(2015. dir: Jack Heller) It's a familiar and well-loved tale: unnerving and inexplicable tracks in the snow, an ancient beast from Native American legend displaced from its secret home by a logging operation, a small-town sheriff called reluctantly from the hypnotic trance of his own personal demons to an act of heroism which will save his town. In fact, the external and the hero's internal, mirrored "demon" seem to be linked, as if the sheriff's guilt over the death of his young son is somehow catalyzing the outer battle. Stuck in a swamplike ennui made of his own heavy shadow, he rejects the monster as a clever prank, indeed, rejects every plea for help, as from a horse-owner who's lost an animal to the phenomenon, prefering instead to fade into the background and watch as events play themselves out.
One of the movie's roots lies in an old Fortean story known as "the Devil's Footprints". In 1855 in Devon, England, folks woke to a trail of some 100 miles of inexplicable hoofprints in the snow for three nights running. The prints not only defied expectation by being "single file", but by travelling right over haystacks, even rooftops. The maker was playful: sometimes the prints seemed to duck into a small drainpipe and emerge from the other end. Explanations put forward included an unmoored balloon dragging a weight behind it, wood mice, badgers, a very lost kangaroo, hoaxsters, or the devil himself. In this case, it's something more mysterious.
The film's palette is relentlessly blue, mirroring the approaching winter storm. The story is told sparingly and well, the town itself brought to life in easily moving pieces, put forward at a small-town pace. Lukas Haas shines in his down-playing as the big-city deputy, and the townsfolk, the wonderful Nick Damici among them, are believable and low-key. The initial hoofprints are chilling, and the slow reveal of the beast (we do not see it clearly until the end) is remarkably effective as the thing travels like a gargantuan squirrel through treetops. It's an old-fashioned, slow-building suspense, an art-form near-lost, and Heller is to be applauded for championing it.
The downside is that, although well-crafted, the formula is so strictly followed as to become claustrophobic by the end.
Recently I read an interview with Emma Thompson in which she complains that throughout her thirties and forties she turned down hundreds of scripts in which her role could be summed up as begging the hero not to do a very brave thing. Since I read that, I'm astounded to find this "don't-do-the-brave-thing" role absolutely everywhere, and I'm even more agog that I never noticed it before. From Andromache begging Hector not to fight Hercules to Calpurnia begging Caesar to stay away from the forum, it's an ancient and hackneyed trope and you will find it in every third movie you watch, maybe every second one. Bianca Kajlich is lovely here as the sheriff's estranged wife, but she is filling this same role, and by the time he goes off to face his end-battle, taking leave of his son with that moth-chewed, "take-care-of-your-mother-until-I-come-back" chestnut, the dialogue has left any vivacity far behind.
The sheriff gathers the townsfolk together in the church to weather the night of storm and monster, and, within this traditional fortress, the climactic showdown will play out. At this point, it's as if the writer stopped setting the story's course and put it on autopilot for the end, giving us the moments (including the last-minute twist) that we've come to expect. It's too bad. It was almost something extraordinary.
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