Score: 4 / 5
Bryan Bertino's latest film surprises us yet again. And yet, while The Strangers and The Monster also featured dark and wicked things, primarily mental, both were manifested in the flesh. Home invasion and monster attacks are terrifying things on screen, but the way Bertino staged them (alone in the wilderness) and filmed them (earned scares with psychological depth) made them unique in the genre. Here, however, in his third major movie, he turns his attention to the horrors of the spirit. We never learn exactly what the dark and wicked malice is in this story, though hints abound, but we are keenly aware that it is nothing we could ever be prepared to handle.
The setting is a remote farm in Texas, and rarely has the state been filmed so coldly. A palpable chill exudes from cinematographer Tristan Nyby's images, and we know immediately that something is terribly wrong here. The family patriarch is dying, looked after though he is by his dutiful wife, and is filmed almost exclusively in close-ups, identifying his suffering as the locus of this movie's horror. We know, and so does his wife, that this will be his deathbed, despite his being hooked up to oxygen and the sudden arrival of their adult children, who have clearly been out of the picture for a long time.
Louise and Michael, after briefly reacquainting with each other, show up with almost unbearable-to-watch feelings of guilt and shame about having abandoned their family. It's heavy stuff, and would make for compelling drama if it weren't so tense with unspoken resentment and anxiety. Mother, which is her only identifier in the dialogue and credits, has been traumatized somehow; she's fixated on telling her children they should not have come, casts furtive glances at open air, and tries to calm her shell-shocked demeanor by singing (incorrectly) repeated lines from the hymn "What a Friend We Have in Jesus". Trials and temptations, indeed, Mother.
I made the very smart choice to watch this movie on a computer while wearing headphones, and I highly recommend that you do something similar. A bigger screen would have been more ideal, but the sensation of surround sound is key. The soundtrack has some music, but much of the score is made to sound like moaning winds and creaking wood, while many of the movie's sound effects (often also wind and creaks) feel like diegetic music. The way it moves around you feels immersive, and I can only imagine how harrowing this viewing experience would be in a cinema. This works in favor of the film, too, which forces us to admit by the halfway point that there are horrible things happening on this farm and within this family that exist outside of our sensory perception.
Tactile and auditory evidence notwithstanding, we're occasionally given access to the hallucinatory visions plaguing these characters, in addition to the herd of goats that are constantly on edge due to a shadowy being in their midst. But fear not, scaremongers! Or, rather, fear more, because unlike many psychological horror movies of late that embrace the unseen and uncanny, this movie packs more than a few genuine jump scares and gory shocks. In fact, the scare factor starts surprisingly early and doesn't let up, even as some of its more disturbing scenes are those that feel ripped from an arthouse response to The Exorcism of Emily Rose (one of my favorite genre movies that similarly works in the gap between flesh and spirit).
I don't think this movie will win any new fans of the genre, and even I occasionally had to shrug off my annoyance at characters who refuse to talk about what's happening to each other, even though their own sanity is clearly slipping and their lives are at stake. The beginning of the film sets up a slow-burner of diabolical proportions, and though the latter half spins through scare after scare like a scream park attraction, I couldn't help but wonder what the purpose behind the film could be. It hints briefly at parent-child relations, estranged sibling relations, and the psychological burden of learning to cope with death. In that way, it's not wholly unlike The Babadook, and you could view the supernatural horror as manifestations of the grief process or fear of losing your parent, but I'm not sure an extensive study of that would lead to much insight, psychologically or aesthetically.
Rather, I suspect that this film is mostly an exercise in unrelenting nihilism. A visiting priest and part-time visiting nurse indicate that the devil tormenting this family (I'm thinking lower-case here, because it doesn't really seem to be an incarnation of Satan) wants Father's soul, presumably due to his bitterness and grief over his children's abandonment of him. But the devil exhibits multiple times its ability to kill lots of other people around the family, which begs the question why he doesn't just kill Father. Maybe it's all about causing pain and fear in others before collecting the devil's due, something we've seen in Devil notably, or even in The Strangers, though that example is purely secular. Ultimately, the siblings, working through their own mental health, are indeed wrestling with their demons, but this time the demons come out on top. It's indeed a dark and wicked movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment