Kate Siegel as Maddie Young John Gallagher Jr. as The Assailant
Release Date
2016
Language(s)
English
Running Time
81 minutes
Hush tells the story of Maddie, a deaf author, suffering from a particularly grueling case of writers’ block. Given her condition, she doesn’t notice when a nameless intruder stakes his claim in her house, hell bent on torturing her until it’s no longer fun and then killing her after. Little does he know that Maddie’s not ready to give in and she’s more resourceful than she looks.
This is the first Mike Flanagan movie I ever watched and is the first of many reasons why I will watch anything he makes (As of writing this, I’m only missing The Haunting of Hill House). Typically when I watch a movie, I have anywhere from a few to a lot of “Why don’t they just…?” or “That doesn’t make sense and would never happen!” thoughts. That issue happens far less often in a Flanagan movie because he spends time justifying every decision and helping the audience understand exactly what all the outs are. This movie takes great pain to humor the audience’s “what-if” scenarios, in a way that’s both logistically and visually satisfying.
The movie does a great job of establishing each of the main characters as individuals and as a cat-and-mouse pair that’s trying to take each the other one out. Siegel is excellent as the lead and manages to convey a lot of intention and emotion through excellent facial expressions and physical acting. She’s not allowed to talk in a traditional sense, so watching her “show” her thoughts makes the experience feel more personal. Within a few scenes, I was invested in her well-being and found myself rooting for her to win. She uses her circumstances and wit to constantly navigate the situation, so the movie feels unique in how competent the “final girl” starts off. It’s a refreshing change of pace that keeps the movie feeling fresh in a genre that needs new life injected into it. John Gallagher Jr. is unnerving as the unnamed assailant. He’s a total psychopath and the movie hammers that point in more than once. Early on, when he realizes Maddie is deaf, he decides it would be more fun to torture her and go in for the kill, because he could prolong it like a game. The cold, calm, and composed way John fulfills his actions makes it clear that the events in the movie are nothing more than sick and twisted entertainment for his character. Side characters are used effectively. None of them linger for longer than they need to and they’re presented as capable in their own right. It makes them feel like they’re real parts of the world, as opposed to throw-away characters meant to change the pace up and add new sources of tension.
Maddie’s condition is used to great effect and Flanagan has found a way to give her a voice in spite of her lack of speaking. Things happen in the background, and Maddie doesn’t turn around to look at them. It’s typical horror movie bad decision 101, but in her case it’s understandable because she can’t hear the noises of the “things” happening around her. It creates excellent square sequences where we see menacing things happen around her and know that she’s walking straight into harrowing circumstances.
Though the movie is deftly crafted and well-paced, it doesn’t do anything spectacular to change up the genre or make its themes refined. There’s a simple underlying story of defying expectations and using them to your advantage, but it’s only ever explored in one way. It’s relatable but not complex. That’s not a bad thing, but given how well executed and conceived the mechanics and performances are, the same level of nuance in the themes or story would have elevated this movie into something really great. Don’t get it twisted, this is one of the best slashers of the past decade. I just thought it had way more potential.
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TLDR
Hush is one of the best slashers of the past decade and is sure to entertain anyone who has a hankering for a bad-ass “final” girl. Deaf author vs sadistic psychopath plays out with a lot more finesse and nuance than you’d expect.There are innovative communication strategies, well executed chase sequences, and tons of chilling harrowing moments. Best part? It’s only 81 minutes, so you don’t need to spend a long time waiting around.
Rating
9.0/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 to view this review’s progress report .
A view of the neighborhood. The camera pulls in through a window… …which is revealed to be the window of the Amityville residence’s attic. Drew (Shannon Cook), the Warren’s technical assistant, sets up the camera’s in the attic. The camera glides through a window frame in the infamous Amityville household. The attic the window sits in is outfitted with equipment meant to detect the paranormal.
A view of a suburban neighborhood transforms into a more intimate encounter as the camera glides from the street through a window pane into the attic of a specific house – the Amityville residence. When Drew (Shannon Cook), the Warren’s technician shows up in the room to set up a camera, it becomes apparent that the duo is here attempting to solve the infamous Amityville case.
Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) and Ed(Patrick Wilson) get ready to investigate the Amityville house. The camera pushes in on Lorraine(Vera Farmiga)Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) gets ready to open her eyes. As Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) opens her eyes, the camera pulls out. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) is revealed to be in the same room, but the lighting is much darker now. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) seems to be the only agent in the room as Ed(Patrick Wilson) and the others are “grayed” out. Wan lets the camera glide into and out of Lorraine in much the same manner as it glided through the Amityville house earlier. Both entities seem to possess an spectral agency, a tie to the world beyond. Lorraine moves from her body and demonstrates her psychic powers are similar to astral projection.
On cue, both Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) appear seated in the living room, setting up a séance with the family residing in the abode. The camera slowly pushes in on Lorraine. Her eyes are lit differently indicating she’s engaging in her spiritual sight. Eventually, the camera settles on a close-up of her face. Her eyes open, and the camera pulls back out to a darkened room. Lorraine is the only person in the area who still retains a vitality, a spark that gives her a color that the others in the room no longer possess.
Lorraine’s (Vera Farmiga) astral projection walks around the Amityville residence as her corporeal body sits with Ed (Patrick Wilson) and the house’s residents. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) sees two of the victims. The woman in the pair looks away. There’s a jump cut and the woman stares at Lorraine’s direction. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) loads her invisible gun and shoots the woman. There’s a jump cut and the woman lays dead next to her husband. The woman’s photograph. Wan employs jump cuts to represent the discontinuity of Lorraine’s experience. She’s roleplaying the Amityville murders, but the manner in which she does so indicates that she’s not fully in control with how the session will play out. To get access to the full picture, she’ll need to re-live the entire event.
Her astral form exits the room, leaving her body behind with the others in the realm of the living. She goes up the stairs and is met with a couple, a man and a woman, in their bedroom. The man has a gash in his body. The woman is sitting facing away from Lorraine. Suddenly, the film cuts, jumping forward. The woman stares at Lorraine and interrogates her. In response, Lorraine reloads an imaginary gun and shoots the woman. Another jump cut and the woman lays dead next to her husband. A close-up of her visage on a family photograph appears briefly. Without saying anything, it’s apparent that Lorraine is using her psychic vision to roleplay the events of the Amityville massacre, allowing herself to be possessed by the events of the house in an attempt to figure everything out.
Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) is “possessed” by the real killer as she investigates what really happened. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) is horrified by the deaths she reenacts. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) expresses her discontent in the corporeal realm as Ed (Patrick Wilson) looks over concerned. As Lorraine walks along a mirror, it’s revealed that she’s possessed by the actual killer. She’s “wearing” his experience so to speak, and once he’s done with his murders, she breaks out of the trance in shock. Her devastation ripples through from her astral body to her corporeal one.
More murders follow in similar fragmented manner until Lorraine jolts in horror at the scenarios she’s been forced to replay. Her emotions break through from the astral realm to the realm of the living, as her physical body reacts in much the same way. Ed, worried about his wife’s distress, asks her to call off the endeavor and return to her body. But Lorraine refuses and seeks to carry on.
A child with white eyes stares at Lorraine. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) follows the child. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) walks and reveals a host of ghost children. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) is caught by surprise as the ghost children all stare in one direction. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) investigates the object of the children’s’ gaze. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) pulls off a cover to reveal a mirror. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) notices a demonic Nun (Bonnie Aarons) behind her in the mirror’s reflection. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga)looks behind her and sees nothing. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) notices the Nun (Bonnie Aarons) has stepped closer to her.Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) is choked out by the Nun. But the Nun’s hands dissapear and become Lorraine’s(Vera Farmiga) own hands. The nun conjures up a vision of a man being impaled for Lorraine to observe. Lorraine follows a specter downstairs and is shown a mirror. In her reflection, she notices another figure gazing back at her. Every time she turns to check for the figure behind her, nothing shows up. But when she turns back to the mirror, the figure, a demonic Nun, gets closer and closer. Finally, the creature steps out of the mirror and attacks Lorraine. But the attack abates as the hands around Lorraine’s neck inexplicably become hers once again. But the nun isn’t done with its target. It conjures up a vision of a man being impaled which sends Lorraine into a stack of abject despair.
She follows a spectral child who leads her to a host of ghost kids. The group stares at an object which Lorraine disrobes and reveals to be a mirror. A figure in the glass’s reflection stares at her. Lorraine turns back to confront the figure. There’s nothing. She turns back to look at the mirror. Now the figure, a demonic Nun (Bonnie Aarons) is staring directly at her. Another turn back. Nothing. When she turns her head back to the mirror, the Nun appears outside of it and proceeds to choke her.
But the Nun’s hands are then revealed to be Lorraine’s hands after all. Where did the creature go and what did it want? Suddenly, Lorraine sees a vision conjured by the Nun. A man is impaled in brutal fashion. While the visage of the figure is unknown to us, it’s clear that the demonstration means something to Lorraine.
Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) screams due to the vision. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) wakes up in the corporeal realm screaming. Lorraine(Vera Farmiga) tells Ed (Patrick WIlson) of the depths of the depravity she’s seen. Lorraine wakes up in the realm of the living, revealing to her husband whatever vision she saw was the furthest she ever wanted to go in their encounters. The stakes are raised, but their depths are unknown.
She screams at its site as the film cuts from the astral world back to the corporeal world. The camera pulls out from her face, indicating that her encounter with the abyss is over for now. She reaches out to her husband and indicates that her experience is the “closest to hell” she ever wants to get to. The two stare at each other and the frame freezes.
A text crawl appears and explains that the Amityville case, the case we were just presented, serves as a good benchmark for the case The Conjuring 2 to explore. This time instead of the United States, the Warren’s are called to Enfield, England to deal with a haunting troubling the Hodgson family. Thus, the story proper can start; the stakes and rules of the spectral world are fully set.
In similar fashion to The Conjuring, director James Wan’s sequel follows the Warrens as they attempt to exorcist the spirits tormenting an innocent family. The story even adopts a similar structure as its predecessor and leaps back and forth between Warrens and the family they’re helping out, developing both sets of characters to raise the stakes for the finale. However, in The Conjuring 2′s case, the narrative regarding the family in question is far more focused and multifaceted. There’s a clear presentation of the family’s inner dynamics and an explanation for why and how they react to the adversities they face in the way they do.
The most important difference between the two films, however, is that this entry demonstrates and ties the nature of the Hodgson’s family’s empirical woes to their supernatural struggles, thereby giving a much-needed depth to the spectral spectacles Wan chooses to employ. [1] This is in reference to my discussion of Stephen King’s analysis of The Amityville Horror in my The Conjuring review. Check it out there for more context. While specters and demons are frightening in a visceral sense, real terror arises when those creatures represent something larger than themselves, a symbol of the more insidious terrors lying beneath the surface. Here the source of the family’s discord is tied to their newly missing father figure who left the Hodgson’s for another family, so the nature of the haunting they experience is that sense of abandonment come to life in ghostly form.
Additionally, as the opening demonstrates, the film’s focus on exploring and providing a more robust metaphysical explanation of the supernatural buttresses theatrical moments which would otherwise deflate the tension. By choosing to delve into the metaphysical aspect of the sub-genre in a manner more akin to his opaquer Insidious franchise’s “The Further”, Wan is able to provide a vantage point by which to interpret the seemingly random supernatural happenings in a manner which strengthens the film’s themes as opposed to feeling haphazard. However, instead of basking in explanation or set-up like he does in that franchise, Wan chooses to demonstrate the rules of supernatural engagement in this film via the camera movements. Push-ins indicate the presence of the supernatural and push-outs demonstrate the resolution of that presence. Consequently, Wan utilizes both camera moves in relation to both persons and locations to clue the viewer into when something otherworldly is happening. On top of serving as visual motif, the movement allows Wan to employ match cuts to hide and allow for stellar in-camera tricks. Just like Juraj Herz does in The Cremator, Wan pushes in on faces to disguise transformations in the set, seamlessly allowing the film to transition from and to areas in slick fashion.
These changes on the initial film’s formula give the sequel a springboard to jump off of which prevents the experience from feeling ham-fisted. Thus, for the most part, Wan gets to have his cake and eat it too; the theatricality and kinetic frenzy of his direction is given ample room to express itself without ever undermining the emotionally resonant story it’s meant to help tell. As a sequel, The Conjuring 2 does everything it should: it expands the scope of the original story in believable fashion while remaining consistent with the feeling and polish fans have come to expect.
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TLDR
The Conjuring 2 is the rare sequel that exceeds its original, improving on not only the narrative but also the cinematic presentation of the same. There’s a care given to developing the characters, both the family being haunted and the Warrens who seek to assist, that gives the film a depth that sustains it even during the more grandiose moments. While fans of the original will surely delight in the machinations presented here, the film’s more pronounced ambitions, namely demonstrated via its camera movements, might win over viewers who found the previous entry too simple for their tastes.
