*SPOILER ALERT*
the Tall Man: (2012. dir: Pascal Laugier) I’m going to give away the farm here, so don’t read this if you’re planning on watching the film. The important news is that if you're thinking Phantasm, look someplace else.
That disappointment aside, this has much to recommend it. The production values are superlative, Jessica Biel is fantastic in the lead and the supporting cast is every bit as good. I was attracted to it because of the Urban Legend aspect: a small, dying town in some picturesque mountains in Washington (although I think it’s really Canada) has a legend of a child-stealer known as The Tall Man. That turns out to be a red herring, but the plot-twists are eyebrow-raising and revealed with a spot-on sense of timing. At one point you actually think it’s going to turn into a Rosemary’s-Baby “the whole town worships Satan” thing, until two scenes later when that (and everything else you think you know about it) gets turned on its head again. That takes some doing. I also want to hand out some credit for the sound effects in the forest: she’s been chasing down a child-abductor, she’s wounded and resting, it’s night in the forest, and the sounds around her are great, just perfect.
Here's the catch: it’s not a horror film. Not for most of us, anyway, although I imagine much of it would be fairly disturbing for parents. Call it a horror film aimed specifically at mothers. It brings up all the dread questions, starting with the obvious: what if someone stole your child? then moving on into subtler forms of psychological torture: what if someone else is better equipped to raise your child? Is it not pure selfishness for you to keep hold of him?
An interesting point: there are no fathers in this movie, only mothers. I take it back: there’s one father, and he’s a mom’s lowlife boyfriend who’s knocked up her teenaged daughter. Every mother in it, even that last one, is depicted as strong in her way, which is one of the great virtues of the film. In fact, it has many virtues, but the question you end up with is… well, a little Mitt Romney, a little Dark-Knight-Rises-rich-folks-know-best. Do rich people, in fact, make better adoptive parents if the true biological parents are poor? To be fair, the movie agrees there are no simple answers, but it does leave you with an unpleasant taste in your mouth.
Sauna: (2008. dir: Antti-Jussi Annila) Stately, burnished Gewissengeist offering from Finland. Just before the turn of the 17th century and on the heels of a dreadful war, a joint embassage of Russian and Swedish ragtag soldiers and scholars, atheists all, travels through desolate land, demarcating the new boundary between their countries. As if the existential futility of that task needed bolstering, it gets it when we see they make peasants kiss a holy relic and swear by their souls that they will be subjects of the appropriate ruler.
A terrible crime is committed at the outset by two of the men, and it seems to curse them as they venture into a vast and unholy swamp at whose epicenter is an unholy sauna. (Apparently the sauna enjoys a far more central role in Swedish culture than our own, so the image must convey a heavier sense of dread in that colder, paler neck of the woods.) By the (very bitter) end, both countries are fighting to sign the malevolent place over to the other.
The film carries a poetic dignity alongside its filthy trudging and body-fluid creeps, unmistakably reminiscent of Aguirre, Wrath of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment