BLINK TWICE
Waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) accept an invite to the private island of tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum), where everybody seems to be having a fantastic time – or are they?
Well, maybe not the women, who have been given a drug that obliterates unpleasant memories – for example, memories of them being sexually abused by King and his pals, who include photographer Vic (Christian Slater) and chef Cody (Simon Rex).
The buildup here, as the protagonists get the uneasy feeling that there is something wrong in paradise, is effectively done, but the explanation disappoints. The drug, which is capable of making characters forget the existence and death of an entire character (Jess, who is summarily disposed of when she starts to see through the facade) increasingly feels like a lazy plot device, blocking out anything it would be inconvenient for the characters to remember.
We could interpret the drug as a metaphor for the way ‘the patriarchy’ messes with the mind, keeping women ‘drugged’ with romance and encouraging them to repress the disagreeable realities of male behaviour, but the film doesn’t quite attain the level of allegory, even if the fact that the venom from local snakes works as an antidote suggests a Biblical reference. Though here it’s Eve being granted knowledge – the awareness that this ‘Garden of Eden’ is an illusion – via the serpent.
Recapturing their memories by drinking the venom and subsequently going on the rampage, the women get their revenge, though it all seems a bit too easy. With only one security guy on hand the patriarchy appears ill-defended – and the apparent assumption that the indigenous staff, conspicuous by their absence for the most part, will be on the side of the women rather than their paymasters is patronising.
In an unlikely ending, Frida uses the drug to ‘tame’ King, and take over his empire. There is a sense that male power – which can so easily ‘disappear’ inconvenient women, yet seems so readily overcome – is being simultaneously exaggerated and underestimated.
The assumption that this kind of abuse is what all (rich straight white) men would visit upon women if they had the chance might even be justified, but here comes across as lazy rather than shocking; and it doesn’t help that Tatum, who was at this point going out with director Zoë Kravitz, is insufficiently threatening. Geena Davis, in a Ghislaine Maxwell ‘fixer’ role, probably comes out of it best.
HERETIC
Another film of two halves, Heretic stars Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, a guy with so much time on his hands that he not only invites a couple of Mormons to visit his home, he draws them into an elaborate game to test their faith.
The early cat-and-mouse stuff with Sisters Barnes and Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) is effective, with Grant plausibly reptilian beneath the surface charm, and even hinting at an undisclosed buried trauma beneath that. Thatcher and East are good too, in roles that allow them to be more than just sacrificial lambs.
Reed makes an entertaining argument against religion using the Hollies, Radiohead and the board game Monopoly, but when Sister Barnes tells him that his ‘rhetoric is thin’ you realise that she’s right, and it’s at this point that the film runs out of ideas – or reveals that it never had any.
When Reed’s visitors are invited to leave, only to be drawn further into his game as the action shifts to the lower floors of the house, we get bogged down in generic murk. The proceedings from here on in hinge upon Reed’s ‘wives’ – abject, anonymous women kept in cages who will happily kill themselves just to prove one of Reed’s points: the fundamental one being that ‘the one true religion is control’.
But control isn’t a religion, and while religious people may give up their freedom and embrace suffering in the assumption that things will be better in the next world, it’s hard to see where the appeal lies in a belief system that offers nothing but ‘control’.
It would be interesting to know how these women got to be where they are, acting as if it’s all the same to them if Reed trims their fingernails or cuts off their fingers – are they big Hugh Grant fans? But we are given nothing.
Religion has a habit of mistreating women, it’s fair to say, but these wretched creatures have been deprived of their humanity not by religion or even by Reed, but by a script (by directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) that promises much but isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is.
THE PHANTOM OF THE MONASTERY
Women in religion are often regarded as sacred, unless they don’t behave themselves, at which point they might find themselves becoming, in no time at all, the fount of all evil. Evil meaning sex.
Blink Twice and Heretic share a Puritan streak. In Zoë Kravitz’s film romance is all very fine until it turns into sex, which is just a form of abuse and, although Hugh Grant has plenty of ‘wives’ on hand in Heretic, the one thing he doesn’t seem to be using these dehumanised drudges for is sex.
There is a scene early on where Sister Paxton claims to have derived a spiritual insight from watching internet porn; but this is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Puritanism – even pornography can be made to yield a pious lesson.
Back in 1934, in the infancy of the Mexican film industry director Fernando de Fuentes and writer Juan Bustillo Oro invoked the spectre of the ‘evil’ woman possessed by sex, but in a film of considerable subtlety, now available on Blu-ray from Indicator, thank the Lord.
In The Phantom of the Monastery Cristina, her husband Alfonso, and his friend Eduardo take shelter in a monastery for the night, led there by a sinister traveller and his dog, Shadow.
Both disappear, but the dog later turns up as a pet of the monks, who claim that it never leaves the monastery, a minor mystery that is soon joined by others in a film that eschews Gothic clichés in favour of surreal touches: instead of bats swooping on the characters, just the (stationary) shadow of a bat on the wall, with nothing there to cast it.
The monks invite the travellers to join them for an appetizing supper of ‘the bread of pain and the wine of anguish’; though even this is too extravagant for the monks, who dine only on ashes. Here the Abbot regales them with the tale of a lapsed brother who sold his soul to the devil in order to get his hands on his best friend’s wife, and now haunts his old cell.
This resonates with Eduardo, who is in a similar situation with his best friend’s wife Cristina, but as he, spooked, becomes increasingly reluctant to pursue the affair, Cristina (possessed by evil forces, or just unapologetic in her desire?) becomes more and more enthusiastic, despising her lover’s weakness and carving the word ‘coward’ into the supper table to spite him.
A disturbing experience in the renegade monk’s cell, which may be a dream, convinces Eduardo to give up on Cristina entirely, and when the sun comes up, it turns out that all the monks are dead, their remains standing in upright coffins in the cellar – the only proof that they ever enjoyed the hospitality of the brothers is that word scratched in the table beneath layers of dust.
At this point, it seems that the natural order is restored – whatever it was that possessed Cristina has been dispelled, if it ever existed, and the chastened trio resume normal relations. On the other hand, that word ‘coward’ resonates. Many fictional hauntings are characterised in terms of the ‘return of the repressed’ – here the ghosts are advocating repression, and in doing so, associating the stifling of passion with a weird, menacing world of dust and desiccation. There’s a sense in which the insidious threat in this film is repression.
Is the opposition here between sexual infidelity and morality, between God and the devil, as it seems? Or is it simply between life, as embodied in Cristina’s passion, and death?
This gives The Phantom of the Monastery a complexity that isn’t shared by either Blink Twice or Heretic in their takes on repression. In the former, repression is just a mechanical (plot) device imposed by men upon women, while in Heretic Reed’s obsession with ‘control’ over the gloomy lower floors of his house is suggestive of a repressed mindscape, but it isn’t quite clear what is being repressed, or whether the filmmakers are themselves conscious of this aspect of the scenario, or instead are victims of it: it may be that those ill-defined ‘wives’ are their repressed material.
In a world that sees brains as computers and pleasure as the ultimate goal, maybe we no longer quite ‘get’ repression anymore – we comprehend it as a form of conscious control, not something whose workings may be hidden from us, something that acts upon us in mysterious ways. Of course we aren’t meant to be aware of it, and if we aren’t, that’s doubtless a sign that it’s still working, for us and against us; but horror should get it.
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