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2010s, 2015, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, psychological, Review, review-movie, S, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: The Blackcoat’s Daughter – 2015

January 25, 2020 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Osgood Perkins
Principal Cast	Emma Roberts as Joan Kiernan Shipka as Katherine Lucy Boynton as Rose
Release Date	2015
Language(s)	English
Running Time	93 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

An evocative, yet disturbing song plays: “Deedle, deedle, Blackcoat’s Daughter, what was in the Holy Water? Went to bed on an unclean head, the Angels they forgot her.”

While these ominous lyrics fill the aural setting, a quick title card using the same iconic blue font of The Shining informs us that this story will be a haunting one; when approached within the context of the devious ditty, this allusive shorthand portends something wicked waiting to come.

We cut to a young girl, Katherine (Kiernan Shipka), who sleeps with her hands clasped as if in prayer — the “Blackcoat’s daughter” praying while the “Angels” forget her. What thoughts lie in her head?

The film intercuts between her still sleeping and a tracking shot moving towards a snowy landscape shot — a white abyss, another callback to the snowy mountains which serve as The Shining’s primary location.

Why does this vision, her apparent prayer, percolate in her “unclean” head?

We cut to an alternative take of her still sleeping, her hands now laying by her side — has her call been answered?

A black shape, a counterpoint to the white environment, obscures the foreground and walks past her, disguising a cut which pushes in closer to her face: is this the dream come to life?

She wakes and looks up at the figure which obscures half the frame, isolating her to the opposite side and rendering her alienated: she’s held completely within this entity’s purview.

Then, she innocently addresses this being: “Daddy. You came early.”

There’s a palpable tension as the unknown is rendered familiar, begging the question as to whether our assumptions were wrong or if Katherine has become ensnared in something deeper.

Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) walks forward.

Suddenly, Katherine walks in the same snowy landscape from her vision, a chimera standing on the interstices of dream and prayer. Another cut to the same tracking shot still pushing forward on the wintery backdrop, confirms that she’s in this unidentifiable location. An eerie foghorn type noise cuts through and ratchets the feeling of unease permeating the moment.

But we cut back to her, still asleep in her bed, her hands now split apart with one of them outstretched — a half-prayer or a call for companionship?

She’s back in the snow walking by this black figure, her “Daddy”.

Then we’re back in her bedroom; the camera is focused on her other hand grabbing a teddy bear, an act of childlike innocence which evokes dread in the grander schema of the intercutting.

She asks the figure: “Daddy, where’s the car?”

We cut back to the snowy wasteland, over her shoulder, and see a crumpled vehicle, shot out-of-focus such as to render it a black blurb in the background; the foghorn comes back. She looks at this wreck in shock while the black figure, her supposed “Daddy”, stands right by her side with its visage still cut out of the frame; what is this creature’s nature and what does it desire?

The outstretched hand starts to tremble as the droning noises get stronger and more invasive. Terror begins to seep in and Katherine calls for her “Mommy” presumably trapped in this wreckage. But then how did “Daddy” make it out and come to her, calling her from her bedroom to the scene of this crash? The loud sound of static is the only response she receives: a non-answer that somehow conveys everything.

The car is finally in focus and we can peer into the wreckage. There are splatters of blood on the front of the car. There are no apparent survivors. There is no explanation to be found.

A resolute cut to black. Are we somehow trapped in the figure from Katherine’s oneiric experience or in another void altogether?

Before we can ascertain the answer, we see Katherine, now cast fully in a black silhouette, sitting up and gazing; the direction she faces is hidden by the shadows; is she looking towards us, the audience, or looking out from the window at the now retroactively signified wintery hellscape, the place of her parent’s demise?

Her harrowing visions, a perverse answer to her prayers, unheard by any but this shadowy figure, a being which given the opening song we can figure is anything but an angel, seemingly overwhelm her.

She slowly turns her head to the side, revealing that she was in fact staring directly at the audience without us being aware, and looks up a calendar; the days of the month are crossed out in red “X” ‘s with a heart symbol tacked onto a day not yet gotten to.

A closeup of her harrowed face as she goes towards it.

A close-up of the heart symbol and the words inside: “Mom & Dad Here.”

We’re not sure of her vision but we, like Katherine, feel despair knowing that her prayer for the family’s happily ever after will not happen: her parents will die before making it to this encounter; that much is certain.

We cut to a new view of Katherine that starts from the back of her head which is placed in the lower part of the frame, an intentional geographic choice which ties us into the idea of descent, the subconscious, the id, hellish recesses far from the gaze of angels. This shot, a formal choice that film will repeatedly utilize, reinforces the film’s preoccupation with the psychological, unknowable zones of its characters, the oneiric chasms where images can convey meaning only through their interstices, forcing us to put the pieces together in a desperate attempt to understand why the characters do what they do, why they think what they think.

The moment passes as Katherine is called into the Dean’s office. We learn from the Crucifix on the wall that this is a religious educational facility. The ominous opening referencing the silence of the divine sinks even deeper.

Meanwhile, the film’s shot-reverse-shot rendition of the conversation between Katherine and her dean, Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) reinforces the abundant alienation she experiences. She’s framed next to an empty seat while the Dean is framed next to the Crucifix. She’s utterly alone and her small talk reveals the extent of that loneliness as she desperately attempts to make a connection, one that is rebuffed as the Dean explains that he will be absent for her musical performance due to the upcoming school break.

A cut to a wide of the room emphasizes the distance she feels and her desperation to bridge it; she changes her focal point of attention from the person in the room to the spot occupied on the other side of the religious symbol, a gaze qua prayer that she knows falls on deaf ears. There are no Angels or humans waiting to give her company. But she smiles in this moment. What has she seen? Was it “Daddy”?

Gordon attempts to gather an explanation for the oddity but Katherine deflects the inquisition. There will be no answers. Fittingly, the film cuts to black once again, the color thus far imbued with perverse ambiguity.

We cut to an empty doorway which the camera slowly repositions to better capture and watch another young woman, Rose (Lucy Boynton), who walks through the frames of this entryway in slow-motion. The eerie ambience transforms into a musical interlude that evokes a sense of jazzy melancholy.

Meanwhile, the camera tracks on Rose who continues to walk slowly down a hallway to a blue, cloudy backdrop — an evocation of heaven. She sits down and gets ready for a school picture. This paradisal backdrop fills the frame and we see Rose, center frame, lower quadrant, break out into a smile for the picture: this is the ideal image.

But the shutter clicks and the screen fades to black once again, formally imbuing this color and the editing refrain itself with the powers of the camera ascertaining and fixing a subject into position.

We see Rose again in a bathroom, this time in the iconic shot used earlier on Katherine; her face is partially turned away from the camera and she’s positioned in the lower half of the frame. There’s something running through her mind as she stares into a mirror. While she ponders, one of the film’s three character titles, the first of which is aptly titled “Rose”, appears in the same blue font used in the title card.

It’s a curious choice indeed to open the film on a character and spend time with them, then cut to another character and quickly use a title card to introduce them more formally to the audience; we’re left wondering why Rose’s story can only be understood once we’ve seen Katherine’s circumstances.

But before the question can linger for too long, the film cuts and shows Rose at the nurse’s office acquiring medicine and treatment for an apparent headache. The nurses are obviously suspicious of the circumstances but let nothing slip.

We cut again to Rose smoking a cigarette, clearly a contraband action given the school’s religious depiction, while she talks to her friend (Emma Holzer) in coded terms that imply that she’s scared of an impending pregnancy. Suddenly, her trepidation in the bathroom earlier makes sense.

This vantage point of Rose directly runs in contrast to the pure, saintly image of her shot for the yearbook; we learn that she enjoyed sex with her boyfriend, takes responsibility for her possible pregnancy, still hopes for her period to come, and is unwilling to talk to her parents about this newfound issue.

We cut to her in an assembly and learn this is an all-girl’s school, one that prides itself on the stock of its students, women who are meant to represent with honor the women that have come before them and the women who will come after them at the hallowed halls of the Bramford school. Here, Rose’s actions become registered in a different, symbolic light: her shameful pregnancy, the proof of her sexual actions, an act marked as deviancy by the rules of conduct, becomes elevated to a sin which will bleed into the student populace at general. She half-asses an affirmation to the school’s call to maintain such a code reinforcing this normative schism outwardly while she deals with traversing it internally.

With the current session of school now at an end, we see parents’ cars pulling in to pick up their kids and are forcefully reminded of the terrible visions from the film’s start.

Right on cue, we cut from a wide shot which shows the majority of the students walking one way, presumably to their parents, while we see Kathrine hauling herself the other way, desperate to ascertain whether or not her nightmare was true or not. Intense strings accentuate this movement away from the crowd, a desperate attempt to find connection where we know it doesn’t lie.

As foretold, Katherine stares out into the snowy wasteland, a tear streaming down her eyes, and is framed completely alone against this environment.

Rose (Lucy Boynton) looks at Katherine’s performance.

