The big screen at the relocated FrightFest (Odeon Leicester Square) is almost scarily big now: I couldn’t face it. For single ticket buyers like me the seating options weren’t promising anyway. So I stuck with the Discovery Screens and found myself in another cinema entirely, although still an Odeon and still in Leicester Square – only situated in the bowels of the earth, and arrived at via a long slow glide down two escalators. Or was it three?
By the time you’d reached the cinema you definitely had the impression that the real party was going on elsewhere. The heart sank a little. One couldn’t help but feel marginalised, even among the marginalised. Which only made the experience more authentic of course: isolation, paranoia, fear (of missing out). It all helps.
I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE
Richard (Kenneth Trujillo), suffering paralysis of the vocal cords after a suicide attempt, gets out of prison only to be locked up again, in a house where he is supposed to perform a cleansing ritual to get rid of the ghosts of previous owners – the kind of ex-offender’s programme that could only exist in (certain parts of) America.
Unfortunately there really is a presiding spirit here – a witch who torments him initially with noises off before manifesting herself more horrifically, bearing the marks of the tortures that befell her (crown of thorns, sewn-shut eyelids). Meanwhile flashbacks acquaint us with the details of how he got banged up in the first place for the ‘involuntary manslaughter’ of his wife (Katerina Eichenberger) and child.
Good as Trujillo is in a role where he only speaks in flashback, there’s initially a sense that there isn’t quite enough to sustain a film here, but it gains some emotional depth when he and a visiting handyman Mike (Christopher Genovese) trade accounts of their scars (emotional and physical).
Mike advises our hero to ‘be nice’ to the witch, a misunderstood widow who was tortured by villagers who blamed her for the plague, and at this point I fully expected this to become an ‘enlightened’ horror film in which Richard comes to terms with his trauma by feeling the witch’s pain, and is thereafter able to move on. Writer/director D. W. Medoff says in the brochure that making this ‘helped me deal with mental health issues’.
Refreshingly, it doesn’t quite turn out like that as the film takes a turn toward the gruesome, while not altogether neglecting psychological complexity. Richard does indeed ‘feel the witch’s pain’, undergoing tortures similar to those inflicted upon her, but they don’t turn him into a better person: they turn him into a some kind of monster.
Yet in a sense he does seem to have resolved his issues. The flashbacks reveal that Richard neglected his wife, who was suffering from post-natal depression, staying out late drinking, so that she killed herself, though not before putting the baby in the microwave – a Hansel and Gretel reference that clearly identifies her with the witch, and so nails a certain male distrust of women and domesticity in general.
At the end Richard, neither alive nor exactly dead, seems to be reunited with his wife, though it is, I think, just the witch impersonating her. Either way, the suggestion is that that whole wife/witch dichotomy has been successfully overcome. Though the result is not exactly ‘mental health’.
It is to be hoped that D. W. Medoff found a better way of resolving his own issues. There was no Q&A, so I can’t say for sure.
SCARLET BLUE
Mental health is also a concern in Aurélia Mengin’s film, which aims to be a study of schizophrenia ‘from the inside’. It is visually entrancing, all hyperfetishized colours and textures, but whether this is true to the experience of schizophrenia I’m not entirely sure.
The protagonist, given the rather on-the-nose name Alter, and played by two actresses (Amélie Daure and Anne-Sophie Charron), undergoes hypnotherapy in a cave, negotiates an awkward relationship with her mother, and forms a romantic and sexual attachment to a blue-haired girl (Mengin herself) who works in the local all-night garage. Eventually she discovers that she had a twin as a child who she accidentally killed and has subsequently forgotten all about, this trauma being the event that fractured her psyche in the first place.
I’m not an expert on schizophrenia, but wonder if the condition is usually quite so easily explained as it is here, traced back to a single and glaringly obvious childhood trauma. But perhaps this ‘resolution’ is itself fantasy?
I want to give Mengin the benefit of the doubt – she has come all the way from Réunion for the Q&A after all – but I’m also a little sceptical about her other big reference point: surrealism. On this score the film unfortunately reminded me of the joke about how many surrealists it takes to change a lightbulb. The answer is fish, and the answer here is fish too, as there are an awful lot of them in the heroine’s hallucinations, reflecting the fact that the original childhood trauma involved a tropical fish in a bowl.
