Hagazussa (2017)

directed by Lukas Fiegelfeld

Austria, Germany

102 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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It's taken me this long to watch Hagazussa because I thought it would be too good and I wouldn't be able to handle it. To date, this hasn't ever happened; it's just something I do a lot. Certain movies like this one, you do have to get into a mindset to be able to fully appreciate them, but that mindset is fully accessible to everyone at any time- don't be weird like me and put off movies because you don't think you're worthy of them.

Hagazussa is overwhelmingly dark and suffocating both in theme and atmosphere. This is the first and most noticeable thing about it. It's set in varying seasons in the Austrian alps circa the 15th century sometime. The film gets lumped into a lot of discussions involving witchcraft and paganism, and that's not wrong- it certainly does involve those themes, but in my opinion the overarching theme of this is not so much witchcraft being done in the traditional sense of spellcasting with intent, as in boiling up herbs or saying words or things like that, but a hexing that was done through the infliction of trauma. I don't want to make it sound like I think there's no supernatural events in this film, because I believe some or all of the characters were tapped into something otherworldly, but the crux of it is the idea that a trauma can be a form of hex in the way it follows its victim for all of her life.

In the first chapter of the film, we see how the main character Albrun lives as a very young girl with a mother who quite obviously has problems both mentally and physically and relies heavily on Albrun to take care of her. The following three chapters follow Albrun as an adult with a child of her own, and explore the lasting trauma of this brutal experience of being around someone at such a formative age who was supposed to be your caregiver but instead does bizarre things that a child can't understand. It is literally a curse on her, it leaves her scarred and unable to process emotions in a healthy way, which in turn causes her to replicate some of her mother's behavior because it's all she knows. I can't think of a more concrete definition of a curse than binding someone to a specific pattern of harmful, destructive behavior for the rest of their life. So in that respect, Albrun's mother is truly a witch.

The environment that she lives in also plays a role in all of this. Living alone, apart from the community, Albrun of course gets branded as a witch herself, especially since organized religion is beginning to spread through the isolated villages at this time. Albrun doesn't display the archetypical signs of being a witch, but in reproducing her mother's behavior she does become in some ways a witch herself- but witchcraft also continues to be done to her in the actions of her neighbors. I couldn't quite figure out what was supposed to be going on with the woman who took a liking to Albrun and her baby, but I think that might have been intentional; a lot about this movie is obtuse and hazy. It has one of the heaviest atmospheres I've ever seen in a film, it is absolutely black metal to the core and watching it made me feel like my breathing and heart rate were slowing down to match its glacial pace.

Again, I don't think there's a lack of magic in Hagazussa, but the dark forces at play aren't always of the metaphysical kind. Movies like this where the enigmas of our own brains and the potential for darkness in broken interpersonal relationships are shown as a type of physical force bordering on the supernatural are a fascinating solution to the years and years when "but actually she was just mentally ill" was an acceptable surprise ending for horror films (and it still is, unfortunately). Things like this don't minimize or negate the experience of trauma but instead create a new language for expressing it. I could watch Hagazussa again and again and I don't think I'd ever get tired of it.

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

directed by Oz Perkins
Canada, Ireland, South Africa, USA
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Lately I've been trying to watch movies that I wanted to see in theaters before it became unsafe to do so. The downside of this is that I'm forced to watch them on the reduced medium of an iPad screen- I'm not a purist, I just enjoy seeing movies on as big a screen as possible- but the upside is that I get to watch really good movies.

The concept of a dark and gritty fairytale reboot has always seemed kind of absurd and awkward to me- aren't they dark and gritty enough? Especially the one that's, y'know, about children being kidnapped and baked in an oven? But if anybody is going to make me ignore the scores of cheesy low-rent fairytale reboots and create something convincingly unsettling, it's going to be Oz Perkins and his brand of slow-burn horror, relishing in the shadows that fill dimly-lit corners and the darkness that settles over the forest at night. Something that didn't work for me at first, but then clicked at some point that I didn't even notice, is the way this is set in such an ambiguous time period: no attempt to be accurate to any specific time or place is made, everybody sort of has a different accent and wears different clothing, and the dialogue has people simply talking like it's the Olden Days. I found this grating initially but then it settled into the pattern that every fairy tale settles into: once upon a time. Gretel & Hansel doesn't try to trace its origins to anywhere in particular, it instead adopts the look and feel of a general conception of Before Now. It's vaguely Irish, vaguely Scandinavian. It doesn't matter. It exists in the mode known only in fairytales where their origins have become so blurred and fragmented that all we know is they've been told for a very long time.

