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.

Shepherd (2021)

directed by Russell Owen

UK (Scotland)

103 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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Some bad press for this one on the ol' Letterboxd, but I'll watch anything for Kate Dickie at this point, and besides, the premise sounded like one of those things that couldn't possibly be bad. A grieving widower decides to leave everything behind and become a sheep-herder on a remote Scottish island where he is the only inhabitant (besides the sheep)? Who among us has not thought at least once about doing that at some point in the last two years? I didn't keep my expectations too high, anyway, and from the combination of poor reviews and anticipating a mediocre film, I basically got what I expected.

I'm sure that there was a trajectory the filmmakers planned for it to go on, but the meandering, non-linear path this film follows doesn't feel cohesive enough to be engaging. Now, this is a movie all about a guy who slowly starts losing his mind (or does he?), so cohesiveness is not the main point here, but even in films that rely heavily on dream sequences or the instability of their main character, there's got to be some kind of force pulling everything together, and Shepherd doesn't have that. It just has random frightening events happening with increasing rapidity to a guy who is entirely powerless to save himself or do anything at all to improve his situation.

However, my favorite thing about this is that those frightening events are executed very well. There's clearly an eye for the eerie and disturbing here, because while Shepherd as a whole didn't quite work for me, it contains a lot of singular images that are, by themselves, really creepy. A baby's hand reaching out of the top drawer of a nightstand, a field of crucified sheep. The looming and mysterious lighthouse. When the protagonist encounters a derelict, beached ship and begins to explore it, it might be the high point of the entire film, but it only takes up a couple of minutes and we don't even know if it was real or what it meant. The overall atmosphere is also as oppressive as you'd expect any movie set on a barren Scottish island to be, so even though the things it contained felt lacking, the film as a vessel is visually striking, with good sound work and cinematography.

I guess my complaint boiled down to its essence is that none of this means anything. Sure, it's meaningful in relation to the ungodly boring "guilt over dead spouse" backstory the main character has, and the visions he sees, to an extent, echo his own guilt. Things like his mother appearing to nag him even in his imagination and the form the wraith haunting the island takes on do relate directly to his memories, but it's too cobbled-together. There's no real order to anything and, most crucially, no context. This movie is all "me me me", or I guess "him him him"; the only important thing is the main character. He's the lens through which we view this island that I would have absolutely loved to "explore" outside of his limited perspective. There's moments where it looks like we're about to get some delicious and necessary context, where a better look at the history of the island and whatever else inhabits it (besides the sheep) seem within reach, but then it all falls to the wayside and the movie just kind of goes "Oh you know :)"

Maybe it's just me personally, but even though I could intimate some of what was happening, I would have enjoyed this far more if any of the points where it looked like there was about to be some background were expanded upon. We could have seen more of the previous shepherd's journal, for instance, instead of just seeing the protag riffle through it and land on a couple scratchy drawings of a crow and the phrase "She's a witch!" I'm so desperate to know more about that whole deal. The concept of something old and horrible haunting an island that requires a living person to... engage with? Feed off of? We don't know! We never find out. But after 103 minutes of this we do get close to feeling like we have an idea that there's some monstrous force on the island, and it's a disappointment that that was glossed over in favor of this dude and his traumatic backstory. It's a crime that this has Kate Dickie in such an ultimately crucial role and then doesn't give her enough screen time for that role to feel as important as I think it was.

I didn't dislike this entirely, but so much of it was squandered potential. I think there was an unnecessarily heavy focus on the main character when the environment around him was much more interesting than how he reacted to it. They're two totally different things, so I shouldn't really compare them, but I was thinking of the film Caveat when I was watching this and how Caveat does a similar premise (taking a weird job in an isolated, decrepit location and having bizarre things happen to you) but focuses much more on the external world rather than the protagonist's internal torment, and is much better for it. As I always say, though, this movie exists; it's the way that it is because people wanted it to be that way, and I respect that. I couldn't do any better. I can just point out things I wasn't a fan of.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