Rating
9.6/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3to view this review’s progress report .
Thomas Jane as Wilfred James Dylan Schmid as Henry James Molly Parker as Arlette James
Release Date
2017
Language (s)
English
Running Time
101 minutes
As someone who actually enjoyed 1922 (the novella), I was fairly excited when I saw that Netflix was going to distribute the adaptation. I’m even happier to announce that this adaptation is not only one of the better King adaptations out and about, but is also an effective horror movie in its own right. The story follows Wilfred James, a farmer whose way of life is under threat when his wife, Arlette, threatens to sell their farm land and leave for the city. Wilfred views land as an extension of ones worth and pride. Losing it is no real option. It gives him both the ability to take care of his family and represents the only thing he can leave his son, an extension of his name, and thereby another source of pride. Fearing that his wife will make good on her word, he decides to commit the cardinal sin and permanently remove her from the situation. However, he soon learns that everyone pays for their actions one way or another.
The framing device the movie uses to tie together all its events is Wilfred in the present day recounting his experiences fighting his wife, deciding to get rid of her, and the subsequent horrifying experiences he has to go through. The movie is a case study in the deterioration that accompanies sin. Even if no one is around to judge you, you know what you did. Your sub-conscious never forgets even if you can put your actions out of your mind. The way the framing device cuts in with the progression of the main story accentuates this feeling by giving the audience first-hand feedback on how the actions ended up impacting Wilfred in the future. As a result, watching him deal with the guilt of his action is both satisfying thematically and visually. The further he falls into the cycle of guilt , the more his world starts to visually crumble. You can always tell the state of his psyche based on the environment around him. It doubles as a cool representation of his inner thoughts and a source of visual scares.
Thomas Jane does a great job as Wilfred. You can see his resolve in his voice and demeanor. He comes off as someone on edge who’s forcing himself to stay rigid and coherent for the sake of his pride. Everything is worth it if he can succeed in his job as a farmer and in his duties as a father. His lineage determines his value as a human being and anything that could harm it is an attack on his very sense of self. It’s why his guilt manifests in such a strong and profound way. It’s because his perception of his worth has shifted, even if he can’t immediately tell it has.
My issues with the movie have more so to do with the original source material and not the adaptation itself. I think the adaptation does a great job at conveying the same sense of paranoia the novella had. The issue is that like the novella, there are some story moves that ruin the ambiguity of whether or not supernatural elements are actually at play. The story wants it to be ambiguous, but the way that it progresses makes that an impossibility. I wish the adaptation just edited certain moments in a different order because it would resolve the ambiguity issue. I also think there are certain additional sequences in the story that hurt the theme and characterization of Wilfred. I was sad to see them kept in the film adaptation. But if you enjoyed the full novella, then this should definitely please you.
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TLDR
1922 is a twisted tale chronicling a man’s descent into depravity. By prioritizing his interests and being unwilling to compromise, he ends up slowly losing his sense of self. Though the ending kind of misses the mark, the movie should satisfy fans of dramas and psychological horrors.
Rating
9.2/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Maika Monroe as Jay Height Keir Gilchrist as Paul Bolduan Jake Weary as Hugh
Release Date
2014
Language(s)
English
Running Time
100 minutes
Wow, my relationship with this movie is complicated. The first time I watched it, it was after its initial release in the US (2015). I had heard a ton of rave reviews about it and was super hyped. I remember feeling really bored by the end of the movie and cast it away as being over hyped. Fast forward a few years, and I ended up randomly seeing the movie on Netflix and decided to watch it again. This time I enjoyed the movie more, but still didn’t think it was that great. Finally, as I was making my best horror movies of the past decade list (coming soon I promise), I decided to give the movie one more watch and ended up genuinely loving it. All the details I had never paid attention to before like the cinematography and the score came into focus and I could appreciate the movie in its entirety as opposed to just honing in on the stuff I don’t like.
The film follows Jay, a high-school student, who receives a sexually transmitted supernatural curse of sorts. She’s told by her transmitter early on that the titular “it” will follow her to the ends of the earth, taking on any form it can to get to her. “It” can only be seen by her and other people who have been recipients of the curse. She can escape “it” for moments at a time, because “it” can only walk slowly towards her. To temporarily get rid of the curse, she has to pass it on to someone else. With barely any time to get a grasp on this knowledge, Jay is tossed out and forced to reckon with the horrifying situation she finds herself in.
The inherent idea of “it” is terrifying to think about. STD/STI’s are scary enough but “it” takes those fears and personifies them in the shape of something that uniquely haunts each victim. Adolescence is the time for a lot of early sexual exploration which is scary enough. It’s an act that makes you vulnerable to an other and to think that someone would willingly expose you to an ailment in order to survive makes the experience even more harrowing. However, voluntarily passing on the curse uses sex as a kind of social glue, giving it a connective tissue. It’s allegorical for how we begin to approach sexual relations. Yes, it can be scary and harrowing but it can also create positive tethers that prove conducive. It’s not just sex though – sex is only representative of the most intimate form of opening up with each other, so the movie can be interpreted at a more general level of the way we interact with one another. Every time we meet someone new we open ourselves up to a range of interactions. Despite the risks, there’s a lot of positives that can come from opening up. It’s a multifaceted message that allows for hope and enables genuine terror.
If that’s not your cup of tea and you just want to see actual scary moments, It Follows has them, but they’re interspersed throughout the movie. “It” violently brutalizes its victims when it finally reaches them and the aftermath of its encounter is presented within the first scene of the movie. Watching our protagonists interact with “it” make the endeavor feel hopeless and you genuinely get scared whenever “it” is in the proximity of the latest person in the chain of the curse.
Now that the story stuff is out of the way, I have to say the production values on this movie are through the roof. It’s an audio visual treat and you should watch it just to have the sensory experience. Mike Gioulakis knocks the visuals out of the park. You can pause the movie at any point and get a picturesque visual worthy of serving as a screensaver or being printed and placed in a frame. Every time “it” comes into the screen, the tension becomes palpable. There were multiple times where I could feel myself gripping my knuckles. The synthy score by Disasterpeace reminds me a lot of John Carpenters music and gives the movie this cool hypnotic feeling. It’s amazing just how different every track feels and I’ve listened to the album a lot while writing or reading. I absolutely adore the title track and how its incorporated into the movie. Every time I hear it the hairs on my arms automatically start prickling up, so I’d say its association with “it” was well established.