This ambiguity allows for great freedom in design and set dressing. The greatest example of this is the deeply sinister architecture of the old woman's house, which isn't made of candy but instead is a dark, incredibly foreboding and mostly triangular structure hidden deep in the woods that always seems to have a sinister, greasy fire burning inside it. Like I said, everything is candle-lit and only very dimly. The sparseness of the rooms and lack of any comforting touches means that the whole film has an atmosphere of holding no safe place to turn. Even the feast on the table feels malevolent in the absence of any light or cheer to go with it.

Most of this movie is good, but I have to mention that there are parts that are... really quite bad, and I don't know if they take away from the movie as a whole so much as turn it into something that's harder to define. The scenes that take place underneath the old woman's house literally look like graphics from the first Silent Hill game. I don't know if the sort of low-poly, whitewashed, blocky aesthetic was a deliberate choice or if something was genuinely wrong with the CGI budget for this film, but it doesn't really work with everything else, except where it kind of... does? As a dream sequence, it's unnerving because it's so real, it looks like the kind of space that doesn't belong anywhere except in a dream. But it's jarring as an add-on to the house in the film, with its enormously tall white brick walls and long curtains contrasting severely against the dark wood of the house itself.

I think Gretel & Hansel is something that goes for aesthetic first and everything else second, but I'm not complaining about that because it's served Oz Perkins well thus far. Absolutely don't go into this expecting something stark and grimly historical like The VVitch. You'll enjoy this if you've ever listened to witch house. It's a good film but really doesn't feel like the type of thing that should have gotten a wide theatrical release.

Pontypool (2008)

directed by Bruce McDonald
Canada
96 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I nabbed a copy of the soundtrack to this on cassette recently, and while the soundtrack is not the best thing about the film (which is saying something, since the soundtrack is excellent), it did make me want to re-watch and properly review one of my favorite movies of all time.

Pontypool is one of my favorite movies because of the fact that there truly is nothing else out there exactly like it. I think this owes a lot to Bruce McDonald not typically being a horror director and therefore maybe being a little gutsier than dyed-in-the-wool horror folks might be. And though it did take off in indie circles and became a relatively well-known film, Pontypool still retains themes and pacing that would be a turn-off to the crowd who are used to believing a horror movie has to look/feel/sound a certain way. The horror in this film is twofold: Most importantly, it's psychological, a purely cerebral and primal fear of the unknown mixed with the fear of your fellow humans- probably two of the most potent and lasting fears humanity holds. The central theme of Pontypool is a virus that infects not through the passage of germs from person to person, but through some bizarre event that causes comprehension of the English language to become a vector leading to total destruction of thought. We don't directly see most of the action, instead hearing about it through reports from outside the studio the three main characters are trapped inside as it ramps up and turns from an odd, drunken novelty to something unfathomable.

The second aspect of the horror of this film is the traditional horror that it largely divorces itself from, and that's just another part of why I like it so much- that there are the proto-typical zombies banging at the door, the cheesy blood-puke scene, the physical hallmarks of a Scary Movie™ that McDonald so expertly marries to subtler elements of experimental horror. This film feels much more like a really good radio play than a movie, but in the end it is what it advertises itself as, which is a movie about radio- not easy to pull off without getting deeply boring. Even the things we do see are just a very, very small slice of what we hear about, however; even the crowd of zombies that mobs the studio is nothing in comparison to the horrors we hear from the poor weatherman, and the mounting sounds of bombs being dropped outside followed by a ghostly, ominous silence allow our imaginations to run wild.

There really is something about the concept of destructive language- not even really the language itself but the comprehension of language- that strikes me in a place nothing else does. There's that concept and then there's the way it plays out in its victims as shown in this film, two aspects combining to create something far, far more terrifying than the combo of a normal zombie virus that works on the flesh and the sight of flesh it has already worked on. One has to wonder if part of this concept of viral language is a response to the parasitism of English; it seems to be the only language affected, the French-Canadians are doing just fine. But this film is so effective that you sometimes don't even notice you're being subjected to a philosophical horror as opposed to a physical one. The tension is so high at all times that you hardly have time to think about what's happening and why it's happening.