Finally, we see our two primary characters enter one another’s circles when Rose enters the auditorium and sees Katherine play her aforementioned musical number. There’s a wonderful shot of Katherine partitioned in the frame again, the piano in the foreground and out-of-focus acting as a delimiter between her and the rest of the space. She looks out the audience and sees two empty seats, places where we know her parents should have been. The scene cuts when she sings about “hope”; her desire that her premonitions of the future are false finally fade away and she’s forced to accept the cold reality of what she’s seen.

These two girls, one whose parents we are certain are dead and one who wishes to actively avoid her parents for other reasons, are seated next to one another as the administration attempts to figure out what to do with them.

Katherine is questioned about whether or not she’s received a call on her cell-phone from her folks, but she reveals that she doesn’t have such a device, a means by which to communicate with her loved ones, and the group focuses their attention on Rose who lies through her teeth and explains that she told her parents the wrong day to come.

The dean attempts to assuage the girls’ concerns, real and fictional respectively, and jokingly mentions that their parents have to come get them because the girls can’t “live” at the school, a statement which utterly gets under Katherine’s skin because of her forbidden knowledge: where will she end up if she has no home to go to and can’t stay at this educational abode?

There’s an attempt made to get Rose to look after Katherine in the interim period before the duo’s parents are expected to arrive, and the girl’s exchange glances at one another while they’re framed in their singles; it’s a moment of hope on Katherine’s part, a potential connection amongst the darkness, and a moment of irritation for Rose, a potential impediment to the plans she has to resolve her own issues. The latter deflects responsibility, calling back to her illness as an excuse and the principal attempts to wash his hands of the situation and tasks the nurses with getting things back in order before forcing responsibility onto Katherine to do the bare minimum and call to her parents once more.

Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) tries to call her parents again.

Per this request, Katherine makes phone-calls, communicative gambits she is certain will fail, to her parents and pleads with them, though we know she’s really begging the forces that be, to provide an answer back to her. Her eyes dart around the frame as she waits with baited breath for any possible response.

As she puts the phone down, we cut to a wide shot that highlights the abject distance she feels between herself and others; the nurse in the room feels miles away even as she sits right besides Katherine.

The effects of this isolation become more explicit when the girls and nurses go down to eat dinner. There’s clearly something wrong in the air and there’s an intense, unpleasant droning noise that continues to intrude as Katherine fixes her plating arrangements. Initially, she places her spoon at a slightly diagonal angle, a seemingly small mistake in the grand scheme of things but one that she obsessively pores over, staring at the deviant ordering with enough intensity to bore a hole through the whole arrangement; it’s a moment of psychological estrangement that feels right out of Travis Bickle’s playbook in Taxi Driver, warranting a comparison to the infamous and off-putting Alka-seltzer scene. It’s only at the apex of the aural discrepancy that she slightly re-adjusts the spoon back into place, a seemingly minute action which takes on a life far larger than it would desire, but the sounds only continue to reverberate, overpowering the “grace” that is said by the parties present at the table.

Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) talks to Rose (Lucy Boynton) who is out-of-focus in the foreground.

Afterwards, in the dorm rooms, Rose curtly informs the underclassman foisted upon her by the authorities that she will not be “babysitting.” Katherine protests and repeatedly brings up Mr. Gordon’s edict, an attempt at channeling authority, which is quickly brushed aside by Rose, someone who we know couldn’t be bothered to follow the school’s regulations let alone a command given during supposed vacation time.

Katherine attempts to at least figure out what Rose is going to do but is given nothing as the latter informs her that she is going “nowhere.” In lieu of any meaningful information, Katherine instead spreads sordid hearsay in regards to the nurses, sisters who she claims are devil worshippers.

From her view, this diatribe is meant as a prank, a way to keep Katherine on her toes and away from her business, but we know that the latter, one who Rose herself described as a “freaking recording” when she repeated Gordon’s request, will play this haunting tale in her isolated mental landscape over and over again; given the fractured state of mind we know Katherine to be in, we know this malefic narrative’s pervasive influence won’t end well.

Rose, however, is blissfully ignorant of the consequences of her actions, an ironic position to be in given that she’s gone to meet with her boyfriend to deal with the unintended results of their lovemaking, and leaves Katherine with no comfort, refusing to answer the freshman’s questions about the source of this rumor, and leaves her with a warning to stay away from her room and possessions.

The elder girl leaves, goes through the snowy surroundings, and enters her boyfriend’s car where the two lovers embrace one another with a jovial warmth, a communicative interplay that Katherine desperately longs for and stares at unnervingly from above as she’s framed alone, isolated in a large window, physically restrained from this moment of connection.

It’s at this moment that the terrifying ambiance seeps back in and we see her slowly open Rose’s door as the camera pushes in on her, enter the room she was forbidden from going into, and then pick up and touch Rose’s belongings; she gazes down at Rose’s hairbrush and then stares at Rose’s school photos, the artificial Edenic images, with the same intensity that she directed at the spoon earlier at during dinner.

A tear rolls down her face as she cries out for this lost moment to connect with an upperclassman who could assuage her worries but a new moment for communion presents itself as we cut to a silhouetted telephone ringing in an empty hallway. If Rose qua “the Angel” refuses to respond, then whomever is calling on the line will have to do. Right as the terror of the situation settles, we cut again to black — a confirmation of the morbid realization.

Joan (Emma Roberts) stares into a bathroom mirror.

Finally, at near the 19-minute mark, our final character, a third young woman (Emma Roberts), appears and walks into a facility, cautiously looking around as if worried that she’s being followed.

She goes to a bathroom and stares at a mirror while discordant noises begin to play and we see a quick peak into her mind, a distorted flashback comprised of short bursts that hint at a medical facility of sorts. She rips off a wristband and confirms that she’s an escaped patient yet the circumstances surrounding her are kept private.

With quarters in her hand, she quietly attempts to use a payphone; the camera obscures her visage as she holds the phone to her face, desperate to hear her desired contact on the other side; but she receives an error message instead and dejectedly puts the phone down. This disturbing moment serves as a counter-point to the communicative misfires that we saw Katherine experience and the cut from the call happening with her to this call failing to go through connect these seemingly disparate settings and characters into a larger tapestry exploring attempts at connection.

These moments are then more explicitly connected when this escapee wanders the facility, finds a map, and stares at Bramford’s location. The cartographic image, a representation of how to traverse (literal) distance, dissolves to the film’s iconic shot of the young woman, who’s positioned in the lower quadrant of the frame with her head facing away from the audience; whomever she’s looking for is at the school we’ve been made privy to and her thoughts are singularly focused on this point in space even as we wonder what she seeks.

Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks up at this black figure which obscures half the frame.

While she waits outside, an elderly gentleman, Bill (James Remar), questions her on whether she’s waiting for someone and offers her a ride East. He partitions the frame as his black-coat, shot out-of-focus, takes up more than half of the space and ominously calls back to the opening moment where Katherine’s anointed “Daddy” fulfills an analogous aesthetic function. The two images look like reflections of one another when presented side-by-side and projects these persons in an alike light or, to be more precise, in a similar shadow. We’re left to wonder then if Bill is the same as the shadowy specter which guides Katherine through her visions or if his position on the opposite side of the frame codifies him as a corporeal comrade meant to help the young woman navigate reality.

It’s at this point that the young woman gives up her name: Joan — a contextually charged moniker that alludes to the great saint herself, Joan of Arc, a woman who was immolated for her faith, a spiritual gesture which we’ve been informed by the opening is doomed to fall on silent ears: the failed phone call is transformed into a moment of divine contemplation. Is this car ride a holy answer to her call to get to Bramford? Has her “prayer” been answered in a way she didn’t expect? Or is she walking down a path that will lead to her ultimate demise?

She accepts the help offered and gets in the car. We see the back of the vehicle drive away and we fade to black once again before fading back to another vehicle belonging to Rose’s partner, which is driving back to Bramford Academy; the edit ties Joan’s journey to Rose’s as well, using the ominous black which the film has cut to as a transition multiple times as a ligature between two different journeys, two different spaces which both lead to the same location.

Thus, the stage is set for the convergence of these three women’s respective desires coming into contact with one another as they try and resolve their respective problems, some of which we’re privy to and others which we’re left more ambiguous about; but all of their issues stem from and are intimately related to: communication and the manner in which it both bridges and causes alienation.

The song which acts as prologue to the film proper and the supernatural opening frame these questions in a religious context, one that evokes the meditations of Ingmar Bergman’s spiritual works ruminating on the silence of God and the meaning of faith in such a world, while using the trappings of the horror genre, both supernatural visuals and psychological interplays, to dramatically raise the stakes of and render the results of these ruminations viscerally explicit.

The constant refrains to a black frame, a plane of unknowability which takes on a plethora of associated functions as the film continues, alongside the film’s shifting spatial chronologies, split amongst the three aforementioned women, give director Oz Perkins the chance to contemplate the same action or lack thereof from multiple perspectives, effectively keeping the narrative engaging even as it circles on itself like an ouroboros, devouring seemingly everything it proffers in search of an inner meaning which is only made explicitly clear as the final narrative domino drops.