directed by Edgar Wright

UK

117 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is a movie that made a very strong first impression on me, and to some extent that's still the impression that I'm left with, but it's also a movie where the longer I think about it, the more flaws I see. I think I liked it as a whole more than I did when I zoomed in and started to examine it, and in the grand scheme of things I did think it was good, which is why I'm going to talk about the things I liked first. I'm going to assume we all know what the film is generally about, and I'll probably get into some minor spoilers, so be forewarned.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of why I liked this movie is that everything about the way it unfolds is so fluid. It deals with intersecting timelines and various impossible things in such a way that the veracity of what happens doesn't feel like it matters, because whether or not everything is actually happening isn't as important as the fact that the main character is experiencing it. I can't even confidently say that this is a story about time travel, because even though the main character has the inexplicable ability to see and experience events that happened several decades before her birth, it doesn't feel like there's any specific name that can be applied to that ability. I admire very much how Last Night in Soho doesn't feel a need to put a label on things and instead creates a narrative space where everything flows perfectly, no questions asked. This is a world in which the impossible doesn't feel impossible, and yet it's not an unfamiliar world or a world that requires us to suspend our disbelief, because the story is presented in such a way that all of its unreal parts fit together with the real.

That initial scene where Eloise falls asleep and enters her vision of Sandy's life in the 1960s is done so well that it almost feels like one of those long single-take scenes that leave you wondering how in the world it was done. The literal and metaphorical dance between Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy throughout the crowded environment of that shady nightclub felt so immaculate that they really did seem like facets of one character. Throughout the film, the distance between the two women fluctuates, sometimes feeling like they're a reflection of one another and sometimes like McKenzie is trapped on a roller coaster ride she no longer wants to be on. Again, at no point does any of this resemble anything I've seen before in a "time-travel" film - despite any other problems I may have had with it, this is the kind of truly inventive and fresh thing that can get me to sit down and shut up and enjoy it for two hours, and turn my brain back on afterwards.

A lot of the problems I did have with this are personal preference things, largely because I am not terribly fond of the whole '60s-throwback aesthetic that Edgar Wright seems to be fond of. While his previous films (which I have not seen, so forgive me if this is all totally wrong) aren't as explicit about it, Last Night in Soho goes whole-hog with the idolization of London at that specific time period, and this brings me to my first point against the film: That, despite the plot ostensibly being that a fairly naïve, near-sighted girl gets confronted with the "real world", the whole movie basically refuses to engage critically with the exact kind of re-appraisal of London in the '60s that it pretends to (or at least feels like it should) be about.

I don't think this movie was trying to present us a detailed listicle about all the ways London sucked back then, nor should it have, because that would have been distracting and preachy, but the main character doesn't seem like she learns anything in the end. On the one hand I did like that, because it shows her managing her unrealistic expectations while still achieving her dreams, but on the other hand... I don't know how to say this without sounding harsh, but when you think about it, Eloise doesn't personally get into any trouble that specifically pertains to London being a dangerous place. Everyone even slightly older than her seems intent on reminding her that the city is big and scary around every turn, but aside from that creepy, aggressive cabbie at the beginning and the culture shock of living in college dorms, she doesn't even remotely find herself in the kind of trouble that Sandy did in the '60s. She just kind of encounters another person's trouble as an outsider, even if she does end up personally involved. This can make her utter devotion to protecting Sandy almost feel patronizing: Here is this girl who has never been through anything trying to become the savior of another girl who is actively being abused. I absolutely don't intend to imply that you have to have been through someone's specific struggle in order to want to help them, but when you look at Last Night in Soho from a certain angle, the contrast between Eloise's relative privilege and quiet upbringing and Sandy getting deeper and deeper into the pit of desperation and abuse is quite striking, and not in a good way.

I also just feel like this movie is really reductive. I was disappointed by the end. I'm not sure what the point was in making Sandy turn out to be a serial murderer if the film was then going to turn around and still retain the "but they deserved it" message that it initially seemed like it was pushing. I guess this was another turning point in Eloise's realization that the wider world was more complicated and risky than she'd expected? Finding out that her idol and inspiration had her own dark secret? But just like with everything else, this didn't feel like it made any huge difference in the outcome.

Aesthetically this is a great film, it's very entertaining visually and Anya Taylor-Joy carries most of it. This definitely would have been worse in the hands of a different director or writer, but I just felt confused at best and disappointed at worst by a lot of the decisions made in where the narrative went. I think its worst flaw is that a complex and layered story could wind up in such a flat, one-dimensional ending.

