The Feast (Gwyledd) (2021)

directed by Lee Haven Jones

UK

93 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

I'm always excited about new Welsh-language films, even more so when they're genre films. For that reason I have had The Feast on my watchlist for a long time without actually knowing much about it, and I think that's the best way to go into it. Because I ended up being so fond of it, though, I really want to talk about things that would spoil the plot, so I'd recommend not reading any further if you haven't watched the film yet. Suffice to say it's an extremely slow burner that isn't afraid to take all the time it needs to establish itself, and the way it goes about being a horror movie is admirable at a time when a lot of movies seem to be obsessed with constantly checking behind themselves to make sure the viewer is still following them.

I noticed right away that Annes Elwy's character, Cadi, was wet when we first saw her. I didn't know why, I just kind of filed it away as something that might be significant later. I equated it with the overall aesthetic of cleanliness that the first quarter of the film has - her having washed her hair right before she came to the house could have been another signifier of the need to maintain a perfect appearance that many of the characters have. But, while her hair being wet did turn out to be an enormously significant clue to who she was, I was wrong about the cleanliness aspect. I wanted to bring this tiny detail up anyway because it's just a taste of how meticulous The Feast is in building itself up using things that are so small you barely realize they're important.

Because I didn't know anything about the underlying story, for a while Elwy's character felt very alienating. There is a slow transition, at least for anyone unaware of the trajectory the film is headed on, from just watching someone do strange things to becoming aware that something bigger is going on, and during that transition the film requires some trust. I have seen movies where the end message is just that somebody is a freak; unkind films about an interloper whose behavior is visibly "abnormal" and who is cast as inherently untrustworthy for it up until a reveal where they turn out to inevitably be some murderer or something, because murderers are always maladjusted creeps according to the popular narrative, so that's where I thought this was going. Don't be like me; stick with this. Have faith that it's not trying to demonize anybody - nothing so simple as that. Elwy does a brilliant job portraying an almost entirely unreadable character, right up until and beyond when her true nature is revealed. I hesitate to even use the word "revealed", though, because it was being shown to us all along - from the second she shows up and is inexplicably wet.

The cinematography is nigh on flawless and perfectly suited to the kind of film this is and the kind of message it gets across. We spend a lot of time inside this house that could be a model home, with nothing out of place, perfectly color-coordinated and magazine-ready until Cadi comes and mismatches the glasses and leaves just a tiny bit of dirt here and there, just to remind the family where they are. Even though the set decoration looks Insta-worthy, I think that kind of fakeness and impossibly clean aestheticism was deliberately meant to look unsustainable rather than be a backdrop for the film that was incidental. It doesn't feel intended to compliment the look of the film so much as it serves as a point being made: Look at what these rich people do, look at how foreign to nature it is.

The other characters may not be as much of a central force to the narrative as Cadi is, but they make up important parts that complete it. Their individual roles are really interesting and I still don't know if I fully understand them. They each seem to end up with a fate that reflects something of the role they played in the environmental destruction that brought Cadi (or the thing wearing Cadi)'s wrath upon them, and the most striking of them all, I think, was the mother and wife's final scene. All throughout the film you get the sense that she's very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, very intent on being a certain kind of person and coming off a certain way, but - and I know tons of women like this in real life, it is something that society can force on a person - you also get the sense that some core part of her disagrees with it all. But she pushes it down, even though all the while she's aware of what she's responsible for and it tears her up inside. She builds a quiet spa room and goes in and does face masks. She nervously evangelizes the benefits of letting people onto your land to rip out the profitable parts and leave a lifeless slurry behind. And finally she admits what she's done, takes revenge on the hand that coerced her, and removes herself from the equation too, the only repentance she can see.

The Feast manages to tell a mythic story that does not feel at all out of place with the so-called "modern" world. There's a sense of, like, "nobody still believes that, how can you believe that?" Characters chide each other for having so much faith in old legends but everyone knows, whether they profess to believe or not, that it's true. A ruthless certainty pervades The Feast, as inevitable as the course of nature. Able to be delayed for a while, but it always comes back in the end. I'm a bit surprised to see so many people calling this "heavy-handed" because of its ecological-horror message - yes, it eventually becomes unambiguous, but it's such a slow burn that it almost feels like the film is trying to be as gradual with its message as it can. I would hope that there are not so many people who see any hint at an environmentalist agenda as heavy-handed; it is justified as there's a generation or two who grew up with after-school specials drilling vague and ultimately unhelpful personal responsibility for pollution into us, but films like The Feast aren't part of that trite preaching.

