The Block Island Sound (2020)

directed by Kevin McManus, Michael McManus

USA

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've been really excited for this for a long time, it's just been sitting on my watchlist as I waited for it to be released and I had no idea that it would randomly appear on Netflix one day. Good for me. This is a niche within a niche, but I love to read about mysterious sounds. I think a lot of ghost stories get bogged down in description of what the ghost physically looks like, and stories about paranormal sounds get down to the root of what I feel like a good ghost story should be: Something intangible that imparts a feeling of horror by altering the atmosphere around you rather than by being frightening visually.

This in mind, I had a bit of a twofold misconception about this movie. I thought it would be something like the Taos Hum, a phenomenon that was specific to a locale and could be experienced by anybody, and because of that I wasn't expecting such a personal storyline. The Block Island Sound is about one man and his family who all become affected by a bizarre sound that is eventually revealed to be just one entry in a record of unexplained phenomena caused by the sound as it roves around the world's oceans. This is good, because if there hadn't been the personal/familial element it would have just been a two-bit horror movie. The family stuff isn't the most original in the world, but it saves this from being an unmemorable story with no hook to it. And for what it's worth, it's directed by two brothers who also cast their sister in a major role, so there is a slight real-life familial element to it.

I think this is one of those horror movies that takes a while to really show its hand as a horror movie. It's got an exceptionally good sense of place, set against the backdrop of a coastal town where the presence of the ocean is heavy and all characters know their way around a boat. I'm not sure if the island is fictional or not but it's set somewhere in the general area of Up North (U.S.-wise, that is) and there is a reference to Providence, RI that I refuse to believe is coincidental. For a while it's largely a daylight horror; even though a lot of the scary events take place at night while a character is "sleepwalking", the investigation of what's behind these episodes takes place during the day, so an important element of what's intended to be creepy goes on in daytime. This gave it kind of a weird tone- although those bright-but-grey Northern days are very moody, there's not a lot of actual ambiance to be felt here. It's unsettlingly realistic that way, because it doesn't feel like the environment was altered to tilt it in a direction that would make for a better horror movie; it just feels like everything that happens is happening plausibly, to real people, in a place that could be the next town over.

There is a scene in this about midway (no spoilers) that set the tone for the rest of the film and made me realize that even though it switched between fleeting, conventionally scary nighttime scenes and unassuming daytime ones, The Block Island Sound is serious about being creepy. The main character, already having hallucinations of his deceased father, is out for an angsty midnight drive when he sees a deer in front of his car on the road. After we see the deer, the movie cuts back to the inside of the car, where the protagonist's dead father is now in the passenger seat and is making this noise, a noise entirely devoid of humanity, that eventually we realize is meant to be the word "deer". He just repeats this over and over, this animalistic sound, like something that's never used language in its life. Deer. Deer. Deer. Deer. That scene was so unexpected and so terrifying that, after not having been too bothered by anything thus far, I got seriously freaked out.

At the heart of this movie is something really, really upsetting in a philosophical sense. Something about creatures that have designs on humanity that are familiar to us because of practices that we already do here on Earth, but that we never consider the implications of were they to be done to us. That's very vague, but it's about as much as I can say without spoiling the ending. I can't say that this was the movie I thought it would be while I was still anticipating it, before it came out, but I'm more than satisfied with what I got instead. This is a lastingly creepy and very original film, and it actually nails making the titular sound be genuinely haunting. I think it's a whale, but who knows? It's distorted and processed beyond being recognizable to my ears, and that auditory uncanny valley effect is why it was so good and disturbing.