Oddity (2024)

directed by Damian McCarthy

Ireland

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I used to actually make an effort to try to keep up with new horror releases. The fact that I don't do that anymore is something I occasionally feel guilty about, but I've mostly accepted it now. If I ever feel like watching something new, I'll do it, and if it takes me two years to get around to watching a movie, as is the case with Oddity, well, it's not like the movie's going anywhere, I guess. (I will be discussing spoilers in this review and this is a movie you should definitely go into blind - preferably without even seeing a poster, but that's harder to avoid.)

One thing I was concerned about when I started watching the film is that it would stoop to demonizing mentally ill people as the source of its horror element, which is something I've always found extremely offensive in horror movies. I kind of figured Oddity had to have some kind of twist somewhere, because fortunately movies that do just straight up say "the killer was a scary insane guy who was so scary and insane, wooo, so scaaary, ooooh" with absolutely no depth or nuance seem to be getting fewer and fewer, but this movie really does seem like it's going in that direction for a while. Thankfully, though, it isn't, and save for one part at the end of the film that I felt was kind of unnecessary, the medical staff who work with mentally ill people are presented as much scarier than their patients.

So the thing about this movie is that it's a relatively normal supernatural murder mystery involving a character with extrasensory perception using her abilities to figure out that her sister's real murderer was not the man everyone believes did it and also what in the god damn hell is that thing. With a heaping helping of cold, dreary Irish weather and such traditionally creepy place-settings as a curiosity shoppe and a ramshackle old country house that's only partially renovated, Oddity presents us with plenty of atmosphere that would by itself make for a very good horror movie and also what in the god damn HELL is that thing. The real centerpiece of the movie is not the murder, it's not the sister with supernatural powers, it's not the canonically-established fact that ghosts and curses are all completely real within the universe of the film, it's whatever the god damn hell that thing is.

"That thing" is, of course, a large man carved out of wood that is, inexplicably, tied to the sister and is able to be controlled by her in some way. How she ended up with it is touched upon so briefly you might miss it. How exactly it works is never touched upon at all. It's present for virtually the entire movie, and when it's not onscreen you can actually kind of forget about it - like I said, there's so much else going on, with the murder, the psychic sister, the cursed objects, and an unholy asshole of a husband - but it's always there. The fact that we never learn what it is or why it is is crucial to basically the entire movie. It's just this deeply bizarre non-sequitur lurking at the edges of the picture. I wish more horror movies were so daring as to present you with an object that is vital to the plot and just not ever explain it.

And I LOVE the last shot of the movie. 98 minutes of what had been a tense, moody horror film gets capped off with basically a sight gag, and somehow it doesn't feel like tonal whiplash - or maybe it does, but it's perfectly-placed tonal whiplash. The husband thinks he's gotten away with three murders and is set for life, who cares about some silly blind girl who collects "cursed" items, what a crazy old bat, none of that could have been real, right? And the very last we see of him, he's two seconds away from getting the absolute living daylights scared out of him by an undead bellboy. If we can't see him brought fully to justice, then at least we can imagine him getting knocked down a peg or ten by the exact thing he so arrogantly assumed was not real.

Damian McCarthy previously directed Caveat, which I'll come right out and say is a much better film than this one, and is one of the rare horror movies to genuinely give me the willies. Oddity, compared to Caveat, is much more polished and seems like it probably had a higher budget, and despite still being a fundamentally weird movie, Oddity feels a little more rote, a little more mainstream. It'll be interesting to see how McCarthy follows this up, if or when he does; he seems pretty skilled at making horror movies that have something really strange at the center of them, and I hope that element of his films never gets ironed out for wider presentability.

Gorgo (1961)

directed by Eugène Lourié

Ireland, UK, USA

78 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I wasn't sure if I wanted to review this as part of KaiJune '23, because I am a little bit of a stickler about not calling just any old giant monster who isn't from Japanese media a "kaiju" as an English-speaking writer. I don't know what the general consensus is about that, but it strikes me as a little weird - sure, Gorgo is technically a kaiju, but by the same token I could say a horse is technically an "uma", or a crab is technically a "kani". But this did get a near-simultaneous release in Japan (a poster for your delectation), and Gorgo himself very much feels like part of the canon that includes other characters who can unequivocally be called kaiju, so I think he does qualify at least in an honorary sense. The first time I reviewed this I called it a "k-Eire-ju" movie. I'm sticking with that.