Station (1981)

directed by Yasuo Furuhata

Japan

132 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

Good lord. I will try to talk about this movie, but it's impossible for me to put into words the feeling of watching something at just the right time while in exactly the right mood and having it hit me somewhere deep and lasting. I typically mention that my reviews tend more towards me simply getting my thoughts about something out as opposed to looking critically at it, and I'm going to invoke that disclaimer again here, because something about Station had me hooked and I couldn't think about it with any particular angle while I was watching it, although I can do that more easily now after it's over.

There is not much plot to this, and what there is could be easily explained within a few sentences, maybe a short paragraph if we're being eloquent. It's not the type of thing that breaks boundaries in terms of the story it tells. But the tone of the film is what makes it resonate so hard. This movie has such a heavy feeling of loneliness and melancholy without resorting to much of the usual visual code for depicting these things. It's Ken Takakura in the lead role who does most of the work in portraying his character's burden of isolation, regret, and sorrow, and imparts those feelings onto the film as a whole. He shows little to no emotion for most of his time on screen, executing his duties as a policeman and as a member of society to the best of his ability, but the shape of those duties and his struggle to fit into it is what forms the core of Station itself. Despite not being outwardly expressive, we as viewers know what he's going through.

I think the major underlying theme of this film is a sense of duty, expectation, and shame. The first portion takes place in 1968 during the Olympics when they were hosted in Mexico, and there's a sense of national disappointment that Japan is not the host country, which is compounded when a runner representing Japan injures himself and subsequently commits suicide. His long goodbye letter is read aloud in full and it's brutal, hashing out his feelings of inadequacy, of his perceived failure to every person in his family. Towards the end of the film, the main character, as his crisis of self-doubt comes to a head, composes a resignation letter to the police department he worked for, and this letter is read out in full in a direct parallel to the suicide letter at the beginning. Although he remains living, the sense of sundering from what one is expected to do that he expresses in his resignation letter feels tantamount to a kind of suicide. Again, although this is never directly expressed, the character's feelings of not living up to what he's expected to do are a weight that builds through the whole film. It comes out once or twice in scenes where he gets into random fights; useless, unmotivated scraps that reveal the tip of the iceberg of his personal turmoil.

There's just a kind of "cut and run" mentality here: The self-imposed idea that if you feel you've screwed something up beyond fixing, or if you believe you're unworthy or unable to carry something out, you have no choice other than to abandon it and never look back. This comes up multiple times, from the opening scene where the main character leaves behind his wife and child to the entire second act which is him trying to put his past behind him and become someone else, someone he's comfortable being - but of course, it's not that easy to forget.

It is absolutely wild to me that this was made in 1981. It was doing my head in to look at some of the actors and think "If they're 40 here, they're in their 80s today". I hate that I'm saying this about a movie from the 80s, because it still feels like that was about twenty years ago at most, but this really goes to show that if a movie is good, it's good forever. The cinematography is so simple but it feels like so much - the deep snowdrifts dwarfing the human characters, the liminality of a bar with only two people in it late at night, people going about their daily business along the tracks that life has set them on. It's overwhelmingly real sometimes.

And the writing and acting are both such that the characters feel real as well - I don't feel like I have the best perspective on the strength of the script, because I only know a very tiny bit of Japanese and was watching this with subtitles, but I could still tell that every actor put in a near-perfect performance. Chieko Baisho, who plays the bar owner that the main character becomes involved with, somehow managed to capture the feeling of just... looking at somebody else, of seeing someone and talking to them and getting the sense that this is a person who has an entire inner life, who has songs that make them cry, who enjoys particular foods, who has lived and carries experiences with them that make them simultaneously more human but also completely alien, because no one can truly read another person. I know that this is all fictional, that the characters only exist as lines on a page, but the way they're brought to life and the way each person works to compliment and create the overall atmosphere of this film blew me away. You can impart a true and real message through a story that is fictional. Fiction is made up of broken pieces of reality.

