use a can opener. It’s a task too big for a very young kid, and yet he does his best to master it. He is determined to save his parents, because he loves them and they are all he has. He will do whatever this stranger is asking of him to get them back, but at the same time this kid who has been terrorised at school is gathering the strength and resources to fight back, and eventually defeat the evil that has moved into his house. 
The other vignette – and the film unravels its story through following different characters, assembling a puzzle not unlike Pulp Fiction – follows the school’s principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), and his attempt to balance the demands of the lost children’s parents against Justine’s journey in proving her innocence in what is, ironically, turning into a witch hunt against her. Justine has staked out Alex’ home and glimpsed his parents, and realised that something is very wrong. Marcus, doing his due diligence although constantly conscious of his own legal limitations, has attempted to contact his parents, which has put him in the pathway of Aunt Gladys. The fact that Gladys outwardly presents as an eccentric older lady with clown make-up and wig throws him off his game, but the situation escalates when Gladys, seeing him as a threat to her scheme, visits him at home. There isn’t much space in Weapons to develop characters deeply, but the little screen-time they get convey a lot about who they are. In this domestic scene, Marcus is settling down for a quiet weekend with his partner, looking forward to a serving tray of hot dogs and a documentary (again, ironically, about Cordyceps, that zombie film mainstay). These two seem lovingly settled, well-matched, the kind of couple that has been together for a long time and developed rituals of care that translate even in the shortest glimpses of their domesticity. Gladys’ spell turns Marcus into a monster: his first act is to kill his partner. It’s a horrifying, deeply disturbing scene, and it occurs in a film that doesn’t just share its format with Pulp Fiction, but also its gallows humour: objectively, we are seeing a man kill his partner after just intimately witnessing how devoted they are to each other, but something about the tone of the film still finds something satirical about Marcus’ blind, unstoppable drive to kill him, the way that the spell can set this regular man on a target like he’s the Terminator. Gladys functions like the Cordyceps, taking over an ant and driving it like a vehicle without a will of its own: none of the humanity, the emotion, the care and love, remains, it is destroyed in a terrifying instant. There is almost an alienating effect here between the horror of what is depicted and the tone of the film, which invites you to laugh at the bumbling cop who does a horrible job at attempting to arrest someone and manages to stab himself with a hidden needle (and then finds himself stabbed by multiple needles later in a fight for survival, in a film where all kinds of sometimes mundane objects are weaponised). It’s funny – darkly, but still – that Archer (Josh Brolin), a dad to a kid who disappeared, gets obsessed with Justine’s involvement in the disappearance and writes “witch” in red paint on her car, before finding out that there is a literal witch at work who stole the children for a ritual that doesn’t sound completely different from a QAnon conspiracy theory. 

I think any attempt to ascribe a particular meaning to the film works like a Rorschach test, saying more about the viewer than Cregger’s intention. The early scene in which Archer, at a school assembly, presents a theory that Justine must have radicalised the children into running away because it’s the only conceivable place where the children could have been influenced, in the imagined space of the dangerous classroom, closed to the parents, resonates heavily with current discourse about teachers and syllabi. She is a young woman, now stalked by Archer and judged for her personal choices, and an easier target to imagine than the eventual reveal of an actual witch moving into the neighbourhood to wreak havoc. The way that Glady’s witchcraft weaponises people specifically against their loved ones made me think of what catastrophes conspiratorial thinking and misinformation have wrought on families who find relatives and friends unrecognisable and unable to reach – but none of these interpretations fit entirely neatly with the film, and maybe that’s where its potency lies. 

2025, directed by Zach Cregger, starring Julia Garner, Cary Christopher, Jason Turner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Scarlett Sher.

Horror Wednesday: American Sweatshop

 I’m just afraid of what’s gonna pop up next. 

The titular “American sweatshop” is a content moderation farm that Lili Reinart’s Daisy works at. It’s an apt name for a place where precarious workers with few other options spend hours of their lives looking at the worst possible online content, deciding if the flagged videos warrant deletion: by definition, most of the things that come across their desks and beam straight into their eyes and headphone-covered ears are horrible. Daisy’s co-worker Ava (Daniela Melchior) tells her to see the occasional porn she comes across as a relief from the avalanche of violence and terror. In that sense, the film works like a horror film, because every time that Daisy clicks on the next video queued up for her, she has to mentally prepare for the worst, like an endless series of jump scares that she has to see at least 20 seconds of, as per company policy. On the business end, the glimpses we get of how the company treats its employees shows that the primary concern is liability  - the balancing of free speech with the platform’s content policy, and what it means to have that interpreted by people with limited training. Every measure to look after the well-being of the workers seems like a half-assed brush-off; there’s a relaxation area that looks like a kid’s corner, a company counsellor who seems ill-equipped to handle the questions he’s confronted with, and a scenic little pond with an alligator in it (it might be allegorical, but this is Florida, so who knows). For a place where employees regularly faint, have panic attacks or get up to scream to relief some of the pressure, it doesn’t quite seem enough, and when Daisy needs an ambulance ride to the hospital after watching a particularly upsetting video her work doesn’t even compensate her for the bill (and of course, the job doesn’t offer health insurance). Everyone seems to be coping primarily with drugs and alcohol, and maybe even with a sense of camaraderie over their shared trauma, even as they find themselves incapable of talking about anything other than their work to each other. 

American Sweatshop is about the unseen work behind the scenes of social media. It appears to be safe from being replaced by AI because, as Daisy explains, only humans have what it takes to do this kind of work: “Computers can’t feel grief, which is technically our only real job requirement if you think about it. They’re paying us for our pain.” The work gets under everyone’s skin because everyone has something that triggers them, that seems specifically designed to cause them hurt: the newest employee in the small group of protagonists we meet finds out when he watches an animal torture video so upsetting that he is compelled to rush home and pet his own dog. Watching and witnessing costs, and everyone in this film is accruing psychological damage until they come to a breaking point. From the perspective of the company, the human cost is an inconvenience, and new workers are trained up so regularly that there’s no question that anyone who drops out is replaced quickly: the humanity of the workers might be their main qualification, but they are treated as if they were machines.
In the second half of the film, when Daisy’s inability to forget about one particular video leads her to obsession with finding out who created it, it becomes a film about the cost of witnessing violence and terror without the ability to do more about it then to delete the record if it violates content policy – policies that are frequently called out for being wrong, or too limited. The video of a woman tortured is so visceral that Daisy is haunted by it. It intrudes on her dreams, destroys her relationships, even undermines her ability to look after a neighbour’s kid, who she’s successfully steered away from devices towards enjoying films with a tub of popcorn. She goes to the cops against the request of her manager and is brushed off – either it’s fake, or at the very least it’s beyond the jurisdiction. There’s no justice to be found here, until Daisy begins investigating it like it is her crime to solve, as her emotional trauma begins expressing itself as violence. One such act ends up, ironically, in front of the eyes of a fellow content moderator (Joel Fry) concerned about her wellbeing. “What if the nastiness leaks in?”, she asks, and when it does, she makes a deliberate decision about how to proceed, even as the film appears to steer her towards a happy ending where she quits her job to finally begin her training as a nurse, as she has dreamed. She explains to a potential employer, in what seems to be a job interview, that she has learned there are three different kinds of people in the world, those who make the world better, those who make the world worse, and those who just watch: and in her estimation, the third group is the worst. As the camera pans out, we recognise the interviewer as the man who was enjoying watching the torture in the video. 
American Sweatshop doesn’t have the eloquence that made Les chambres rouges last year’s best film, but it’s still captivating, and Lili Reinhart, with another memorable performance after the great and underseen Hal & Harper, is a revelation. 


2025, directed by Uta Briesewitz, starring Lili Reinhart, Daniela Melchior, Jeremy Ang Jones, Joel Fry, Josh Whitehouse, Christiane Paul.

28 Years Later

When I think about Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later, which came out in 2002, I think of it as a film released at a moment in time that now feels like the beginning of a historical arc. The emptied-out streets of London, the feeling of a man who had fallen into a coma in one world to wake up in a completely different one, resonates with the radical change in world politics after 9/11. In the world of the film, only 28 days have passed, but in that period, civilisation has broken down. The most shocking part of the film isn’t the zombies, but the soldiers who have been promised by their leader that civilisation will be restored through the violent acquisition of women – “I promised them women” is the ultimate statement to showcase that it matters how we survive, not just if. The least believable thing about it now is that this pandemic of the rage virus was contained to the UK, that a global quarantine on the island has limited the spread, so that history there has stopped while it continued elsewhere. In that sense, it’s hard not to take 28 Years Later as a film that chronicles the intervening years in our actual timeline as well. 