As has been noted, the plot of Gappa: The Triphibian Monster is pretty similar to the plot of this movie, with some differences. A small, fictional Irish island is devastated by a sudden storm at the same time as an underwater treasure hoard is discovered, and the continued searching for more treasure eventually brings divers into contact with a strange, prehistoric-looking animal: Gorgo. Just like how they comb the sea floor for treasure to be made into a profit, the two main characters quickly realize that they could make a lot of money off of exhibiting Gorgo and charging admission. He's captured, shipped off to London where he attracts massive crowds, and everybody is making money hand over fist - but at what cost, we wonder?

Like Gappa, this is a movie where all of the main characters are kind of terrible people. Gappa is different in that some of the characters are nice about it and we're not supposed to hate them, but all of the adults in Gorgo have nothing but money in mind. I guess not all of them, really; the two main guys are warned by everybody around them, who have a very sensible mindset of "What is wrong with you? You have no idea what this creature is and you just want to stick it in a cage and charge money for people to gawk at it?" And much like Gappa, the only person with any sense is a child, in this case a little boy with no parents who helps out an archaeologist living on the island (which, by the way, is called Nara, but, you know, not that Nara). I could have been missing something but I don't think the film's tagline - something to do with "Only a child knows his secret!!!" - is entirely accurate to what's shown in the film; the boy is clearly more savvy than everybody else, but I don't think he or anyone ever gives a clear-cut explanation of Gorgo's "secret" beyond just "it isn't right to be parading around an animal like this".

I'm really fond of the Gorgo and Ogra (Gorgo's helicopter mom) suits. Mick Dillon is listed as the suit actor for both of them, but evidently there may have been other suit actors who did not get credit: Wikizilla lists them as "likely" being David Wilding, Peter Brace and Peter Perkings. The creatures do have a very classic kaiju look about them: very reptilian, dinosaurian, big hands, big teeth, you know the deal. The elephant roar is reminiscent of Titanosaurus, but that would not come about until over a decade later. The miniatures are also nothing to sneeze at, and while very obvious to modern viewers, neither is the repeated use of optical effects to edit people into any given backdrop. It's a very well-made movie for its time.

Behind-the-scenes, a lot was apparently cut from this, and it sounds like it was mostly for the good. 78 minutes is a perfect running time for this and it allows for the philosophical aspects of the story (such as they are) to be focused on after we're introduced to Gorgo and his mom. There's an awkwardly shoehorned-in news reporter at the end of the film who kind of does some Takashi Shimura-ing, telling us what folly it is to believe we're the dominant species, warning us away from our disrespect of nature, etc. I think this would have been more potent if it had been a character we'd seen already doing this monologue instead of just a random guy, but it still mostly works. The destruction that Ogra visits upon London in search of her child is truly at a devastating scale - our newsman says that it's worse than it ever was during the Blitz, and the effects are remarkably good at conveying a city being almost completely torn to shreds. Like most kaiju, Ogra isn't deliberately killing people, she's just mad and looking for her kid, and her kid happens to be in the middle of an extremely populated area. And whose fault is that? Ours.

So it's easy to look at this as kind of a goofy artifact of the '60s, and in a lot of ways it really is, but it's not without its message, even if said message feels a little tacked-on. Notably, Lourié wasn't originally going to include the city destruction scenes, which provides for an interesting thought about what could have been: Would he have gone in an even more philosophical direction, dealing with what the two monsters represent in the imaginary instead of in physical space? Or would he have replaced the destruction with something worse, possibly a goofy romance subplot like a lot of mid-20th-century monster movies have? He did self-edit a version of this film in the 1980s to conform more closely to his original plan for it, but this was never shown to the public, so we will never know what it could have been like. Fortunately, though, the movie we do have is just fine by me.

The Green Knight (2021)

directed by David Lowery

Canada, Ireland, UK, USA

130 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I wasn't sure if I was going to review this because there's already so much that's been said about it and I doubt I have anything intelligent to contribute, but after putting it at the top of my "best of the year" list, I wanted to at least get some thoughts down about it. So consider this less of a critical review and more of me talking about how I personally responded to the film.

