When I Consume You (2021)

directed by Perry Blackshear

USA

92 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I somehow missed that Perry Blackshear, who directed the absolutely wonderful They Look Like People and then the perfectly decent The Siren, had a new movie out. It took me a minute to get around to watching it, but after having done so I'm going to go ahead and say that he's made not just one of the best films of the year but an incredibly original, almost Gnostic genre-bender of a horror movie. I don't remember the last time I've given out a five-star rating, but I feel comfortable giving one to this film.

A lot of what I remember from They Look Like People returns in When I Consume You, but it's married with a far more cerebral plot and a depth to the two central characters that I wasn't expecting. The character who we follow for much of the film is Wilson, a thirty-something that the film presents as subsisting in the margins of life with one bright light that keeps his head above water - his sister, Daphne. The two of them are the only lifeline each other has, after an implied horrible childhood and through various struggles with drugs, alcohol, and underemployment. The film is much more about Wilson, but it doesn't shirk Daphne's role, because the two siblings are written to be inseparable parts of each other. There's a constant exchange, sometimes unspoken, between the two of them where neither ever lets the other down; when Wilson is in crisis, Daphne is there, and next time when it's Daphne who's in trouble, Wilson takes what he has learned from her of how to support another human being and gives it to her.

I loved the way these two were written, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about the script in general, because I felt like this was one of those films where the dialogue is ever so slightly poetic, but never unrealistic. In one scene where Daphne is talking about the life she wishes she could have had, she says that she wanted to have many children "that I would have treated like they were the Sun". Something about that is sticking with me, "like they were the Sun" - the lyricism of that line but also the truth of it, the way such simple words can dissect the powerful love between an (in this case adoptive) parent and their children so much more than just "I love them". The villain's monologues are similarly no more wordy or grandiose than they need to be, but still effective, which is a tough thing in horror and I guess in any movie where an evil character is present and verbose. Blackshear also wrote the script, and it feels like something personal born of areas of interest and expertise specific to him as a person, but also something that I could heavily relate to.

I've gotten this far without actually talking about this as a horror movie. This is a prime example of horror-as-metaphor, but it's also horror as... well, horror. The constant state of insecurity that the siblings are in is the result of a bad childhood having followed them all through life, which when you think about it is its own kind of stalker, its own It Follows demon that is constantly one step behind you. The weight of having A History™ behind you follows you your whole life, it confronts you when you try to get away from it, it drags you back down to dark places, it doesn't want you to have anything good or be anything other than a person with A History™. This is taken into literality in When I Consume You. The monster is physically present and it beats you down, bruises you, breaks your teeth. The past is ironically not elaborated upon specifically here - apart from one disturbing anecdote about being forced to kill a pet turtle, we never learn exactly what happened to the siblings as children that deprived them of the kind of "life skills" that people with a normal upbringing might have. But the past is also in every frame of the film, and the horror of it is that overcoming it may be impossible, and the only option sometimes is to face it and move on, even when it won't move on from you. There are ways to live with suffering and to rise above it - another angle I don't frequently see explored in media, because we want an easy resolution wherein all trace of hardship is erased. Not much thought is given to the possibility of transcending suffering through mental change, and I appreciate that it is accepted as an option here.

But like I just said, along with the metaphor for echoing childhood trauma, there is also a literal, actual horror in this film. And it is created along lines that I so seldom see done in horror and certainly never outside of indie film. This is a little bit reminiscent (but not quite) of The Empty Man if you shaved off an hour and change from the running time and just focused on some of its philosophical implications. It is in its way a subversion of the idea of a "good vs. evil" story - or maybe not a subversion of the fundamental concept but of the process and the outcome. I'm thinking about how Wilson very clearly does not defeat the demon in the end - how he still sees it, every day, how it is an indelible part of his life but instead of cowering in fear from it he looks it in the eye and recognizes something of himself in it. That's why the creature in this movie is so terrifying, not because of looks or even its sinister declaration of intent to consume and consume and consume, but because of its permanence, its inherence. This movie feels like being inside a nightmare that you keep thinking you've woken up from only to realize you're still asleep. I don't want to say too much specifically about the creature because the movie is very deliberate in not establishing too many details on it, revealing little by little until it's given us as much as it's going to give us and leaving the rest in our heads. There is a clear framework behind it (and I loved that framework) but it's also a little bit open to interpretation.

I honestly can't think of anything I disliked about this movie. Evan Dumouchel does such an amazing job portraying a grieving brother that it's hard to look at at times. This feels conceptually brand new and edited to perfection, with nothing there that made it feel a minute shorter or longer than it was supposed to be. I'm glad I can still be surprised and captured by horror films made today. I am a little confused at where the negative reaction to this is coming from; granted I tend to be really fond of stuff that nobody else likes, but it seems like people are jaded from having disliked an Ari Aster movie or something and conflating any slow, methodical horror movie with whatever they disliked in another one.