The aesthetic decisions, both the choice to focus on the character’s visages — lower quadrant shots and close-ups of their faces — and their unknowability — deep shadows and constant silhouettes obscuring possible information — along with the Antonioni-like framing of the character’s against persons and backdrops that render them isolated in the frame, exposing their inner-most thoughts visually through the mise-en-scène, have a psychological effect that compliments the narrative as it shifts through space and time, accentuating moments of uncertainty and unease which make the unnerving progressions chilling to experience and render the set-pieces, few and far-between, an absolute terror to witness.

In spite of its aesthetic and narrative withholdings, Perkins never “cheats” the viewer, carefully presenting all the details along the way in such a manner that one finishes the film and realizes that the twists were truthfully presaged and the disasters were dutifully portended. Caught under the film’s spell, the viewer is left entranced and befuddled until the moment of divine revelation is rendered, leaving them as chilled as the wintery backdrop that serves as the film’s milieu.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Blackcoat’s Daughter is one of the truly great debut films, utilizing the horror genre to explore deep-seated questions about faith and meaning without sacrificing the bite and terror one would associate with it. The film deftly intercuts between different perspectives, delivering a cartography of the psyche that will leave attentive viewers truly haunted.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

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2010s, 2013, A, Grade, Horror, mystery, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: The Conjuring – 2013

January 22, 2020 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	James Wan
Principal Cast	Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren Lili Taylor as Carolyn Perron
Release Date	2013
Language(s)	English
Running Time	112 minutes
Report Card	Click to go Review TLDR/Summary

The camera pushes out on the Annabelle doll.

We open on a shot of a doll, Annabelle, staring directly at the us. The camera pushes out as we hear a pair of nurses recount their story regarding the doll to two unseen figures who flank them from both sides. The nurses explain that the doll asked for permission to move in with them, they gave that permission thinking the doll was a ghost, and then they experienced hauntings due to it. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, they cannot get rid of the doll. They ask the unseen figures to help.

These figures, Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren finally come into frame; they explain that the nurses are dealing not with a ghost but with a demon. We see a repetition of the first shot; the nurses are still being flanked by the Warrens on both sides, but this time the Warrens are visible. Their presence has come into effect and they’re in “control”. We cut once again to the face of the Annabelle doll before the screen gets grainy, and it’s revealed that what we’ve been watching is actually a tape recorded by the Warrens for presentation purposes in a classroom setting. Without knowing it, we’ve adopted the Warren’s point of view and been sucked into their world.

Under the title card resides a window encased in shadows.

It’s at this time the title crawl pops on the screen, informing us of the Warren’s history and the fact that what we’re about to watch is “based on the true story”. The camera continues tilting down past the title of the movie to a window right beneath; a seamless transition that lets us know that we’re entering the horror immediately. The darkness around the window fades away while the camera pushes forward, revealing a car and a moving truck driving towards the house. We see a the Perron family come out; we know that their upcoming journey will be one of terror. The camera tracks left to follow the family as they make their way in through the front door; the way the camera moves from the window to the door makes it feel like the house is alive and waiting for its upcoming owners.

Most of the family, a set of parents and five daughters, makes their way into the house. However, their dog, Sadie, refuses to come in. The camera moves down towards the floor, and hones in on the dog who refuses attempts to be coaxed into the house. Even if you didn’t know about the horror tropes regarding dogs being able to sense the supernatural, this disagreeable behavior is more than enough to confirm what we already know: bad times are coming.

Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) calls out to April.

The Zombie’s “Time of the Season” plays in the background as Wan employs a fantastic tracking shot showcasing the family moving into the house. The eerie mood that’s been set up gives way for a few moments, while we get a “tour” of the entire house. One of the kids, Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) looks around for her windchimes to place at the front of the house; an source of music tries to establish its place . As she puts them up, she calls out to her younger sister, April (Kyla Deaver), to come into the house. Unbeknownst to her, April found a music box hidden under an ominous looking tree. She plays the music box at which point “Time of the Season” stops and the lighting becomes much darker; a nefarious source of music usurps the light and takes control.

The girls eat dinner and then play a variant of clapping hide-and-seek where the seeker has to place a blindfold on and gets to ask the hiders to clap up to 3 times to figure out where they are. The innocuous game meant to facilitate the girls finding one another fails, as instead, the girls end up finding the dark curse embedded in the house by cracking a barrier sealing the basement. This dark, grimy, underbelly of the house is thus unleashed and the “fun” truly begins.

Like his previous foray into the supernatural genre, Insidious , director James Wan’s The Conjuring also functions as a facelift of an older titan, or in this case titans, of the supernatural horror genre; this time he’s updating The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Exorcist instead of Poltergeist. From The Amityville Horror, he takes idea of a haunted house terrorizing a family, the theatricality of the haunting, and the subtext of economic plight in relation to haunting. There are multiple comments from the the father of the family, Roger (Ron Livingston) indicating that the family’s money is tied to the house and they have no way out, which solves any practical concerns we could raise to the family staying in such a location. From The Exorcist, he takes the notion of treating the supernatural as grounded and the idea of a metaphysical evil fighting a metaphysical good. Especially by the ending, it becomes clear that Wan is trying to introduce a notion of God and “true goodness” as a way to elevate the status of the haunting. The end result of combining all these factors would be a serious haunted house story with plenty of subtext to go around.

However, the end-result lands a bit ajar from this expectation. Unlike The Amityville Horror, The Conjuring is missing a scene of “honest” drama that ties the Perron family’s financial woes directly to the nature of the haunting. As Stephen King says, “Everything which The Amityville Horror does well is summed up in that scene,” whose implications make the connection between the haunted house and the financial troubles of the family clear. ^[1] King, S. (2010). Danse macabre. Gallery. Furthermore, the gravitas of The Exorcist arises from both the documentary-like shooting of the movie, which helps ground the horrific nature of the haunting and the honesty and severity by which it wrestles with the ideas of God and the divine. The theatricality Wan is going for runs against this and makes the depth he’s trying to achieve feel forced especially near the end of the film which is more focused on spectacle rather than spiritual catharsis.

But by pushing these ideas together and presenting them with his knack for dynamic set-pieces, Wan has still ended up creating one of the best horror movies of this side of the century and a blockbuster at that. By grounding the possession story via two families – one regular and powerless and the other spiritual and powerful – Wan is able to ensure that the hauntings, while not as thematically rich and textured as their base ideas would allow, have enough of a thematic throughline to develop on.

Wan spends a just enough time letting us breathe with the Perron’s, namely the girls, as they get try and adjust to the house. We get to hear some of their bickering and get a feeling for what their sisterly dynamic looks like. By the time the supernatural rumblings start, we have a good understanding of their personalities along with a few of their quirks – just enough to latch onto when the theatrics take hold.

The crux of the character work comes from the other family, the Warrens, who are given nearly as much, if not more, screen time than the haunted family themselves; this move is an improvement on even Insidious, whose attempts at giving the “exorcist” type character a more textured backstory is one of the better narrative pivots in the supernatural genre. The reason this usually never happens ,sans the best cases like The Exorcist, is because movies usually wants to spend their time building up our attachment to the subject of the hauntings so we care about what’s happening to them. As a result, there’s usually never time in the screen-play to develop the spiritual-type character to a level we care about.

Wan side-steps this issue by splitting screen-time between the two families and having their stories run in parallel to one another: usually, when something horrific happens to the Perron’s, we cut back to the Warrens. These cuts not only give the time needed to get to know and care about the Warren’s involvement in the story but also give Wan a way to neatly exposit to the us without it feeling ostentatious. He disguises the rules of the supernatural genre in scenes like interviews and college lectures; these movements not only give Via Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, the movie’s best two actors, time to show their chops, but they also help make sense of the hauntings proper. In one key scene transition, the Warrens explaining the sequencing of a haunting: infestation, oppression, possession; this is a perfect mapping for the three act structure of the movie and helps clue the audience in on how to interpret the “why” for the spectral occurrences.

Now, while I personally don’t enjoy the more grandiose spectacles The Conjuring goes for, I can appreciate the craft behind them, especially in the way they’re built up. By using longer than average takes and moving the camera along with the characters as they venture the house, Wan is able to generate a sense of constant paranoia; the stakes are apparent but there’s no way to escape the stifling tension. When the theatricalities begin, there’s little reliance on the distracting CGI that plagues many similarly plotted movies with many of the sequences utilizing in-camera tricks and practical effects. These make the the monstrosities feel like they have a physical presence which in turn exacerbates the feeling that the characters are always in a genuine danger.