The translation I read of the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poem was not fantastic - an extremely stodgy rendition that felt like it had been given a bag with a very limited number of words in it to choose from, and specific instructions never to become overly emotional or upsetting - but it highlighted something that, I think, made me approach this film in a different way. Prehistoric Britain is a personal fascination of mine and something that I'm so much of a stickler for in media that it ruins my enjoyment of anything set in the era, and I was almost edging on getting my enjoyment ruined several times during The Green Knight because of all of its anachronisms, but then I thought about that garbage translation I read and I realized that the Sir Gawain poem itself was not being faithful to the truth of ancient Britain, but creating a motif that would have been recognizable to the people of its day. The Green Knight does not attempt to re-create a specific time and place so much as it uses those themes as a palette with which to create something recognizably "old", but in the process it creates something out-of-time. It's not important that we believe 100% what we're seeing is pinned to a specific era. The feeling just has to be there enough for us to respond to it.

There is a scene that I particularly liked in which Sir Gawain essentially has his photograph taken by the lady of the castle he comes across in the wood. This is a great example of trading perfect historical accuracy for tone, and I felt that using anachronistic technology also said something about the mystery and inaccessibility of the past. To imagine that the technology to take a photograph might have existed in the time of Arthurian legend risks bringing us into bunko Ancient Aliens territory, but as long as it remains just an idea and we recognize that we have no actual evidence to prove that it could have happened, it's such an interesting concept that I'm kind of still struck by it. There's something about the thought of people in such a far-flung time having the ability to permanently capture images without the use of painting, and how that would have impacted the entire world, that resonated with me.

In its context, the photograph plays an important role to the story as well. Gawain is captured in it not yet having reached the end of his journey. The first time we see it, he's a troubled man reckoning with his place in the world around him having been shifted and smudged to incomprehensibility. The second and last time we see the portrait, it's hanging behind him while he is on the throne during the vision where he sees himself becoming king. While he's been thrust into a role of power and fulfilled an expectation that others had of him and that he, possibly, had for himself at the start of his journey, the difference between the morally conflicted man on the throne and the confused, searching knight in the photograph is only the addition of a crown.

One of the most interesting things that was present in the film and not in the poem is that there seemed to be this confederacy of women throughout the entire thing, who were driving the entire thing, and that was never explained or even really shown in full but only hinted at. Gawain's mother is rumored to be a witch and is shown performing some kind of ritualistic magic multiple times, magic that parallels and perhaps even invites the Green Knight's challenge to Arthur's court. The magic she performs also mirrors King Arthur's own demise, possibly as part of a plan to get her son on the throne. Even in the far reaches of his journey, when Gawain comes across the castle, there's an old woman present who is blindfolded in the same manner as his mother during her rituals, suggesting that his mother's method of divination or spell-casting is not specific to her and her peers but scattered, known by many women across the land. The little girl in the post-credits scene who finds Gawain's crown also hints at an inheritance of power by girls and women. The lady of the castle, the one who takes the photograph, is learned and certainly seems to have some knowledge that neither Gawain (nor her fairly inconsequential husband) are privy to. And despite Guinevere's otherwise small role, when the Green Knight enters the king's court, it is her who delivers his message, not the Knight himself, which seemed to me to further prove that there was some connection between the Green Knight and Gawain's mother's circle of women. I would argue that girls and women are at the heart of this whole movie, influencing everything that happens, though it may not be apparent at first glance.

The central message of the story has also been changed to reflect more of the storytelling norms of our modern era as opposed to the structure of the original poem. At the time, the tale would have been told to audiences not as a story about a single man but as more of a moral fable intended to teach them something about how to be. These kinds of tales with morals still exist today, of course, and are now often blended with stories about an individual person's journey, but The Green Knight as a film is far more focused on Gawain as a single, specific man than stories of its time typically were. I am going to link to a Reddit comment that explains very eloquently how Gawain goes through five separate encounters that force him to face the five values of chivalry, because this person's analysis of the film in contrast to the original poem is very good and opened my eyes to a couple of things I had missed out on. As chivalry is really not something people follow to the letter anymore, at least not in the sense that it was followed during the Gawain poet's time, these five trials are used as moral building-blocks for Gawain as an individual instead of a lesson to to the audience about how to act. To transpose something originally written with a completely different aim into a format that modern audiences are familiar with and still not lose any of the feeling and symbolism shows that David Lowery has significant talent.