Still and all, meandering as it is, the film is mesmerising: Mengin describes the film as a ‘painting’ and on that surface level it really works – it was the best cinematic experience I had at FrightFest 2024. If it is a triumph of style over substance, well that’s still a triumph isn’t it?
DELIRIUM
Delirium would have worked better as a title for Scarlet Blue than it does for Arró Stefánsson’s film, which is called Wrath in the origical Icelandic: Delirium makes it sound giddier than it is. Though fast-moving, it’s single-mindedly grim.
Ingi (Hjörtur Jóhann Jónsson) is an ex-alcoholic trying his best to get his life back on track after accidentally killing a woman in a car accident while he was drunk. His wife seems to be on his side still, though her uncle, who he has to beg for a menial job, is less convinced.
When the tenant of the flat the couple are renting out kills himself, the discovery of a mysterious box among the man’s possessions confirms Ingi’s downhill trajectory, and hastens it. Inside the box, among other things, are tapes on which the previous owner describes the effects of possessing the box, a cursed object created by a witch, which at one point also fell into the hands of the Nazis.
Knowing this, it turns out, does not help Ingi evade the evil influence of the box, which might as well have been empty – indeed, flashbacks to the box’s previous life feel somewhat beside the point. Ingi keeps trying and failing to dispose of the thing, and it messes with his mind in simple but devastating ways, causing him to experience missing time and suddenly find himself in situations he is quite unprepared for.
There is nothing particularly original here, but Delirium keeps us rooting for our hero, even as we are aware that he is doomed – hounded eventually to suicide, at which point the box clicks neatly shut.
The box was also previously in the possession of the woman Ingi accidentally killed, and thus can be said to relate to his guilt (or does it relieve him of guilt, because the ‘accident’ is revealed to be part of the curse’s design?)
Either way I’m inclined to view the box as a metaphor for depression: a malign influence that can’t be shaken off, easily understood or explained, and which all too often snaps shut on a suicide without ever giving up its secrets.
Even that title, Wrath (possibly an allusion to Dreyer’s witch-burning drama Day of Wrath) is apposite: depression often being categorised as a disavowed and ingrown anger.
Not that the film makes any overt claim to be dealing with mental health issues, but surely horror (or even just the ‘horror adjacent’) always does at some level. Anxiety especially.
LONELY MAN WITH THE GHOST MACHINE
Graham Skipper’s latest film is possibly the ultimate expression of isolation – he plays the last man on Earth following ‘the Calamity’, wherein voracious aliens invaded the planet and ate everyone else. Skipper wrote and directed and on this occasion even handles the introduction and Q&A himself.
The protagonist Wozzeck spends much of the film sitting in a remote cabin talking to himself, or to his own voice on a tape recorder, and mourning his dead wife Nellie (Christina Bennett Lind), eaten by an alien. He is trying to bring her back using the ‘ghost machine’, which looks like a big lamp.
However, it seems (somehow) to work, because she starts to appear, initially unresponsive but gradually regaining her humanity – at which point she makes it very clear to her ex-husband that their marriage wasn’t as idyllic as he likes to think it was. Indeed, it’s fair to say that she is quite upset, especially at his failure to intervene in the matter of her death.
Also relieving Wozzeck’s solitude is a visiting alien, ‘the Deletarian’ (voiced by Paul Guyet) struck (so it maintains) by its own form of loneliness now everyone is dead. The alien is played by a puppet, possibly a glove puppet, and resembles the Phantom of the Muppet Show (but less scary). I did wonder if it might have been better left as a menacing shadow and a sinister voice on the other side of the Skipper’s front door.
On the other hand, the basic props emphasise the possibility that this is all going on inside Wozzeck’s head, that this really is a one man puppet theatre of the mind. And a surprisingly gripping one thanks to Skipper’s engaging performance.
In the end it turns out that Nellie and the alien have been conspiring against our hero – she comes back to life but at his expense: he is eaten and then reconstituted using the machine, to be consumed over and over again, like a modern Prometheus.
This is a fate so cruel that, if we posit this all taking place in Wozzeck’s mind, it feels excessively self-lacerating. We can’t know the extent to which Wozzeck is Skipper in this ‘personal’ film, but it did seem like the one question that should have been on everybody’s lips in the Q&A was: ‘Are you OK?’
But of course he is – he’s got it out of his system. And into ours.
Recent Comments