Lovely Devils (1982)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

94 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm a really big fan of Nobuhiko Obayashi, and this more obscure film of his was on my watchlist for a long time. I can't say it's all bad that Hausu has become vastly more well-known than Obayashi himself, because it's one of my personal favorites too, but it can gear the uninitiated up for a different experience when checking out his non-Hausu work. That being said, though, Lovely Devils (and most of his other films, honestly) is still a deeply weird film. If I had watched this on "Tuesday Night Suspense Theater" in 1982 as it was originally aired, I would have come away from it wondering what in the world I had just seen.

This movie was not written by Obayashi, and I have no doubt that if anybody else had directed it, it would have been an absolutely bog-standard thriller with few remarkable qualities. The plot is largely straightforward on paper, but made weirder by the disorientating directorial style. The film opens at a wedding party where we're introduced to basically the main antagonist, a little girl named Alice who is extremely intent on getting her aunt's wedding veil, and when she promises that Alice can have the veil after the aunt dies... Alice does what's gotta be done to get that veil. This sets us up for a movie full of Alice's further misdeeds, but the actual main character is a distant, non-blood relation of Alice and her family whose situation parallels Alice's in certain ways. We see that she holds herself responsible for the accidental death of her boyfriend, who died in a car crash after she wished he was dead during a fight, and that this troubled her so much that she ended up in a mental hospital for several years before being released to come and stay with her brother-in-law, who lives with Alice and her mother.

I say that their situation is parallel because what Alice does without guilt, Ryoko thinks she may have done once, to fatal ends, and the guilt torments her for the rest of her life. Alice wishes people dead and acts on it, making her desires manifest no matter what's in her way so that she may get whatever object or end result she desires. Ryoko is haunted by wishing someone was dead and seemingly making it happen. It's like Alice represents the side of Ryoko that she's afraid to let take over - a remorseless, almost psychically powerful arbiter of life and death.

On its own, like I said, this is decent suspense-movie fodder, but not that weird. However, the way Obayashi lays it all out is borderline hallucinatory. The wedding scene at the beginning could have been one of the most normal points of the film, but instead it feels extremely uncomfortable and tense because everything is taking place in what looks like a severe windstorm. This is not plot-relevant whatsoever, but stuff feels worse when it's windy out. It's beautiful and sunny, and everyone is dressed in their nicest clothes, trying to enjoy one of the best days of their lives, but their hats are flying off and everything is blowing around and it just looks like a really bad time.

Recently, Midsommar brought up much discussion over whether a horror movie could be truly scary if the horror of it took place in the daylight. "Daylight horror" was not really coined as a phrase at the time when this movie was released, though I have no doubt that the concept was discussed in horror fan circles, but I would argue that much of Obayashi's oeuvre almost defines daylight horror, especially his influential Emotion. Lovely Devils is 100% daytime, appearing to take place on the brightest and calmest (save for the wedding) summer day you can imagine that never ends, and the women all wear these gorgeous white flowing dresses with pretty straw sunhats and look immaculate. The interior shots are lush and inviting, the scenery is green and beautiful, and the whole of the film looks like something you wish you could fall asleep and wake up in. But there's also something deeply wrong. I would say that one of the biggest contributing factors to this feeling is actually the one thing about the film that I initially disliked: the fact that the soundtrack is so overwhelming and ever-present. There's pretty much not a single second of this film that isn't flooded with loud classical string music, and at first I was waiting for this to stop because it was distracting, but as the film went on I realized that it fit perfectly with the overall tone and it became one of my favorite things about it. The heavy use of music really sums up the aesthetic of Lovely Devils as a whole: beautiful, elegant, relaxing images and sounds, but cranked up and shoved at you so much that it feels stifling.