Caveat (2020)

directed by Damian McCarthy

Ireland

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Lately it seems like there's been a rise in what I think can be called unsafe horror: Horror movies in which the entire atmosphere is unsafe, as opposed to a single situation that the protagonist gets into either by mistake or by force. Of course, this has always been an element of the horror genre, but I look to the past and I largely see films where the unsafe situation does not take up the entirely of the movie. Caveat, and the rest of the films of its ilk that I'm referring to, is made out of uncertainty. We never get a toehold of familiarity to grasp onto; there's never anything reassuring or good, it's just wall-to-wall dread. I've been looking forward to seeing this one for a while now and I'm happy to say it does not disappoint.

Not only is the main character in an unsafe, bizarre situation, he himself seems to be inherently unsafe due to the fallibility of his memories, which is revealed increasingly throughout the film. The protagonist's self-doubt and unawareness of his past is used by a shady acquaintance to rope him into a shady housesitting gig involving his shady friend's daughter. This is how the film sets itself up: The main character getting duped into doing something by somebody who has way more knowledge of him than he does. So while we, the viewers, are kept in the dark, so is the main character. We have to watch everything unfold at the speed he does, and instead of feeling clunky or slow, this only ramps up the tension and, as I said, removes any anchor we might have where we can sympathize with somebody. Every character in this has something suspicious about them and that prevents us from getting comfortable.

I'm really amazed by just how oppressively uneasy the overall atmosphere of Caveat is. How it manages to make what is probably a pretty small house in reality seem labyrinthine, its walls about to fall down and blanket the characters in dank moldering wallpaper and splintery boards. Isolated on an island, decrepit and lonely, it's never explained why the people the protagonist is housesitting for still live there or how they get by in such an obviously meager situation. Nothing is ever explained except for that which is relevant to figuring out how the main character came to be in the spot he's in.

I'm going to say what I usually do when I review scary movies, which is that I don't think scariness should be a measure of the quality of a horror film by any means... but also that when a horror movie does manage to stick the landing and be properly terrifying, it can be so much fun. The last twenty minutes of this movie were SO deeply unsettling that I found myself leaning away from the screen because I was just so on edge. This is one of those movies that seems to be comprised entirely of the moment before something jumps out at you. I could count the number of actual jump scares it uses on one hand, but it makes such good use of the tension right before a jump scare that it feels like the whole thing is one big one. There's a specific scene where the main character is passing his flashlight beam around a horrible, horrible room in the basement that contains horrible things, and this musical sting keeps playing that was genuinely so nerve-wracking that I felt like I was flinching every time it hit, like a nervous dog hearing fireworks or something. I haven't seen a movie this effectively scary in a long time. I feel okay discussing this as an aspect of the film, because how scary it is is integral to the story and the film as a larger picture. This can't be isolated from its creepy parts the way some horror movies can.

And the best part is that this is not without its hidden symbols and unexplained strangenesses, so even while you might be watching in peeps from behind your hands, you can still catch things that linger in your mind and require extra thinking. No cheap scares here. One motif in particular that kept coming up throughout the film was circles. They appear often enough that they clearly mean something, but it's never explicitly established what. As a horror fan the thing I immediately thought of here was Ringu and the ghostly, electric-white circle on the videotape that represents the well Sadako was thrown down. It's likely that the circles in Caveat actually represent something similar: A hint at where a body is, perhaps a final image that someone saw. But the circles are just everywhere, and are even carried around by multiple characters in the form of flashlight beams, roving portable circles that can go with them from scene to scene. It's like by cutting the power, something in the house was forcing the characters to carry around its mark on them.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I'm going on too long about this out of excitement at something new and really really freaky, but I wanted to mention the last thing that's perplexing me about this, and that's what the dog means. Outside the nasty old house is a friendly midsized dog who seems to be decently taken care of, but is chained up in the backyard. When the main character gets to the house he is also put on a chain, so there's an obvious parallel there, and when he leaves, he takes the dog (good on him), but what does the dog mean? Why is it there? We only see it two, maybe three times throughout the whole movie, and it doesn't do anything but eat some potted meat and look cute. This leaves me with no choice but to create a picture in my mind of the dog just chilling outside the house the entire time, unaware, while unspeakably frightening things happen inside. This is probably the only time where I'm glad somebody never let their dog inside the house.