Now that we’ve gotten past the good stuff, let’s tackle my biggest issue with the movie- the characters. I couldn’t tell you any of the personality traits of the characters outside of some small facts about Jay. That’s right I said facts, not personality traits. Jay and her group of friends all feel incredibly stale. It’s not because they lack dialogue or chances for interaction. In fact, I enjoyed some of the conversations the group has with each other. It’s just all the characters have the same “gray” disposition. None of them are particularly energized and they come off as low energy. This compounded with the slow pacing creates the perceptual issue that nothing’s really happening, which is far from the truth. It’s not even that the performances are bad. For example, Weary’s performance as Hugh, the individual who gives Jay the curse to begin with, is great. His motivations come off as justified and scummy, which is exactly how he needs to be. It’s more so that characters are never told to approach situations with a lot of levity. There’s no real opportunity for high octane moments given the way everything plays out. This means the characters only have a few range of emotions to go through which makes certain sequences feel more boring than they should be. It’s an issue that bugs me, but not nearly enough to make me discount the movie like I used to.
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TLDR
It Follows is a treat on your eyes and ears. The idea of a sexually transmitted curse is terrifying, but the nuanced way the movie utilizes it to open up discourse on the way humans open up to each other is beautiful. This is a slow paced movie that relies on atmosphere so if you want jump scares or a lot of action, you may want to skip this. If you enjoy slow burn/arthouse movies then you might really like this,.
Rating
9.3/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Neil Maskell as Jay Michael Smiley as Gal MyAnna Burning as Shel Emma Fryer as Fiona
Release Date
2011
Language(s)
English
Running Time
95 minutes
I remember one rainy day in 2013 I was scrolling through the internet looking for a horror movie to watch that would be scratch a different itch from the supernatural movies I was getting used to seeing. I happened upon a Kill List recommendation, saw it was a crime film, and expected to see a typical psychological thriller. I was not ready for the ride I was getting into. This movie is a violent, adrenaline-fueled crime movie that really pushes the genre into new places. After re-watching this movie years later, I can only say my appreciation for its creativity has gone up.
The movie follows Jay and Gal, former soliders who have started to adapt to life back at home. The former finds it incredibly difficult to re-adjust to civilian life and his inability to go out and provide for the family has caused strains in his domestic life. Thankfully for him, his friend Gal comes in with a hitmen job posting. Jay and Gal receive a series of contracts and go out on a mystery laced journey, killing different seemingly disconnected individuals.
I love how the movie approaches its protagonists’ relationship to violence. Gal is more reserved , wanting to do the work because it gives him an source of income and he’d be good at it. He doesn’t want anything more to do with the job than the job itself. On the other hand, Jay is excited for the work because he misses the feeling of being in combat and persecuting the other. The idea of finding a scumbag, of being able to execute a vision of justice by taking out problematic individuals , in an almost ritualistic fervor is what drives him. Money is just the cherry on the top of it . The juxtaposition of their drives and the way their friendship operates in light of certain revelations is interesting and additionally serves as a referendum on the way that people decide to be jury,judge, and executioner in their actions. The discussion becomes more interesting as the movie delves into the identity of the contractors and the scope of their operations. As more things become revealed, the scope of this discussion becomes more ambiguous and open to interpretation. It’s fun to talk about with friends because everyone can come away with a different meaning for why everything happens.
The movie keeps the audience on its toes in how it approaches its depictions of violence. With a name like Kill List, you know that bodies are going to hit the floor. The question is how gruesome are those moments going to be. I read that Wheatley wanted to maintain a mystery about the way violence would be incorporated which is why every instantiation of it plays differently. There are cut-aways that imply the action have happened. There are also very deliberate, maddening displays of violence that will stay in your head for a while. It’s done for the sake of developing the discourse around the themes, not just for the sake of creating a visual spectacle. It manages to be visceral for the people who like to see more gruesome things and also gives people who want to imagine the depictions of violence room to enjoy things. That multifaceted approach to the issue makes it easy to watch in bigger settings. I’ve found the movie to be a good way to convert more mainstream horror/thriller fans into more out there horror movies, so if you’ve been itching to share that arthouse movie to a buddy, try this out first.
There are certain twists in the third act that I love. I can’t talk about any of them for fear of spoiling the movie, and I urge you to watch the movie without watching any trailers about it. There are some awesome sequences that I can still vividly remember. It’s shocking and should please a lot of people. However, it feels a bit rushed and that’s in spite of certain bits of foreshadowing in earlier scenes. I would have loved if the movie had developed these later elements in with the earlier discussion of violence to create a more nuanced take.
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TLDR
Kill List is a innovative crime horror that pushes the genre into a cool new direction.It’s an interesting look into violence and the way we orient ourselves in relation to it. If you want to show your friends more arthouse horror movies and they’re already into thriller/psychological horror movies then this may serve a sa good transition point.
Rating
9.3/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 to view this review’s progress report .
Colin Farrell as Steven Murphy Barry Keoghan as Martin Nicole Kidman as Anna Murphy Raffey Cassidy as Kim Murphy Sunny Suljic as Bob Murphy
Release Date
2017
Language(s)
English
Running Time
121 minutes
Saying I love this movie might be an understatement. When I first saw this back in 2017, I was left completely floored. This movie goes dark, nihilistic places but is somehow hilarious in an awful twisted way. It’s one of a kind and had me on the edge of my seats up till the credits started to roll. Watching it again for this review only reminded me of how amazing it all was and I promise I’ll watch more of Yorgos’s stuff in the future (starting with The Lobster) .
The plot summary will be sparse, because watching the mystery unravel is the best part. Steven Murphy is a renowned surgeon, living the bourgeoisie American life. He has a gorgeous exorbitant house and a nice idyllic family life. After he starts a friendship with Martin, an unnerving high school student, his family mysteriously starts falling ill. As he struggles to find a way to bring them back to good health, he’s forced to confront his past and make some truly outrageous decisions.
Without spoiling too much, the movie is about revenge and responsibility. When someone is wronged, how can we rectify the scales? Who should be responsible and how should things play out? The movie doesn’t stray away from some dark explorations into these areas and watching the characters grapple with the weight of their actions is both disturbing and comedic. There’s just something funny about the lengths people will go through to deny the truth of what’s going on in front of them, and Yorgos knows exactly how to depict that absurdity in a way that’s poignant and sardonic. It’s telling of the human condition- in particular the American bourgeoisie lifestyle – in how people are willing trade bits and pieces of themselves to keep a sense of social coherence/status. People are so preoccupied with inflating their sense of self, that they lose focus of the the important things, trading their humanity for some ludicrous fantasy.
