Murder Me, Monster

 

Murder Me, Monster

Muere, monstruo, muere

Writer & Director ~ Alejandro Fadel

2018, Argentina-France-Chile

Stars ~ Víctor LópezEsteban BigliardiTania Casciani

A glorious oddity that is more aligned with (so-called) slow arthouse cinema than the exploitation or the fun monster movies promised by its title. It veers between awe-inspiring bright vistas of the Andes Mountains* but becomes increasingly nocturnal – those flares-in-the-night scenes are gorgeous. My initial impression was that this was like the ‘Once Upon a Time in Antonia’ of monster films. It is gruesome and ikky, but Fadel’s interest is in the machismo of such an isolated location rather than monster shocks. The true assets are Víctor López’s craggy face and quasi-elegant dancing, not to mention his troubling subservience to his melancholy but surely unstable Capitán (Jorge Pado). The feel is dirty and sad, of people going through the motions, a forgotten community. The sudden spate of headless corpses that appears in this remote town seems only to generate more melancholy, self-doubt and existential male confusion.The only considered suspect insists that a legendary monster is responsible.

 The English title is one that will automatically hook me, taken from the mantra in the narrative (is telepathy involved?). The original Spanish is 'Muere, monstruo, muere' meaning "Die, Monster, Die".

(And if you are intrigued, read no further for best to be on  tenterhooks about if the monster will appear or not. And don 't google.)

If the insistence on obliqueness may prove unsatisfying for some, for the mysteries will remain intact, the reveal of the outré, absurd and outrageous monster will be worth the patience for others. When it appears, all the moodiness and sexual disquiet and repression that has preceded is suddenly resolved with a WTF? This is revealed without breaking a sweat, with all the casualness and downbeat energy that has defined the film. Certainly, all its symbolism – and it’s a more overtly genital-based monster than Giger’s Alien but matches that of ‘The Strangeness’ – implies that some meaning has been achieved, but the monster’s mythological status and roots in the geometry of the landscape means its meaning is left vague. The film isn’t afraid to show this goofy-hideous monster in close-up, and it’s left as an Id of masculine depravity wandering the beautiful landscape unchallenged.

·     *   And if you want more of this, the accompanying short film (on Blu-ray) that exists within this world offers three helmeted figures arguing about “Freedom” amidst drone-electro and jaw-dropping landscapes.

Burning

Burning

Lee Chang-Dong, South Korea, 2018

Hangul: 버닝 – RR: Beoning 

Maintaining and leaving a thorough sense of ambiguity, when done correctly, can create the most haunting of fiction. For this reason, for example, Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ will always be a Rorschach test and it seems to me that no line of Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’ can be trusted; or maybe it’s just perhaps something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the early works of Nicolas Roeg. Lee Chang-Dong’s ‘Burning’ is all about ambiguity: for example, is there a cat/well/killer? 

Lee Jong-su (a rivetingly disarming Ah-in Yoo) is a loner looking for a story to write. But he mostly seems aimless and friendless. Also, his dad is on trial for violent behaviour, leaving the farm for his son to look after. Then one day he runs into an old a neighbour, Shin Hae-Mai (a charmingly shambolic Jong-seo Jun) … or is she? After all, he doesn’t recognise her as she says she had plastic surgery to now make her beautiful. Like everything else, there indeed seems to be some truth in there somewhere: she does seem to recognise the old neighbourhood, for example... 

She asks him to look after her cat when she’s away, which he never sees. Nevertheless, it’s obvious he’s becoming obsessed with her, so when Hae-Mi returns with rich-boy Ben (a mesmerisingly opaque Stephen Yeun), Jong-su is put out and even more repressed than before. Ben’s behaviour seems more and more like that of a sociopath, and Jong-su starts to suspect him of being a serial killer. Or maybe he’s just privileged and shallow?

Maybe Hae-Mi just disappears because the last thing that Jung-su said to her was staggeringly rude and she no longer wanted to play? Maybe the watch is in the drawer because she deliberately left it behind because she didn’t like it – maybe she dropped it? And maybe the thing about Ben and burning down greenhouses is just a pretension, a fancy? After all, there does seem to be some fabrication going on. And who can trust a cat's reactions? Everything is circumstantial, which means bewildered Jung-su’s escalation of assumptions and conclusions takes a more chilling and tragic turn. The more you try to pin down the film’s certainties, the more they tend to the subjective. It’s all in Hae-mi’s pantomiming: just believe it’s there. 