I will stop talking about this now, because there's not much more I can say about how this made me feel. This is just one of those things that makes me feel the joy of film as art, storytelling as art. It's just... it just made me feel. If you can interact with and respond to a movie like this, if you can find something that really hits you, it's a very singular feeling. God, this was just so good. I apologize if I seem hyperbolic but it is important to me to be earnest about things that I like.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

directed by William Eubank

USA

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I don't know if this came out of nowhere as much as it seemed to me that it did, or if I was just not paying attention, but a new Paranormal Activity movie was not on my radar this year. Much less one directed by William Eubank, who has been on my "people who I'd throw money at to see make a pure horror movie" shortlist. I appreciate him as a director because although he doesn't have many films to his name thus far, each one of them is distinct from the others in terms of subject matter and general vibe. And now he's contributed an entry to one of the most popular horror franchise of the 2000s, although the screenplay was written by someone else.

The Paranormal Activity series is heading in a weird direction, I guess, and I definitely don't dislike it. I've seen nearly all of them so far and I can say with confidence that all but the first one are pretty terrible. But maybe this is what can rescue the series: Divorcing itself almost entirely from the blueprint of the original, because sustaining that specific tone for close to fifteen years and in the hands of a multitude of different filmmakers is next to impossible. Turning into something like what Cloverfield seems to be edging towards could be great for the series. Maybe making this into an anthology series is what needs to happen to keep it fresh. Next of Kin resembles the previous PA films in essentially no way whatsoever, and it doesn't even have ghosts in it, if you can believe that.

Probably the biggest reason why this didn't feel like any of the other entries in the series is because it isn't strictly found-footage. Typically this would have annoyed me - either stick with being found-footage or abandon it altogether, you can't just do a hybrid of the two - but in this case, a departure from the norm is a breath of fresh air. The majority of it is filmed through cameras that the characters are holding, but here and there are a few complementary shots from a "fictional" perspective, showing the characters from the outside rather than as if they're interacting with one another. A small moment that I really loved was when Eubank seemed to be poking fun at his own signature slow-mo shots by having the cameraman explain how slow-motion filming works to a couple of small children in the background during one. I'm not sure if that was him lightly lampooning his own technique or if it was totally not meant as a joke, but if it was meant as a joke at his own expense, it makes me admire Eubank even more - to be able to say "I know this thing I always do is a little ridiculous, but I like doing it, so I'm going to keep doing it". Further slow-mo shots later in the movie confirm that he is still putting them in there remorselessly, even though it causes the found-footage facade to crumble a little more.

I was afraid that this movie was going to be all about how "weird" Amish people are, and would caricature them at best as backwards yokels and at worst as religious nutjobs with something to hide. I don't know why, but poor or comedic depictions of Amish people piss me off a lot. They don't deserve to be pointed and laughed at. But - and I can't fully explain why without spoiling the whole movie a little bit - the bizarre goings-on around the farm and cultish behavior the Amish family engages in is presented as markedly not the actions of real Amish people. That they are visibly Amish and known as being Amish to outsiders who would accept that as fact due to their ignorance about the community is important to certain elements of the plot.

Speaking of the plot... I feel like anybody watching this would be hard-pressed not to realize that literally everything that happens is thanks to the main characters all acting like unsupervised two-year-olds. Granted, nothing would progress the story if they didn't go snooping around where they were explicitly told not to and getting themselves into trouble by ignoring common sense, but especially at the end, the big picture becomes clearer and clearer, and that picture is that while the Amish were up to some suspicious stuff, a whole lot less people would have died if they'd been left to their own machinations and not spied on by some naïve twenty-somethings with no respect for boundaries. I personally liked the characters, because they had that vibe of casual camaraderie that the characters in The Signal also had, where they felt believable as friends (or at least friendly acquaintances) on a road trip. But your mileage may vary depending on how high your tolerance for people doing the exact opposite of what they're told is.

I guess my most damning criticism of this is that I definitely wouldn't have thought as much of it if it wasn't branded as a Paranormal Activity film. I liked it, but the interesting part comes from the fact that it's so different from what came before it. I enjoyed the chaotic last twenty minutes, which is somewhat of a trademark of the series, and the source of the horror is, like I said, not ghosts but something else older and more vicious. I would love to see the baton handed off to somebody new for the next entry and to have it be unrelated to this or any of the previous films, but a constant churning-out of PA-branded films could ruin the franchise as fast as this has renewed it.

The Medium (2021)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun

Thailand, South Korea

131 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I was extremely excited for this. It seemed like every mention of it I saw online was someone calling it the scariest movie they'd ever seen, and I'd heard so much high praise for it that it became one of my most anticipated of the year. And... well. I definitely won't say it disappointed me, but with hype like that, I guess it's hard to meet expectations. This was a good movie, but not the non-stop thrill ride I was hoping it might be. That might just be personal preference, because possession horror doesn't do anything for me. And before I start, I want to be clear: Scariness is not the metric by which I measure a horror film's quality. It never will be. But in this case, I'm focusing on the scare factor because that's specifically what The Medium is getting so much buzz for.

So the movie starts slowly, with a documentary crew introducing their subject, a woman living in the rural hills of Thailand who is the village's main shaman, possessed bodily by a god called Bayan. The place where she lives is rife with gods, they inhabit every little object and represent any and every occasion, and the villagers live with this as part of daily life, it's a neutral fact. I enjoyed how low-key this was, because in many films that focus on folk religion or tradition, they kind of invent an aesthetic that's so far removed from actual practice that it's like that awful Annabelle doll: So obviously creepy-looking that it can't pass for anything anybody ever created on purpose. The wide and inscrutable pantheon is left opaque, and although I don't believe spirituality is supposed to be the antagonist of The Medium, the way the villagers seem to be entirely at the whim of whatever forces they pray to is an unsettling takeaway.

It's quite a long movie, and it feels like it's divided into two distinct halves. Because of the length, you spend a lot of time getting acquainted with each of those halves, and when the first shifts into the second, it's genuinely great; the feeling of going into unfamiliar territory is disquieting and only gets worse as the film goes on. But at the same time, you start getting used to the film repeatedly reaching for new levels of horror, and so it becomes what feels like a contest with itself to see how over-the-top it can get. The first half of the movie is, in my opinion, the best, because it's not trying too hard and it's still eerie: The possession is subtle and, above all, relatable, because what's happening to Mink, the possessed girl, isn't the neck-swiveling, white-eyed melodrama of a typical possession film - it's shown as a bodily thing. It almost appears like she's having a miscarriage despite not being pregnant. She goes through horrific pain in her stomach and other areas, she bleeds heavily and vomits, but worst of all are the behavioral changes, horribly public and extremely embarrassing actions that she isn't in control of. This is one of the most frightening parts of the film because it's uncomfortable to imagine losing control of your body and your personality in such a fast and unstoppable way.

But like I said, this is a movie that ramps up and then keeps ramping up and doesn't stop. The possession goes from blood and pain to a state where nothing of the girl's original self remains. During the tail end of the second half, night vision is used heavily, and this is about where the film started losing me. It tries so hard to show things that are repulsive, disgusting acts that could only be done by a demon or somebody with no humanity left, that it almost becomes boring. Again, it is not so bad as many a possession film. The horrible acts committed by the girl under the influence of whatever that was aren't played up with cheesy evil laughter and overly-long speeches about the demon's loathing for puny humans. But it is sustained for so long and without stopping that I became used to it and then it was no longer interesting.

The found-footage element is by far the weakest aspect of the whole thing. I was really hoping it would play a bigger part, because I love found-footage films and the good ones are some of the creepiest horror movies I know. But it's woefully underused, and flat-out illogical considering the events of the end; there's not even a "these people all died and then we found their tapes blah blah" title card, the narrative just flouts logic without notice. There is also B-roll that looks far more professional than the rest of the film, and background music during tense scenes, two things that take away any real purpose to having a found-footage aesthetic.

The strongest point is that everybody in this is a really good actor. All the things I said about the ways that this differs from lesser possession films are mostly down to Narilya Gulmongkolpech, the actress who plays Mink, doing such an unbroken and relentless job portraying her. It's hard to believe she's a first-time actress, but I think maybe her "normal girl" vibe makes her spiral into possession more palpable. She shifts from being an average, somewhat bored-seeming young girl to something deeply evil so well that it's believable even while much of the rest of the film is not. And the people around her, although they don't have to shoulder the task of playing a possession victim, also feel real, and their sadness and fear feels real too.