This commitment to genuinely scaring the audience is why The Conjuring endures almost a decade after it’s release as a common favorite among the masses. In spite of narrative issues, the film manages to follow a distilled horror formula that emphasizes authenticity in the spectacle while remaining fun throughout it’s runtime. Wan knows how to distinguish the movie in just the right places, ensuring that the scares are well-earned and leave a lasting impact.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Conjuring is confirmation of Wan’s talent in the horror genre and is proof that highly polished horror blockbusters are possible. The movie is technically precise and features gorgeous camera work that one can’t help but admire and get wrapped up in. Though the story isn’t Wan’s most memorable, it manages to serve as a more than serviceable vehicle for lulling and scaring the audience; in other words, it’s a great time.
Rating	8.8/10
Grade	A

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2010, 2010s, A, Grade, Horror, mystery, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Insidious – 2010

January 22, 2020 The Critic 1 Comment

Director(s)	James Wan
Principal Cast	Patrick Wilson as Josh Lambert Rose Byrne as Renai Lambert Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier Ty Simpkins as Dalton Lambert Andrew Astor as Foster Lambert
Release Date	2010
Language(s)	English
Running Time	110 minutes
Report Card	Click to go Review TLDR/Summary

We open on a large lightbulb before the camera flips itself around 180° – the world we’re entering is not one that plays by our expectations. The camera tracks revealing a young boy sleeping before moving right to traverse the rest of the house. Discordant strings rise in the background as a shadowy figure shows up on a wall – a confirmation that we’ve entered a whole new world. Finally, the moves past the figure to reveal a Woman in Black, smiling and standing still in the center of the frame; in her hand, she holds a red candle with a bright flame – the only light in a screen full of darkness.

The screech of the strings reaches its apex as the bright hellish red title card comes onto the screen. Every other image after in the title sequence features a black-and-white image of a location and red font that slowly fades away as an ethereal gray wisp spelling the same words comes out of the initial word, almost like the spirit of the words taking leave. Many locations and objects show up multiple times, priming the viewer for their future appearance’s. Some of the frames reveal ghostly figures hiding in the shadows while others showcase spectral happenings like chairs moving by themselves. This seemingly innocuous presentation is anything but and primes the audience for spectral encounters to come by sowing the seeds with an assortment of images whose meanings are yet to be shown.

Eventually the montage ends and the camera pushes in slowly on a clock surrounded by shadows before the screen turns completely black. A woman, Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne), happens to be sleeping. As she wakes up, the color in frame gradually returns. Sleep is over and the time for waking is here.

Renai (Rose Byrne) stands with a clock behind her.

Renai goes down the stairs. Behind her is the clock that’s been featured multiple times already – a harbinger of doom. She takes out some books from the moving boxes scattered around the cluttered study and puts them up. The title of the book in front reads: “Self-Healing Through Music.”

After putting the books up, Renai has to deal with her 3 children: Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor), and Kali, the infant in the group. She gets their affairs in order during a hectic kitchen scene where her husband, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), offers very little help. However, upon leaving the room she sees her books have now been scattered on the floor – a sign of things to come. Frustrated, she confronts her family who claims they had nothing to do with it. Unable to get any answers, she asks Josh to help with the kids and school – a request he denies to be apparently being busy. Her exasperation grows and the scene concludes with an establishing shot of the house, tracking from left to right.

Afterwards, the camera tracks onto Renai playing the piano. The books have now gained an additional purpose besides source of first supernatural sign: they are Renai’s work tools. She’s a musician trying to compose. Immediately it’s clear: this moment of musical creation is the overworked matriarch’s reprieve from her daily duties. Unfortunately, the specters seem to understand this as well and refuse to let her have her time. The baby monitor which has been creeping on the frame in the corner takes center place as the cries of the child interrupt the music and force Renai to come upstairs.

Upon ensuring Kali’s safety, Renai sees a door that draws her forward. She opens it and goes up to the attic of the house where she sees both a ladder and a lightbulb. A lightbulb starts the film and it appears here once again, enticing Renai to turn it on. She climbs the ladder and tries to grab the switch; upon doing so, the rung she’s standing on breaks. Immediately, a bright red-hot fire starts on its own from a furnace near the bottom of the floor. Just like the opening, the presence of a bulb is followed by the presence of an ominous red fire surrounded by blackness. It’s no coincidence that the bulb is above and the furnace is below; the use of red is evocative of hell and the flames associated with the damned location. Coming up here was a mistake – now the fire has started.

Nighttime comes and with it comes the start of the Lambert family problems. Dalton goes upstairs to the same room while wearing a red superhero cape. As any hero would do, he tries to bring the light; just like his mom, he gets up on the ladder to reach the switch, but unfortunately for him, the broken step in the ladder gives way underneath him and he crashes, falling unconscious momentarily. His parents realize he’s missing and run up to him to find him conscious but in pain. They get him all fixed up and put him into his bed before themselves retiring for the night. The couple finally unwinds as Renai talks about her music and her hopes for the future. The two laugh and call it a night.

Then the ticking of the clock starts; a momentum builds as the hypnotic rhythm cascades through the house. We see a series of images as the clock’s pulse continues: a leaking faucet, Foster asleep in his bed, Kali asleep in her crib with an ominous red light illuminating the room, Renai and Josh soundly asleep. Finally, we cut to Dalton and the hypnotic lull of the ticking clock stops. The camera pushes in slowly towards him and the darkness surrounding him. All the while the sound intensifies transforming from a low buzzing to a violent set of discordant noises – a callback to the title card’s ominous arrival.

The next day comes and Josh comes in to Dalton’s room to wake the still sleeping child. He repeatedly asks Dalton to awaken but comes to realize his son is unresponsive. A quick hospital later confirms that the aspiring superhero is in a coma like state with no apparent medical explanation. The narrative jumps forward 3 months as the camera tracks on the house again this time from right to left – the situation for the Lambert’s has changed once again as they find themselves taking care of their still-comatose son while eerie and supernatural events continue to pile up in their everyday lives.

In 20 minutes, Insidious has established a family dynamic with nuances in the main members of the grouping and set in motion a series of visual motifs – the color red, lighting up dark spaces, the baby monitor, music, the “presence” of the house – that will build to patterns of terror all while never jumping the shark. Similar to Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, the driving force propelling Insidious is based on the anxiety that the “modern” family is unable to secure itself against outside forces that threaten it; in this case, the parents are unable to protect their son.

As the opening shows, the couple has made the move to provide a new start for their family. Renai is overworked but hopeful for change, Josh is supportive of his wife and children but isn’t the most helpful partner at home, and Dalton is a young boy looking to be an purveying hero. In spite of their struggles, they hold on to the hopes for a better tomorrow. This is why their son’s condition and the family’s subsequent trials are so cruel and poignant: the journey delves into dark places where the failures and traumas of the family, left unresolved, will come to roost among their unsuspecting children.

These fears are allowed to roost because Director James Wan is more than content letting the feeling of unease build up slowly in service of letting the genuine moments of fear terrorize the audience in poignant fashion. By setting up patterns and building up the tension and letting the spectral occurrences linger in ambiguous contexts, forcing the audience to stew in their nescience, Wan gives his film that quality which all the best horrors have – the ability to get under the skin without one being aware of the same. Motifs become patterns which anticipate a future without giving it away, so Wan is able to employ them in tandem to keep building up just until the right moment. This is also why Wan can go against expected evaluation of some of these patterns; because their teloses are unknown, they can be repurposed to pull off unpredictable story moves. By the end of the film, all these moving parts become intimately linked with one another and act as puzzle pieces for the viewer to finally piece together to come to an understanding, an understanding whose ambiguous underpinnings allow Wan to pull a Silence of the Lambs style moment that truly has to be witnessed first-hand.

It’s funny because despite borrowing so much from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, Insidious does much of what the former film did: offer a breath of fresh air on the “haunted house” story. Like Hooper, Wan pushes the boundaries on what hauntings can entail and do. In fact, I would argue that Insidious is a breath of fresh air for the genre and offers an overhaul on the “haunted house” story in much the same as Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist did. Hooper’s film offers a positive interpretation of the supernatural alongside a negative one and demonstrates the way that specters operate and link up in parallel with one another. In this way it ties the nature of its families hauntings to social happenings in a larger sense, serving as a larger take on the American Dream and the powers of family. As evidenced above, Insidious does much of the same but focuses less on the social commentary of the hauntings than on the metaphysical breakdown of how those hauntings occur and interact with the world.

The film’s key contribution to the cannon is its exploration of “The Further”, the film’s term for the supernatural realm that houses specters. At one point, the Lambert’s ask a psychic, Elise (Lin Shaye), to help them with their son and her crew, method of investigation, and treatment procedure which involve “The Further”. These scenes and the ideas visually present in them are distinct and evocative all at once, giving Insidious a wholly unique aesthetic and set of rules for supernatural engagement. There are more ideas regarding the supernatural in here than in 5 other lesser movies put together. Despite using Poltergeist and its ideas as a base, Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell don’t remain complacent and push the boundaries on what hauntings can entail and do.

Alas, Insidious is unable to fully tap into the potential its framework allows and settles for oddities that feel like they would have benefited more from structure. Ambiguity is great, but tying that ambiguity to thematic purpose on top of setting up narrative surprises helps those moments play more effective. They gain an emotional resonance because they speak to something larger and end up being more memorable. While Insidious does a great job at navigating the contours of its family’s personal struggles, it lacks the depth to make those struggles touch on other issues, reducing the story’s reach. Given just how much leverage “The Further” gives Wan and Whannell, it feels a tad disappointing that they don’t probe into larger questions.

