Monsters: (2010. dir: Gareth Edwards) Gorgeous movie about two travellers falling in love at the end of the world. It can be read as an allegory concerning U.S.-Mexico border relations, with a melancholy undermessage about how our fear-inspired bellicosities lead to our downfall, but that's mere reduction, and it's far vaster than that. They say it was done on a limited budget, but that's hard to see. The world Edwards has created, with its gas masks, light-being infested jungles, coyotes overcharging for "evacuations", and its alien-invaded "infected zone", feels entirely and fully realized. Really something extraordinary.
Absentia: (2011. dir: Mike Flanagan) Ultra low-budget but inventive and well-executed chiller about two sisters and the horror-film equivalent of the troll who lives beneath the bridge and drags travellers to their doom. Strong, realistic women, an otherworldly threat that is mostly suggested and still effective, and handheld photography that looks clean and doesn't distract from the story. It's a movie made of quiet suggestion, its mystery full-blown but never, as is usual in life, witnessed in its entirety by any single person. Its most unsettling lines are quietly delivered ("You traded with it. I wish you hadn't. It fixates.") and its best exposition given entirely through succinct visuals.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Neverlake: (2013. dir: Riccardo Paoletti) Not straight-out horror, but what you might call Young Adult Horror-Ish. A teenaged girl raised by a grandmother in America is called back to visit her long-estranged father at his villa in Tuscany. Thematically, it fits in with Jessabelle, in that the children (both dead and alive) suffer by and are called upon to rectify the sins of the father. It also falls in with a fairly new and burgeoning tendency toward the examination of the daughter's search for the mother, a new yearning toward the (at this point, still wounded) matriarchal, as witnessed in the Final Girls and the Falling.
The editing and photography far outshine the script here, as does the story itself, which involves a lake into which ancient Etruscans chucked images in order to invoke its healing properties. Toss into the mix a doctor/father who seems to have stepped, ethically, anyway, out of Eyes Without a Face, and there's a very dark story to be told. The fatal weakness of it lies in the dialogue, which hits the ear as if conjured clunkily from the pages of a Young Adult novel, and a pacing which belongs more to the Twilight-esque "don't worry, everything will turn out alright" template than to bona fide horror. In effect, Paoletti wants to tell you his very dark story without taking the risk of scaring you at all.
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