Boys from County Hell (2021)

directed by Chris Baugh

Ireland

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to this for a long time because I just think the title is so funny. The director, Chris Baugh, previously made Bad Day For The Cut, a solid, non-vampire-related revenge movie that felt like an instant classic for the genre. But I am not talking about a revenge movie here, I'm talking about a good old-fashioned vampire film. And I do mean "old-fashioned": Nothing about this resembles the classic vampire tale you've come to know from pop culture, its roots are in something far deeper.

The attitude that the characters in Boys from County Hell take towards the legend that eventually becomes their problem is interesting. It avoids falling into the standard trap of having some old-timer come onto the scene and bestow their knowledge on the youngins, who ignore it and stumble into danger (it's certainly got the youngins stumbling into danger, but the knowledge is all in their heads already). We're introduced to the vampire legend through the main character and his buddies taking the piss at the expense of some Canadian tourists, and it's clear that even though they kind of laugh it off, they do know the ins and outs of it and at least have some regard for it, if not as a literal true story then at least for its place in local history. It's sort of this halfway point between belief and disbelief, like, yeah, they say there's a vampire buried under here, how silly is that? But also we give this place a wide berth for a reason.

The characters are what made this stand out for me personally, and I think maybe the writer/director having experience with giving people that kind of short but effective backstory that comes up often in revenge films helped a lot. No one monologues about their life or their dead relatives for too long, but they also say enough to make them feel like real people with real pasts, and that's a hard balance to find. I always reference The Room when I talk about this, how that one character just comes out with "By the way, I have breast cancer" right before she's killed, in an attempt to do the very barest minimum to make us feel bad for her so we'll be sadder when she dies. That's speedrunning character development, it's cheap and it's always super obvious. Boys from County Hell gives pretty much every one of its characters time to reveal an emotional wound or two but it doesn't pace it in such a way that it feels like they're quickly dispensing with the traumas so they can get on to the blood and guts.

Another great thing about this movie is that it has a serious knack for inventive gore. It's not just "let's stick a stake through this guy's heart, let's have this guy get his throat ripped out". There's a level of care taken here. The kills- and even things that don't kill people, just these really unique moments that make you stop and go "whoa!"- are things that somebody had to deliberately come up with. The cold open is what won me over, because it established not only that we were dealing with a non-traditional vampire in a brilliant way that I've never seen done before, but it also set the stage for those little moments of "how did they come up with that?" that were so good. One scene where a guy gets a pole to the chest and it literally rips his heart out through his back in one piece made my jaw drop. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but the way it looked. Iconic.

Also, speaking of the way things look: What a great vampire. No extra ornamentation, no ostentatiousness, just a guy who's been buried in the ground for god only knows how long. I got such a sense of malevolence from this creature because instead of having bells and whistles they took three of the most inherently terrifying things to humans and smashed them together: A dash of "person who wants to murder you", a smidge of "who can't die", and a heaped tablespoon of "and who looks like he's rotting".

All this and it's really funny too. I appreciate the emotional range of this movie so much because it is so funny. The characters go through such authentic-feeling grief at the death of like half their friend group, and the trouble of being youngish and still feeling cut up about the loss of a parent while also struggling to make something of your life- and then there's this stupid vampire, and you have to fight it with all your buddies and your da, and none of you know how to fight a vampire, and the whole town is gonna die but the vampire isn't like the ones in books and oh god, it doesn't even die when you chop its head off! The response to this is an absurd, frustrated humor that gives the movie a great tone. I could have given this four stars if it hadn't dragged a little bit in the middle- like a lot of movies do- but as it is, it's a whole lot of fun without ever feeling like a movie that's trying to goad you into having a good time.