Yet, Insidious has to be applauded trying something new and doing it with such technical fluidity. There’s a propulsion to the way the narrative unfolds and the pressure constantly ratchets up. Recurrent motifs and discordant strings help make the journey towards the eventual scares all the more dreadful as Wan allows the anticipation to build to a fever pitch before giving the audience a chance for release. There’s no cheap throwaway moment here and even if not all the pieces line up the way they should at all times, the extended durations showcasing when they do work more than make up for any disgruntles.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Insidious’s propulsive narrative, technically sumptuous filmmaking, and innovative takes on the “haunted house” story sets new benchmarks for what audiences should expect from “mainstream” horror films. Director James Wan effectively utilizes ambiguity in relation to genre trappings to prime the audience for spookier scenes which are further accentuated by the film’s distinctive mystical and metaphysical stylizations. *Even now they give the film a distinctive texture and weight that helps Insidious* stand against the crowd.**
Rating	9.2/10
Grade	A

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2010s, 2017, C+, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Annabelle: Creation

January 18, 2020 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	David F. Sandberg
Principal Cast	Talitha Bateman as Janice Lulu Wilson as Linda Stephanie Sigman as Sister Charlotte Anthony LaPaglia as Samuel Mullins
Release Date	2017
Language(s)	English
Running Time	110 minutes

A man begins to create the infamous “Annabelle” doll introduced in The Conjuring. He gets to work crafting the different parts of the toy; its hollow face takes center frame as it waits to be filled in and made whole. The finished doll is put into a box which the dollmaker, Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia), brands with his seal.

As he finishes, a note is slipped underneath his workroom’s door: “Find me.” Samuel gives chase; the note marks the start of a hide-and-seek game with his daughter, Annabelle (Samara Lee). He finds the young girl and promptly showers her with affection along with his wife, Esther (Miranda Otto). The loving parents dote on their daughter; the Mullins family is whole and their residence radiates with warmth.

The camera rotates and sweeps around the church…

But these happy times are doomed to come to an end. The camera whips and flips around a church signifying the shift in fates while the family makes their way out of the service. On their way back home, their car stalls out and the trio waits on the road; something awful is about to happen.

A car approaches in the background. We notice it creeping in. Esther calls attention to the vehicle. The horrific realization of what’s to happen begins to dawn. Yet, when Annabelle runs in front of the car to retrieve a stray bolt and is promptly killed, the shock is all the same. Her broken doll occupies the frame: innocence has been destroyed. The title card is “branded” in with flames; the seeds of this horror story have now been sown. Then, the film cuts to 12 years later on a view of Annabelle’s grave-marker, and a bus of young orphaned girls passes by on route to the Mullins residence. Their crossing of the tragic threshold signifies the something sinister approaches them as well.

However, the girls inside the vehicle are none the wiser to the horrors that await. They’ve struggled to find a place to stay while waiting to be adopted and the group’s caretaker, Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) sees the invitation from the Mullins to stay as a blessing from God. Meanwhile, a duo within the girls, Janice (Talitha Bateman) and Linda (Lulu Wilson), sit with their own dolls closely in hand, hopeful that the Mullins residence is just a stop on the road to their dream of being adopted together by a nice family.

They make their way into the residence and director David F. Sandberg gives us a tour of the abode in a James Wan-esque one-shot that sees the girls traverse their newfound home. At the end of the house tour, Janice gets into a stair-helper machine meant to help her manage her polio-related mobility issues and get around the house. Excitedly, she gets onto the machine and heads up the stairs to explore her new environment.

But as the camera pans from a hellish red-stained glass balcony that envelops the frame to reveal Janice emerging from the end of the structure, it’s clear her journey is going to evil places. The next shot confirms as much as a young girl that looks like the deceased Annabelle shows up in the looming dark space to the right of Janice which threatens to envelop her.

Far from being a godsend, the Mullins residence is a malevolent location fraught with demonic forces that seek Janice out from the outset. It’s from this backdrop that Sandberg and writer Gary Dauberman seek to not only explain how the Annabelle doll came to be within the larger context of the The Conjuring franchise while making sense of the convoluted logic of the previous franchise entry, Annabelle (also written by Dauberman), that attempted to do the same but also tell Janice and company’s story in a compelling manner in its own rite. Juggling one film is difficult enough but course correcting a former entry while maintaining a tonal consistency with it is a whole other task, and Creation deserves praise for mostly succeeding in its efforts.

The film improves upon its predecessors failures in two distinct fashions: first, it engenders a sense of goodwill towards its protagonist, Janice, by showcasing her personal struggles and developing her interactions with other characters to make her feel sympathetic; second, it streamlines the narrative to focus on Janice and her personal battle to furnish faith in a seemingly desolate world instead of trying to posture and tack on additional overarching, possibly conflicting thematic ideations.

By keeping the narrative and thematic throughlines easy to keep track of, the film is able to bracket its more generic supernatural set-pieces around a story that’s emotionally compelling enough to hold interest; simple parallels serve as markers that make tracking Janice’s journey through the otherwise contrived horror trappings easy to comprehend. Her friendship with Linda serves as a counterpoint to the potential possession by the Annabelle-like specter; one girl represents a path towards a fantasy while the other gestures towards nightmares. This dichotomy is extended through the presence of the film’s different dolls. Both girls have their own more innocent dolls and see them as extensions of one another. These figures represent a faith in a future where they’re together in the same home. Meanwhile, the Annabelle doll represents an evil that seeks to take refuge within, making a home out of its victim – an inversion of the idyllic dream shared by the girls.

However, the film does stumble occasionally when it shifts focus to the other girls – far less interesting characters who serve as little more than reminders of Janice’s alienation. Their segments create moments of temporary visceral engagement that leave little lasting impact, especially in the context of what the film sets out to do; the constant barrage of them, especially in relation to such tangential characters, end up raising questions regarding why the demonic forces present have not swiftly dealt with whatever they needed. When we see the evil entities wreak obscene havoc in spite of safeguards, it becomes hard to ignore when it then then pulls punches and leaves like the most obnoxious “practical joker” after getting a reaction. Cutting out these bloated sections would help the narrative maintain its momentum and avoid undermining the tension generated by the supernatural set-pieces related to Janice’s story.

Thus, while Creation is a step up from its predecessor and does a much better job at establishing the foundation for the Annabelle doll, it never becomes greater than the sum of its parts – a shame given Sandberg’s competence at building the set-pieces proper.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Annabelle: Creation, sees Director David Sandberg tasked with righting the mythos surrounding the Conjuring franchise’s Annabelle doll. While he manages to establish a background story that works, both as explanatory mechanism and narrative in its own right, the constant barrage of temporarily upsetting but overall unmemorable horror set-pieces drag the better parts of the movie down. It’s competently put together and features performances that will get viewers to care, but it’s a disappointment given the skill hinted at.
Rating	7.3/10
Grade	C+

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2010s, 2019, F, Grade, Horror, mystery, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Review: Annabelle Comes Home

January 18, 2020 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Gary Dauberman
Principal Cast	Mckenna Grace as Judy Warren Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren Madison Iseman as Mary Ellen Katie Sarife as Daniela Rios
Release Date	2019
Language(s)	English
Running Time	106 minutes

I didn’t like Annabelle. I did like Annabelle: Creation. Both Wilson and Farmiga have been great in the other Conjuring movies they’ve been in, so when I saw the trailer for this movie I had real hope. The Warrens and Annabelle – maybe it could be as good as the movies in the main franchise. The movie even starts off with a bait, introducing Ed and Lorraine as they’re on their way back home with the Annabelle doll ready to be stored away. They get it in it’s iconic case and emphasize its power. Then they disappear from the movie and we get to the absurd mess that is the main story line.

The movie follows Judy, the Warrens daughter, and the mishaps that occur when her parents go off…to do something? Anyways, she’s left with her babysitter Mary for the day. Mary’s friend Daniela then comes over and opens and touches everything in the Warren’s demonic possession room. Then Annabelle gets loose and releases OTHER DEMONS to be menacing to the girls and the movie chronicles their miserably boring endeavors to fight them off. Another Annabelle movie where Annabelle doesn’t do anything of her own account. It’s like what’s the point of making these spin-off movies if you’re not going to actually expand on the character or make them more menacing in their own right.

Speaking of menacing- nothing in this movie is. All the “monster of the weeks” are poorly set up through lazy exposition and have no meaningful significance to any of the characters. They’re all just cheap attempts at recapturing the magic of creatures like the Nun or the Crooked Man but they don’t work. It’s sad because the movie is actually shot pretty well. There are some nice tracking shots that amplify the tension. If the scares took advantage of those the movie could have been so much more effective. There are plenty of great scenes early on where there are just scary apparitions in the background waiting- but the movie doesn’t know how to deal with them outside of fake-out jump scare. It gets repetitive which makes the 3rd act of the movie feel like the same scene happening in succession.