You could pause the movie at random (most of the time) and end up with a nice picturesque moment. Yorgos knows how to create tension and mood with proper shot composition. There are gorgeous tracking shots that accentuate drama. Most of the time the camera zooms in or out very slowly to show the characters relation to the situation around them. Often times, it feels like it’s highlighting isolation and their attempts at projecting outside of that. The score only amplifies this feeling. There are boisterous orchestral moments that make the movie feel like a classic, and modern touches like a cover of Ellie Goulding’s Burn (which is horrifying but catchy).
Everyone’s performance is on point, but Barry Keoghan’s portrayal as Martin is something especially noteworthy. He’s creepy – all caps. He comes off a awkward initially, but as the plot progresses he becomes incredibly versatile. He’s menacing, honest, to-the-point, dry, nonchalant,serious and consistent at his core despite shifting among these moods. If he couldn’t balance the dead-pan, serious delivery of the lines, then a lot of more more memorable scenes wouldn’t have the same impact.
I only have a few problems with the movie. Some of the loftier plot elements feel a bit too “convenient” for me to accept without any question. They’re a bit too fantastical and feel at odds with the depth of realism in other areas. Furthermore, I wanted to understand some of the main drivers of the mystery in more depth, because I thought it could add and enhance the discussion of responsibility, but the film avoids that explanation. It becomes a bigger issue because the first act feels at odds with the conclusion of the movie without this explanation.
The characters also feel a bit odd. Don’t get me wrong. They’re memorable, distinct, and definitely all have moments where they shine. They’re just not relatable because they’re all odd, both as individuals and as interconnected units. Their characterization makes the themes of the movie pop out more , but make the horror harder to relate to.
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TLDR
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a deep dive into the dark crevices of the bourgeoisie psyche. It explores themes of revenge, responsibility, and the practice of engaging in cognitive dissonance for social standings. Some of the more ambiguous elements hold the film back from fully exploring its potential, but it hardly matters. If you’re looking for a dark comedic drama with some absurdist moments, I implore you to check this one out.
Rating
9.7/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
A child is born. The villagers are nicely blocked. The father treks. The father journeys forward, framed in the background as lonely among the elements. The father approaches the enchantress. The enchantress (Melody Carrillo) extracts the illness. The enchantress (Melody Carrillo) sits framed by a triangle. The enchantress dissolves to the child with second sight. The child is returned to the forest. Spectral children surround the Beautiful child. The beautiful child (Giulia Doherty) looks at the audience. The title card appears in the triangle surrounded by the reach of the tress. The fairy tale of the “Beautiful Child” serves as the fictional heart of this fairy tale adaptation and and takes broad strokes from the fairy tale serving as the film’s source, Hansel and Gretel: a witch, a forest, a child being abandoned. Yet, this telling differs in that the source of malevolence is the child who stares at the audience once the story is done and the moral has been imparted. We know we should be wary of gifts, givers, and receivers before the title drops, framed in the triangle, warning us of the supernatural events to follow.
We open on a black frame as a narrator invites us to listen to her tale, a story which “holds a lesson” that “might keep” its childish listeners “safe.” This is the story of “the Beautiful Child with the little pink cap.”
We cut to a scene of labor. A child is born to a couple through great pain and we’re treated to beautiful shots of the environment (utilizing both depth and blocking to accentuate the milieu in highly evocative fashion) of her upbringing.
This child is ill and her father (Jonathan Delaney Tynan) seeks alliance with an enchantress (Melody Carrillo), a denizen of “darkness”, who can heal any ailment. Her father bravely trusts the powers of this iconic figure, one whose silhouetted presence in a distinctive triangle emphasizes her narrative importance and the extent of her domain. The framing of her reveal needs no other dialogue to highlight her power.
A treatment is given and an ooze is extracted from the child, the illness rendered corporeal; in its place, a gift is given: the child (Giulia Doherty) is granted “second sight.” The film marks this transition from the witch to the child with a wonderful, dream-like dissolve which emphasizes the mystical connection between the two figures.
The town, eager to hear their futures, is ultimately made uncomfortable by the girl who predicts their “bitter” ends, an emotional response which is only exacerbated by the manner in which the gifted child ensures her prophecies come through via her use of supernatural gifts ; she even goes so far as to execute her father, the man who braved everything in his journey to heal his daughter, by hypnotizing him into taking his own life.
The child is returned to the deep woods, an attempt to isolate and seal the darkness resulting from her presence. But the girl, far from powerless, acquires new “friends”, the undead resurrected, who surround her in lieu of her former town and family.
With the tale concluded, the narrator warns her audience to be wary of gifts, those who offer them, and the willing benefactors willing to take them.
Fittingly, the “Beautiful Child” stares menacingly towards the audience, a 4th-wall breaking shot which serves as a wonderful footnote to the nature of the monologue so far, affirming to the audience that the deconstruction of the fairy tale will start promptly as the evils lurking behind the fantastical framework of the narrative form will be allowed to break through.
We cut to black and travel upwards through the reaching limbs of crooked trees, an evocation of the forest which served as the point of abandonment and magical mystery, before the iconic triangle, the symbol of the powerful enchantress, pops up back in frame and captures the film’s name within its domain, a title, Gretel & Hansel, which inverses the order of its Grimm fairy tale counterpart, Hansel and Gretel.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) walks through the woods as the camera tracks her. Gretel looks at her upside-down reflection in the water while contemplating. Hansel (Sam Leakey) and Gretel (Sophia Lillis) grunt at one another, a piggish affirmation of their relationship. The switch to another narrator, Gretel, marks a formal shift in the film. The tale being told goes from an epic, fable to a personal recollection of one’s life, a switch from objectivity to subjectivity. The frame goes from wide to boxy to reflect this. Gretel laments on the manner by which tales psychically become embedded within listeners and the manly deus ex machinas that inhabit the genre, usurping the potential of feminine agency.
Then, we’re entreated to new narration, one that operates in a psychic conversation with the opening, deconstructing the gendered apparatus of fairy tales and the way they subordinate identity through strict normative paradigms and establishing the thematic posturing of the film itself: a genealogy examining the fairy tale as heuristic along with its gendered machinations and the manners in which they frame the morals commonplace to the format.
