Midnight Mass

Fallen Angel

Midnight Mass
TV Mini Series
7 episodes September 2021
Canada/USA
Directed by Mike Flanagan

Warning: All the spoilers... well, many of them implied, at the very least. If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

Midnight Mass is the third recent(ish) hit series created by Mike Flanagan, who is a director I find a little hit and miss. I loved Absentia (reviewed here) and Doctor Sleep (reviewed here) for example but hated Oculus (reviewed here) and was fairly entertained but ultimately disappointed in his hit show The Haunting Of Hill House (reviewed here), which took more than just a few liberties with the original source material. Although some of the cast from that show and his follow up adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw, aka The Haunting Of Blye Manor, are still working with him here.

And that was one of the good things about this show... the acting in this is, once again, incredible and the highly talented cast, including such people as Zach Gilford, Kate Siegel, Hamish Linklater, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli and Henry Thomas... are what keep you watching. That and the way the script unfolds although, I have to say, I did have a few problems myself in that I was disappointed in the way the story chose to develop, the lack of any surprises and what I also think might be a major mistake in terms of the inner ‘physics’ of the series that seems to have been overlooked (unless a load of stuff was cut out which would originally explain a certain oversight).

The series has a strong theme of Religious faith, practice and, ultimately, fanaticism and the story deals, on the surface of the first episode, with a new priest transferred to a small island community who, well, starts bringing little miracles with him. Indeed the seven episodes are named after biblical terms so we have Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Lamentations, Gospel, Acts Of The Apostles and Revelations. The majority of the small population of the island are Christian, asides from a Muslim sheriff and his son... and the more they attend the Sunday service and take the sacrament, where they eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, as proxied by wafers and wine... the more their senses start to sharpen, some of them begin to look younger, a paralysed girl walks... and so on. The only real non-practicing Christian character is a young man who has just served four years in prison for drink driving and killing a woman as he fell asleep at the wheel. He is haunted each night by the corpse of the woman watching over him as he tries to sleep and he is the one who really starts to question what he’s seeing on the island when things start to get... miraculous.

Okay, I will say that I loved the show, it held my attention, I was hooked and entertained for all seven episodes and I would recommend it to all my horror loving friends... but...

Okay, here’s the thing. It telegraphs itself heavily as it goes. By the end of the first episode I realised who the mystery priest really was due to the story being a little too heavy handed with its hints... something not ‘revealed’ until the end of episode three. In the second episode I realised just who the father of the young lady who is the island doctor was. And added to this, my first reaction at seeing a lot of the people in this show was... why are they all wearing ‘old person’ make up. Ever since I was a kid and I saw the Star Trek episode The Deadly Years, I’ve been disappointed with ‘ageing’ make-up. You can tell right away when someone has been done up with this, even if they’ve only been aged a little... so I knew very early on that it was only there to slowly come off as the show progressed and that the only common catalyst that could get this reaction in people was the sacrament. I figured out the priest, played absolutely brilliantly by Hamish Linklater in a riveting performance, was putting something in the wine and, yes, that it was probably something like blood.

The story felt just a little too much like ‘Salem’s Lot to me but, that’s okay, I love that book and the original TV mini series. And the reason it disappointed me a little is because, when it’s revealed that the ‘angel’ in the desert who de-aged the priest was a kind of flying demon of some kind, the story went directly into vampire mode, with the priest mistaking the word of God for vampire mythos (although the word vampire is never referenced and none of the characters seem to have any point of reference for them... which frankly they could have used by the time they’d get up to episode seven). Also, the priest in question has already died and been infused with vampire blood before he returns to the island as a young man... so he really should already be sensitive to light and start burning up in the sunlight (like everybody else in the story) but, no, he kind of dies again and then starts going through that whole process... which really makes no sense compared to the ‘rules’ that exist for everybody else. So, yeah, bits  of this really annoyed me, to be honest.

That being said, I did like the flying vampire guy who is somewhat reminiscent in appearance of a winged version of Nosferatu (who was, of course, the basis for the look of the vampire in ‘Salem’s Lot, my review of the TV show can be found here). However, it also seems clear to me that his look is greatly inspired from Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell’s iconic painting of a winged demon entitled Vampire’s Kiss... which has inspired a few movie monsters in its time, I believe. So, I guess, if they had to go down the vampire route... at least we have one in this series which looks really great, it has to be said (and who eats a lot of cats, too).