It begins on day zero, with a scene that only makes sense of the end, with a young boy experiencing the initial outbreak of the plague: his whole family is slaughtered, and his father, a priest, welcomes it as if it is the fulfilment of something he has read in the Bible. As the violent herd consumes him, he is exulted, but his son escapes only to return at the end of the film as Spike’s saviour. I am guessing we will find out much more about this in the future films planned, and for now Jimmy’s identity and the community he has built with others is an enigma (all also named Jimmy, all copying the looks of Jimmy Savile, media personality and paedophile, but only revealed in 2012, years after the apocalypse of the film happened), so that whatever answers we gleam from it are speculation and interpretation. This second option of a chosen community the film presents is, from what we’ve seen so far, in contrast with the island’s, which is modelled on an (imaginary) ethnically homogeneous England of the 1950s. The men on the island fight with bows and arrows, like the historical film clips the film uses throughout the beginning – inspired by an imagined heroic past - whereas this group uses martial arts to fight zombies, conscious of individual flair. They wear tracksuits and jewellery, graffiti the walls where they have been, deliberately mimicking something that would have been seen as a cultural threat. Jimmy himself has inverted the cross that his father has given him. At the very least, there are two very different imaginations of England at play here, both boiled down to the essential core of caricature and performance. 

The film takes place in a very limited geographic space. There’s Holy Island in Northumbria, a small island off the coast that is only connected with a narrow land bridge to the mainland in low tide. In terms of defensibility, it feels like an ideal spot for the community of survivors that have made a home there, but the striking thing about it is that it doesn’t look like a place that got stuck in 2002: instead, it’s as if the short journey across the water entails time travel to the 1950s, to an England of the distant past. The ethnically homogeneous group (it works as a weird echo to the opening scene with Jimmy’s many siblings, past and present, all incredibly blonde) gathers in a hall that features a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the earliest years of her reign, and the more we see of their rituals, the eerier they become. There are odd, folkish masks, hinting at a newly emerged religion that isn’t further explained. There are alcohol-fuelled parties that are filmed in a way that makes the participants look and sound like a horde not unlike the zombies on the mainland. It creates a sense of threat and insecurity, a sense of alienation that feels as if much more than only 28 years have passed, or as if time has passed the wrong way, like the apocalypse and the loss of technology has reverted the community back to an earlier stage in English history. It isn’t a radically new idea that one of the results of a (zombie) apocalypse could lead to the emergence of new cults, but what makes this one so scary is that the viewer has to extrapolate so much from very little information, and that imagination has to fill the holes because Boyle isn’t interested in giving us an anthropological tour. Instead, along with the camera, we’re right in the middle of it with Spike (Alfie Williams), our 12-year-old protagonist, who has never known a different world than this one. 
Spike is about to undergo what feels like it is a ritual in this community: he will cross the bridge to the mainland to “get his first kill” with his father. He is only twelve, but has been taught how to use a bow-and-arrow for this purpose, has been drilled in military manoeuvre. The existence of this ritual reveals much about what kind of society this is exactly, because it appears to have no greater purpose behind it except to prove that he is becoming a man: Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, unrecognisable under a beard), gives him a tour of the great land beyond in which, unimaginably, you can walk so far that you stop seeing the sea, and the only hint that this land has any meaning to the people of the island at all is an area where all the trees have been cut for fuel (an image that is powerful in and of itself, as if the only purpose of this land is the extract resources in a manner that resembles past destruction of woodlands). The kill serves no purpose but to bloody Spike: they target what looks like a family of slow zombies who are grazing for worms in the soil, as far from the horrifying aggression and pace of the original threats of the first film as could be. They are not aggressive, they only fight back when targeted, their appearance is a reminder of the old zombie-film conundrum about how far removed something has to be from human before it can be identified as a monster and be regarded as something that can be killed without moral implications. The ritual is meant for Spike to prove that he is part of the community, but instead this whole journey functions for him as an awakening of sorts to reality: the first kill doesn’t feel heroic at all, and what follows is a very narrow escape from death that opens the question of why his own father should have pushed him to go in the first place, if it is so easy to die out there against the overwhelming odds of swarming zombies and the newly emerged, much smarter Alphas. He also spots a fire in the distance, proof of other human life out there, that Jamie is unwilling to explain to him. 

Spike is in essence a character raised by a cult, limited in his knowledge about the world by an insular community. His mother (a great Jodie Comer) is suffering from a mysterious disease (mysterious, because none of the characters who were once alive in a whole different world are willing to explain it to him) that leaves her hallucinating, in agonising pain, unstuck in time. His father eventually does tell him that the fire he saw was the home of a doctor who lives on the mainland – there are, for some reason, only 28 years later, no doctors left in this community, and so this man becomes for Spike a final hope to save his mother, especially after he loses all trust in his father when he watches him have sex with another woman. It feeds into Spike’s suspicion that Jamie has limited care about what happens to Isla, that he is already planning for a life without her, especially after he finds out that there is a potential cure out there, so tantalisingly close. Instead of seeking out this help for his wife, Jamie is following the community’s taboo about Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who was once observed from a distance doing something inexplicable and therefore horrible with the bodies of the dead. 
Alienated from his father, or thrown into a position of having to question everything he has taken for granted, Spike sets out with Isla to see Dr Kelson and find a cure. Spike’s transformation as portrayed in the film is powerful: he returns to celebrations of his bravery that his father plays into, telling the great story of their heroism, but it is at odds what he experienced out there. It feels like a lie, and that lie translates into questions about the community itself (I would ask why there has been no previous attempt to connect to the last remaining medical doctor, who would surely be essential for a community to have, why technology has disappeared so utterly and completely, what exactly the education and culture of this island is like, what exactly has been replaced by the hinted at folk religion). This second journey is radically different from the first, because now Spike is travelling with a woman who regularly falls out of time: seeing the Angel of the North reminds her of the past, of seeing the statue with her father, and she thinks about permanence and history, about the impossibility of nailing down time now that everything else is impermanent except what is in front of her. She mistakes Spike for her father. She is sometimes lucid, at one point lucid enough to save her son’s life, but as a character she feels like a personification of a story where time and memory (or history, as remembered and written by humans) are slippery. They meet a young Swedish soldier who has become stranded after his quarantine patrol ship has sunk off the coast and with his stories about the internet (and plastic surgery) he might as well be a mystical creature, a time-traveller from the future who only becomes truly real when he dies gruesomely at the hands of an Alpha. Before that, they all witness the birth of a human child from a zombie mother, an incredible reminder that zombies were once us. The baby, now named Isla after his mother, will be returned to the island, but Spike will never go back.

When Isla and Spike find Dr Kelson, the film flips again. Other critics have compared this journey to a search for the Holy Grail – Spike is trying to find a cure for his mother, and the Holy Grail promises healing powers and eternal youth. I was reminded of Hesse’s Narcissus und Goldmund, a tale about the search for meaning through a landscape ravaged by the plague, and how it tackles the importance of art and love even in times of great destruction. 
What they find, once they enter Kelson’s domain, is almost overwhelming in scale and ambition, and one of the most memorable images I’ve seen committed to film in a long time. Kelson’s life-defining project of Memento Mori (an idea that emerged alongside the Black Death) is a monument to humanity as much as it is a reminder of death. He has taken the bodies of the dead – human and zombie alike – and boiled them down into bones, to create towering structures with them, built an awesome (in the original sense of the word) ossuary, by himself, driven only by the intention of remembrance. Each of the skulls once contained the thoughts of a person. Each one stands for an entire life lived. Most importantly, human and zombies look exactly the same once reduced to bones, which is a powerful statement to make in a film where zombies are killed – not just for survival, but also for ritual, as we’ve just witnessed – without hesitation, as if they were prey animals rather than like they once were human. The distinction falls away: there is barely any of the other great caveat of zombie movies here, where frequently characters must kill zombies who were once people they knew and loved. Kelson’s intent is to remember both equally, because both are part of humanity, and pretending otherwise dehumanises not just the zombies but also the remaining humans. Kelson, 28 years later, lives alongside zombies, has accepted them as an unavoidable reality, and he is grieving the dead through these burial rites, without even the comfort of a single other person ever having asked him about his project – until Alfie and Isla come along. It made me think about the impossibility of reckoning with death at scale, the unbearable task of thinking about the dead as individual lives when they are counted in casualty numbers, in war and natural disaster and plague. This is Kelson’s attempt to reckon with it, and therefore that of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the script writer. I can’t think of a more poignant image for this time. 
Kelson can’t save Isla. He diagnoses her with the brain cancer that both we as the viewers and she herself as a person who was alive before the end of the world have already guessed as a diagnosis. He can save her in the sense of remembering her death, giving her meaning, immortalising her. Spike leaves her skull at the top of the tower, facing the sun. Kelson leaves him with Memento Amoris – remember you must love. 

