Padraig
Reyolds, 2018, USA
Mary
(Vanessa Grasse) has just been released from a mental institution for setting
her serial killer boyfriend on fire – how’s that for baggage? She is barely
keeping it together as she tries to embark on a normal life and gets a job at a
remote all-night petrol station (you see, there’s
your problem…). Things are made harder by the fact that she has the stigma of
being called “The Watcher” due to the fact that her boyfriend The Rain Ripper
(cue old classic rain-themed popsong) used to force her to watch him kill. …But
she keeps seeing him right now: is she going crazy?
Despite
the fact that it’s a pretty crowded story, it’s more of a grab-bag of tropes
and red herrings to mask the fact that it’s your usual slender premise. There’s
nothing wrong with that but the twists don’t really resonate as much surprise as
they should and the whole premise of is
she imaging it? runs out of steam pretty quickly. It’s nowhere near as
tricksy and trippy as it should be. It also cheats in that the Rain Ripper
seems to be able to appear whenever and wherever. Too long and without a good
shave to sharpen itself up, ‘Open 24
Hours’ provides unremarkable genre diversion.
THE
FIELD GUIDE TO EVIL
Yannis
Veslemes, Ashim Ahluwalia, Can Evrenol, Severin Fiala, Vernika Franz, Katrin
Gebbe, Calvin Reeder, Agnieszka Smoczynska, Peter Strickland, 2018, USA- New
Zealand
There’s
always one FrightFest film that induces unintentional humour, but it’s not
usually the arty subtitled one. On paper, this looks like a winning premise:
eight tales from folklore and myth by a variety of international directors.
Fiala and Franz’s opening story, “Die Trud” has the quietude and pace that
speaks to the patience of European cinema: in a time ago, a couple of girls try
to conduct a love affair but only seem to summon the eponymous monster. It’s
promising and despite the vivid and troubling Trud itself, the story seems to
go nowhere – although I am willing to accept that perhaps this impression is
because I am unfamiliar with the legend. The man next to me just threw up his
hands in bafflement when it ended. But what is most interesting about this and
Katrin Gebbe’s “A Nocturnal Breath” is that the summoned monster is embraced by
the women for sexual freedom.
But
there was a little response of bafflement to most of the tales. As Kim Newmanwrites, “many of the episodes have an
unfinished, anecdote-like feel typical of often-told stories handed down with
contradictions and ellipses.” There was outright laughter at the
revelation of the melon-headed cannibal children (Calvin Reeder’s “The Melon
Heads”). That, and the references to “fucking up a goblin” in "What Ever Happened to Panagas the Pagan ?"
caused much laugbter. This Yannis Veslemes’ episode is so frantically edited
and dark that I gave up trying to understand what was going on (forgive me: I
am watching a lot of films here). Peter Strickland’s “The Cobbler’s Lot” perhaps
proved the most satisfactory, channelling his inner Guy Maddin to conjure the
ludicrous and nasty nature of his tale.
‘The
Field Guide to Evil’ is by the same team that produced ‘The ABCs of Death’, Ant Timpson and Tim League, and the idea that this could be
a similar series promises further improvements and gems, but for now this film
succeeds mostly on its bizarreness.
THE
DARK
Justin
P. Lange, Austria 2018
There’s
a pleasing patience and austerity to ‘The
Dark’ that, at first, implies that there’s going to be a concentration of
build-up to something perhaps unusual… the kind of tone and austerity that
served ‘Inheritance’ so well. There’s
even a slight playfulness at first and slyly delivered twists (Alex’s first
appearance made me jump). But then it settles down to something far more
recognisable, resembling one of those tween romance-horror about a
misunderstood special one overcoming their alienation through friendship. Yes,
I’m aware I’ve dampened its appeal as adult fodder, but there is much to like
about ‘The Dark’ and that tone,
although not especially leading to transcendent things, maintains a
level-headed detachment and elusiveness throughout. The slightly drained
palette helps.
Mina
is a flesh-eating ghoul, mythologised as the creature in the woods praying on
those unfortunate to stray into the trees. But then she accidentally discovers
a blind and abused boy in the back of a victim’s car and, finding herself
burdened with him, things start to change for her. For a start, Alex (Toby
Nichols) is a far more convincing representation of trauma than Mary in ‘Open 24 Hours’, exhibiting a crushed
soul and a little Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a physical performance where he always
seems to be trying to make himself smaller. Mina (Nadia Alexander) is a little
on the side of the bratty undead, a Goth girl fantasy about to save the nervy
needy boy. Nadia Alexander’s performance storms ahead through the film like a
teen strop, providing momentum that always seems a step ahead of the more
deliberate pace. She provides the dynamism without disturbed the measured tone.
The relationship of the kids doesn’t fall into unwarranted sentimentality and
there is a healthy streak of nastiness to keep it on the right side of the
tween horror I compared it to earlier. The pinnacle of such a tale is ‘Let the Right One In’, but ‘The Dark’ is a assured and spiky enough
to conjure a painful coming-of-age fantasy.