However, asides from these gaping plot holes and going down the vampire route instead of, well, maybe exploring the ways religion taken as a literal thing can also overlap with vampire folklore, which I think would have been more interesting, I thought Midnight Mass was a pretty addictive show and certainly worth a look for fans of horror. Also, there’s some great imagery introduced into the show, like waking up to a beach full of hundreds of dead cats one morning... lots to look at but, ultimately, it felt as flawed as it was entertaining.

The Haunting Of Hill House

Eleanour Handbasket

The Haunting Of Hill House -
Extended Director’s Cut
10 episodes. 2018
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Paramount Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has spoilers for pretty much all iterations of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House.

Well this is going to be a hard one to write about because, in some ways, it feels almost like a personal attack on one of my favourite movie adaptations, the great 1963 version of The Haunting (which I reviewed here), based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting Of Hill House. Easily the best horror movie ever made and I suspect that’s why horror director Mike Flanagan, who I actually find fairly hit and miss, was so drawn to it. Everybody loves this novel/movie and, if you can get it right, it’s one of the scariest things you could do.

Alas, I’ll be up front here and say the reason why I’m torn on this new TV series ‘adaptation’, for want of a better word, is that it happens to be a quite well made TV show while, at the same time, having almost nothing in common with the original text.

That’s not to say the original text doesn’t make it into this iteration. It’s peppered all over the place throughout the series, just in completely different context. Richard Johnson’s opening delivery of Shirley Jacksons words, for example, open the series but this time spoken by the character Steven Crain and it is he who speaks dead Eleanour’s (Nell’s) lines at the end of this version.

Other examples would be the repeat dialogue from caretaker Mrs. Dudley’s line reading... “In the night... in the dark.” At least it’s, most of the time, Mrs. Dudley’s character who is saying it throughout the series here but there are a lot of lines of dialogue which are taken out of the mouths of others and given to different characters with a completely different context to the words... kinda like a fanboy homage to the original. Which in some way, I can’t really blame the writers for.

And as for the “Oh God, who’s hand was I holding!” moment, which was so terrifying in the 1963 adaptation (even though it was used as a highlight of the trailer), it’s referenced here at least twice by different characters. It’s like they wanted to have two different ways of giving us the same kind of scare (which is truly terrifying in the novel and original film version) but failing in the scare department and indulging themselves twice.

Not to mention a load of name drop references to people and things associated with the legacy... such as the funeral home being called Harris, in reference to Julie Harris who played Eleanour/Nell in the original movie. Heck, they even bring back Russ Tamblyn, who played Luke in the original, as Nell’s psychiatrist. Not to mention Nell’s ‘paranormal’ hail stone attack back story incident actually being present in the narrative, albeit given to the mother figure here, Olivia.

So, okay... I’ll start off with listing all the really bad points before finding my way to the positives because, it is a gripping TV show, even if it has nothing to do with the original...

Rather than three strangers brought together by the parapsychologist in the original... Nell, Theo and Luke are all siblings, along with their other brother and sister Steven and Shirley (obviously named after writer Shirley Jackson). They, along with their mother and father, played here by Carla Gugino of Sin City and Henry Thomas, who played the little boy in E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial, all live for a few months in Hill House. So when they eventually return (in the final episode), the events which are manifest are things which have been with them all their lives.

And the film takes a time jump kind of approach... which wouldn’t really be even doable if the director was making a straight adaptation. That is to say, the narrative keeps cross cutting from when the central characters were kids in Hill House to their various lives in the present (like in the original Stephen King novel IT)... where we have Timothy Hutton playing the older version of Henry Thomas’ Hugh Crain... another name which will mean something to fans of the original work but, again, taken totally out of context here. It’s actually not that confusing but the very nature of the structure is enough to tip you off to certain things as, of course, ghost stories have always been trafficking in states of temporal manipulation... ghosts by their very nature are ‘of a time’ different to that when they manifest.

For example, the death of Eleanour at the end of the novel/film is done and dusted in the very first of these ten episodes (half of the content of which doesn’t even take place in the titular residence). It’s not even the same death, instead it harkens back to the character who hung herself from the top of the spiral staircase at the start of the 1963 version. However, once Eleanour dies it’s more than enough to tip off the audience that the ‘bent-neck lady’ as seen by young Eleanour throughout the series, is obviously her older self revisiting backwards in time. I actually got there way before the character died right back near the start of the first episode actually but, yeah, by the end of the episode I think most people would have twigged it and it becomes something of a spoiler. Unless, maybe, Flanagan intended it to be just that, in order to give more meaning to the structure of the show itself... I dunno, could be, I suppose.