Ghost Town (1988)

directed by Richard Governor

USA

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I found this in an online discussion about the best movies involving haunted/abandoned towns, and the person who mentioned this title was so emphatic about recommending it that I looked it up and decided to watch it. If nothing else, I knew anything with Charles Band attached to it would usually be good for a laugh. But there's something weirdly compelling about this movie that's hard to put my finger on. It might be one of those things you just have to be in the right mood for.

If you look online, you'll find a lot of cheesy posters for this movie featuring skeletons in chaps and other things like that, and you might assume you know what to expect if you go off of those posters, but I guarantee it's different than you're thinking. There's a vibe to this, I don't know how to explain it. The concept is so strong that it outshines the trappings of a relatively cheap late-80s horror film made by a studio that was winding down after consistently churning out so many horror films, you'd be hard-pressed not to have seen at least one or two. It begins when a woman driving down a desert road alone is accosted by a cloud of dust and the disembodied sounds of stampeding horses, then dragged off by invisible hands and her car left burnt out in the middle of the road. Our heroic deputy is called upon to investigate, but pretty soon he ends up having his car catch fire and he unwittingly follows the missing woman into a bizarre pocket of reality where the residents of a town have been trapped by an evil entity for the past hundred years. Why exactly everyone's car catching fire signaled their entry into this pocket reality was never really explained, but in my opinion it adds to the general weirdness and didn't bother me much.

A single ghostly cowboy or spirit sharpshooter does not itself an interesting horror movie make, but the concept of an entire town trapped in time, cursed to exist just under the skin of reality, always there but never fully visible unless you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time - that's what fascinated me about Ghost Town. The landscape under the landscape, the world beyond sight. The deputy doesn't enter the haunted town all at once; as soon as he's forced to abandon his car, he gradually begins a journey through a scorched and desolate landscape that becomes more and more occupied by the echoes of something not quite dead but not quite living. The people and materials around him solidify as he tries in vain to walk his way out, until - after being accosted by the desperate, pitiful living corpse of the town's sheriff, begging him to end the evil once and for all - he's stuck fast with no way to go home. The townsfolk are now as solid around him as any living person would be, but in short order he finds out that they're nothing more than revenants.

There isn't anything special about the aesthetic here: it's no more than a bunch of white people in cheap generic faux-Western costumes putting on bad accents and pretending not to know what a zipper is. But like I said, it's the story that keeps this movie interesting, not the way it's told. There's just this kind of Westworld-esque uncanniness to it that spoke volumes even when the visuals didn't put in much work.

It's also got a villain who's genuinely terrifying despite being just sort of a cliche evil guy. Like most everything here, the exact mechanics of why the town is stuck in time are never explained, only that it's the fault of this drifter named Devlin who cursed the whole town to remain trapped in a liminal state between life and death for as long as he himself lived - and unfortunately, he seems to be immortal and really, really pissed off. He also has the power to somehow "banish" townspeople who resist his iron fist, turning them into disembodied voices who the rest of the residents listen to in fear, knowing that could be them if they don't obey. In general, Devlin comes off like a deeply disturbing, reality-warping abomination in a loose-fitting human costume - something that might have had the outward appearance of a generic outlaw at some point, but over the years has become so angry and hateful that he's something else now. At one point he claims to have haunted the town for "one thousand years", which could be nothing more than villainous hyperbole, but when he's finally done in and his body splits apart to reveal that he was full of dirt, dust, and writhing black worms, I tended to think he was truly something separate from the miserable half-ghosts the innocent townsfolk had become.

I would almost say that this concept deserves a better vehicle than this movie, but I feel like the fact that Ghost Town is slightly goofy and your experience of it may vary is part and parcel of the film as, like, itself. Maybe it's better because you have to look past the surface level, look past the bad dialogue and corny acting and poor set dressing, to excavate the thought-provoking kernel of story at the center. Or maybe I'm just making too much of a bad film. I'm finding the number of films that I think are objectively bad to be vanishingly small these days, though - all art being up for interpretation means that there really can't be a single, consensus "bad" or "good". It's all what you make of it, and something popularly regarded as "bad" can resonate with you if it strikes the right chord. If nothing else, appreciate Ghost Town for the gorgeous practical effects. Happy Valentine's Day, I'm in love with horror movies.