This switch of type of narration — narrating a fable (third-person) versus narrating the subjective thoughts of one’s own life (first-person) — is visually indicated in the change in the frame’s ratio which goes from a wide, elongated, epic shot to a more personate, intimate shot; we’re going from a tale told externally to one told internally.
Our new narrator, a young girl, Gretel (Sophia Lillis), refers back to the story of “the Beautiful Child with the little pink cap” and remarks on the manners in which such tales can “get” into one’s head like the way this fable has burrowed itself into hers. She examines and questions the nature of the tale, the history of how its come to be burrowed within her psyche, and the manners by which real stories are elevated into the grandiose mythical encounters. Finally, she laments on the way “princes” come in and resolve a good portion of such stories, rendering the question of the female characters’ agencies a trite manner.
But there are no princes in her surroundings. Her tale will be a different one, focused on a journey of femininity finding itself in a world that seeks to consume this freedom through its socialization processes. The film’s titular choice begins to poke through as we understand the vantage point that will color it.
Her quest for agency begins with a journey where her brother, Hansel (Sam Leakey), a young boy, questions her incessantly as she walks with him through a forest in search of a job.
The siblings come to stand in front of an expansive building, press their faces against one another, and grunt like pigs, affirming their solidarity and making us aware of their struggles. Their choice to celebrate their relationship through an animalistic parlance reminds us of the underlying manner by which fables utilize non-human creatures to impart messages and simultaneously reinforces a motif of consumption (the children, acting as animals which are traditionally rendered food, are seeking labor in order to acquire nourishment)— a reminder that lurks ominously in the backdrop given the source material.
Gretel sits in an interview room, silhouetted against wondrous stained-glass windows. The master (Donncha Crowley) of the house interviews Gretel. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) speaks her mind. The shot widens as Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is reminded of her place. Gretel sits in the interview room filled with colorful stained-glass displays, a mosaic of colors which serves as an ironic counter-point to Gretel’s limited pathways. Her interview is derailed by sexist comments which she refuses to succumb to. This failure, her decision to find a new identity, is made clear by the cut to a wider shot of her which reveals the colorful windows once more alongside her, a sign of the possibilities that she yearns and seeks to tap into.
Her interview quickly devolves into a didactic interplay as her interviewer (Donncha Crowley) quickly corrects Gretel when she openly speaks her mind and criticizes the bureaucratic structures which oppress her brother and her. He tells her to address him as “milord” and questions her “maidenhood”, quickly affirming the oppressive milieu and reminding Gretel of her uniquely vulnerable, feminine place within the social apparatus.
The shot tracks Gretel (Sophia Lillis) as she walks back home. Gretel and Hansel are framed by a dark entryway as they return back home. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) sits while being chastised. Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) berates Gretel. A flame sits in the middle of Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and her mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy). Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) moves towards her daughter (Sophia Lillis), covering the flame between them. Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) perverts the piggish affirmation with Gretel (Sophia Lillis). Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) axes the table as a final warning. Gretel’s inability to get a job forces her back home in the rain. But she is unable to stay here and her mother, through heinous and twisted remarks, lets her daughter know as much. A perverted piggish affirmation from the matriarch which covers the only light in the room, signals the dissolution of this family unit, a proclamation which is confirmed by an axe which she lodges into the table as a final warning to leave. Left with no other options, the siblings must depart that place which they called home and seek new shelter.
We know that things have gone poorly when Gretel rushes out of the location, brother in tow, as the rain pounds on them accentuating her failure in procuring employment. She questions whether or not it would have been proper to slap the man for his controlling, disgusting demeanor and the camera, fully focused on her face and tracking her movements, imparts her deliberation with a subjective heft that emphasizes her agency. But before we get an answer, the film cuts to her house, framing both Hansel and Gretel within the closed-off and darkened boundaries demarcating it.
The manor, lit in a depressing, overwhelming blue makes the siblings’ mother’s (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) chastisement of Gretel sting all the harder. Gretel is questioned as to her insolence but attempts to push back against the unfair debasement. Yet, the matriarch continues and tells Gretel that the latter must leave. There’s not enough room in this house for “ghosts”, a haunting proclamation which ties the house and its inhabitants towards death, and Gretel is told to take her brother and try to make it to a convent.
Gretel argues logistics but her mother quickly ends the conversation, telling her daughter that if they’re unable to do as much, they should dig their own graves and make sure to make one for their mother as well. She reaches over to her daughter, places their faces against one another, and grunts like a pig; yet, the utterance is perverse, an explicit acceptance of annihilation, a far cry from the earlier evocation which hinted at perseverance in the face of tribulations.
Immediately, this disjoint is emphasized. A loud thud shocks as an axe falls onto the table and the matriarch threatens to kill her children if they do not leave; the family unit is broken apart and must be re-forged once more.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Sam Leakey) are covered by the forest. The siblings head to a manor in the darkness. An upside down overhead shot of Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Sam Leakey). A man (Jonathan Gunning) appears behind Gretel (Sophia Lillis). The emaciated man (Jonathan Gunning) has Hansel in his grasp. The huntsman is revealed, framed by the doorway of the abode. The children are framed in the hazy fog and looming trees of the forest. They are small and feeble, vulnerable to the powers that reside within this environment. They head to a manor in the darkness and think they’ve found security. An upside-down overhead shot of them showcases this temporary unity which is broken as a man rises behind Gretel and reveals that this abode is no longer safe. He almost takes out Hansel, but a Huntsman, framed and given importance by the doorway of this manor, saves the duo and takes them in temporarily.
As a result, the siblings find themselves swallowed in the “terrible mouth” of the forest, a metaphorical rendering which paints the world as a consumptive machine with its denizens being nothing more than foodstuffs waiting for their turn to eaten, subject to the whims of the trees stretching across the backdrop, limbs reaching down for the next tasty morsel, and the hazy fog pervading the area, obscuring their fates and diminishing their presence; they are truly at the whims of nature.
Hansel, innocently unaware of the gravity of the situation, questions Gretel on her obstinance to accepting the seemingly easy solutions to their problems. If she had just accepted the earlier offer of employment and subjected herself to the decorum required of the same, the family might still be together; food (particularly cake) might be on the horizon. But Gretel, unperturbed by the childish problem-solving, explains the reality of the world: “Nothing is given without something else being taken away.”