Another big element for me which kinda failed is that, unlike the 1963 movie, the show is not actually scary. And when it does go for some fright scenes it uses that technique of making the ambient sound in a room sound more ‘fizzy’ (a technical term, obviously) and it telegraphs (subconsciously for some, perhaps) that something unusual is about to happen. The 1963 one had outstanding sound design and that added much to the scary atmosphere... here it’s just like every other horror movie you see these days and... sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t but if you’re going to do a film following in the steps of the classic movie, then maybe you want to do something more jarring or special with the sound?

Also, the big, clever trick of the 1963 version is that you really see very little and your head puts the frights together for you... for this one, the big ‘scare’ moments are anything but subtle and often come across as cheap tricks.

Okay, I’m coming off as a little negative here but only because I love the original versions in their respective media so much. This TV show is actually quite well put together, in spite of some of my earlier criticisms...

For instance, the way the director inserts ghostly figures appearing and disappearing from certain scenes, such as a 360 degree pan which both includes and excludes ghosts depending on which revolution it is on. Or some nice transitions such as... one of those when they definitely got the sound right... a man nailing a frame to a wall in one shot cutting to a guy in Hill House knocking in a chimney as the bangs, slightly exaggerated, spill over between both shots and time zones.

There are also some nice moments scattered throughout where the director uses a very slow, almost imperceptible zoom on a static shot and, clichéd as this has perhaps become in modern horror, he makes this work fairly well and, while the show isn’t actually nearly as scary as it seems to want to be, it’s certainly handled competently as a technique and adds to a voyeuristic, creepy atmosphere which is held throughout the show’s ten episodes.

So yeah... some nice stuff and, because of the decade in which Flanagan is directing this from, Theo’s lesbianism is much more overt than what the Robert Wise directed version got away with when the character was played by Claire Bloom, where it was definitely there in a kind of capitalised highlight of the subtext but, by nature of its time (I suspect), much more suppressed.

Another interesting thing... and I didn’t even realise this until I was about four episodes in... is that the majority of episodes, bar a few of them, are all told through the eyes of one of the main characters. So Luke, Steve, Shirley, Eleanour, Theo, the mother and father are all given their own episode and, of course, this helps with certain ‘reveals’ when an event already witnessed by one character catches up with another character and we can see the whole picture. Such as when Carla Gugino smashes the mirror of a dresser in one scene. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty obvious what caused her character to do this but it’s nice seeing it revisited from her eyes when the time comes. So, while the structure of the way the story is presented may seem ponderous or padded out some of the time, it actually really isn’t... it’s just a complex puzzle the director is presenting to us in an interesting way and, I have to say, it must have been really hard to keep it all in your head in the right order at the writing stage when certain things need to be injected into a specific person’s episode and still be a ‘reveal’ when scenes are revisited. I wonder how much of that stuff was created serendipitously in the editing room.

So yeah, that’s me about done with this particular project. The Haunting Of Hill House TV show is an entertaining enough horror series with much more to be admired than scared of but, absolutely not anything like the original source material and fans of previous versions of this might find this a huge barrier to getting any enjoyment of the show. So if you’ve not read the original novel or seen the 1963 classic, then you will probably get a heck of a lot more out of this than others might. I’ll just leave you with this one thought though... in the 1963 movie, Eleanour, once she has ‘passed on’ and become a ghost, gives us the closing narration... “Hill House has stood for ninety years and will probably stand for ninety more. And we who walk at Hill House, walk alone.” In this version, it’s a very much alive Steven Crain who narrates the famous line reading but, this time around, it’s changed to... “And those who walk there, walk together.” Which is a very different look at the equation and says something, perhaps everything, about this new manifestation of what is, to many, a classic piece of literary and cinematic horror. Still, after all these years, it’s nice to see that walls continue upright, bricks meet neatly and the floors are still, to this day, firm.

Doctor Sleep

Look Before You Sleep

Doctor Sleep
2019 USA Directed by Mike Flanagan
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Contains spoilers for the original novel of Doctor Sleep.