I first watched this before I had seen any other Bruce McDonald films, and now that he's become one of my favorite directors, I understand a lot about this that escaped me before. A lot of people dislike the post-credits scene and deride it for not making any sense, but those thirty seconds or so of footage are basically what all of McDonald's films are like, and the preceding 95 minutes were really the outlier here. When I look up this film on imdb a page comes up for a sequel still in development, directed by Bruce McDonald as well- if I could zap the coronavirus into oblivion just so production could continue smoothly on that sequel, I would do so.

Go Down Death (2013)

directed by Aaron Schimberg
USA
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Go Down Death purportedly owes its existence to the writings of folklorist Jonathan Mallory Sinus, who does not actually exist outside of this film. Nevertheless, the film presents itself as if the audience is supposed to be familiar with Sinus' work and doesn't give us any information about the man or what he wrote. If this had been an actual film based off of the work of a folklorist, it would be one of the best I've seen because of the total lack of an authorial presence- we can infer nothing about the way Sinus wrote about this town, we only see the town itself. I had the thought during this film that it's sort of like if someone were to make a movie not about Jack and the Beanstalk, but about what Jack and the Beanstalk is about: the world that it takes place in, not the tale itself but the kind of place where giants roam the clouds and beans can grow stalks up to the sky in an instant.

I doubt much of that made sense, but neither does Go Down Death. Not even in the slightest. Nothing anybody does in this film resembles anything like normal human behavior. If Sinus wrote about this town he surely was either out of his mind or was writing about a town full of people who have lost all semblance of humanity. There's humor to this film, but there also is that lack of humanity that makes it, to me, a bit eerie- you can't sit and watch people say and do bizarre things for an hour and a half without feeling alienated after a while. It never gets truly frightening in the classic horror movie sense, but certain things give it an element of foreboding similar to moments in David Lynch's or (to make a comparison I've seen often) Guy Maddin's filmography.

I'm intrigued by the reasoning behind the decision to set Go Down Death in a kind of ambiguously Old West setting, because it seems to serve no real purpose and nobody makes any significant effort to seem period-appropriate outside of wearing the requisite clothing and not using new technology. Nothing about the plot ties it to the era it's supposed to be set in but somehow I can't imagine it being anywhere else. Setting it in an unspecified time somewhere between the mid-1800s and early 1900s puts the events of the film at an even further remove, allowing it to not feel quite as pretentious as it would have if taking place now- everyone who watches experimental cinema has endured a couple of unbearably artsy black-and-white student films where people try very hard and very conspicuously to be dada. Being in the past gives the film unfamiliarity, because nobody alive now can relate to the time period it's set during. Which is why I really could have done without the dinner scene at the end; it's exactly the kind of self-serving pretentiousness that I thought this was better than.

All in all I can't really tell if this movie is good or bad, I just know that it's... something. The format of vignettes only connected tangentially by way of (probably?) taking place in the same town doesn't allow you to get too involved in the life of any singular character, and the fact that everyone is saying nonsense totally eliminates any ability to relate to anyone you may have had left. There's not really anything to "get". It just is.

A Record of Sweet Murder (2014)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Japan, South Korea
86 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I tried to watch this a few months ago, but it was only a day or so after I'd moved house. I was absolutely exhausted and I couldn't make it through more than the first 20 minutes. But I wanted to give it another try with fresh eyes, because I'm such a fan of Kôji Shiraishi that I couldn't let time pass without having seen this film.

So my low rating of it is because, even though I did think this was good (at least I think I did?), Shiraishi goes to some... places. I'm not going to go into detail here because it's pretty lewd. It's not just the violence- ironically I didn't have as much of an issue with that, because it felt more like a stylistic choice and was in keeping with how (sometimes brutally) real the whole film was; it's just that there are some sexual elements that were entirely unneeded and didn't add anything at all to the film except to make me hate it a little. Which was disappointing. Something that surprised me, though, is that there's almost no blood in this despite how extremely violent it gets. I was glad at least that while this is a little too edgy for my personal tastes, it doesn't turn into an all-out splatter flick. Interesting, too, to have everybody threaten each other with big knives and baseball bats- if a single person in this had a gun the film would last like five minutes.