The whole movie just feels like a missed opportunity. So many cool ideas don’t get teased out properly.Exploring the life of a child ostracized because of her parents demonology background is interesting and I thought the movie would be a family drama centering around that issue. Instead, it’s ignored and never develops into anything meaningful. Exploring the Annabelle doll’s actual power? Nah, let’s let her summon other spirits instead. Have a good reason for someone to enter the room and do anything? Nah, we can just skirt around the issue and give her some vague sad backstory. It’s all just unsatisfying, especially when all the pieces to resolve these questions are present in the story. Heck you could even have the babysitter and her friend- just introduce them naturally and have the inciting incident be more believable. I don’t know – it just feels sloppy.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Annabelle Comes Home feels like a series of missed opportunities wrapped up into a generic feeling horror movie. The Warrens are barely in the movie , so don’t hold your breath if your expecting this to feel like The Conjuring. It’s just a sad imitation.
Rating	4.8/10
Grade	F

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2020, 2020s, F, Grade, Horror, mystery, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Year

Review: The Grudge (2020)

January 3, 2020 The Critic 1 Comment

Director(s)	Nicolas Pesce
Principal Cast	Andrea Riseborough as Detective Muldoon John Cho as Peter Spencer Betty Gilpin as Nina Spencer Lin Shaye as Faith Mateson Frankie Faison as William Matheson
Release Date	2020
Language(s)	English
Running Time	100 minutes

I’m a huge fan of Ju-On and it’s first English remake The Grudge (2004). Both movies were formative in fostering my love for horror and scaring me senseless. So when I saw the remake trailer, I felt a sense of nostalgia on top of the impending sense of doom. Remakes usually aren’t the greatest and the January release date only made that sense of dread more palpable. On top of that, the first remake was good enough , so it felt weird to want to try and add something new again. However, that sense of trepidation gave way to slight optimism when I realized that Nicolas Pesce was directing the movie. I loved The Eyes of My Mother and felt that maybe he could deliver a moving remake of a beloved movie. After having just seen the remake, I can confirm that it’s indeed a mixed bag of emotions. The plot feels messy and stretched too thin and the scares feel repetitive and predictable. In spite of this, I found myself thoroughly enjoying some moments. The film has it’s flaws – but it also has cool ideas that I wish it had run with more.

The movie has a main plot and then 3 additional subplots all taking place at different times between 2004-2006. The primary plot follows Detective Muldoon as she finds herself entangled in the “grudge”- a curse that kills anyone that comes into its proximity. The main issue with the movie is that the main plot is pretty boring by itself until the final few moments and a few macabre scenes in the second act. Riseborough is relegated to being an exposition scene and literally just helps Pesce cut to the other more interesting subplots. Each of the subplots deals with a separate family and their own experiences interacting with the “grudge”/each other It’s funny because seemingly the most important subplot is only touched near the end of the film. The subplot featuring the Spencer family is heartfelt and had me feeling something in spite of the messy plot. The Matheson subplot introduces some of most horrifying thinking and I genuinely wish the film had spent most of the time here. There are some creepy ideas that are kind of toyed around with but never expanded on. Honestly, I wish the movie was just more focused. Cut out the incessant exposition and over explaining and just let the character interactions and ideas out. The movie is at its best in precisely these moments.

Acting in the movie is fine- for the most part. It honestly feels like the actors did the best with the way the plot went about so I can’t fault any of them. In spite of sparse characterization, Lin Shaye stole the scenes she was in. I loved her in all the Insiduous movies and watching her play a different role highlights just how much of a range she has. She gives a lot in this performance and made everything involving her really fun. Cho and Gilpin add the only real emotional weight to the convoluted plot. They do a great job in making the unfolding horrors more tragic and less undeserved.

There’s nothing special in terms of camera vision, but that’s mainly because most scenes are just set-ups for obvious jump scares. It’s always characters walking, then finding something, then looking away ,cue realization of impending scare, look back, then scare . It’s okay the first time but it’s lackluster with how well the scares are executed in the other Grudge movies. The lack of creativity in set-ups wasn’t something I was expecting. Thankfully, the score is engaging. It kept me at least partially invested when it came on. Especially during the last two scenes- it makes them memorable.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	All in all – The Grudge (2020) isn’t awful – but it’s definitely a bag of missed opportunities. I appreciate the way it tried to add some new twists to the original Grudge but those attempts fall flat or aren’t pushed far enough – which is a shame because I really enjoyed some of them.If you liked Ju-On or The Grudge I think there’s something in here for you. Yes – it’s not amazing or groundbreaking, but it’s certainly not the worst horror movie I’ve seen. The theater I went to was mostly packed and was quite engaged for a lot of the moments I responded to, so I really think some of ya’ll might enjoy portions of this.
Rating	5.8/10
Grade	F

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2012, B+, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Sinister – 2012

December 26, 2019 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Scott Derrickson
Principal Cast	Ethan Hawke as Ellison Juliet Rylance as Tracy James Ransone as Deputy So & So
Release Date	2012
Language(s)	English
Running Time	109 minutes
Report Card	Click to go Review TLDR/Summary

A projector starts up and the guttural mechanical sounds of its inner workings cloud the soundscape. Super 8 footage emits from the unseen machine depicting a family, each member of which has their head covered by a bag, being hung on a tree. The gritty footage is augmented by the abrasive noises of the projector – the footage takes on a disturbing home-made quality. Every member of the domestic unit is executed when a tree branch is cut by an entity not shown on the screen. As the family’s feet stop moving, the title card crops up in the lower right corner of the frame, as if etched out against the grain of the celluloid.

The sheriff (Fred Thompson) accosts Elliot (Ethan Hawke).

Post title sequence, the viewer is introduced to the film’s protagonist, Ellison (Ethan Hawke), a writer moving to a new house in an effort to find materials to publish a new best-seller. However, his move is interrupted by a sheriff (Fred Thompson) who accosts him and gives the audience Ellison’s relevant backstory: the writer published a best-seller but struck out with his subsequent novels which not only painted law enforcement as incompetent but also incorrectly assessed the nature of situations being documented. It becomes clear that this current book is Ellison’s attempt at striking gold once more after a set of failures.

Before leaving, the sheriff mentions that Elliot’s pursuits will only bring up answers that no one wants to know and that his decision to move into the house he’s chosen is disrespectful in light of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance. Both warning and condemnation alike are ignored by Elliot who waives the sheriff off. This interaction is noted by Ellison’s wife, Tracy (Juliet Rylance), who asks her husband what the altercation was about. She hesitatingly questions if the house the family has moved into is next to a murder site again, implying that Elliot has made the family move to dangerous locations before. He assuages her concerns and confirms the house is not neighboring a murder location. But as he stares at the same broken tree from the snuff film from the opening, it becomes clear that he’s moved his family into an abyss where a family was hung. Far from keeping the family some proximity away from the terrors of his investigative work, he’s brought them right into the heart of darkness.

The all-encompassing evil surrounding his family makes its appearance felt as the four-person unit eats dinner in complete black. They don’t know what Elliot has dragged them into and act in total bliss, unaware of the abyss slowly encroaching from all around. Unfortunately, this façade is one doomed to collapse as Elliot discovers when he goes upstairs to do some unpacking. He notices a black scorpion near a box filled with super 8 film reels. Suddenly, the title sequence rears its ugly head again – the scorpion becomes an emissary of terrible things to come.

Alas, Elliot is unaware of these connections and takes the box of “home videos” downstairs after trying to dispatch the scorpion. He goes into his private study, far from the eyes of his family, and starts to play the tapes. At first, the super 8 footage depicts a peaceful domestic image; a family plays around while having a joyous looking picnic. However, this idyllic image is shattered as the jittery footage cuts to the title sequence’s footage – it becomes clear that this cheerful family is the same one the viewer saw being hung. Now, Elliot has seen the same. Now, the tree in his backyard seems all the more ominous. Now, evil has made its presence brazenly known.

Perturbed by the experience, Elliot goes outside to check on the tree and is confronted by its looming presence. It’s as if the spirits of the family still linger from where they were executed, warning Elliot of what’s to come. Nevertheless, he persists and goes back to his study to continue investigating the demented home films.

The carnage is displayed on Elliot’s (Ethan Hawke) glasses.

But the footage proves to be too much. Each film he watches follows the same pattern – a peaceful vision of a family which is followed by their gruesome execution. Finally, the violence erupts and totally breaks Elliot down. Shocked and disgusted, he takes out phone and dials the police, ready to get legal enforcement in on an issue which seems to be more heinous than he previously imagined.

And then he stops. He looks up and sees a stack of his bestseller, Kentucky Blood, sitting perched on a shelf under a bright light, a limelight from a past age. The decadent red color of the books entrance Elliot; within them, he sees this case as a chance at being great all over again. The allure of greatness takes precedence over all else, and he turns the phone off. A decision made that cannot be undone.