Doctor Sleep is a pretty good film but I’m really surprised that Stephen King himself, the author of this sequel to his earlier book The Shining, has endorsed it. It’s not a secret that King hated Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of The Shining (reviewed by me here) because of the way it differed from the novel and there are two reasons why I would have thought that King would have been equally damning of this new movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep. One is that the last third of the movie is nothing like the last third of the original book (which I reviewed here). It takes so many more liberties with the text than Kubrick did on his adaptation of The Shining and the ending is completely changed. That in itself would have been something he would be quite critical of, I’d have thought but you also have to factor in that director Mike Flanagan (who directed the wonderful Absentia, which I reviewed here) has deliberately synched it in visually, in a lot of it, to Kubrick’s version of The Shining... which King hated. So, yeah, puzzled but happy, at least, that the famous horror novelist is finally recognising a good movie, albeit a slightly flawed version of his original novel here.

So lets get to it then.

The film will give fans of Kubrick’s original chills right from the opening Warner Brothers logo, as the Newton Brothers recreate the first few bars of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s opening title variation of the Deus Irae from The Shining before they go into their own thing. The film starts off not long after the original and we get some scenes showing Danny and his mother after the events of that film. These two don’t look as much like the original actors as you might like but they’ve done their best to make them look like variations of what they might look like at that point in time. Then the movie picks up speed and jumps to Ewan McGregor playing a grown up version of the first film’s/novel’s central child protagonist Danny Torrance, first in the scene where he wakes up in a woman’s bed in full ‘morning after’ mode and, then, as he ends up in New Hampshire and is helped back into both employment and into the local alcoholics anonymous group by his new friend Billy (played here by Cliff Curtis). We also get background on the group of antagonists called The Knott, headed up by Rebecca Ferguson as Rose The Hat.

The film then jumps forward another eight years and carries on with the story of the novel for a good way, building up the tension in The Knott but precluding them systematically dying from measles due to contaminated steam (steam is basically their name for the essence found inside people who ‘shine’). So we get them noticing the young girl protagonist Abra (who has a powerful version of ‘the shining’ in her and who is played by Kyliegh Curran here) and we get Abra’s psychic relationship with Danny reaching the point that, after she psychically witnesses the slow murder and absorption of a kid at the hands of The Knott, she seeks Danny out in real life and the two ultimately hatch a plan to put a stop to The Knott before The Knott can find and kill them too.

Then, around about the point where The Knott spring a trap set by Danny, Abra and Billy, the film deviates massively from the original novel in a lot of ways. Although the last battle takes place in the grounds of the Overlook Hotel it’s only Rose in that final battle and not a big battle royale with a large portion of The Knott. Also, in the book the Overlook is no longer there and The Knott have their campsite in the ruins. In the movie, Danny and Abra lure Rose to the still standing Overlook Hotel for their final showdown. There are other characters that make more appearances than they did in the novel too and, frankly, the number of survivors of ‘the good guys’ and the specific people still left standing at the end is completely different. It is like watching a new story from this point on.

It all looks and sounds fabulous though. The performances by McGregor, Ferguson and Curran are brilliant and Curtis give solid support as Billy. In fact, there really isn’t a bad performance in this movie. Even Alex Essoe, who takes over from Shelley Duvall as Danny’s mum Wendy, does a good job here... especially since she doesn’t look all that like the original actress (the same could perhaps be said of whoever they’ve got playing Jack Torrance in lieu of Jack Nicholson here... I can’t find out who plays him in this as the Internet seems somehow shrouded in mystery about him right now).

The last third features a lot more Stanley Kubrick references (pitching in with the references at the opening of the film) and it’s a fun time if you’re an admirer of the Kubrick picture. Some of the sets and shot set ups have been recreated (and that’s down to the sound design too) but, nice as they are to look at, it’s all a bit of a strange mix up. For instance, in the novel, Jack Torrance makes an appearance right at the end in a rescue/redemption moment. Here that’s gone and the scene and necessity for his appearance is also not here... instead, Flanagan tries to shoehorn the character into a much bigger role and... honestly, it doesn’t work that well here, I think. Also, the character’s effect on Danny and the subsequent chase scene is... well it’s a bit laboured, it seems to me.

However, the party guests, the brief reappearance of the twins and other things are done pretty well.  One cameo and set up for the new denouement which people who haven’t read King’s The Shining may find puzzling is also strangely mixed in here and, like I said, if you have only seen Stanley’s take on the story, then it might seem like a really clumsy 'deus ex machina' moment. I’m talking about the boiler in the Overlook Hotel... I’m not going to say much about it here other than to remind readers that, in the original novel The Shining, it played a huge role... and I’m saying that bearing in mind that I haven’t read the novel since the late 1970s/early 1980s but, yeah, even I can remember the boiler room being a big thing in the book. So, yeah, Flanagan and co bring that back in to the mix but, like I said, it’s going to seem like a really sloppy addition if you haven't read The Shining.