Vivarium (2019)

directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Belgium, Denmark, Ireland

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to watch this for reasons unknown. I think it was just too popular at the time and that intimidated me. There's a whole lot to unpack here, and I'm about to attempt to do that, but before anything else, I want to say: this movie is good. It's very good. I want to make sure I emphasize that it's an excellent movie aside from all of the metaphors and symbolism I believe it uses, and even if 100% of what it tries to convey goes over your head, I think anybody can still enjoy it just because of its overall quality.

The image of rows and rows of identical houses in a labyrinthine suburban neighborhood is not, by itself, necessarily indicative of any particular message, because it's used so frequently in media that it doesn't have to be attached to any societal commentary anymore. It can just be a motif used for aesthetics. It can come up in a child's drawings and in fact frequently does- the lines of houses made up of a block with a triangle for a roof, two windows, a little door; everybody knows how to draw that. But Vivarium does take a deeper look at this image of a perfectly spotless and identical suburbia, and it examines how insidious the idea of a "neighborhood" is at its heart. I think most things about this film were made to represent the unnatural cycle of life that capitalism tries to impress on young people- but not everything about it, which was crucial, and which I will get into later.

The film starts off with a young engaged couple wandering into a real estate company's office and eventually being shown around Yonder, a housing development made up of, as I just said, innumerable rows of the same house copied and pasted over and over to infinity. The sky is wrong; the clouds don't look real, and nothing about the scant bits of "nature" that exist in Yonder here and there is natural. In short, it's all obviously constructed as a prison of sorts. And it ends up being one- the couple immediately gets roped into staying in their assigned identical house, No. 9, and is almost as quickly presented with a human baby and the instruction "Raise the child and be released". 

(The child is probably the creepiest thing about this overall pretty creepy film. That boy just ain't right.)

One of a multitude of tiny details that makes everything about this movie's scenario that much more sinister is that the agent who shows the main characters the development emphasizes that it is good for a young couple. The very last thing Imogen Poots' character says before her and her fiancé get trapped in the neighborhood is that they don't have kids- not yet. These two facts, them being young people and not having had children yet, are why they're unacceptable to Yonder and, in a larger sense, to what society expects of us. It's not acceptable that by a certain time a couple should still be without a home and children, never mind personal desires or the economical instability that might lead them to that situation. "Not yet" is never a good enough explanation for not having children. A woman can't be allowed to have her own reasons for living her life at her own pace. The monitoring eyes of capitalism have to know if she can be used to reproduce more subjects.

Circling back around to the child they're given: The aspect of reproduction is what makes Vivarium such a nightmare to think about, insofar as any one singular thing can be described that way- the whole thing is just a horrible scenario to imagine yourself in. It's explicitly established that the only purpose of a mother is to produce identical, obedient subjects, who will then further ensnare other potential mothers into Yonder, who will then continue the cycle and produce more subjects in an endless loop. I am intentionally only mentioning the role of Poots' character as a mother because it seemed to me that her counterpart did not have too much of a part in any of this. I still wonder what Yonder really wanted with him- I guess he was kept around so that she would be slightly more complacent, but why allow him to dig the hole in the front yard and discover the whereabouts of their home's former inhabitants? But then that leads to the question of just... why do anything? Why any of this?

Things that seemed open-ended and made no sense were vital to the overall feel of the movie because, coming back to what I said at the beginning of this review about not every single thing being tied to a recognizable metaphor, it's better that a large portion of this is just totally absurd and random. It makes for a better viewing experience and more stuff to chew on. I know that I've used this as an example for how not to make a "dystopian" film before, but I think back yet again to that movie where straight people are ostracized and gay people are the norm. Simply flipping a stereotype on its head does not good science fiction make. Pointing a finger at a thinly veiled caricature of society doesn't do it for me either. A contextless child's drawing of rows of square-and-triangle houses means nothing without a narrative behind it. But something like Vivarium that is not straightforward, that has all of these bizarre and unsettling elements to it- like the fact that the boy seems to be in contact with some thing, some indescribable entity that may or may not be running the show- something like this is an interesting, unique dystopia. It merges recognizable commentary on society with the truly weird. Imogen Poots really does carry the film, even though kind of the whole point is that no space is given for her or her fiancé to be individuals. Her performance, especially at the end when the relentlessness of the neighborhood's assault on her leaves her just broken and helpless, is what makes this movie as good as it is. And again: it is very, very good. Director Lorcan Finnegan is establishing quite a track record.