But aside from that, this is basically an amalgam of everything Shiraishi is about and I'm super into it. A lot of his previous work incorporates a reclusive eccentric-type character trying desperately to convince other people his weird ravings are true, and this time that guy is pretty much the main character. Also as before, Kôji Shiraishi plays himself behind the camera, and seems to actually be the same character he plays in Occult and other previous films of his- he makes reference to "filming some supernatural events in Japan", which seems like a clear nod to his other movies, assuming he didn't canonically get blown into another dimension at the end of Occult like I thought he did. A Record Of Sweet Murder is pure found-footage, shot in one take or made to very convincingly look that way, and even though it seems like it's taking a non-supernatural route, which would be a departure from Kôji Shiraishi's typical subject matter, it has a... complicated ending that I will now spoil recklessly, so stop here if you haven't seen this and don't want to have it spoiled for you.

Oh my god, that ending. I was feeling burnt out, disappointed, upset by what I'd just seen, my confidence in one of my favorite directors was shaken, and then the end of this film kicked me in the chest. What a pure distillation of everything Kôji Shiraishi tends to incorporate into his best films. There is a dimension separate from the one we inhabit and it is filled with creatures who watch and manipulate us. God is an unknowable, incomprehensible entity. Humans can, through immense and physically painful effort, at least glimpse some tiny sliver of this dimension. If Shiraishi ever directed a movie in which he just explains to us the idea behind these creatures who show up so often in his films, I would be all over it. This is one of the best endings I've ever seen for a film that otherwise would have left me kind of not feeling it.

Wolf (2019)

directed by Stuart Brennan
UK
85 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is a film set in around 150 AD that follows a small group of Roman soldiers along Hadrian's Wall searching for a lost compatriot while being stalked by werewolves (or the ancient Roman analogue to werewolves). This is essentially everything I want in a movie, and glancing at the director's filmography, it seems he really has a thing for werewolves, zombies, and this particular time period, which could get tedious were it not for the fact that, from watching Wolf, I get the feeling that he also understands the nuances of history better than many. I say this because Wolf has several women in the main cast both as soldiers and as scouts, one of whom is black- a huge thorn in the side of the startling amount of people who seem to think black people just didn't exist in Roman times.

So I went into this automatically giving it a lot of slack because I was so in love with its concept- this might be why I enjoyed it and why I'm so surprised to look at reviews now, next morning, and see people... really not being very positive about it, to say the least. The complaints are valid, and the more I thought about it while I was watching the film the more flaws I saw: the dialogue isn't great, not a whole lot really happens aside from some walking through creepy woods, and I'm pretty sure most of the costumes were made of tin cans, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I was satisfied with everything. At least the women don't have boob armor. It also depicts some pretty accurate use of shield formations which I am always happy to see. Form the orb indeed.

Its biggest flaw is probably that it has the most disappointing werewolves in all of cinematic history, but I think that these weren't meant to be werewolves in the sense that most people expect when they think of them- I partially blame the poster for building up expectations, as there is clearly an actual wolf in silhouette on it, and the monsters in the film take the form of crazed, half-naked men with fangs, nothing more. But to me, this was quite effective; it's not "hulk out and turn into a big muscly wolf on two legs" lycanthropy, it's a sickness that is, like I said, only analogous to werewolves. It's from a different time and place and only an offshoot of another, more familiar legend.

It really isn't that bad. I don't want to get all preachy about keeping an open mind when watching movies, but... keep an open mind when watching movies. Life is short and nobody is under any obligation to watch films they think are bad, just like with reading books, but also I think that it's a mistake to get too caught up in singular parts of a film (poor dialogue, lack of budget, etc) and let them overshadow the fact that it was made with care and presents an original idea that's worth thinking about.