The cinematography is all good though and the music from the Newton Brothers gets back nearer to the soundscape of The Shining soundtrack once you get into the last third. Honestly, there’s a series of shots which come just after the film really starts deviating from the book and I was kinda expecting them to happen and I was thinking, I hope they remember to properly use Carlos and Elkind’s Deus Irae here again... yeah, they do and although the sequence of shots is much, much shorter than the original ones the director is parodying (and shot at night in this instance), it does feel good when this little moment comes.

And that’s me done on this one I think. I hate the new ending as I thought the one in the book was perfect and, frankly, if King ever gets it into his head to write a third novel in that sequence, the movie studios are going to surely find it hard to adapt it after the big U-Turn ending this film takes. That being said, in spite of all these terrible changes plus the overuse of a character who would have been much better left as the brief but weighty appearance he has in the novel, I still thoroughly enjoyed the ride on this one and will certainly be grabbing the Blu Ray when this one gets released. UK fans of the score may want to know that there’s a CDR release of it on US Amazon which they’ll ship to the UK, if you want to hear the music properly rather than attempt to listen to a disappointing and compressed electronic download. Looking forward to giving that one a spin when it finally arrives in the mail. Anyway, Doctor Sleep is definitely something you should see if you liked the Kubrick version of The Shining but please don’t expect something close to the book... there are some wild deviations here.

Before I Wake

Am Mad Butterfly

Before I Wake
USA 2016 Directed by Mike Flanagan
Intrepid Pictures German Blu Ray Zone B 

I don’t know how I managed to miss this one last year.

I first became aware of  Before I Wake earlier in the year when Varese Sarabande released a very limited pressing of the score on CD. Since it was by The Newton Brothers and had themes by Danny Elfman, I figured I’d pick it up in advance of the inevitable cinema release of the film. However, I then started wandering the internet and realised that it had already been out at the cinema in this country... according to the IMDB it got released in the UK in April of 2016 so, since I like the odd horror movie or two, I am surprised I totally missed this one when it came out. Especially since it was written and directed by Mike Flanagan.

Flanagan is someone who I have a weak track record with at the moment. I saw his Occulus movie with Karen Gillan (which also had a cool score by The Newton Brothers) and I wasn’t much impressed. Nor was I tempted to go and see his prequel to the US version of Ouija after the original movie had been so dire (although I’m told Flanagan’s movie is pretty good). I did, however, love one of his first features, Absentia (which I reviewed here) and so once I’d found out this was by him, I felt on more familiar territory than when I watched the trailer... which makes the film look like a glorified version of that old tale, The Monkey’s Paw. Which it kinda is, actually, with just a little more window dressing.

I ordered a German Blu Ray for the princely sum of £6 because the UK doesn’t have a Blu Ray release of this yet and, if the marketing of this movie continues in the way it has, I doubt if we could expect one anytime soon, either.

The film itself stars Kate Bosworth as Jessie and Thomas Jane as Mark, a bereaved mother and father who have lost their only child, a son, in a freak drowning accident in their bathtub. So they have decided to adopt a child, which is where their new foster son Cody, played by Jacob Tremblay, enters the picture. Cody has had a number of troubled placements with previous families and we already get more than a hint of just how troubled they were from a pre-credits sequence showing one of the previous foster fathers going to shoot Cody dead in bed.

Now, one of the nice things about this movie is that there are no twists around the corner for you to puzzle over and, inevitably, be disappointed in when you get them an hour before the end of the piece. Instead, everything is up front and out in the open so it’s not that long before Cody, who tries to stay up without falling asleep every day and night, falls asleep and the things of his dreams are manifested to those closest to him, in this case his new foster parents. At the start this seems a benign gift rather than the curse it appears to be later... he dreams of beautifully colourful butterflies and they appear to Jessie and Mark until he wakes up. After a few more nights of this strange behaviour where he gets more surreal in his dreaming of the butterflies as his impression of them grows (there’s a nice scene with brightly coloured ‘light bulb butterflies’, for example), things start to get a little out of hand as he dreams up Jessie and Mark’s dead son. Rather than report all this, though, in a stunning display of unbelievable stupidity from the central protagonists, the couple decide to accept these occurrences as fairly normal, rather than go through the obvious denial and evidence gathering stage.