The movie actually gets significantly less outwardly strange after maybe the first 20 minutes, but it never stops drowning you in classical music and the horribly, hideously lush countryside. There are singular images in this that I felt were as visually striking as anything out of Hausu, although less unorthodox - the sound effect used in a particular scene involving a glass vase (which you can just tell is coming throughout the entire film, thanks to some very effective use of the Chekhov's Gun technique) is going to haunt me forever. I really, really loved this, and I wish it was more well-known outside of a specific circle of film fans. There's a lot more to it that makes it a lot more strange than I could describe in a review, so the best I can say is: go watch it. It's on YouTube.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

directed by Dutch Marich

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this movie was made during the pandemic, but if you didn't otherwise know that, you wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, because I don't want this to be tagged as a Pandemic Movie for the rest of time. But the format of it is such that nobody needed to be within six feet or even the same room as each other - it's set up like a focus piece, not a "pure" found-footage film; nobody claims to have recovered and pieced together the footage a la Blair Witch Project or anything like that, instead it's edited together, with background music and dialogue cards like a longform local interest news story. Everyone does a great job acting like non-actors, and even the newscaster who's on screen for about thirty seconds really nails the "newscaster" tone, which is surprisingly difficult. All in all, everything about this is believable because it hits the right emotional notes only when it needs to and avoids hyperbole entirely. It's not afraid to be totally flat and uninteresting in the spots where a real documentary would be, and as a result the payoff is all the more potent.

The story follows a man in his 30s who disappeared in the Nevada desert and the bizarre events that he recorded in his video journals leading up to his disappearance. The people interviewed are his sister, a news reporter, the missing person's roommate, and a fourth guy who, forgive me, I don't remember how he was involved. Again, everyone seems genuine and there is no extraneous material in this film whatsoever - we briefly find out about the relationship between the missing guy and his sister as well as the relationship between him and his roommate, but at no point does it ever feel talky or like we're being teased for stuff that will be important later on. In fact, the faux-documentary format allows Horror in the High Desert to not force us to eke out meaning from small hints at all. The film can tell us about how the sister held a little resentment for her brother when she was forced to raise him after their parents died while they were both young, in an incident that he indirectly caused, and it does nothing apart from provide us with background on him. In a film with a traditional narrative, this episode from his past would be his motivation, and we'd see how it influenced the way he reacted to events. Here, all it does is make him feel like an actual person who we might meet in real life.

I was also extremely fond of the missing hiker's video journals, because they don't make him out to be a self-absorbed vlogger or a savvy survivalist-type. He is entirely just a guy who's passionate about the wilderness and enjoys sharing his genuine love for hiking with an audience, who, from the sound of it, he admires and appreciates instead of just flaunting his life like a consumable product to followers that only exist as a number. It's established that he's not even really that good of an outdoorsman. He just does it because he loves it. In the end I was left liking him immensely and feeling a lot of empathy for everyone involved.

I've mentioned a few times that I generally am not moved by horror films that aren't supernatural in nature anymore; it's not that I don't like them or that I think they're all bad or I have any real moral or ethical problem with them, I just very rarely manage to get engaged with slashers or other horror films with a human antagonist. It is a me problem. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, this movie is one of the rare ones that hit that perfect spot where it doesn't matter if the horror is paranormal or human, because the way it's shown to us is so deeply unsettling that there's an inherent aura of almost supernatural danger to it anyway. Halloween is the ur-example of this: Michael Myers is a person, but there is such a mythos built up around him and he's so enigmatic that he feels more like a creature than a human. This is relevant to Horror in the High Desert, I promise. There is ultimately nothing truly ghostly going on here, but it just feels like something is so, so not right.

Much like the way it lays out the background of its subject's life, but doesn't use those details for anything more than creating depth, this film also divests itself of context in its terrifying final 20 minutes, giving us no more knowledge than the unfortunate missing hiker would have had. With my usual disclaimer in place about how sheer scare factor isn't the best thing to judge a horror movie on, I have to admit that I really did not want to look at the screen during a lot of the final moments of this film. A good horror movie doesn't have to be scary, but for a movie as bare-bones as this where 90% of it is just boring and uneventful discussion of a missing person, followed by the most intense and nerve-wracking 20 minutes I've seen in a long time, to be able to create scariness within such a mundane atmosphere is an obvious sign of talent.

After Yang (2021)

directed by Kogonada

USA

96 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Oh yeah, this one hurt me. I have to admit that I still get excited for a new A24 movie - as popular as it might be to poke fun at the studio's artsy output, and with all of its flaws that I will readily acknowledge, I still think they're consistently putting out some of the best genre movies today. I'm not familiar with the short story that was the basis for this, so my review will be solely for the film itself.