It’s the mystery that lingers, but as well as precisely staged, ‘Burning’ is beautifully filmed in slightly washed-out colours that verge on film noir, wallowing in slow reveals until it has fully planted its questions in you. Like everything else, the sound design and music also take time to show how meticulously placed and riveting it is. Based loosely on Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Barn Burning’, it’s as much based upon its lacunas and ellipses as what we see. There’s the gamut of issues of violence, class, repression, sexual longing and rivalry informing this troubled central love-triangle: big game is being caught here, even if motivation is often obscure. There’s the sense that the elusive centre is just within reach, calling from a distance like the propaganda blared across the border to the Lee farm. 

The three leads are exceptional, all playing a little abstract and yet thoroughly human. Yoo gets so much from silences beneath which sexual jealousies and class resentment is festering; Jun is the life and soul of the party, both bubbly and slippery and it’s easy to see why she would be the object of infatuation. Yeun is rivetingly all surface and slick, unknowable; saying so little but seemingly doing so – unlike Jung-su – out of arrogance and a superiority complex. ‘Burning’ is firmly anchored by these performances while taking its time distributing its clues and secrecies and pantomime. 

Is Jong-su looking for the truth or a story? But that’s a little disingenuous: he’s looking for both and the question is of how much the latter obscures the former. Then again, perhaps things are just what they seem. And we’ll never know because all we are left with are assumptions. And also a great film about how those assumptions and our need to impose narratives dictate our obsessions and behaviour. And class war, and sexual jealousy, etc...

Harlequin

Simon Wincer, 1980, Australia

Screenplay by Everett de Roche, a reliable genre writer, This hodgepodge oddity is one of those films that, as a kid, I could throw in with psychic power films and stuff like ‘The Medusa Touch’, ‘The Fury’, ‘Carrie’ or even ‘The Omen’ and 'The Gate', where anything seemed possible, where an unseen logic dictated strange occurrences. Where a stain on the floor turns into a face, for example. Like superheroes, such abilities appeal greatly to power fantasies and ‘Harlequin’ certainly appeals to a male fantasy of mysterious powers as well as those of martyrdom.

It’s a rendering of the Rasputin story where a mysterious stranger called Gregory Wolfe (how’s that for allusion?) ingratiates himself into the political Rast family by seemingly curing the terminally ill son. Wolfe’s ultimate plan is to show the ambitious politician Rast (David Hemmings – and don’t forget to spell “Rast” backwards) how he is being manipulated by devious superiors, but it’s not clear how he plans to do this by spending months talking and smirking cryptically, turning up in hilarious garb and bedding Rast’s trophy wife (Carmen Duncan).

Robert Powell as Gregory is just short of the full-on camp of ‘Rocky Horror’s Tim Curry, but it’s campness of the inadvertent kind: he spouts French for flirting, acts like a dick to the women, holds the child over cliff-edges for some lesson about the closeness of Death. Occasionally he indulges in parlour tricks, spangly eyebrows and – when exercising true magic which everyone seems to just accept as illusions – charmingly dodgy effects. It still appeals for being offbeat, a mishmash of political and horror-fantasy that makes it winningly offbeat and always intriguing. When potentially anything goes, there’s always anticipation for being surprised. But no, it doesn’t quite go full-on bonkers, although Powell does wear a Harlequin outfit (which he must have hired from the same place he got the clown outfit).

‘Harlequin’ turns up in discussions of the run of Ozploitation films of the 70s and 80s, a slick and offbeat inclusion. It smudges its Australian origins by importing British leads and dubbing characters in American, but Powell’s frosty charm and Hemming’s slightly hangdog blustering raise the bar even as Duncan is constantly throwing herself at Gregory’s feet. Richard Kuipers gives a good rundown of how this is “the most ‘internationalised’ of [Australian] genre pictures”, and notes that upon release,

“Australian critics and audiences may have been cool but the story overseas was very different. Harlequin won awards at the prestigious Sitges and Paris Fantasy Film Festivals, received theatrical release in the US and UK and was a sizeable hit in several Latin American territories.”

It’s datedness, its unintended campness and the fact that it’s determinedly unspecific on many details all add to its fascination. If it doesn’t quite make sense at the end, if there’s a sense that the audience has always been kept at a slight distance throughout by intention or lacuna, that all becomes part of the mystery.

* I also note that the recent 88 Films blu-ray release also features a epilogue where the corpse is found by boys fishing, which is different to how I saw it end originally and makes more sense of Wolfe’s actions.