This is the heart of Sinister and where the film excels: the story of a writer pursuing the restoration of his status at all else, making a Faustian deal with to get back in the limelight. The film spends the entirety of its run-time with Elliot as he attempts to discover the root of the mystery, the reason behind the murders, and the connective tissue behind the tapes. The more he watches the found-footage films, the more he gets invested. Because we’re forced to watch with him, the same sense of morbid curiosity infects us. Even though the conclusion of each tape is foregone, there’s a horrific spell cast that makes it impossible to avert the eyes from the screen. It’s in these moments, watching a man watch horror films, that Sinister manages to unnerve the most. The true crime feeling gives the supernatural events captured on the home videos gone wrong a palpable malevolence – they’re meanspirited and get under the skin because of how vicious and unforgiving they are.

These moments gain their power not from gore but from their propensity at triggering the viewer’s imagination. At a fundamental level, there’s something creepy about super 8 film stock because of the way the texture of it obfuscates and “dirties” the image. There’s an uncomfortable grittiness that’s always present. Normal images are distorted enough to feel unnerving, but the hellish and inexplainable nature of what’s depicted only amplify the feeling. Sinister takes this unease and transforms it into palpable dread with its sound design. Along with the sounds of the projector, the film utilizes distortions, scratches, incomplete jumbles, demonic choral riffs, and other sonic oddities to create states of paranoia. Something is always buzzing or disconcerting enough to create worry. Because of this, the viewer is forced to think about where the noise is coming from and what it has to do with the image. There’s a fundamental disconnect between what’s going on and that sense of mystery is what generates unease and causes one’s thoughts to run wild. Like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sinister evokes the feeling that one has seen gore of the most depraved kind even when no gore has been shown purely by stimulating unconscious fears regarding the situation.

It’s precisely when the film tries to explain the nature of its supernatural set-up and remove the level of mystery that it suffers; the unconscious fears that had previously been building up fizzle out as the direct explanation of the spectral undermines the unease by which it operates. The film goes for these more overt gestures in order to engage in predictable, expendable jump-scare sequences that pad the story until it ends. In fact, once the last home movie is played, there’s a significant drop in narrative momentum, as the film becomes lost on how to effectively move the characters to the next story beat.

This should not have been the case; the terrors should have been built around and upon Elliot’s compromised relationship with his family and his obsessive pursuit of a glorious time at the cost of everything else. It is precisely in the destruction of the idyllic family life that Sinister disturbs deepest, so the larger story should have been focused more on the disintegration of the family unit in relation Elliot’s decision; however, the film only ever shows his arguments with Tracy and even those play second-fiddle to the film’s investigation into the actual nature of the supernatural mystery, which as previously mentioned, undermines what makes the film effective. Consequently, the tension that the first half excels in is lost for much of the latter portion of the film as both character and narrative momentum is squandered on cheap thrills that pale in comparison to the frights from before.

This pivot in focus is a shame because it squanders Ethan Hawke’s grounded and terrified character work which otherwise laid out a perfect foundation on which to build the film. His emphatic reactions to the home movies is part of the reason they come off as so disturbing. There’s a visceral pain he imparts upon seeing the families meet their end. But then this pain is juxtaposed against the ambition in his eyes that props up every time he’s reminded of his past. Both heaven and hell are present in his gaze and lets the viewer at least understand his character’s actions even the consequences seem disastrous.

Thankfully, the final few minutes of the film bring the narrative back to the threads that made it compelling to begin with, both subverting the the haunted house story and resolving Elliot’s arc in satisfying fashion. It’s a far cry from the potential hinted at in the opening act, but Sinister‘s craft, mood, and performance carry its uneven narrative to terrifying heights.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Sinister starts strong as a true-crime styles supernatural thriller that follows an author going in over his head to get a story, but falters towards the end as it settles for cheap and conventional horror tactics. When the film is at it’s best, it’s truly terrifying and promises to unsettle even the most veteran of horror aficionados, but at it’s worst, the film does little more than undermine the basis of what makes it so effective. Thankfully, with an near impeccable first act, a thoroughly engaging performance by Ethan Hawke, and a perfectly poetic ending, there’s much to recommend for viewers looking for a spooky time.
Rating	8.5/10
Grade	B+

Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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2010s, 2019, F, Grade, Horror, mystery, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Review: The Curse of La Llorona

December 24, 2019 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Michael Chaves
Principal Cast	Linda Cardellini as Anna Tate-Garcia Raymond Cruz as Rafael Olvera Patricia Velásquez as Patricia Alvarez Marisol Ramirez as La Llorona
Release Date	2019
Language(s)	English
Running Time	93 minutes

Boring. Uninspired. Dull. These are the first words that come to my head when I think of The Curse of La Llorona. Despite having seen the movie only a few days ago, I can barely remember large portions of it because of how uninspired and hollow the characters and their story are. It’s a shame, because as a huge fan of the Conjuring franchise, I wanted to have a fun time with Michael Chaves debut in the same.

The movie follows Anna, an recently widowed social services worker who’s life is subsequently haunted by the titular weeping women, La Llorona. Even though the plot unfolds exactly like how you think it would, the performances are never awful. Caddellini does what she can as a worried mother fighting for the sake of her family but the plot never lets her flesh herself out more in an interesting way. The child actors also do their job. There was almost a moment where I felt myself caring for their struggle. Unfortunately, the film never builds on that feeling and by the time the terrifying events start ensuing I had to struggle to find a reason to watch.

The real issue is how underdeveloped the plot feels. There are some initial stakes and interesting situations set up- but then instead of letting those threads play out naturally everything just gets pushed to the periphery in favor of a generic series of jump scares. This movie has all the tell tale signs of a generic supernatural horror story- random noises, the camera suddenly “revealing” the threat, characters doing incredibly out of place things despite knowing the danger of everything, and magical solutions working or not working depending on what the plot necessitated. As such, nothing ever feels scary. Every scare is telegraphed from miles away.

Add on to this the feeling of coincidence- nothing ever feels like an authentic character decision and everything feels out of place. There’s this whole subplot with child abuse and misdirection but instead of doing something interesting with that and doing a nuanced commentary on how certain bodies are demarcated and judged without getting a fair shot to present their stories- everything is glossed over for a new scare. It makes every moment feel hollow and empty.

I would have been more okay with this if the scares were at least interesting or terrifying , but the special effects and actual scare reveals lack any meaningful buildup and failed to ever elicit any kind of real response from me. The only thing that separates this movie from the random horror movie you’d stumble on in the middle of the night on a streaming service is the higher production values. It helps the movie at least feel more refined, but its just like putting lipstick on a pig.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Curse of La Llorona is a disappointing story that squanders a lot of the potential of its source material. You should think of the film as a vehicle for cheap jump scares- elements like characters or the score almost feel like afterthoughts to the scare set-ups.As someone who even had fun with The Nun, the fact that I couldn’t find anything to latch on in this movie says a lot. Watch it if you feel a special connection to the myth and are okay with watching a bland enactment of the horror from the same.
Rating	3.8/10
Grade	F

Pages: 1 2

2010s, 2016, B, Drama, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Lights Out – 2016

December 2, 2019 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	David F. Sandberg
Principal Cast	Teresa Palmer as Rebecca Gabriel Bateman as Martin Alexander DiPersia as Bret Maria Bello as Sophie Alicia Vela-Bailey as Diana
Release Date	2016
Language(s)	English
Running Time	81 minutes
Report Card	Click to go Review TLDR/Summary

The film opens on a burst of white light. As the camera pulls back, the source of this light, a post outside a textile building, is revealed.

A worker in the building, Esther (Lotta Losten), goes to finish off the last of her duties and notices a woman’s silhouette standing in the doorway. She turns on the light to get a better look and the figure disappears. Esther tests the phenomenon by flicking the lights on and off, but immediately stops and runs off when the silhouette moves closer to her during an intermission between the light switches.

She promptly goes to warn her boss, Paul (Billy Burke), who pays little heed to her warning as his focus is preoccupied on a conversation with his step-son, Martin (Gabriel Bateman); Paul tries to assuage Martin’s concerns about some personal affairs and then gets ready to leave the office.

Paul (Billy Burke) sees the shadow figure.

But the silhouetted figure makes her appearance once again and stops him. Suddenly, he finds himself being chased through the warehouse; the creature manages to injure him when in shadow but can’t seem to touch him while he’s under a light source. Unfortunately, the shadow demon seems capable of turning out the lights and manages to kill him under the guise of the dark. She throws his corpse and the scene fades to black – a counterpoint to the intense light that opened the scene. This is a clash between light and dark with deadly stakes. The title card flickers onto the screen, breaking through the darkness and the battle continues.

The camera pulls out from a poster of a vampiric entity, a domesticated rendition of the shadow entity from before. It moves from the poster to a young couple, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Bret (Alexander DiPersia), getting up from bed. Bret attempts to establish a more explicit relationship with Rebecca but she rejects his attempts. She’s dealing with her own set of issues and as she gazes into the mirror, it’s clear she’s trying to affirm herself. She reassures Bret of her feelings but explains she can’t be as forthright as he is.

A photograph of Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Martin (Gabriel Bateman) in Rebecca’s room.