The Platform (2019)

directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Spain
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I'm a little bit late to this particular party, but I've seen this movie become fairly popular even among people who don't normally watch genre films. Every so often this happens to a random movie on Netflix; something about it starts off this cycle of people taking to social media and going "omg did you watch [movie]???" and before long everybody and their sister is watching a weirdo film that otherwise only people specifically into weirdo films would see. This isn't me complaining, by the way- if a movie is good I want it to reach a wider audience, period, I'm not into gatekeeping.

The Platform is about an enormous underground(?) prison structure with an ill-defined number of levels, counted only in gossip and the nightmares of those who tell stories of being on what they believed was the lowest level, then going lower. Each room is identical, with a large hole in the floor through which a concrete slab covered in food passes from the highest floor down to the lowest. When the table starts out, the food is immaculate and high-class, but as it passes further and further, the food gets devoured, stepped on, spat on, and worse until, beyond about floor 51, basically nothing is left for the people down below. "But wait," you might say, "won't people literally just die at the lower levels if they have no food?" The prisoners are cycled between floors every month, so that everybody ostensibly has a fair chance at getting to a better floor, reflecting the refrain of capitalism: everybody has a fair shot at wealth and stability, asterisk, unless you're part of a toilet-paper-roll-length list of basically anybody who is not a rich, white man from a wealthy family.

This cycle of never staying on the same floor more than a month causes everybody in the prison to hate each other, since they've all been in the position of having their food spoiled and picked over as well as being the ones doing the spoiling and picking over. This is also reflective of capitalism, specifically the way that it pits us against each other because it convinces us that the obstacle to reaching our goals of immense fortune is not the ivory-tower institutions or the select few who control the money we so desperately beg for a chunk of, but some random guy who "stole your job" or a hypothetical person who might be committing welfare fraud. At one point somebody ends up in the prison who works for the people who run it- she goes there on purpose out of a sort of vain mission to make sure everybody gets an equal amount of food, but she goes about this the wrong way because, even though she might genuinely want to help, her position of power renders her literally unable to see what life might be like for anybody below her.

I know all of this sounds heavy-handed and un-nuanced, but in practice it isn't. A movie like this really requires an extensive cast of people who don't necessarily stick around for the whole runtime to flesh it out, and that's where the nuance comes from. This feels like an actual location despite the fact that several things about it are unexplained; for one, the food platform literally just levitates, no attempt is ever made to justify this or write it into the script. The logistics of the place are obviously full of holes and it would be easy to simply write this whole thing off as a metaphor, and, like, yeah, maybe it is. It isn't subtle. But it's a metaphor that's so well-made that it feels much more engaging than a one-room talker where two people just banter back and forth about their situation: something this easily could have been. I would hope that at least some of the people who jumped on the bandwagon and watched this understand how true its message is.

Possessor (2020)

directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Canada
102 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This isn't a comfortable or familiar movie, but it is an immersive one. I feel like it needs a little explaining first if I'm to make any kind of sense talking about it here, and because the plot is not immediately obvious and the film just sort of expects you to learn as you go along. It is essentially about a woman working for a faceless organization who uses brain implants to enable their employees to share the minds of specific people and pilot their bodies to make them assassinate targets. It is so unique that I can't draw any comparisons to other films in specific but it does echo some things- I try not to involve artists' parents if they're also famous when I talk about their work because I want to judge everything on a case-by-case basis, but I do want to say briefly and once only that Brandon Cronenberg definitely has his father's eye for horror and that Possessor shares a certain vibe with Videodrome.

Okay, I said "once only", but I do want to expand upon how this reminds me of Videodrome because it gives me a good jumping-off point for talking about Possessor in general. Videodrome has this deep sense of moral decay; a story about the technology current to its era being not a tool for assisting our lives but a tool for overtaking it. Possessor has that same sense of decay and positions itself in a grey, lifeless, streamlined, alienating neoliberal hellscape where being employed necessarily means degrading yourself according to the whim of another. This is highlighted not only in the subplot where the man who the main character ends up controlling works in a creepy, Orwellian data farm but also in what the main character herself is doing. I'm trying to avoid drawing parallels that are too close to reality here because this is at its core a very surreal film with little recognizable as "real" about it, but I think there's something to be said about the way that the orders of some faceless- literally faceless, we don't know who orders these assassinations- entity or entities can use your job to control every aspect of your life and personal relationships.