After Yang is set in either an optimistic future or a better version of the present, and the aesthetics of it are the very first thing you notice. It got close to losing me in the first five minutes, but the thing that brought me back around and got me hooked into it was the dance scene that plays during the opening credits. Credits are usually skippable by nature, but if that scene had not been there, it would have changed the feeling of the entire film for me. Something so energetic and fun being present in such an immaculately groomed world indicated to me that even though the core of the film might appear to be based off of looks, everything about it is a vehicle for telling us something about humanity. Even the angle the dance scene is shot from is perfect - the way the camera remains stable at around adult torso level, so that Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, who plays six-ish-year-old Mimi, looks every bit as tiny as she is, but it still giving it all she's got.

Even so, the look of this film may still lose people. It rubbed me the wrong way for the same reason why horror films that start off with a family moving into a house that would cost more than most people I know make in a year rub me the wrong way: I can't connect to something when the presumption is of wealth and prosperity. But After Yang really doesn't feel like that. "Prosperity" might be on display here, but it didn't feel like it was connected to wealth. Like I said, this is either a better future or a better present, one where the environmental problems plaguing us today seem to be largely solved and humans are able to live in a comfortable and above all beautiful world where flora and fauna are seamlessly incorporated into our lives, and vice versa. Everyone's home is filled with hardwoods, natural fabrics, and healthy, lush plants. All cars appear to be self-driving and are also, from what I could see on my small screen, filled with plants. This looks like a world where nobody has to worry about dying from environmental injustice anymore - it is still not perfect, and is filled with human flaws and prejudices, but there's something deeply serene about it.

The film is, as the title implies, set after Mimi's companion android Yang dies, for all intents and purposes. We see a little of him in the present day at the beginning, but everything we know of him after that is seen through his memories of the past - a method of storytelling that fits the emotional tone of the film and absolutely wrecked me personally. The existence of synthetic humans referred to as "Technosapiens" is an established fact throughout the film, and the way they coexist with born humans is fascinating to me: Yang is what they call a "cultural" Technosapiens, intended for families with Chinese-adopted children to buy to assist their children with feeling more connected to their heritage. Despite the seemingly tranquil and balanced society, it is made extremely clear that most people view Technosapiens as objects. They're referred to with pronouns, but treated like objects. No one shies away from admitting that you buy them like any other product, and Mimi's father carrying Yang slung over his shoulder like an unwieldy carpet, before hauling him around to several variously indifferent repairpersons, highlights the fact that society at large does not seem to give these beings full human autonomy. Also present but not elaborated upon are clones - the father openly dislikes them, despite multiple people in his community being clones. All in all, prejudices definitely do exist in After Yang's created world; they might not run along the exact same lines that they do in our world, but the introduction of new technology and new ways to be human seems only to have spawned ugly new ways to exclude and scorn, as well.

At multiple points during the film, people express disbelief that a "cultural" android could have romantic feelings or be otherwise capable of being anything other than defined by their race. That Yang could be anything other than Chinese. This was one of the places where this film mirrors reality. People struggle to see Yang's faceted existence as a person because they only see his race.

But as the film goes on, the tides begin to change. We see a side of Yang that his non-synthetic family was blind to. His adoptive younger sister can see it; she views him as nothing less than a true brother, but it seems like most of the adult populace just sees him, again, as a product. Yang has a viewpoint of the world that is entirely different from ours, and therein lies the backbone of the film. This is a movie about an android - a science fiction story - but it is also about the possibility of looking at the world in a different way. It's about realizing that you have become jaded and used to experiencing your life in a specific way, that the years have beaten that into you and trained you to live according to what's expected of you. Again, even in a peaceful world like the one this film shows us, there is still a level of societal - if not simply personal - expectation. But Yang contradicts those expectations, and the tragedy of this is that his memories physically have to be dug out of him for anyone to understand this. We, and the other characters, get to see that Yang viewed his world as a place that was utterly precious and full of individual miracles, but no one understands this until after Yang dies. No one, that is, except his little sister.

So this movie cut me to the core in a rare and exceptional way. I think some of the best fiction makes us realize the true breadth of the world - our world, the one we really live in - by creating a world that's just slightly different from reality and using it to highlight the things we might not notice. After Yang is a well-crafted film full of talented actors, but it also feels simple. An unfamiliar world inhabited by speculative versions of future humans is used to show the inherent need to find and connect.