All in all, I don't think there's that much wrong with this movie. It's very good and it's unlike a lot of other Thai horror I've seen. I usually don't like to generalize like that, but I'm doing it to make a point in this case, because not that many Thai horror films make it out of the country and into the international spotlight, and those that do are not like this one. I definitely picked up on influences from The Wailing, especially in the big finale exorcism scene, which could have been even longer and more intense in my opinion. I loved this as a horror movie and as a movie in general but I was let down by believing it would be far more frightening than it was.

Shutter (2004)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom

Thailand

97 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

This was one of the first horror movies I ever watched a long, long time ago, but I've been meaning to rewatch it because I first saw it under less-than-ideal circumstances. I'm not an evangelist for the theater-going experience, but no movie deserves to be watched on an iPad 2 (on portrait mode) in an uncomfortable desk chair in somebody else's crowded office. I also very recently saw Banjung Pisanthanakun's latest movie The Medium, but to be honest I see few similarities between the two films, and this one had a different screenwriter as well.

As I've mentioned before, analog horror is my favorite thing. Any film where the haunting or otherwise supernatural event central to the plot has to do with the physical medium of film, or any technology that has now been streamlined out of existence, is inherently fascinating to me. You (or at least I) don't notice it that much when you're watching Shutter, because it really feels like a movie that could have come out this year, but it hinges on technology that, while not entirely defunct yet, is slowly disappearing. The protagonist can't immediately see that he's captured a ghost on film; he has to physically go to a print shop and get his pictures developed (or otherwise develop them himself in his home darkroom). This, to me, is infinitely more terrifying than waving your phone around and being able to instantly see ghosts through the screen. The element of waiting and being uncertain if there's things around you that you can't perceive, but can perceive and possibly harm you, is much more potent than the instant gratification of digital photography.

This is one of those movies that has such a stellar concept that I feel like it would have made an amazing short film, but a lot gets added in to make it a normal runtime, and while the depth of the plot doesn't ruin the movie, it does make the central idea - capturing ghosts on film - less central. We know from the start that the protagonist is not the best guy, but for a while we're still able to put ourselves in his shoes, and that alone is upsetting - who can say what they would do if they ran somebody down on the road by accident? We all hope that we would stay and help, and most of us probably would, but people are unpredictable when their panic instinct kicks in. It's oft-used horror fodder to have somebody become haunted for a one-time mistake that eventually overtakes their life, no matter how big or small. But as the story unfolds we gradually become more and more aware that the main character is not just somebody who did the wrong thing under pressure, he's been actively making bad choices and hurting people in the events that happened before the start of the film. This is not a movie where the horrific message comes from the possibility that any small mistake could cause you to become haunted. This is a movie that shows the awful side of humanity, that follows the descent of a terrible person into the depths of the retribution he deserves.

The only conceivable way I could compare this to The Medium would be that they both get much more intense in their second halves, but like The Medium, Shutter is way better when it's more subtle. There's a vibe to this. It's very laid-back when it's not being terrifying, and the easygoing way that the non-involved characters (like the print shop guy) interact with the protagonist show us there's a world that exists outside of the crises the film's characters are having, which is something horror movies don't do a lot. When I think about this movie, even before this last rewatch, the thing that has always stuck in my mind isn't the end, when the protagonist is finally able to see his ghost without the aid of a camera, but his lingering neck pain throughout the film. I don't know what it is about that small sideline of the story, executed with no real need for CGI, that is so lastingly creepy. Feeling something and knowing it's there but not being able to get anyone else to corroborate it or gather enough proof to show it to someone else is something I feel like we've all experienced at some point, not just in the context of a haunting.

There's a reason why this is a cult classic. It's a good movie. Despite one baffling and totally unnecessary scene of comedy relief that felt like I'd stopped watching the movie and started watching a parody of it, Shutter manages to keep up the scare factor steadily and even work in a "plot twist" (some call it a twist, but I think it's more like a slow reveal). It doesn't do a thorough, academic-level deep dive into any one subject, but its themes of personal responsibility, character, and ghosts on film all work together to make something that still stands out as unique today.