Mark realises, after a few visitations, that it’s not really his dead son but Cody’s imagination toppling out of his mind. Jessie, however, wants to carry on with theses manifestations so she gets a doctor to prescribe her child some sleeping pills for the evening. Alas, what she doesn’t know is that Cody also has a monster that eats people living in his head and it's this which brings the peril right into Jessie and Mark’s house....

And that’s as far as I going with the story set up, other than it’s got no twist ending (as I said earlier) and it’s a fairly straight forward arc to the end, especially when it strays away from that Monkey’s Paw angle a little. Another thing that’s nice about it in terms of the story is that, although it’s not particularly twisted or unpredictable, it does do a couple of things at certain points which are not the usual things you would see in a cosy, American horror movie. There are genuine sacrifices made by the characters at specific moments and that gives the film a lift in certain places where, honestly, it sometimes needs them.

The only weakness I could find was the muffled and unrealistic reaction the main adult protagonists have on finding out their new foster son dreams things alive but if you are okay with this, then some of the surreal imagery, like the two light bulb butterflies who swarm together with many others and become the demonic eyes of some nightmare creature, are quite rewarding. Also, the director resists the usual Hollywood horror fetish of constantly moving the camera around like you’re on a roller coaster ride. There are loads of static or extremely slow tracked/panned/zoomed shots in this and it gives the film a nice leisurely pace. Whether that’s necessarily a good thing for a horror movie to possess is something which is perhaps better left for another discussion but it makes a change from some of the other stuff you see in modern horror movies so I felt this was a good move.

And yes, the score by The Newton Brothers and Danny Elfman is pretty good as a stand alone lesson and certainly appropriate as you get into the movie. Again, it’s not ‘quite’ your typical horror movie scoring sessions here although, as I’ve said a few times above, it does have its moments.

Before I Wake is not the best Mike Flanagan movie I’ve seen, for sure. Absentia still takes my number one spot in terms of that. It is, however, fairly good fun and if you like low key horror movies with not too many scares (it has to be said) but a nice tone and some inventive creations thrown in, then this is probably a film you’ll be okay with. I’m now wondering if it’s time I tried to find this director’s other feature that I haven’t seen before, Hush. Maybe I’ll try to catch up with that one next.

Absentia

Fond Hearts

Absentia
2011 USA 
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Second Sight UK DVD Blu Ray B

Absentia is a film I watched because, after seeing Oculus (reviewed here) by the same director and being somewhat disappointed by it, one of the people I talk to on Twitter, @screamqueenlauren, told me I should check out this earlier feature as it was a bit of a classic for her. So yeah, I gave it a go, via a cheap blu ray from Fopp, and I’d have to say that she was dead right about one thing... Absentia is a far superior film and it was presumably made on a much lower budget too... since the director partially financed this with kickstarter funding.

Absentia won me over pretty quickly in that it has the look and feel of a typical US independent film. It’s not that it’s not in any way slick because the whole thing is very well put together (for a low budget feature) but it does seem a little rough around the edges at times and that’s what gives the whole thing both its inherent charm and, in certain sequences, gives it something a little different to the standard shock moments of a horror film. This is partially to do with the music too but I’ll get to all that in a minute.

Absentia tells the tale of an ex-drug addict, Callie played by Katie Parker, going to stay with her estranged sister Tricia, as played by Courtney Bell. Tricia is pregnant and has a husband who has been missing for seven years. As the time gets nearer for her to finally get legal closure on his death certificate, she becomes more and more anxious about things and, with a baby on the way, it’s good timing for her sister to come and stay with her. However, the ghost of Daniel, her missing husband, seems to be popping up in her line of vision whenever Tricia, and the audience, is least expecting it. Is he dead and haunting her? Did she murder him and is lying about his strange disappearance? Or is it just as her psychiatrist says... that she’s hallucinating him strongly because of the emotional trauma involving the impending arrival of his death certificate.

Well, the truth is none of these. I don’t want to give too much away about the origins of these problems but I will say that there seem to be two main concerns running around here in the writer/director’s head which are both coming out in the narrative and, while at first the phantom images of the first half of the movie started to make sense, the second half of the movie, when something else happens to confound everyone in the main narrative, is almost at odds with some of the creepier moments in the first half... although it does all kind of fit together when you take a long hard look at it.