The Witch (1952)

directed by Roland af Hällström

Finland

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this for Kalevala Day/Finnish Culture Day, which it is not anymore by the time you're reading this, and I'd been searching high and low for it for a long time, because anything that involves someone or something being buried in a bog is an instant watch for me. Some recognize this as Finland's first horror film, but as far as I know that honor belongs to Noidan kirot from 1927, although that one seems to be so scarce as to nearly be a lost film. This movie gets overshadowed by The White Reindeer, another horror film released in the same year, which is also quite good and I recommend it highly as well.

The film begins with a bit of a clash of views between the local farmers on whose land is the bog where the titular witch is "dug up" and the researchers who are searching the bog for archaeological finds. It's a typical situation that comes up in nearly every horror movie involving something being unearthed: The locals know there to be a legend surrounding the area that spawns whatever artifact or entity will later end up plaguing the film, and they wish the city folk would go back to where they came from instead of messing with forces beyond their control. The body of a young woman is uncovered from the bog, and the village's long collective memory immediately recognizes it as substantiating the legend of a witch who was murdered and thrown into the bog 300 years ago. As soon as the body is uncovered, things begin to go awry in the village, but it only gets worse when, in place of the corpse, the very alive body of a nude young woman is found.

There's some severely weird gender politics going on in this film. The arrival of the seemingly undead witch causes every man in town to go a little nuts - not in some primeval, mind-control way (the witch doesn't seem to have that much influence), but she signifies something that frustrates them on a deep level. "All women are witches", they say - in fact they say this over and over, many times. Every man teases his brothers and friends that every woman he's sweet on is a witch. All women are witches. It's posturing to cover up the fact that they're clearly afraid of what the witch represents. She's something they thought they killed, a force they tamped down and then built their identity upon the banishing of. If the witch is back, if the woman we forced into the earth when she tried to defy us is back, who are we as men? The women say that the witch was not really a witch, but a young girl who dared to resist when a local baron demanded a night with her as per tradition; in resisting she became a witch, not for having magic powers but for being the kind of woman who couldn't be suppressed. And the women are solidly afraid of her - they know what the presence of one defiant woman can mean for the rest of them, who will pay the price once the men suspect that they might not have total control over women like they imagined they did.

Mirja Mane plays the witch role with reckless abandon, and she plays it, again, not like a fairytale witch with magic powers, but as a woman who would have been scorned and branded an outcast for her unashamed behavior. She dances naked in the streets, doesn't chain herself to one man, and flaunts her sexuality openly. But when she's first unearthed, she's nothing like this - she's terrified, borderline incoherent; any time anybody suggests she might be the 300-year-old witch come back from the dead, she physically reacts as if someone slapped her. It's only with time that she becomes the impish, cackling, free-willed terror running roughshod over the town's rigid menfolk.

There is some ambiguity that the film seems to be pushing about whether or not she's actually the witch of legend, and this is the only thing I disliked about it. The ending felt weak and too soft for a film as bold as this one. Spoilers for a 70-year-old film: She basically comes to her senses and realizes that she was just a normal girl who - silly old me! - tripped and fell into the bog hole, never mind that we literally see her do things like disappear into thin air and that nobody acknowledges whether or not the unearthed skeleton was just laying there beneath her the whole time, as it would have been had she really just fell into the bog. I guess the point was that she became whatever the people of the town were afraid of her becoming, that at first she was a blank slate with no opinion of herself, but once people started to fear her, she became what they feared and worse. In the end, as is so often the case, the single person who is the object of an entire community's fear isn't the villain - the community is.

The Witch has a kind of dynamic energy that fits it as one of only a few horror movies coming from a country whose film industry was still relatively young. It doesn't feel stiff or restrained the way so many '50s horror films from the West do. The characters are not afraid to speak their minds and be loud and authentic - not rude, but with the shackles of performativity removed. I'm thinking of the woman, who's only in one scene, that they bring in because they get the idea that maybe the bog witch is this lady's daughter. She takes one look at her and basically goes "Nope, she's not mine, you think I don't know the people I've made?" and then demands compensation for being made to walk a long way on her elderly, aching legs. She's not treated as the butt of a joke, as some caricature of a tough old broad, she's just there for her one scene and exists as something outside the bounds of gender roles, much like the witch herself. Even though it tapers down to a somewhat disappointing ending, this movie is a joy to watch. As an aside, it seems to me like a lot of Finns have a very negative opinion of their country's film industry - I'd like to know what, if any, modern Finnish movies are generally well-regarded among the public.