Immanence (2022)

directed by Kerry Bellessa

USA

93 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

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I try to keep apprised of new horror and sci-fi movies coming out, but I do it for entirely personal reasons, picking and choosing which ones sound good to me and disregarding others no matter how popular or well-liked they may be. Immanence caught my eye because I love any horror movie involving radio transmissions, and when you add mystery objects from space and the ocean to that mix, it should create something excellent. But... well, I've gotten excited about exactly 3 new horror movies this year, and we're three for three on disappointments thus far.

Immanence turned out to be a religious horror movie that felt like it was made from a Christian perspective. I'm not religious, but suspending my disbelief has never been an issue, so I don't have a problem watching something from a viewpoint I personally don't subscribe to. However, the reason why heavily Christian religious horror feels like it doesn't work for me is because by definition there is always an "out" (which is God). Part of what makes (not all, but the majority of) horror so effective is that we need to feel helpless, like there's nothing and no one that can save us. Even if it's not true, the viewer or reader or participant needs to feel like it is, for a time. Texas Chain Saw Massacre proved the viability of the cathartic, triumphant ending, but I doubt any slasher film would feel as potent if the final girl were running through a house with well-lit exit signs or packing a gun with which she could easily just shoot her pursuer. It has to feel like there's a chance the characters may be in real, serious danger that they can't get out of, and horror from a Christian point of view renders that impossible, because no matter what happens, God is always present offscreen and ready to assist the characters once things get too dire. It robs the characters of agency, too: It doesn't matter how clever you are if only God can save you.

Maybe that's satisfying for some people. Maybe if you're religious, it brings you joy to see people's faith rewarded - I'm not judging that, everybody gets something different out of every movie. But I feel like even if a religious horror movie gets really down deep into demonology and gives us truly scary villains, all they ever are is a foil to the glory of God. No evil in a religious horror movie can ever be actually compelling beyond the surface level because every single character is armed with prayer and faith that defeats the horror every time without fail.

Bringing it back around to Immanence specifically, I wasn't aware that it would be this heavily religious from the start. In my defense, the synopsis says nothing whatsoever about God or demons - "survive the ultimate evil" may be a dogwhistle for more religious people than I, but to me, before watching this, it just sounded like generic horror hyperbole. The two possibilities initially presented in the film for the events that unfold are that it's either aliens or Satan, which, like, again, I'm really not here to judge, but the concept of Satan personally slingshotting a meteor around the sun and crashing it specifically into one area off the coast of Florida just for fun is a little wild, in my mind. So I was going off the assumption that Immanence would be a UFO-horror type deal, until it started leaning really heavily into the single Christian character's point of view.

There's a weird banter between all the characters in this thing that I couldn't stop thinking felt more at home in a '90s action movie than whatever Immanence is, and I'm not sure how to describe what made me feel that way. There's very little personal background on any of the characters save the two who clash the most often (the non-religious girl who advances the UFO theory most ardently, and the guy who is so Jesusy he renamed himself Jonah after he died for three minutes and declared himself saved) but for a while it's all of them together on a rented party boat, ostensibly doing science. It feels like the kind of walk-and-talk rapid-fire bunk science presented in stuff like The X-Files when they have to at least marginally explain the presence of aliens.

But none of it is real. The Christian perspective soon overrides any other theories until it becomes apparent where this movie is coming from. And it bothered me that only a handful of things even really happened. First there's the unidentified object, then they go out on the boat and pull up (I'm not joking, and yes this is as unintentionally funny as it sounds) a live pig in the trap they're using to catch fish to eat, then they see a mirage of their own boat that they board and explore and they start hearing what appear to be radio signals from a future where most of them are doomed. Ultimately this all leads to the physical manifestation of a guy we're supposed to believe is Satan, who is maybe the least intimidating devil ever put onto film, with his receding hairline and single red contact lens. I actually skipped half of his monologue because after a point it genuinely felt like he was just ad-libbing random stuff, it was unbearable. But all of these things are so few and far between, so spread out during this movie's achingly long 93-minute running time, that they make up about 10% of the film, and the other 90% is bickering and one-sided theological debates where everybody sounds like they think the other side is just the stupidest thing ever. This movie is boring, on top of everything else. I wish I'd looked up the director before watching it instead of during because I would have seen that they (and the same writer) made the very widely derided Amber Alert and possibly saved myself the trouble of sitting through Immanence.