The good thing about Absentia feeling like a low budget production is that the acting by the two female leads is top notch, extremely naturalistic and left at longer takes in some sequences than they might have been in a movie where several different takes might have been spliced together to augment the performance. It’s also less melodramatic, both in realistically lethargic acting style and in regards to the scoring of the movie which, if anything, resembles an early Hal Hartley work in its tone. This helps build the atmosphere of lurking dread which starts to manifest in every frame. For instance, “dead/absent Daniel” pops up from behind doors or is revealed in camera movement in close proximity to his wife on a number of occasions and, in a bigger budgeted movie the scoring, which would almost certainly be a lesson in “atonalism versus sound design”, would highlight these moments with musical stings designed to make you jump or shudder. Here, the music rambles in and does its own thing, as does the awesome Courtney Bell in these scenes, and the effect means your gut accepts, credibly, the “supernatural” element on screen before your brain has got accustomed to the fact that you’ve actually seen something and, while both approaches to horror are equally valid, this approach works really well here.

After the casual teasing of the narrative along these lines, and an obsessive amount of visual hints that Callie has got a stash of drugs hidden under her bed (which turns out to be a clichéd way of allowing the other characters to disbelieve her eye witness testimony later), we are then catapulted into a new section of the movie where the tunnel at the end of the street, which has always been treated in the film with a certain amount of sinister attention up to this point, both in the way it is shot and also scored, becomes rather significant to the survival of a number of the characters and is revealed to be a special place in the history of the area where this film is set. Right from the start of the movie we are bombarded with posters of missing people and missing animals and, while the ultimate reason for the multiple animal disappearances in the area is touched on, it would be true to say that all the disappearances in the movie are related to the tunnel and what supernatural mystery dwells within.

By the last third of the running time, this film reveals itself to be firmly in 1950s B-movie territory in terms of the credibility of the explanation for the events that have been unfolding in this small town but, again, because of the low budget, independent feel of the way the material is represented, the director deftly manages to get away with the, well... the silliness... of this story’s primary “monster” and he manages to show just enough of the real, main antagonist to keep your imagination suspending your disbelief for a while. Coupled with the acting style inherent in a production of this small size and you have a really neat trick ending of a movie which brings about an acceptance of its own logic, best found represented in the world of children’s fairy tales, without the overscoring and over dramatic highlights that a lot of big budget Hollywood movies might have brought into play here. In fact, I suspect if there had been a big budget involved in this one then the final explanation of what’s going on in Callie’s new home town would not have been allowed to stay in the mix... which is a shame because there’s something almost Cthulhuian in the final denouement and epilogue of this movie.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one I think. Like I said, it’s a little rough around the edges in terms of production values at times but that doesn’t stop it from packing in a slow and persistent punch to the gut as you get further into the movie. I like that the director has got away with what he has in the form of the antagonistic presence in this one and it’s a film I would recommend to both horror and science-fiction film fans alike. Definitely a strong independent horror film you should take a look at and certainly a lot better than Oculus, I think.

Oculus

Oculus Riffed

Oculus
2013 USA
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Playing at UK cinemas now.

When I first sat down to write this review, I was going to call it Bin-Oculus... but then I decided I couldn’t be so mean spirited to something where the director, cast and crew have obviously all worked very hard on a genre tale which is, at the very least, quite competently put together... a hell of a lot more than some of the ones I’ve seen over the years, I can assure you. However, having let this film lay in my memory overnight I have to come to the sobering conclusion that, while Oculus certainly isn’t a terrible movie.... it’s not exactly a classic either.

The film is based on a short horror movie by the same director called Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With The Plan and, although I haven’t seen that earlier film myself, I’m guessing that the subject matter, and the way the story is spun out, probably carries a lot more impact in its original Twilight Zone sized format than it does expanded out to a feature. In many ways, that’s the film’s main problem, which I think the writer/director probably recognised very early on and is what gives the film its specific structure... but I’ll get to that in a minute.

There are some good things about this movie. Karen Gillan is one of them.

She is and always has been, the person you look at when she is on screen. To say this lady has some screen presence is a massive understatement and she is a big positive for any film or TV show she is in. In this case, though, that doesn’t matter because, frankly, all the performances are pretty good, including the child actor and actress who play the brother and sister leads for half the movie in the back story. And if the prospect of having the aforementioned Doctor Who actress in the movie isn’t enough to get any sci-fi fan’s pulse racing, we have the added attraction here of Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV show, playing her mum. So this is all good stuff.

And, to be honest, the central concept of a haunted mirror which causes madness, death and destruction to the owners of any house in which it resides is also a good one. I think, as I said earlier, the structure of this one is a problem in some ways... not that the director's solution isn’t a good one, I just don’t think it worked too well here in terms of scares. A bit of a wasted concept.