THE
GOLEM
Doran
& Yoav Paz, 2018, USA
The
Paz brothers produced one of the better found-footage films in ‘Jeruzalem’, a film that did right what ‘Cloverfield’ got wrong. For this reason,
I had much anticipated for their second feature, ‘The Golem’. It starts much like I imagined the film would continue,
with a huge Golem in the shadows. But this is the prologue and we then move
into the tale proper. In 17th Century Lithuania, Hanna is trying to
assert herself as a woman as their community is threatened by outsiders. She
uses Kabbalah magic to create a Golem from mud to protect them, even though she
is forbidden to do such a thing as a woman, which puts her in conflict with the
men and her husband. But the Golem she creates takes the form of her dead son,
responding to her desires and dormant anger, and this can only lead to tragedy.
This
isn’t a monster movie as you might anticipate, but something more concerned
with characters and the question of genders and defiance. It’s the monster as
an extension of the individual, an Id unleashed for both good and bad. In this,
it benefits immensely from the full-blooded performances of Hani Furstenberg as
Hanna and Ishai Golan as her husband who treat it like the serious drama of
relationships and community that it also is. It’s intriguing and shows that the
Paz’s are interested not only in Judaism but in the nature and origin of
monsters, not just in unleashing them (‘Jeruzalem’
had evidence of this too). Perhaps I wanted more head-crushing Golem
devastation, but this is a thoughtful, considered and well-rounded tale about
the uses and causes of monsters.
CLIMAX
Gasper
Noé, 2018, France
The
surprise was that Noé was there to introduce the
film. The opening question was from Alan Jones who declared how this film was
receiving the best reviews of Noé’s careers, that is was generally getting
great response, and then he asked, “So what went wrong?” Of course, Noé is
notorious, loathed and heralded for being controversial and although the
Twitter responses to ‘Climax’ have
mainly been positive, I have also seen reactions bemoaning that this is not a
horror film and should have not have closed the festival. All I know that I was
fully engrossed and captivated and that then when I actually thought of the
world around me, about two thirds into the film, I realised the women next to
me had walked out and I hadn’t noticed: I guess that is an example of two
differing responses.
It starts with the epilogue and end credits and then a series
of talking heads introducing the diverse bunch of dancers we are about to meet
in a practice hall surrounded by the harsh winter conditions outside. Then they
come together and dance in what might be one of the greatest dance scenes ever
filmed. And when the music starts, it never stops: this is a constantly sublime
dance soundtrack (a highlight being Aphex Twins’ ‘Windowlicker’, one of my all-time favourites).There is no flash
setting or context or props, just amazing moves and glides and contortions: Noé
uses a typically long take which allows the dancers to perform without edits
interrupting or creating false fluidity; and when the camera does move, it’s to
gently prod and probe the performances with flowing slides between them. Synchronicity
is not the whole game here, although they do that too, but it’s the
individualism of each dancer that is prioritised and celebrated. And I was
mesmerised from then on as the long takes deliver a real-time descent into
madness when someone spikes the booze.
Then the outrageousness takes a nasty turn. PeterBradshaw says, “It is as if Noé has somehow mulched up the quintessence of
dance, coke and porn together and squooshed it into his camera.” The acting of hysteria
is something I’m usually averse too (hysteria is often mistaken for poignancy
in film, which is why I can’t quite get along with Zulawski’s ‘Possession’), but this is about that. There is a long scene where
Selva (Sofia Boutella) puts her hands down her tights in a kind of onanistic
ecstasy and then, in the following moment, has this abruptly change to panic
when she thinks her hands trapped: it’s moment that plays out the ups and downs
of drug-induced moods that can change in a blink, and a convincing playing-out
of the high and lows of hysteria. We don’t get to connect with characters and
we know just enough about them to give their LSD nightmare some context. But
this is not a film for that: it’s just following them around as the barriers to
their civility, restraint and responsibility crumble. And the music keeps
pumping.
Descents
into madness and/or hell are standard in horror – and of course represented at
this festival - and in this way ‘Climax’
fits the horror mould: it’s not a fall into an orgy of gore and Bosch-like
terrors, but there’s nothing truly stretching the realms of plausibility. In
this way it’s all the more unsettling. It’s not a character piece, but the
various personalities come through enough to make it a tragedy that we start
out at a place of ensemble exuberance and, when the barriers are down, fall
into the realms of irresponsibility and debauchery. By the end, it falls into
the realms of an upside down camera with strobing editing which left me
wondering what the hell was going on and I gave up trying to decipher; it’s only
at this final hurdle that Noé lets
the camera interfere instead of observe. But otherwise, it’s formally engrossing
with its long takes and convincingly lays out its improvisations and decline
into cruelty in real time. But it’s true that from the evidence of the first half
of the film that Noé would do just
fine with a ensemble piece if he ever decided to step away from being a shockmeister.
Perhaps the camera is searching too hard to find the next outrage. It’s conclusion
that our civility is a tissue-thin construct is an old one, but this mixture of
dance and decadence is vibrant and compelling where hell is on the dancefloor.
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