2025, directed by Danny Boyle, starring Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Presence

Contains spoilers for Presence, a film that I think is most effective the least the viewer knows about it beforehand.

I’ve always been a fan of haunted house stories. I like all the ways in which the conventions of the genre can be taken apart and reassembled into new forms. Presence, marketed as a horror film, spends a lot of its runtime camouflaging its true identity: it’s not really a horror film because there’s a haunted house and a ghost, it’s a horror film because it has a serial killer in it. The horror is not in the haunting, which for most of the film has a gentle touch – it’s a feeling of wrongness and unease as the pieces of the puzzles fall together and the real story emerges.
The gentleness is what floored me, because it is there from the beginning but not really comprehensible in its full tragic reality until the end. The film begins in an empty house, introducing how Soderbergh will spend the entire film: both behind the camera and directing, from the point of view of the “presence” that wanders the empty halls, looks through windows but unable to go beyond the confines of the outside walls. A realtor and a family enter, and with them all the dynamics of the family, seen from the outside, like an enigma that must be decoded. They are strangers but in watching them interact, they will reveal themselves to us. The mother (Lucy Liu) isn’t interested in the house itself, only in its location, within a prestigious school district that will allow her son (Eddy Maday) to swim competitively in a highly rated programme. The daughter (Callina Liang) catches the eerie details of the house, like an old silver-nitrate backed mirror. The son is on the phone with a friend, a bit too loud, a bit too braggy. The dad (Chris Sullivan) tries to hold it all together. Something traumatic has occurred prior to the move that has affected the daughter. Maybe it’s too early for the great change, or maybe it’s just what she needs. They buy the house; they do some minor renovations. One of the painters refuses to enter a room, and a conversation hints that this has been an ongoing problem, for now unnamed. We watch bits and pieces, snatch pieces of conversation, try to make sense of them. Then the family moves in.

It's difficult to convey in words that the way the presence moves through the house, the way the camera does, communicates emotions. It’s a gaze imbued with meaning. It observes, it follows, it seems to try to understand. In retrospect, the first two moments in which it touches – always inanimate objects, as it seems to be unable to interact with anything currently held by a human – are deeply emotional. While Chloe, the daughter, takes a shower in her walk-in, it picks up school books from her bed and puts them on her desk, as if to remind her to take a break, or to take a chore off her shoulders. It tidies after her in a specific way that feels deeply familiar and caring, profoundly gentle. When she realises, she is scared, but it’s only one of many moments where she knows that there is something else in the house with them before anyone else does. In a later moment, the son, Tyler, retells a story of cruelty against a female classmate without seeing that his lack of empathy is glaringly obvious – and the presence moves furiously up the stairs to wreck his room (the only moment in the film where the presence acts violently), focusing on his trophies, as if intending to destroy all these signifiers of his vanity and selfishness. At this point, Chloe is convinced that the presence is her friend who passed away before the move, looking over her – but it’s only with the realisation in the end, when we know the true identity of the ghost, that this moment of anger receives the more meaningful interpretation of the presence’s shame and regret.  

There is also a sense here that the people the presence observes are frequently captured in important emotional moments – discussions between the father and the mother about their daughter, who is struggling with the loss of her friend, hints of some kind of white-collar crime the mum committed (and justifies, in a disturbingly frank and drunken conversation with her son, as being right because it was done for him, as if putting the emotional weight of her crime on him proves her love), the dad considering a separation for legal reasons, a breakdown into tears outside on the patio that the presence watches through the windowpane, incapable of crossing the threshold. And yet, in spite of this witnessing, the full story never emerges because it’s a one-sided observation, and it can never capture the whole thing. Maybe that sense is a combination of the limitations of the presence and the divisions within the family – especially the mother, who is so open about her favouritism for her son and her annoyance at her daughter. It comes into full view whenever the dad voices his frustrations at their lack of care and closeness, like in a foreshadowing conversation he has with his son in which he tells him that he knows that there is a better man inside of him, that it “wouldn’t kill him to stand up for his sister” for once (it’s almost as if Soderbergh relishes the irony of this – after his son’s death, he must replay that sentence in his head again and again).

Story-telling wise, it’s interesting that there are two narrative threads that unfold, each with the potential from drama, but one of which turns out to be a misdirection, just another random thing that occurs at the same time. The white-collar crime story is never fully told, it’s more of a backdrop that explains why the parents may be distracted enough from what is going on in their children’s life to realise in time that danger is lurking. The trauma of having lost a friend, and having known another girl who died under similar circumstances, is the actual key to the events. It’s not only the explanation for Chloe’s emotionally vulnerable state – her mother’s frustration at medications not working or the trouble of finding a new therapist for her – but also reveals itself to be the true horror of this horror film. Tyler befriends the most popular guy at his new school, Ryan (West Mulholland), who seems to be popular for his attractiveness and the fact that he provides drugs across the district and beyond. Chloe begins a relationship with him that looks to be based on empathy – he is the only one asking questions about her feelings, about how she feels after the loss of her friend. It seems to be a genuine emotional relationship, a moment of true connection outside the distance of her mother, the presence of a brother who teases and annoys her, the inability of her dad to say the right thing, as much as he tries (Chris is very much a good dad, but overwhelmed and unsupported). But then it turns intensely creepy and concerning – the presence intervenes when Ryan tries to drug her drink – and it all comes to a head when the parents leave town and leave the two teenagers to their own devices. Ryan drugs Tyler, and then Chloe, and brings out the Seran wrap, revealing that he’s responsible for the deaths of her friend and other girls – he’s a serial killer obsessed with controlling girls and watching them die. The time loop closes when the presence manages to wake Tyler, who runs upstairs and tackles Ryan through the window. They both die – the family moves out, and the mother catches a glimpse of her son in the mirror, revealing that the presence was him, the whole time, dislocated in time the way that the medium that came to the house earlier explained, with unfinished business and disoriented as to his identity and purpose, but now finally able to leave that he's saved his sister.

I had watched Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone a few days before Presence, which feels like an odd kind of coincidence now. There is a similar twist to the haunted house narrative there, where the ghosts of the kids that a serial killer has murdered previously do everything in their power to help his current victim escape. And then there’s Nickel Boys, with its POV camera that is so effective at conveying the horrors of institutional racism and violence at a reform school in the Jim Crow South, and even more effective by juxtaposing that violence against the gentleness of care that the protagonist receives from his friend and his grandmother. The Jonas Mekas-like scenes from his childhood have the same sense of gentleness that the presence’s care for his sister conveys – Tyler is unstuck in time and unsure of who he is anymore but the love has remained.  


2024, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Callina Liang, Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, Julia Fox, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Lucas Papaelias.

Des Teufels Bad

Ich wollt einfach weg von der Welt.
I wanted to be gone from the world.

Without having read about the film and what inspired it first, I found it incredibly difficult to locate this story set in rural Austria in terms of its time period. This is in no way criticism of the directing team Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, who did ample research, asked their actors to live in the farm houses during shooting, and recreated costumes and farming vernacular from the period. It’s more of a reflection on rural Austrian life itself, I think: the film is inspired by events from the 18th century, but in terms of how these daily lives unfold, it’s hard to detect how they differ from what they would have looked like 400 years earlier. Viewers are used to tracking historical eras by lavish costumes and technological innovations, but both would not have been available to the rural population that the film is depicting. If anything, that feeling of temporary dislocation adds to the horror of the film: much of it shows the daily toils of the community, fishing and farming to eke out a living, arranged in tableaus that resemble Renaissance paintings of rural life. These chores make up life, and they are demanding enough that they strictly regiment the day, leaving very little space for anything else – and the sense of timelessness increases the feeling that there is no way out, that this is how it always has been and always will be, that there is no escape from the drudgery.

The film is framed by two moments in community life that do break up the daily routine: a wedding and an execution, two events that look eerily similar in how they are celebrated joyfully with music and dancing. Agnes’ (Anja Plaschg aka musician Soap&Skin, who also contributes music to the film) wedding to Wolf (David Scheid) sets off the events of the film. It’s a hopeful affair: she is excited on her big day; she enjoys the playful ritual of the wedding, she is desperate to have a child. As soon as the festivities are over, things go wrong: her husband, who seems to be a stranger to her, takes her to a house in the woods that he has purchased for them without asking her. It’s far from her family, and close to his mother (Maria Hofstätter). The passage from life with her own family to being married begins with the realisation that her husband is not affectionate or loving, but seems to consider her not too dissimilar to the animals on the farm: useful for their purpose, but nothing beyond that. Agnes’ natural inclination is curiosity and fascination with nature – she frequently wanders off the paths, getting lost, investigates, instead of finishing the long list of tasks that she is now required to undertake to make her husband (and god – “The Lord won't like it if you don't cook for your husband.”, as her overbearing and constantly present mother-in-law says) happy. Instead of tenderness and support, she finds hardness and blame, and in her isolation, she only finds solace in prayer.

Religion is as present as the hard work required. Frequently, the workers of the community are confronted with ill omens that they attempt to ward off, or interpret, mixing religion and superstition together. The opening sequence of the film – a woman, despairing, killing her baby, then immediately confessing the killing before being executed – turns into a constant presence in Agnes’ imagination when she stumbles across her exhibited corpse that serves as a reminder to keep people in line, the nature of her crime explained in an illustration for all to study. In addition to disciplining through exhibiting the result of committing a crime, the locals also use parts of the body as good luck charms – Agnes received a finger from her brother, as a wedding present. This dead woman is a haunting presence that Agnes is deeply fascinated by, especially as she begins suffering from depression that the local quacks attempt to solve with bloodletting and sewing horse hair through the back of her neck that she is meant to use like worry beads. Agnes – already regarded by both husband and mother-in-law as an ill-functioning piece of machinery that refuses to do the work it is meant for – further deviates from societal expectations, unable to leave her bed, or take care of herself, much less the animals or her husband (many horrible things happen to animals in this film, as a further reminder of the brutal reality of rural life in the 18th century). An attempt to flee to her family ends in a terrible return to her husband – there is no escape, no hope of change, no way out. She witnesses what happens to those who seek the last desperate resort of escape, a young man who has hanged himself, who is refused a burial by the church, having committed a crime that the priest calls worse than murder, because he could not confess before he died. In her imagination, she sees the man’s body rotting in a field of bones, ungrieved and without reprieve even in death.

The film is based on research into the historical practice of “suicide by proxy”, committed by people aware of the church’s taboo against suicide, who instead commit a crime that will lead to execution. What Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz utterly succeed in is creating a fictional context in which all other pathways out become unthinkable, while the situation itself is so unbearable that the idea of a woman – who we have seen as deeply devout, loving, and yearning for a child of her own – committing suicide by proxy becomes thinkable. In Agnes’ mind, there is no other way out of a world that has become unliveable. The depiction of depression – misunderstood entirely by everyone who surrounds her, and bleakly horrifying in how debilitating is without anyone showing compassion or caring to help – is the true horror of the film, while it is contextualised in an environment that is abundant in everyday violence and a sense of deep superstition that misinterprets reality. Agnes, tortured and with no way out, leads a young boy to a shrine where they pray together, and then stabs him to death. She goes to confess – just like the woman did in the beginning – and is later beheaded, in a ceremony that ends in a joyful celebration not unlike her wedding, as if it didn’t matter what kind of event breaks up the daily toils of rural life – and its depiction is even more effective for how it breaks up a film that is bleak, how it contrasts Agnes’ suffering with the celebratory nature of her death. The community drinks schnapps or beer to celebrate a wedding, and Agnes’ blood to ward off melancholy after the execution, the violence seamlessly integrated into their daily lives.

2024, directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, starring Anja Plaschg, Maria Hofstätter, David Scheid.

Horror Wednesday: Civil War

Does Civil War count as a horror film? I was going to write about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (for which Demi Moore certainly deserves all the laurels), but it turns out that something about this new wave of grotesque body horror films, reminiscent of 1980s films like The Blob and Society, and David Cronenberg’s work, doesn’t quite click for me – or maybe it does, and it’s just difficult to capture the way they utilise disgust to invoke horror in words. Alex Garland, director of Civil War, is well-versed in horror – he’s written 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and directed Annihilation and Men. What all these films share, on some level, is transformation on some levels – sometimes literally, physically, sometimes more esoterically. A specific experience, or a historical event, or trauma, change society, a group of people, an individual protagonist. This isn’t limited to horror – it’s general fuel for storytelling, to depict impact, but I find it easier to consider Civil War is the context of what Garland portrayed as the true horror of 28 Days Later (not zombies, but the loss of humanity in reaction to them, and the attempts by the main characters to hold on to connection in spite of it).
I think what makes Civil War interesting isn’t any question about its depiction of the United States in its titular rift: there are many debates about Garland’s vagueness, his non-commitment to outlining ideologies according to what the viewers might expect if they’d extrapolated from the current moment into the future. The ambiguous image of an antifa massacre that can be read in two different ways is deliberate, but so are the two moments of the film where the vagueness is replaced by the very conscious choice to model a speech by the President (Nick Offerman, who was also very good in Garland’s Devs) to resemble the jumbled, histrionic words of Donald Trump, and to have Jesse Plemons’ character decide who dies based on their place of birth, how truly “American” he considers them, as he is standing over the mass grave of his victims. The driving force behind the film isn’t a story about the transformation of a democracy into the chaotic, violent reality of a civil war. It’s the transformation of Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie into a war photographer who no longer flinches, or considers the moral cost of making a shot instead of intervening in the unfolding horrors.
In that regard, Civil War is almost a straightforward Bildungsroman of sorts, delivering a set of situations (stations of a kind) for the characters to pass through to arrive at the final image that they have set out to capture. The goal that propels them forward, with disregard of their own safety, is a career-making scoop: the tides of war have turned enough that an end is in sight, and the embattled President will likely not survive once the Western Front troops reach DC. Kirsten Dunst’s seasoned photographer Lee wants to capture a final shot of him, Wagner Moura’s reporter Joel will ask him hard-hitting questions, just before the end. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a journalist for “what is left of the New York Times” tags along because he cannot stop, even though he outlines the way that they will all certainly die in the attainment of their goal – shot or garrotted on the lawn of the White House by Secret Service Agents (here the film captures how the adrenaline rush of being in the midst of it is an addiction that none of these doomed characters can quit). Spaeny’s Jessie, in her early twenties, stumbles into their car in a way that seems accidental: she spots her idol, Lee, during a protest. Uncredentialled, she doesn’t have the press vest that keeps Lee and Joel safe (the idea that it makes a difference makes Civil War feel almost too optimistic). Lee assumes responsibility for her, as if Jessie’s idolisation of her and her profession mean that she has to, but she also seems to see her own instincts in her, and help her become better. She is still horrified to find that Joel has decided to take Jessie with them into a situation that is inevitably going to cost lives.

Garland deliberately tips his hat to the decision to name Lee: a reference to Lee Miller, war correspondent for British Vogue during the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. It’s one of the odd coincidences of pop cultural history that Ellen Kuras’ Lee, a biography of the photographer, came out last year: championed by Kate Winslet, who stars in the titular role, it’s fascinating to see how close the two performances are. We encounter Kirsten Dunst’s Lee at the height of her career, struggling with the images that are stuck in her mind (it must have been a deliberate decision to have the scene in the bathtub, considering what shot Lee Miller is most famous for). She doesn’t speak about the cost to Jessie: her teaching is about finding a shot, identifying what would make a good image, and how to stay as safe as possible so as not to be a burden to the others. In one of their first stops, the group ends up in a gas station, and Jessie follows one of the armed men to a car wash, where two “looters” have been strung up. Jessie is scared out of her mind, but Lee follows them and immediately assembles an image. While Lee photographs, the man asks them to decide what should happen to the captives: death or life. Neither of them makes a choice, and Jessie struggles with not having intervened, or saved a life (Sammy points out that the outcome would have likely been determined anyway). Worse, she couldn’t even bring herself to take a single photograph, a moment wasted. But she learns quickly. Lee imparts on her that their job isn’t to intervene, but to tell the story truthfully: and Jessie, eloquently, asks if Lee would capture Jessie’s death.