As he leaves for the night, the camera pans to Rebecca’s shelving unit and pushes into a photograph of Rebecca and Martin, the boy from opening talking to Paul; the two of them are siblings. The camera pulls back from the photograph, pulling us to a new room – Martin’s. From the photograph of the siblings, we track from additional photographs of Martin with Paul and his mother, Sophie (Maria Bello) to an obituary photo of Paul to Martin sitting on his bed with an expression of fear: a trail of familial darkness coalescing in one scared boy.

He gets up out of his bed to check on his mom and notices her talking to a “Diana” (Alicia Vela-Bailey) hidden in the shadows. He tries to get a better look at her but experiences terror as he feels something inhuman gazing back at him. He hides in his bed, utterly petrified of the situation and unable to close his eyes.

The next day, Martin, suffering from sleep deprivation, is brought to the nurse and calls Rebecca to come pick him up. From there, she learns that Martin has been sleeping in school for days on end, seemingly unable to get any rest at home. Rebecca, with Bret in tow as chauffeur, drives to Sophie’s house to get a handle on the situation. On the way, Martin mentions to Rebecca that Sophie has been speaking to someone named Diana, and a chilling realization sweeps through Rebecca’s eyes. She tells Martin that “Diana” came to their mother a lot during Rebecca’s youth as well – a harbinger of the debilitating depressive phases Sophie commonly went through and is currently going through.

With the context of Diana, Rebecca goes in to confront Sophie and comes to the realization that her mother has fallen into a depraved state, neglecting therapy and medication in favor of communing with Diana in a perpetually dark house with the lights out. The loss of Paul has sent Sophie reeling into an abyss that threatens to take her family along with it. Thus, Rebecca and company are tasked with figuring out a way of to deal with the darkness and the despair that comes along with it.

From this angle, Lights Out is an allegory about depression much in the vein of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, utilizing the trappings of a supernatural horror to explore the way dark thoughts lay roost and come to consume not only oneself but ones entire family as well. As Sophie suffers the people closer to her – Rebecca, Martin, Paul – are forced to deal with and suffer the consequences of depression imagined as supernatural infiltration. By mapping depression to darkness and healing to light, director David F. Sandberg sets the film up for frantic battles where characters have to desperately scramble to find the light in the darkest of situations to keep themselves afloat, nailing the metaphor on its head.

Yet, this reading of the film is rendered formally suspect by the opening sequence at the textile factory. Having Esther deal with Diana makes the latter less a representation of familial grief and more a general demonic entity, and the film leans into this idea repeatedly, having Diana engage in creepy maneuverings typical of something more akin to The Conjuring films. Instead of being tied to Sophie’s thoughts and inner circles, Diana is allowed to be a loose cannon only tangentially tied to depression and is able do whatever the plot needs her to do. This conflict in identity contributes to a disconnect in the narrative and its emotional arcs as the story refuses to commit to either being an horror motivated by intimate family drama or horror motivated by the machinations of an evil creature.

Instead of this combined approach, the story should have committed to one haunted vision over another: either go for a more traditional supernatural demon story with an explicit threat or go for an allegory about grief. As is, the narrative feels like it wants to be the latter story but is forced to deal with intrusions from the former story.

Consequently, even though many of the more shocking sequences are technically competent and incorporate creative uses of lighting to keep the tension palpable, they are transformed from being evocative representations of the characters’ inner turmoil to run-of-the-mill jump-scare sequences. There’s still fun to be had, but it’s a far cry from what the ideas and sense of sequence design should have allowed for.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Lights Out is a technically proficient horror that knows how to set up a scary sequence but its story is torn between wanting to be a character-driven supernatural allegory and a ghost story about a spectral menace. This lack of direction pervades the narrative and makes it the well-executed scare sequences nothing more than temporary frights with no staying power after watching.
Rating	7.7/10
Grade	B

Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
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2000s, 2002, A+, Grade, Horror, mystery, Review, review-movie, supernatural, Year

Review: The Ring

November 24, 2019 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Gore Verbinski
Principal Cast	Naomi Watts as Rachel David Dorfman as Aidan Martin Henderson as Noah Daveigh Chase as Samara Brian Cox as Richard Morgan
Release Date	2002
Language(s)	English
Running Time	115 minutes

Gore Verbinski’s iconic remake of Ringu , The Ring, was my first horror movie and I have a soft spot in my heart for it. I remember as a kid, I watched the beginning scene of Scary Movie 3 and got so scared of it that I had to run out of the room. Yes, young me was so afraid of everything that even a horror parody could get me breathing heavy. Looking back on the moment I have no idea why it was so scary,but I knew that I had to avoid the film. Imagine my horror, when I realized what I had seen was a comedic take of a much scarier scene from an actual horror movie . I wanted to get over it, but I was also just scared of it. Thankfully, in my early teen years, I decided to conquer my fears and take the plunge. The Ring absolutely terrified me and I couldn’t look at my T.V for weeks after my first viewing. Even now the movie holds up suprisingly well and should provide more than the meaningful scare for those ready to take the plunge.

For those of you not familiar with the original , the story follows Rachel a journalist who starts to investigate a series of mysteriously connected deaths. After doing a bit of digging she uncovers a rumor of a tape said to kill anyone who views it in 7 days. Desperate to get to the bottom of the mystery she locates and watches the tape falling under its curse. With a 7 day timer, Rachel has to uncover the mystery before falling victim to the curse. Just the premise itself is terrifying in its simplicity. TV’s are ubiquitous and the idea a program on it could end up killing someone is horrifying. It’s tangential and something that could happen to anyone who happened upon an unnamed VHS, which growing up could totally happen.

Given that it’s a remake, it’s surprising to see how much Verbinksi managed to add to the film to breathe new life into it. I love how the color palette is dark and blue which keeps the mood bleak and ominous. The story deals a lot with water and murkiness so the colors thematically tie everything together. It’s such a distinctive feeling and stays with you long after watching it. On top of this, Hans Zimmer’s score is absolutely chilling and feels inseparable from the story the moment it starts playing. It’s a one of a kind horror soundtrack that I’ve never felt from anything else in the genre and I think that’s commendable. Just listen to “The Well” and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Furthermore, the deaths in this movie are a lot more chilling and scary than the deaths in the original. When we see our first victim it’s like a sucker punch to the face. I can still remember the nauseous uncomfortable feeling that ran down my spine. They linger on the screen briefly – just enough to disturb the viewer without giving us enough time to inspect the damage. What makes it all the worse is we’re never told how it happens. We see our soon to be dead victim perfectly fine, reacting to the horror of the tape, and then see their body. It gets you thinking as to what horrifying events they went through to go from healthy and happy to their ultimate fate. Despite having seen this film at least four times, the scares still get me each viewing. The changes to the contents of the cursed tape are also great. It’s a lot scarier in a visceral sense and some of the images made my stomach churn. The images are incorporated well throughout the story and I appreciate how much effort went into exploring the way the tape is created and the ramifications of such a process.

One surprising change is how much more agency the lead character is given in comparison to her counterpart in the original. Rachel feels more humane. In the original movie, Reiko (Rachael) wants to investigate the deaths because she’s a journalist. Her personal relation to the case is secondary. Meanwhile, in this movie, the situation is reversed for Rachel, and she only investigates because her sister asks her to look into deaths. It makes Rachel feel more sympathetic and her plight more tragic as a result. Watt’s acting also helps her character feel relatable. She’s a no-nonsense get down to action person so when she shows terror after watching the cursed videotape you know something awful has happened. The terror of the tape feels real ,like it’s come out into the world around. The movie does a good job of getting you attached to her and rooting for her to win.

I didn’t like how the mystery of the tape was handled in this movie compared to the remake. The way characters come to key discoveries feels undeserved and more luck based which takes away from the realistic portrayal of events. In particular, Aidan is used as a plot tool more than once and it makes his entire character feel like a device to set events in play. This is indicative of a larger problem with the movie. Certain moments are carried over from the first film, but because this movie skips certain subplots, those moments don’t feel as emotionally charged. For example, the removal of a lot of the psychic subplot removes a lot of the rich commentary on how we treat and inflict violence on the Other. It also makes the decision to keep Aidan a psychic feel strange and unneeded. It’s never done to do anything cool and its inclusion actively makes certain plot elements more confusing. The scope of his powers and knowledge of the situation also don’t line up properly, so it just makes more trouble than necessary.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Ring is a faithful remake of Ringu that manages to add enough new and interesting material to appeal to fans of the original. The film isn’t as thematically strong, but its scares and chilling atmosphere more than compensate. This is one of the few good remakes of a horror movie I’ve seen and anyone who wants a atmospheric, clever, scary movie should watch this.
Rating	9.5/10
Grade	A+

Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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Category Archives: supernatural

Film Review: The Blackcoat’s Daughter – 2015

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Film Review: The Conjuring – 2013

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Film Review: Insidious – 2010

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Film Review: Annabelle: Creation

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Review: Annabelle Comes Home

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Review: The Grudge (2020)

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Film Review: Sinister – 2012

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Review: The Curse of La Llorona

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Film Review: Lights Out – 2016

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Review: The Ring

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