While her use of the adage is in reference to the sexual politicking she had to and will have to navigate, there’s a uncomfortable undercurrent catalyzed due to the nature of the opening’s tale of the girl whose illness was traded for power; sickness is transfigured not as purely negative, an impediment stopping natural functions, but instead as metonymical humanity, one that has been traded for supernatural powers; humanity, and it’s reliance on over-arching norms, poison from a certain point-of-view, agreed to upon by the powers that be, is rendered fungible and can be sacrificed for that which exists beyond in the realm of the supernatural.
This overarching connection, subtly implied through the film’s posturing, lingers in the air like the malevolent fog surrounding the kids and makes Gretel’s plan to find shelter at another woman’s house suspect, especially when she reveals that she sees this abode not through her normal vision but through some special sight.
The two tepidly approach a solitary building with a fire out front and enter the dim, cavernous building with flickering lights. They decide to rest in a bed and we see a top-down view of them oriented upside-down — domesticity has been established but at an unseen cost is waiting to let itself be made known.
The situation completely flips on itself, when a hidden figure (Jonathan Gunning) slowly rises behind Gretel as the siblings attempt to comfort one another, stripping away any sense of security and warmth the duo had managed to clench onto.
The kids run out of the building but the menacing man takes hold of Hansel in the chaos. Gretel attempts to take him out, injuring his eye and rendering him even more of a monstrosity, but he only appears to get more powerful, threatening to bring the duo’s journey to a premature halt.
Suddenly, an arrow flies through the man’s head and removes him from the equation. A huntsman (Charles Babalola), framed neatly in the doorway of the building announcing his presence, comes forward and takes the children in before questioning them about their unfortunate circumstances. They converse in room lit by a musky, yellow haze which saturates the area, making grime on the children’s’ faces more prominent and pessimistically highlighting the realities of what they must do in order to survive.
Hansel (Sam Leaky), Gretel (Sophia Lillis), and the Huntsman (Charles Babalola) sit around the dimly lit table, enshrined by yellow hues. Gretel bathes. The huntsman (Charles Babalola) gives advice. Dissolve from Gretel (Sophia Lillis) to the forests which she must once again navigate. The siblings return to their trek through the woods. The encounter with the Huntsman, an event whose magical underpinnings Gretel questions, leads the siblings to a new path back into the forest. They will have to make their way back to society and slot back into the socially ordained order of things.
The huntsman offers to help the two by leading them towards labor, work defined by explicit gender roles that remind Gretel of the way her femininity has been coded and the way she can be taken (in even the darkest senses of the term) by the realm of men. However, with no other options, the two acquiesce to the huntsman’s suggestions and depart the location; all the while, Gretel questions the coincidence of the encounter and its fantastical nature, neatly tying her journey back to the earlier discussion about fairy tales.
The siblings once again journey through the forest and director Oz Perkins uses a series of nice dissolves which accentuates the environment’s fogginess and the dreaminess of the endeavor.
While taking a break, Hansel once again breaks into a tirade of childish inquisitions and Gretel is forced into an uncomfortable position, forced to deal with her younger brother’s lack of knowledge regarding sexual processes (and the disturbing manners in which gender roles are implicated in them) and the responsibilities that she faces in spite of her own young age. He believes in the fairy tales about procreation involving children being delivered by birds while she knows the involves processes underlying such myth, but her only response is sardonic disavowal instead of deeper explanation; what else is she to do?
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) looks out into the forest. The silhouettes of enchanters fills the forests’ negative space. A shot looking up at the reach of the forests.The siblings walk in the dark, silhouetted against the forest. An enchantress’s silhouette appears in the fog of the night. The siblings’ journey is marked by silhouettes, their own and those of the enchantress who follows them. This spectral figure, framed by trees and fog, stares at them and then disappears into the night as a black-bird emerges, the storybook sign of the witch.
He asks her to tell him the “pink cap” story again but she refuses, not willing to scare him and cause him to fall victim to delusions: the repetition of the story will only exacerbate their unwieldy conditions and cause the younger of them to see things which “aren’t there.” But as the older sibling looks into the woods and sees the silhouettes of enchanters in the forest, covered in the haze, we’re left wondering as to the nature of her visions and feel the pernicious effects of the story in her psyche that she alluded to earlier. Is her warning to Hans based off her own circumstances or is she truly gifted with a second sight like the character from the fable embedded within her?
Nighttime falls and the journey becomes increasingly treacherous. A solitary silhouette stands in the forest blocking the children’s path and the camera slowly zooms onto it. What does it want?
A whisper: “Gretel”.
Then, a dark bird, an evocation of the supernatural, flies up ending the moment. The figure is missing and reality becomes suspect. We’re left wondering the figure’s motivations and its reasoning for reaching out to Gretel while being unsure of its status as dream or reality.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) narrates until she is interrupted by a noise. A tracking shot follows Gretel (Sophia Lillis) as she searches for this disturbance. Hansel is pretending to cut a tree. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) attempts an amends with Hansel (Sam Leakey). Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Sam Leakey) do a pig affirmation in a closer shot, affirming their reunification. Gretel’s narration is cut off by a noise which she promptly goes to investigate. We track on her as she moves to the site of this disturbance which is revealed, in a wide-shot, to be Hansel trying his luck at chopping trees. She initially responds with anger and upsets the bond between the two. But then the camera cuts to a more intimate framing of the two, and their piggish affirmation unites them once more.
Back in the daytime, Gretel narrates again about her powers and how her mother told her to put such thoughts out of her head, but this internal discussion is interrupted by an unseen noise which Gretel begins to trek towards. The interruption in thought reveals the “real-time” aspect of the film proper, informing us that this tale, unlike the fairy tale, is far from set in stone and is being carved out. The camera adopts a handheld quality as it tracks her, imbuing the shot with a subjectivity that affirms this moment of urgent agency.
We’re initially tense with her. Is this her nightly visitor coming back again?
No.
It’s just Hansel, who bored in the moment, is “practicing” his craft by whacking a stick against a tree, an affirmation of his future role as a manly woodcutter. A wide shot that frames the duo within a larger scope of the trees and reveals the truth of the situation: objectivity reigns once more.
Initially, Gretel is cross with her brother for worrying her but the discord is cut through as the two affirm their piggish bond, coming closer within a more enclosed frame, and continue forwards.