The entire film turns around that question: it shows the camaraderie of shared peril, the necessary light moments in-between necessary to mentally survive. Lee and Joel have been friends and partners for years, and they both care deeply for Sammy. And yet, their entire job depends on putting themselves in danger, and pointing a camera and witnessing death and atrocity, including when they become part of the story themselves. Holding a camera means not holding a gun, but to take the shot, Lee and Jessie can’t act, they can only document, which leads to a thorny question about culpability. The decision to pursue the story at all cost is juxtaposed with Jessie’s and Lee’s parents, who are living out the war on their respective farms, “pretending this isn’t happening”, which is as close to a moral judgement of specific actions either of these characters get (looking away from atrocity deliberately). The choice that Garland makes here is interesting: the longer Lee travels with Jessie, the less she follows her own paradigm. When Jessie and another journalist they meet on the road are kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’ group of soldiers, Lee watches them through the lens of her camera. She sees as they kneel down, as the moment of execution approaches. By her own rules, she should stay where she is and take the shot, but instead she decides to intervene and attempt a rescue (Jessie survives, the Hong Kong-born journalist is shot). They narrowly escape, but Sammy is fatally shot during the heroic rescue, and Lee from that moment on seems incapable to continue as she was before. She deletes the final shot of her friend. She photographs less and less, just as Jessie gets more and more confident and reckless. Whatever cold-bloodedness is inherently required to do the work has become inaccessible to Lee: she is no longer unaffected, and she has taught Jessie all she could teach. 

The film culminates in the final battle to reach the White House. Lee, Jessie and Joel follow as the troops press forward under heavy fire, and enter along with them. Jessie is at the peak of her recklessness, disregarding considerations of safety to get her shots. Lee ends up saving her life, putting herself in the line of fire, and dying: Jessie is the one who photographs her, and it’s not even a death that the film affords them any time to contemplate. Lee is now just one of the many bodies on the floor, and the group moves forward to the ultimate goal, the last moments of the President of the United States.
This decision not to ponder Jessie here, or to show in any way if and how this death affects her, is so effective – it’s the logical outcome of everything that has come before, but also opens up questions that the film deliberately doesn’t attempt to answer. What has Jessie lost in the transformation from someone horrified at her own indecision to save a life to someone who can unflinchingly point a camera at a dying friend? What has Lee gained, in changing so radically in the process of caring for Jessie, even though she dies in the end? In the final moments, Joel gets his quote – the dying words from the President, where he asks for help, words recorded for posterity but ultimately of no consequence, as they appeal to someone who is only there to create a record. Jessie gets the money shot, and completes her transformation to become who she idolised.

2024, directed by Alex Garland, starring Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nelson Lee, Nick Offerman.

Horror Wednesday: Les chambres rouges

In Alfred Tennyson’s 19th century lyrical ballad “The Lady of Shalott”, Elaine of Astolat lives in a tower near the legendary castle and court of King Arthur. Cursed, she must weave on her loom but can never look directly at the world outside her window, instead watching people passing on the busy road to Camelot through reflected images in a mirror. “Half-sick of shadows”, she sees Sir Lancelot, her mirror cracks, she escapes her tower, finds a boat and floats down the river towards Camelot, but dies before her arrival.
Kelly-Anne (played by an arresting Juliette Gariépy, the entire venture of the film depending on not being able to look away from her), uses Lady of Shalott as her username on the dark web. Her screen background is John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of the lady, lying dead or dying on the boat, the painting saturated with gloomy ochre-greenish colours that give everything a sickly pallor. Her AI assistant is named Guenièvre, after another character of Arthurian legend, wife of Arthur and lover of Lancelot. Guenièvre has been reprogrammed from her factory settings, improved from the flaws imparted in an entity that has been raised on the digital wastelands of online forums, and is, for the first part of the film, the only voice that Kelly-Anne deliberately communicates with. In her sparse apartment, with light emitting primarily from her double-screen, it isn’t difficult to see the parallels to Tennyson’s heroine. The mirror through which life is reflected is her screen, and with the exception of the photo shoots she attends (where in turn, she is captured to be mirrored on a screen herself), her entire social life unfolds there.
The exception is the trial. We begin the film following Kelly-Anne into the courtroom, disoriented because there are no markers as to what is unfolding. She has spent the night sleeping on the street, but doesn’t look like she does so frequently. She is clothed in an almost Gibson-esque – Cayce Pollard Units outfit, broken up only by a small cross. As she takes her seat on the spectator benches and watches a man emerge to sit in an isolated glass chamber, her face remains inscrutable. The prosecutor gives a harrowing introduction to the trial, outlining how the man in the dock is accused of torturing, raping and killing three teenagers and livestreaming the horror to paying customers on the dark web (it's an update to the conclusion of Olivier Assayas' Demonlover, perfected through technology). Her introductory remarks are emotional, preparing viewers along with the jury for the abominable details that will follow as the trial continues over two months. She has seen two of the videos, been made witness to unmitigated violence that is impossible to keep away from her dreams – and it is now her job to inflict upon those tasked with delivering a verdict in court what she has gone through.

Plante is preoccupied with the question of seeing and witnessing violence: there is the prosecutors outraged description of how it has changed her, there are the anonymous viewers of the red rooms who have paid for being able to access the material, there are the reactions in the court room, witnessed through the doors by Kelly-Anne and Clementine (Laurie Babin), who have been sent outside as spectators but hear the screams through the closed doors, see the mother of one of the victims leaving in horror, and finally watch the medics arrive for someone who has collapsed from the violence of the images. There is an obligation to witness for the jury, to comprehend the crime and follow along with evidence given that identifies the masked man in the videos by his eyes and stance as the accused Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). There is something else, not an obligation but a compulsion, in Kelly-Anne for having traced the videos on the dark web and watched them herself, a revelation that changes the course of the film.
Kelly-Anne’s inscrutability is juxtaposed with Clementine’s openness about her motivation for following the trial. She is convinced that Chevalier is innocent, not based on any evidence that she has of his character, but because she has projected innocence on him, and no amount of factual evidence can change her mind. She insists that everything the prosecution presents is fake – that the videos are photoshopped, that the identification of Chevalier under the mask is a lie, that the whole trial is a conspiracy against an innocent man. She has never spoken to him, and has no pre-existing relationship: she is a true crime groupie, but not in the sense of emotionally connecting with who she knows is a killer. Instead, she has constructed a fantasy in which whatever is presented in court is incapable of proving Chevalier’s guilt.
Clementine also assumes, as she begins trailing Kelly-Anne and essentially forcing a connection through persistence, that Kelly-Anne attends the trial for the same reason, an assumption that Kelly-Anne never confirms or denies. She gives nothing away, but her embrace of Clementine comes as a surprise: it feels tender, somehow, for a character who is so essentially isolated to make these attempts at friendship, to break out of the routine we have seen her follow: work-outs, online poker, an appointment to be photographed, using her AI assistant to respond to emails. Clementine is invited to sleep over, to share a pizza, is gifted a racket to play squash, where Kelly-Anne, instead of ridiculing her inaptness, insists on coaching her to some success. Kelly-Anne explains that she makes her money from online poker tournaments, and it’s the first time that she seems to give something away of herself. She targets emotional players and takes them for all they have, exploiting their weakness. Clementine, half-jokingly, calls her evil for it, but it’s as close to a hint at what is going on as we’ll get. 