It’s a story of two halves, you see. Being both a contemporary story of siblings Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites), who are trying to end the mirror because of what it has done to them in the past, and the story of that past with their younger selves played by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan. Rather than play out as two separate elements, since they are obviously both lengthy sections, the director wisely decides to cross-cut between the two which also, of course, gives him the added bonus of highlighting things happening in one time zone with things happening in the other, as seen in contrast to each other. Which also gives him the obvious option of bleeding each reality into the other and he grasps that opportunity with both hands and utilises it in an attempt to manipulate the audience’s emotions. However, at least in terms of this disappointed audience member, in that last thing he fails to some considerable degree.

I know this because, throughout the whole movie, I didn’t find this one scary. I was expecting to get a taut, white knuckle ride of emotional jumps out of this film... which a lot of the modern ghost stories seem to be getting much better at, in my opinion. However, I knew this one wasn’t pulling me in like it was supposed to because I wasn’t getting that concerned about any of the central protagonists and I even, and this is really annoying, found myself checking the time three quarters of the way through to find out when this one was going to end. Not good.

I think one of the reasons this thing maybe isn’t working, aside from the structure meaning it takes a long time to get on with things, is due to two other elements.

One of these is that the film is just too damn predictable. It telegraphs the ending of one of the characters, for example, within the first 20 minutes or so of the opening of the film. That is to say, one of the characters sets a kill switch, a sure fire way of ending the mirror should things get too out of control. Which is kinda nice but, frankly, anyone who hasn’t figured out that at least one person is going to fall victim to the trap hasn’t watched enough movies in their lifetime. It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen at the end of the movie and the only thing you really have to worry about, or not in my case, is just who is going to “get it” by being snared in their own trap.

It’s not all, completely predictable, though. Just mostly. The structure becomes quite freeform due to the rules set up in the movie by the “ghostly properties” of the mirror and there’s one sequence where a certain thing, involving a pet dog, is used to set up audience expectation which it then refutes... except, oh no it doesn’t, you just share the confused perception of the characters, as it turns out... so you might, as I was, feel a little bit cheated by the off screen nature of that particular reveal, or lack of reveal in this case.

Which leads me to why I really couldn’t care less what was going on in the movie after a certain point, even with some fantastic portrayals by the actors and actresses involved. And it is this...

At a certain point in the movie, fairly early on, we are taught, along with the main protagonists, that the reality of the movie is not necessarily how we are perceiving it at any one time. That physical laws are unstable and subject to change because anybody in the film could be hallucinating anything that’s going on, including their physical location. This means, basically, the film can do whatever it wants and lie to us visually as much as it likes... but it doesn’t matter what it does because there is no consequence to anything we are seeing. What will be will be... regardless of what reality we think we are experiencing. This, of course, has the effect of taking the sting out of the tail of the film... the movie can do what it wants to with the characters and it doesn’t have any influence on their ultimate fate... so, naturally, you stop caring about them and having a stake in their survival. What you’re seeing at any one time could always just be the mirror lying to you... so what does it matter? It felt like the horror element of the story got de-toothed long before it had properly started... so I had no investment in the way the images and sounds were presented to me... they were just something washing past my retina which didn’t really mean much.

However, having said all that, the film is generally nice to look at, with some smoothly flowing camerawork and some nice visual ideas. The introduction of Karen Gillan’s grown up version of Kaylie, for instance, which focuses on the movement of her big, red pony tail, made me smile in delight as I watched the movie. A predictable little sequence involving a light bulb and an apple is, similarly, well executed. And the score too, by The Newton Brothers, is nicely done as an appropriate but, quite typical, example of modern scoring for the horror genre. So that’s all good and I’ve got the CD on in the background as I write this review.

That being said, I really can’t find a lot of really good things to say about this movie and, my moans about structure and visual trickery aside, I really can’t say much of anything too bad about it either... except that on a “scary horror movie” level, for me it just doesn’t really work that well. Can’t say I could recommend it for fans of the horror genre but I can recommend it for anyone interested in following Karen Gillan’s post Doctor Who career because, as I’d expected, she does a great job in this movie and they should put her in a lot more of them, methinks. Also, the concept itself isn’t bad and the director/joint writer may be one to keep an eye out for in the future... we might see some seriously good stuff from him before long, methinks. All in all, though, I have to say I had a bit of a dull time with Oculus and I’m not expecting to watch it again in the future, to be honest.