The repeated use of the phrase "pull me out" (and the subsequent failure to be pulled out) to signal that the main character needs extraction from her host body made me feel like I was inside a bad dream myself. It pays off to have a good environment when you watch this film, somewhere where you can focus on it entirely, because it's not something you can half-watch; you'll miss the plot. And if you can get that feeling of being inside the film like being inside a dream, those "pull me out"s hit really weird- it's too familiar to anyone who has ever tried to wake up from a nightmare but couldn't.

Brandon Cronenberg's next feature-length film has been a long time coming and it's absolutely worth the wait. I think there's a lot of similarities to Antiviral here, namely in the theme of degrading yourself for a job to the point of losing who you are, as well as the theme of merging uncomfortably with another human being. I'll watch literally anything for Andrea Riseborough, who is fantastic in this, but her and Christopher Abbot share this film equally in my opinion. I'm not sure who it says more about that I was able to fully feel like I was watching the protagonist even when nobody was in the scene other than the guy she was controlling. This is a stylish nightmare of a film. Seeing "cinematography by Karim Hussein" makes everything about it make sense. I liked practically everything in this film even if some of it works better as an art piece than a coherent narrative.

The Lodge (2020)

directed by Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Canada/UK/USA
100 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I wanted to see this in the theater, but a certain virus had other plans. I did, however, see a trailer for it before the last movie I did see in a theater, and I knew right away that I'd like it. And while the film itself did not disappoint, I don't think the trailer quite captured the depth of how bleak The Lodge is.

I believe that this film is part of the wave of horror we're going to see in upcoming years that draws obvious influence from Hereditary. Both films involve a deeply broken and convoluted family dynamic, both films heavily incorporate dollhouses/miniatures as a motif, and both films have a cult at the heart of the supernatural(?) events that occur in them. Both films are also similar in how unflinchingly they depict personal tragedy to the point where it can be very uncomfortable to watch- Lia McHugh gives an absolutely stellar performance as Mia and her crying after the death of her mother definitely reminded me of Ari Aster's signature shots of people sobbing on the floor following the death of a family member. The Lodge differs from Hereditary in that place seems to be a more prominent aspect of it- one of two themes that, as far as I can determine what anything about this movie meant, were central to the general idea of the film.

From the start, the interiors that the characters are set against are somehow conspicuous in how perfectly designed they are. This is something that I tend to notice a lot in film that bothers me if I feel like it isn't intentional: it really draws me out of my immersion if I'm supposed to be relating to a character and their house looks like a model home with no personal touches. But in The Lodge, the high-end, 21st-century-Scandinavian style of interior design feels more like a prison. The last act of the main characters' mother before her suicide is to obsessively straighten already neat books on a table that looks like it belongs in a storefront rather than a person's home. I think a lot of the discomfort of this movie comes from the strain of keeping up appearances, of maintaining your personal life to an impossibly perfect standard in order to impress whatever force you think is watching. To some of the characters in this film, that force is God.

The second of the two themes which provide the backdrop for most of the anxiety in this film- and I say "most of" because this really has quite a wide array of reasons for being ominous and upsetting- is being stuck. I could trace almost every issue that comes up during The Lodge back to a feeling of being stuck. The characters are stuck with the stresses of keeping up a perfect life. The characters are literally stuck inside a lodge with storms and a lack of transport preventing their leaving. The stepmother is stuck in her cult, as much as she tried to believe she had left. All of the characters are, in some way, bound to one thing or another, or occasionally multiple things, saddled with their own anxiety surrounding the inability to live a free life under the constraints of an ideal image imposed on you by, again, any number of forces- God, father, cult leader, architectural sensibilities, yourself. In essence, this is a movie about being in purgatory.

I still can't say I fully understand what was going on here, if this was a story about being haunted by literal ghosts or the metaphorical ghosts of trauma. It gets so deep into dread-inducing imagery that after a point it no longer matters whether the events taking place were supernatural in a literal sense or not because it shows that what your brain can do to you is terrifying and unexplainable on its own. There's such a sense of hopelessness, of- again- being stuck. It hits too close to home for a whole lot of reasons. This feels like a look into what it feels like when you become overburdened by your past and it's more quietly unsettling than it is scary.