As a film that is so concerned about the consequences of bearing witness to violence through a screen, the turning point of the story, the moment where it gathers momentum, comes after Clementine realises that Kelly-Anne has access to the torture videos. Remember that Clementine has insisted that these videos are not real, are part of the conspiracy to convict an innocent man, or that if they are real, they do not show what the prosecutor is insisting they do. She wants to bear witness herself, and I think that Kelly-Anne is torn between knowing that Clementine will not be able to bear it, and wanting someone else to share the experience of watching them with her, even though it is clear from their entire interaction that they are very different people. They go back to Kelly-Anne’s apartment, and watch the videos in front of her screens. Bathed in the red light from the videos, their reactions unfold in contrast. Plante makes the decision to stay on their faces – again, the only thing breaking through to the viewers are the horrible sounds of the torture. The point here is not to titillate the viewer with the gore that has been described in detail by the prosecutor, but to show the effect that it has on the characters. In an earlier courtroom scene, the director documents the effects of seeing the artifacts of violence when the prosecutor creates a trilogy of images for the mother of one of the victims: it starts with a school picture, the details of the girl’s uniform, then turns to pictures of just the uniform as discovered by the forensic team, covered in blood, and then, in a glimpse that disappears almost immediately but still has the searing quality of something that cannot be unseen, a decomposing jaw. In showing this image to the mother, even if just for a moment, the prosecutor wants not only to make a point about identification (the retainer that her daughter was wearing), but to elicit an emotional response from her, and in turn from the jury, seeing her reaction. Not dissimilarly, Kelly-Anne watches the video and her reaction to it is detached, clinical, accustomed to violence or maybe capable of seeing it from a distance because it unfurls on a screen. She focuses on the kind of details that the investigators trying to identify the killer would have had to see: the eyes, the gait, the arms of the perpetrator. Meanwhile, next to her, Clementine cannot bear it. She closes her eyes, she cries. She is horrified, and essentially, incapable of insisting that the video is fake now that she has witnessed it, and incapable of insisting on her belief that Chevalier is innocent. The images have fundamentally changed her, and in seeing that Kelly-Anne remains the same, she leaves (the apartment, but ultimately also the narrative for the most part, except for a bit at the end where she attempts to explain herself in a talk show). The connection that the two women forged over an assumed similarity has been irreversibly severed, and Kelly-Anne is back to being alone with Guenièvre (who is changed by the experience of having encountered Clementine, and now tells jokes and has the vibes of having an unsettling amount of insight into Kelly-Anne).

There is another interesting parallel here to the story of The Lady of Shalott and her mirror. Kelly-Anne interacts with the world through her screen, but in her awareness of data security or lack of it – she hacks the emails of the mother of one of the victims to retrieve the code for a door lock, to be used later – she seems unreflected by the screens. She sees through them, but they do not see her, even when her image appears on fashion sites, where she is changed through make-up and outfits. The warning that a technical expert gives in the trial haunts her. He describes investigators as hackers who follow the trails of those committing crimes on the dark web, who are doomed to make mistakes eventually. Forewarned, Kelly-Anne’s project, which comes into view in the second part of the film, after Clementine’s departure, feels precarious and dangerous, as if in descending into the abyss and trying to buy the missing video file in an online auction, the abyss is looking back at her. She is asked to take a photograph of herself, and her image suddenly appears, ominously, seen through the video cameras of the lobby and the court house. Her inscrutability, her invisibility, is compromised through the same channels that she uses so expertly. That concept is interesting here because in a way, Kelly-Anne is morally compromised already by her ability to watch the video unflinchingly, to regard violence without having an emotional reaction to it. A mirror does not just reflect the outside world, but also the person looking into it.

Early on when they meet, Clementine tells Kelly-Anne that if she were younger and had blonde hair and blue eyes, she would be the exact kind of person the killer targets. As she is pursuing the third video, Kelly-Anne enters the courtroom in a wig, wearing a school uniform under her coat. In the courtroom, she puts in a retainer. The mother sees her, horrified, and she is removed, but the point of the exercise is to see Chevalier’s reaction – a man, who throughout the film shows little emotion, and gives nothing away. He leers at her. He waves, as she leaves. If there had been any doubt as to his culpability, it is now resolved.
Plante’s stated inspiration for this film was his fascination with women becoming serial killer groupies and becoming obsessed with true crime narratives, which predominantly document horrors that happen to women. It’s clear how Clementine fits into this narrative, but Kelly-Anne’s involvement is thornier. I’ve gone back and forth on what her motivation is: she ends up with the video, leaves it in the mother’s house like the worst gift that a cat could possibly give as a present, and forwards the elusive trail of bitcoin for the investigators, leading to Chevalier’s conviction. In the process, she annihilates herself in all the ways that she has existed before: her career as a model is over, she destroys her phone and personal assistant, she is absent, in the end, when the Montreal skyscape dissolves into the fuzziness of a lagging videostream. Was her goal to insert herself into the investigation itself, by extending her stance towards poker into this horrendous crime, trumping emotional players with calculation and focus? Did she apply her specific talents to prove that she could, conveniently filling all the gaps pointed out by the defendant’s lawyer, thereby proving his guilt without any reasonable doubt? Chevalier, the knight, has irrevocably changed her, has tempted her out of her tower, has cracked the mirror, and she is left drifting in the boat towards a place she may never reach alive – but maybe Plante doesn’t have to spell that out for us.


2023, directed by Pascal Plante, starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos.

Horror Wednesday: Cuckoo

 

 

Watching Cuckoo as someone who grew up one country away from the Bavarian Alpine village this film is set in (and used to holiday in places that look pretty similar to it), I wondered how widely known cuckoo facts are outside the borders of Europe, especially as the American members of the family don't seem to necessarily share its most distinctive feature. Someone who doesn't go into the film and just based on the title can take a solid guess at what kind of horror will unfold maybe has a different experience of the denouement. I don't know when I was taught this, but definitely by the time I was in primary school I knew that cuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests ("brood parasite" is the very effectively horrible actual term), and I think we were also communally told stories about adult birds then killing the competing baby birds of other species sharing that co-occupied the nest. If you were interested and fascinated by how the natural world sometimes comes up with nightmares that parallel those a gifted writer of horror may dream up, then this is definitely up there. German director Tilman Singer, who also wrote the script for this film, presumably had a similar schooling, and combines this bird trivia with a very topical (see also the double feature quality of The First Omen and Immaculate) anxiety about forced pregnancy and loss of bodily autonomy - the very contemporary way in which horror films digest reality post the Supreme Court's overruling of Roe v Wade. 

I the context of these two horrors - the natural and the political - it's especially interesting to think about how the idea of "conservation" works: it is after all what conservatism claims to be all about. Conservation is what the movie's most clear-cut villain is after: the comically German Herr König (played by Dan Stevens, who is having a great run in horror film villainy), who runs a resort hotel in the Alps, has dedicated his life to the preservation of a species that just happens to be a highly effective predator of humans, and needs them for reproduction. The cost of his conservation process is the destruction of some of the human guests in the resort, and it is a price he is all too willing to pay. Under his guidance, the entire village infrastructure has been fine-tuned to serve this purpose: the local police man is in his pay to tie up loose ends, the local hospital specifically outfitted for the medical procedures necessary to facilitate the process, and document the results (something about the idea of institutions being co-opted in this way to serve a single, ideological purpose that callously harms humans feels like a very specific German anxiety). 

Gretchen (played fantastically by Hunter Schafer) gets caught up in these machinations when her father (Marton Csokas, whose characters I disliked on sight because of the character he played in The Monkey's Mask many years ago, even though he is much more famous for Lord of the Rings), moves her and his disturbingly inappropriately young second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick, The Royal Hotel) along with their eight-year old daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) to a modern house near the resort. Luis and Beth are designing a new resort for Herr König, and they have been connected to him ever since spending their honey-moon there eight years ago. From the start, Gretchen is obviously an outsider in her father's new family: her step-mother is critical of her, her little sister doesn't speak (but seems eager for her presence), her father is aloof in a way reminiscent of other fathers who have made a new family and find the remnants of their old ones burdensome. Before things get weird in a more traditionally horror film way, Herr König is already a looming and disquieting presence, overly familiar, somehow always there even when it seems inappropriate, like his stake in this family is much higher than it should be if they were only acquaintances and business partners. Gretchen has a difficult time figuring out where the boundaries are: if this is just a weird Germanness she can't quite parse, or if something else is going on. The alienation of place translates perfectly into the resort hotel that Gretchen is soon tasked to work in: everything feels out of time, her use of a smartphone (mainly to listen to music and to leave messages to her mother that never receive a response...) in aesthetic conflict with the Eighties interiors and paper filing system. Tilman's deliberate use of architectural juxtaposition is particularly effective here: it serves to disorient and creates unease even before the monster makes its first appearance. 

 

Hunter Schafer's physicality is the driving force behind the film: arriving in an unfamiliar place that she doesn't want to be in, she spends most of her time under big headphones listening to playlists, hunching her shoulders whenever she encounters new people, retreating into herself. It makes her look vulnerable, but there is also a level of prickliness that makes it immediately obvious when a situation or person makes her feel uncomfortable (which happens frequently). As the story escalates, she accrues injuries that limit her ability to move - first it just a head-wound from being chased on her bike on the dark mountain roads (Herr König's insistence that the dark isn't safe that she again can't quite parse as either inappropriate over-protectiveness, attempts to limit her freedom of movement, or admittance that something much more weird is going on, is the first sign that this is not a good or normal place), then a broken arm from a car accident when an escape attempt fails, and finally, after the epic battle at the end, a complete physical collapse (it reminded me of Angelina Jolie in Salt, or Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde). Gretchen almost goes beyond being a classic horror movie final girl here and becomes, at time, a full-blown action hero, navigating her injuries and succeeding in spite of them. One of my favourite scenes is early on, when she encounters a new guest at the hotel reception and the prickly discomfort and stand-offishness turns into the charming and awkward stance of someone who is immediately and absolutely attracted to someone: Astrid Bergès-Frisbey's Ed offers a very short-lived, temporary reprieve, and an opportunity at escape that fails tragically (but it is the one connection that in the end opens the road to true liberation from all the horrors of the film, including that of her useless father). 

The emotional core of the film is Gretchen's relationship with Alma, whose muteness is explained once the pieces fit together: She is the product of Herr König's breeding programme, in which female guests are unknowingly turned into carriers for the species he is trying to conserve. Gretchen starts off not even recognising Alma as a sister, in a stubborn attempt to protest her father's abandonment of his former family, and the horrors of now having to live with them in a strange place. But among all the people that are meant to care for her, especially in light of what the film eventually reveals is the death of her mother (hence the unanswered messages), Alma turns out to be the only one attempting to reach out, to ease her suffering, even though she is only a child, and not quite human. Gretchen, the outsider, realises that this non-human family is the truest one she has, and decides to save Alma from both  Herr König and a discharged cop (Jan Bluthardt) with a personal stake's attempt to end the breeding programme. They escape this horrible fairy tale (Dan Stevens playing a flute to attract the monster like some even more twisted version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is an image that will stay with me for a while), and drive off into the night, far away from the Alps.

 

2024, directed by Tilman Singer, starring Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey.

Pamyo/Exhuma

2024 feels like an interesting year to think about Godzilla. The big scaly boy has been present for a few years now in the American Monsterverse series of films and TV shows, which, in spite of still sometimes capturing meaningful emotional moments (I’d say this is mostly true of Monarch – the recurring theme is absent or failing parents), mostly strips the cultural meaning and context from the story. This is most obvious in comparing the two most recent releases, Monsterverse’s Godzilla x Kong and the Japanese-made, Takashi Yamazaki-directed Godzilla Minus One: one of these films is about the post-WW2 devastation of the Japanese psyche, specifically about the shame of a kamikaze pilot who returns home, an oxymoron, a contradiction that he desperately struggles to live with, the other, in spite of having its moments (I could have maybe watched a whole dialogue-free film about Kong’s struggle to free his new-found people and his emotional connection to a deeply traumatised sulky teenage ape), seems mostly predicated on “wouldn’t it be cool if…” (Kong and Godzilla fought in front of and absolutely flattened the Great Pyramids, fights took place in zero gravity, etc.). These American films are an exercise in what happens when something culturally load-bearing like Godzilla (an ultimately unbeatable, unimaginably strong entity that wreaks havoc – the reality of the nuclear bomb, made into a giant, ancient lizard awakened by the atomic age), is removed from its context and thrown into a different one, with little grasp of inherent meaning (I think this is maybe why Kong, a character much easier to place and make sympathetic due to his simian similarity to humanity, has been more at the centre of these films lately). Godzilla Minus One is one of the best films to come out this year (or last year, originally), Godzilla x Kong is an entertaining but ultimately forgettable entry into a series of films that must, by virtue of 2024 franchise logic, continue for as long as there is any money to be made (to its credit, it still attracts great actors like Rebecca Hall, and young Kaylee Hottle once again gives a fantastic performance).

This is a very long-winded way to arrive at the idea of what cultural context means for a horror film, and how horror can meaningfully address historical trauma, while that meaning would inevitably get stripped away when removed from a context where it could be understood. The devastation in Godzilla Minus One does not begin with the attack of the monster, it’s the pre-existing condition of the firebombed Tokyo that pilot Koichi returns to after the end of the war. The population has already been defeated, and many of the returned soldiers live with both the shame of their loss and the realisation that they were never more than cannon fodder for empire. Familial ties are torn apart by death, and somehow, new connections and meaning have to be found in what is left, only to be again tested once Godzilla appears from the waves, like a personification of PTSD where trauma is ever-present.

The 2024 Korean horror film Pamyo (titled Exhuma in English) is a great example of film impossible to imagine removed from its cultural context. It is steeped in traumatic history and religious rites. The titular idea of exhumation – literal in the sense that the removal of a body from a burial site is at the centre of the film – carries through as a theme of exhuming history, and finding more than one kind of monster in the process. The film is separated into chapters that could also be said to correspond with the process of disinterring, as the true story is revealed the deeper the main characters dig. The story begins when shaman Hwarim (a truly great Kim Go-eun, rightfully lauded for the performance) and her assistant Bong Gil (Lee Do-hyun) are hired by a rich man to investigate a curse that has befallen the firstborn males of his family. While his newborn son is in a hospital in the US, suffering from an undiagnosed illness, Hwarim and Gil team up with seasoned geomancer Kim Sang Deok (Choi Min-sik, from Oldboy) and mortician Ko Yeung-Geun (Yoo Hae-jin) race against time to lift the curse. They trace it back to the grandfather, a collaborator with the Japanese occupiers (the family’s wealth is based on a century-old betrayal), who is buried in an unmarked plot behind a locked gate, in the mountains near the border to North Korea. Geomancer Sang Deok immediately realises that the promised fortuitous plot promised to the buried man by a monk named “Gisune” (the first hint of how history will play into this story – it’s not a Korean name) is anything but, and the team sets up to remove the body, with the intention to cremate it without ever opening the coffin. This first part of the story almost functions like a self-contained film, and features the most haunting and memorable scene: Hwarim performs a mesmerising ritual before the coffin is removed, a stunningly choreographed dance featuring knives, guts, ashes and pork. Lacking the cultural context of the beliefs represented in the film, I could only be deeply moved by the aesthetics of the ritual, the sheer feat of the actress moving through the steps, all of which adds up to one of the most affecting moments of film I’ve seen this year (the closest reference point for emotional impact of one scene is Mariko’s attempt to leave Osaka castle in Shōgun – also a choreographed performance steeped in deep cultural meaning). The coffin is eventually removed from the plot, but a witless assistant in the funeral home the coffin is taken to makes the error of opening it before it can be incinerated. A spirit escapes, and takes full revenge on the family that has doomed him, from his perspective, to this grave – hungry because no sacrifices of food have been made to him in the century he has been buried, he kills all firstborn men except the baby, which narrowly escapes when the team manages to finally burn the coffin, just in time.

This is only half of the film, and what follows goes deeper into history. The burial of the collaborator (this dates back to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945) is only the tip of the iceberg, and the geomancer feels compelled to dig deeper, feeling that there is more to uncover in this haunted place, when one of the men who have helped lift the coffin falls inexplicably ill. Deeper in the gravesite, the team discovers another, massive coffin, buried standing up, wrapped in barbed wire to either keep someone out or, more likely keep something in. The solution to this horrifying mystery that soon begins having a bodycount goes deeper into Korean history: the buried man is the beheaded body of the 16th century Japanese general who unsuccessfully tried to occupy Korea in a seven-year campaign just before the end of the Sengoku Period. His placement is part of an attempt to disrupt the Korean peninsula with the placement of metal rods at vital points (“The fox that bites the waist of the tiger”, separating North and South Korea) – although it takes the geomancer until the final moments of the film to realise that the General is carrying this rod in his body, in the form of a samurai sword. Without either knowledge of Korean and Japanese history and mythology, or the willingness to research them, many of the smaller details of the film would remain elusive for a Western audience, and yet they are exactly what makes the film so interesting and layered, and it wouldn’t be without the cultural specificity.

2024, directed by Jang Jae-hyun, starring Kim Go-eun, Choi Min-sik, Lee Do-hyun, Yoo Hae-jin.

Servant

While thinking about Servant’s fantastic three seasons, I’ve been considering the strangeness of how all three characters Lauren Ambrose has played regularly on television (save in Torchwood) are connected by a thread of grief and refusal to move on from trauma and loss. They are three very different people, and yet feel thematically linked. Six Feet Under's Claire Fisher, whom Ambrose embodied the longest, is growing up with the constant presence of grief and loss in her parents’ funeral home and she has just lost her father when we first meet her. One of the most well-known scenes of the show that even people who’ve never watched it may have encountered on social media is from the last episode, when Claire finally takes off to begin her own life in New York, and takes a final picture of her family. An apparition of Nate, her older brother who has passed away from brain cancer, tells her that she can’t take a picture of this – it’s already gone. As an artist, capturing moments is what Claire does to make sense of things, but the whole theme of Six Feet Under is impermanence – every episode begins with a death – and the famous ending that shows each of the characters final moment is an eloquent way to drive home the point that everyone dies, even if the show throughout its run allows dead characters to return as ghosts (or embodied memories – there’s nothing traditionally haunting about these apparitions) who comment on the lives of their loved ones long after they themselves have passed.
Last year, Lauren Ambrose was cast as adult Van Palmer (a character eerily apt at survival) in Yellowjackets, and the first time we encounter her is in a video store – a lovingly curated space, but also, in the present time, a time capsule of the past that directly references the time period a younger Van went through the trauma of the plane crash and survival in the wilderness back in the mid-90s. She rents out video cassette tapes, not DVDs, and this dedication to an obsolete technology means that she keeps having to explain to her younger customers how to use a VCR. On the surface, it’s a quirky (maybe even hipster) dedication to the past, but there are other signs that Van is very much arrested in time, as if preserved in amber, that her way of dealing with the past is circling it endlessly, in her cozy little shop, while her financial problems and addiction issues escalate and remain unaddressed. It feels like a realistic reaction to a period of time that was incredibly traumatic, and, in Yellowjackets’ second season, becomes more and more violent and incomprehensible.
I only began watching Servant after having seen Ambrose’s Van, and on the surface, the first thing that struck me about Dorothy Turner was how different she is from both Van and Claire Fisher, who would both likely loathe her. Dorothy grew up with privilege and money, and is very much a product of both: not in any way interested in counter culture, dedicated to outward signs of wealth, arrogant and dismissive towards Leanne, the “help” she’s hired to look after her son Jericho. She is a successful television journalist and eager to return to work, while her husband Sean (played by Toby Kebbell, who proves in Servant that For All Mankind criminally underused his talents) is an up-and-coming chef (the first season very much uses the same aesthetic approach to his cooking that Chef’s Table does, and very deliberately). They live in a gorgeously renovated Philadelphia town house. But as soon as the show kicks off, it immediately becomes obvious how of that surface is hiding underneath. There’s the big twist right at the beginning: Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) has been hired to look after Jericho, the Turner’s baby, but there is no baby, only a life-like doll that, as we soon find out, Dorothy very much believes is her actual baby, while everybody else plays along. It takes a while for Sean to explain to Leanne that this replacement doll has been suggested to help Dorothy deal with the loss of their actual child some time ago, after which she became catatonic, and the twist is that Leanne finds nothing strange about this at all: she plays along perfectly, treating the doll like a human child to an extent that seems to be freaking out Sean (and Dorothy’s brother Julian, who maybe goes through the greatest change as the series unfolds, but is an insufferable ass to start off with). Leanne, eighteen and from Wisconsin, also turns out to be much more than she seems: she appears to the Turners as sheltered, meek, deeply religious. But then, the doll is replaced with an actual baby.
It's interesting to think about Servant as a companion piece of sorts to The Leftovers, in which the cataclysmic loss affects almost everyone in the world, and creates a different reality of grief on a global scale. Jericho’s loss and magical reappearance in Servant, by contrast, plays out within the constraints of the Turner’s home and life, contained within the four walls like a chamber play. Sean and Julian cannot acknowledge that anything has changed, because to Dorothy, nothing has: where they have both suffered the trauma of losing Jericho, the months of painful pretense with the doll, and now the shock of finding an actual baby returned to the home, Dorothy has had a continuous experience without any breaks in it, and her loved ones have to continue the charade because they fear what would happen if she realised that her son has died. It’s a trap of their own making that limits their ability to act. Their suspicion, and the only rational explanation they can come up with, is that Leanne has somehow tricked them, either passing her own baby or a stranger’s off as Jericho. They begin investigating her background, and things get weirder and weirder the more they find.
One of my favourite things about Servant is its unpredictability, how much it embraces its own weirdness (in the interesting time constraint of thirty-minute episodes, a rarity for a drama/horror thriller). Toby and Julian, with the help of a private investigator, realise that Leanne was raised in a cult with weird beliefs, and the remnants of that cult soon begin infiltrating the Turner’s lives. Character, throughout the series, fluctuate in their perception and acceptance of what is happening – it takes a while for threads to really crystallize, which only really begins happening once Leanne begins developing and starts being surer of herself. Nell Tiger Free’s performance is incredible in this, especially as Leanne embraces what she perceives as her power, and battles down in a household that frequently treats her as unwelcome, insisting that they make a family together, because a loving family is what she has yearned for her whole life. Leanne is a fascinating character – an eighteen-year-old who was raised to believe that she had to serve, had little agency, who is growing into someone powerful and self-assured the more she situates herself in the Turner household. Her presence also begins to reveal how much of that household is a facade: she brings out the worst in Dorothy, who lashes out when she loses control. She lives in a part of the house that hasn’t been renovated, so following her means going to the creepy parts of the house that feel like its true nature, as if everything else is just paint covering up its history. The basement (containing the extensive and very expensive collection of wines that are frequently drunk) becomes an uncontrollable entity that keeps acting up, turning into a quagmire in spite of frequents attempts to fix it somehow. There are enough nooks and crevices in the house that the burnt corpse of someone who came after Leanne remains indefinitely hidden. It’s as if the house becomes an extension of Leanne, controlled by her own emotions – her anger creates damage, her desperation brings plagues of termites and moths (it’s like Leanne is haunting the house, but at the same time, grief is, and sometimes Dorothy). Eventually her power seems to extend beyond the house into the street, beyond the street into the whole city. The show presents a rational explanation for everything, as if all these strange events only appear connected through the eyes of its increasingly paranoid and bewildered protagonists, but the mystical, or religious interpretation stays just as valid: Leanne is whatever the viewer decides she is, either a scarily powerful entity that grows in power the more her identity is allowed to develop, the surer her footing becomes, or a delusional young woman deeply traumatised by the cult that raised her, desperate for connection and love that she feels she can only attain through deception and force. I’m ambivalent about the ending – I think Leanne would have deserved exactly what she yearned for – but in the end, Servant is a show about unresolved grief and what happens when grief remains unaddressed. Dorothy cannot move on, or continue existing, if she doesn’t eventually address the abyss that was created the day that she lost Jericho. The show takes a long time to reveal what really happened that day: Sean, frustrated by the limitations of his role as a father, decided to take a gig as a guest presenter in a cooking competition show in Los Angeles. Without his support, with a constantly crying baby in a sweltering city, Dorothy became overwhelmed. A desperate phone call to her brother remained unanswered (and he never really gets over that guilt, it drives his whole character). She forgot Jericho in the car, during a heatwave. It’s a gravity well, not unlike the one that exists in The Haunting of Bly Manor, a single act of desperation that changes everything around it. Servant’s animating force is that this doesn’t feel like something that has torn the family apart. Sean feels guilty for having left Dorothy, and he loves her deeply (a rare kind of love to find on television in straight married couples – it reminded me of the otherwise very different Santa Clarita Diet, where Van Palmer’s young alter ego Liv Hewson got their start). Julian, in spite of how insufferable he is throughout the first season, loves his sister, and knows that his inaction played a part in the loss. Both men forge connections with the new, mysterious baby, in spite of being fairly certain that he isn’t really Jericho. As much as Dorothy is the only character who, on the surface, has not suffered the loss because her brain has removed it from her memory, she feels substantially changed by it too, as if the labour of forgetting has forced a mask on her that keeps her ability to really connect, or show empathy, limited. There’s a moment in the final episode in which Dorothy, having finally remembered, has the first encounter with Leanne that feels true, where she feels like a whole person again, capable of the full range of emotions. It shows how outstanding Lauren Ambrose’s performance is in the series, having played Dorothy as so removed and distant throughout, that this connection now feels like the first real thing she has done in years, like Dorothy has finally become fully human again. Dorothy has to embrace her, and as easy as it would be to embrace what Leanne offers: a return to a normalcy where they are all back in the house, with Jericho in their midst to bind them together forever – she knows that she will be never be whole unless she begins addressing Jericho’s death. I still wish there had been a way for Leanne to survive, but then I guess the whole point was that Leanne presence is predicated on Jericho’s, who she was hired to care for. What a great, strange, ambitious show.

2019-2023, created by Tony Basgallop, starring Lauren Ambrose, Nell Tiger Free, Toby Kebbell, Rupert Grint, Tony Revolon, Bons McGiver.