Sunday 17 October 2021

GRIMMFEST digital: 'Midnight', 'Faceless'. 'We're all going to the World's Fair', 'The Free Fall'. 'The 3rd Day'


Midnight

Writer & Director - Oh-Seung Kwon

Stars – Wi Ha-Joon, Park Hoon, Ki-joo Jin

2021, South Korea

 

A hearing-impaired daughter and mother get mixed up with a devious serial killer. Well, it should be profoundly deaf, because the sound design makes it clear they can’t hear a thing. This allows sound monitors of various kinds all over the place (they must have spent all their money on them?) which aren’t quite used inventively enough. However, the portrayal of Kyung Mi (Jun Ki-joo) is mostly sympathetic although her hearing impairment is, of course, just a conceit to rack up tension and misunderstanding. It’s no mistake that the killer’s ability to talk himself out of situations is the counterpoint to her desperation to be understood; he represents the constant threat of the verbose on her impairment. Wi Ha-Joon makes for a handsome and slick killer

 

It pummels along, but it relies on everyone being a super-runner and the fumbling and stupidity of police and a little convenience-contrivance to keep things going. And going. Perhaps it’s twenty minutes too long because all the way through, the balance swings towards suspense and then rolling your eyes or shouting at characters (you may do this from the first scene) and it’s a little tiresome come the last act (No! Don’t turn your back on the killer! etc). There is a little of the debate about citizens responsibility to one another, a fine melee in a police station and a fine solution to stop him talking his way out all the time.


Faceless

Director - Marcel Sarmiento

Writers - Ed Dougherty, Marcel Sarmiento, Freddie Villacci

2021, USA

Stars - Brendan Sexton III, Alex Essoe, Terry Serpico

 

A small time trouble-maker wakes up with someone's else's face and a case of amnesia: uncovering the mystery ensues. Shadowy alleys and bars and murkier medical experiments are all there. Sexton III puts in a vulnerable performance as he experiences existential angst and identity crises, trying to piece together what happened.

 

A film of face trauma and a plot that is both conspiracy and film noir convolution. Uncomfortable throughout for the constant face abuse, packed full of too many questions (Sarmiento says this himself, but one shouldn’t fault a little over-ambition) but ultimately satisfying for the body horror and plotting in a slightly confused and confusing noir manner.

 

 

 

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Writer & director - Jane Schoenbrun

2021, USA

Stars - Anna Cobb, Holly Anne Frink, Michael J Rogers

 

With another remarkable young performance from Anna Cobb, this is something like ‘Eighth Grade’ and ‘Wild Tigers I Have Known’ for horror girls. Friendless video teen Casey (Cobb) plays The World’s Fair, an internet horror game that is meant to possess you. The vibe is American slacker suburbia - but more shoegaze ‘Wild Tigers’ than the metal of ‘Gummo’ – with the protagonist creating her own world online, although she may be talking to no one. But then she is contacted by the dubious MJR, and afterwards she becomes increasingly unstable.

 

The pace is slow and immersive, utilising long takes and a modern teen’s ease with being on camera. Details like the colourful interior of Casey’s room are vivid and diegetic sound of rain on the roof and traffic passing becoming increasingly create unsettling ambience. It creates a convincing depiction of experience through online videos (expect your screen to buffer frequently) but, like ‘Eighth Grade’, it sides with the kids in that they know exactly how to navigate the artificial and performative world online. Empathetic and weirdly creepy as we seem to be watching a girl’s loneliness turn to mental instability, it maintains its elusiveness to the very end. A character study of teenage malaise and escapism.

 

 

The Free Fall

Director - Adam Stilwell

Writer - Kent Harper

Stars - Andrea Londo, Shawn Ashmore, Jane Badler

 

Slick but prosaic with obvious scares and gaslighting, starts all Gothic ‘Rebecca’ before a touch of ‘The Shining’ and ‘The Conjuring’ universe and ‘The Exorcist’. Possibly camp fun? It didn’t strike me the way Grimmfest’s synopsis did as “a chilling commentary on the seductiveness of Hollywood's dreams of dark romance.”

 


On the 3rd Day  -  Al Tercer Día

Director - Daniel de la Vega

Writers - Alberto Fasce, Gonzalo Ventura

2021, Argentina

Stars - Mariana Anghileri, Arturo Bonín, Diego Cremonesi

 

Like de la Vega’s previous ‘The White Coffin’, this too features a woman running around in the middle of something supernatural with a child’s life at stake. The influences and homages to Seventies films are evident (red and yellow raincoats, anyone?), but de la Vega makes the somewhat choppy pacing and nightmare logic of giallo into a pell-mell ride through tropes and mystery. There’s nothing you wouldn’t guess here, but de la Vega’s style always feels like it can’t stop to be obvious, always throwing into hints of something else that implies it could go off in any direction (the silhouette of a man wielding a crowbar in front of a house is straight out of a slasher, for example). This makes for a fun and artful ride through genre, heading for a classic last image before the credits. But there’s also more after the scrapbook credits.

 

Normally film stills in credits and post-credit codas aren’t something I like, but there is something “everything in!” about da la Vega’s style that I go even with this.

 



And the very entertaining 'Night Drive' also featured in Grimmfest today.

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