Gretel runs towards mushrooms framed in the foreground. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) laughs. Hansel (Sam Leakey) laughs. Hansel (Sam Leakey) is perturbed. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is enamored while Hansel runs past her. Witches appear in the foggy trees. A carriage goes by in the forest. The beautiful child (Giulia Doherty) and her mother ride in a blue-lit carriage. The trip sequence marks the start of the film’s disorienting form, once which discombobulates space and time through its edits to reveal the effects and powers of the supernatural forces which, stemming from nature, govern all. The siblings’ trips from their mushroom consumption starts off well with both of them in giggles but quickly becomes unnerving. An edit which shows Hansel broaching Gretel’s space is the first disorienting step which is followed up when the latter sees new witches in the surroundings. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a carriage appears in the woods, its proximate location to the children unexplained. We cut to the inside of this impossibly blue-lit carriage and see the figure of Gretel’s tale, the pink-capped child, along with another woman riding along. The sequence, evocative yet confusing in its progression, calls to question the reality of the situation and where the siblings’ trip has ended and where the magic has started.
Incredibly hungry, they come towards mushrooms growing on the forest floors, growths which appear prominently framed in the foreground. Gretel dresses the moment up with make-believe, pretending to talk to the fungus (although given her claims of magic, we’re also slightly convinced that her dialogue may in fact be real) and gets the “okay” to eat them. Hansel eagerly accepts her affirmation and the two eat the mushrooms.
We cut to the delirium: both children are framed in their own spaces and the two laugh before the soundscape becomes more intense. Hansel becomes perturbed and begins to walk out of his position. An immediate cut disorients us, as the continuity of Hansel’s trajectory within Gretel’s shot is whiplash-inducing in how it changes our spatial perception of the environment the two are in.
Figures, once again hidden in the fog, appear in response to this spatial schism, and call to question the reality of the setting. Are they a drug induced vision or something more nefarious?
Then, another childish whisper: “Follow me. Come and find me. Follow me, sister.”
A carriage pops out of view, once again usurping our orientation of the environment through the intentionally obfuscating editing; where did this vehicle come from and where is it in reference to the children?
The questions only pile up as the visuals continue to become more abstracted as; suddenly, we cut to “the Beautiful child” and a woman in a carriage lit in impossibly deep blues, a luminescence similar to the children’s’ house at night. Then, the dream temporarily abates, leaving only questions in its wake.
The siblings are framed by the gates. A doll is hidden among the grasses. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is one side of the gate while Hansel (Sam Leakey) is on the other. The red-glass of the house stares at the siblings. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) tries to hold Hansel (Sam Leakey) back. The house watches the siblings. Gretel looks through a triangular peephole. She sees a bountiful feast in front of her eyes. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) keeps watch in front of the window. Holda (Alice Krige) appears behind Hansel (Sam Leakey), framed off by the door. The children happen upon a new house which is littered with ominous signs that would serve as deterrent for anyone in the area. A gate which demarcates the two, dolls on the floor, and an ominous red-window (which the camera pushes on imbuing with its own supernatural agency) all scream ill tidings, but the smell of food from the house serves too powerful a force and compels the siblings to ignore their better judgement. Gretel looks through a triangular peephole, a sign of the enchantress’s domain, and keeps watch for Hansel who sneaks in to retrieve some food. But the house’s owner, an older woman, Holda, appears in a doorway behind Hans, an eerie callback to the manner by which the emaciated man appeared behind Gretel moments earlier, and whisks him away. Gretel’s attempt at saving her brother make no progress and she is forced to take refuge with this mysterious stranger who warns the young girl off of any foolish plans.
A gate frames the siblings as they walk towards the source of the voice and they find a partially hidden doll-like figures on the floor, a sign of civilization and a marker of lost innocence, that points them towards a house where the smells of cake are overwhelming and tempt the hungry children desperate for any source of meaningful consumption.
But the revelation of the triangular structure of the house informs us of what we now know: this is the abode of absolute power.
Yet, the sibling’s drive to consume overwhelms all other senses and notions of common sense. Gretel cautiously peers into the house, one lit in ominous yellows, but her eye, framed within a triangular peephole, a confirmation of the overarching architecture, sees only a bountiful feast on a table. There is only one goal Gretel and Hansel care for now: satiating their hunger which takes full control of their faculties.
Hansel sneaks in with Gretel’s help and starts to steal foodstuffs. But then, a figure appears from the background (seemingly out of nowhere like the horrific emaciated man from earlier), isolated in a doorframe, and whisks Hansel away with the flip of her cloak. Unfortunately, there are no princes (or huntsmen) to save the duo from their current perils and the older sister is tasked with figuring out her own solution to the major impediment facing her.
She decides to throw a rock at the building in an attempt to save her brother but is unable to make any meaningful dent as the projectile weakly bounces off the abode. While she begins to start a fire in another rescue attempt, the woman (Alice Krige) and Hansel come out and the former warns the young woman to not “start something that she can’t stop”, clearly alluding to a more sinister double meaning lurking beneath the words.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) finally decides to eat the food gifted to her. Holda stores Hansel’s hair. Hansel (Sam Leakey) and Gretel (Sophia Lillis) sleep, comforted by the fact that they are seemingly safe. Gretel eats the food, left with no other options, while Holda puts aside a piece of Hansel’s hair, an ominous sign of the costs of these gifts. But the children, asleep in their own beds now, are comforted by their temporary safety. This has at least started better than their failed encounter at the house of the emaciated man. But we are well aware, their newfound freedom will turn upside down once more.
Finally, the visions and reality collide: Gretel is tasked with dealing with this strange and mysterious woman, a seemingly kind soul named Holda, who offers the first positive words in regards to Gretel’s femininity and the roles available to her. With no other path to turn down, Gretel joins her brother and begins to consume the bounty in front of her all while the elderly woman takes a strand of Hansel’s hair and stores it away.
The opening’s warning, made all the more poignant due to the slow burn nature of the narrative creepily crawling towards this preluded epiphany, is brought to sinister light as all the visible pieces — gifts (the food and boarding), those who offer them (Holda herself), and the willing benefactors willing to take them (Gretel & Hansel) — make us eerily aware that a cost will have to be paid when the battle between the parties plays out.
Perkins perfectly encapsulates the nature of this triangular antagonism through the metaphor of chess; as the children get acquainted with Holda she has them play the great strategic game and uses the pieces and rules to further extend the gender discourse: “the king is afraid, and he should be. Because the queen can do whatever she wants.” In this battle to determine her own fate against the powers that be and seek to domesticate her, Gretel is tasked to play in this game, her opponent being the woman who seeks to educate her, the other “queen” on the other side of the board.
The characters (and their affects) become pieces in an overarching game and the cinematographic decisions reflect as much, demonstrating the effects of their movements on the wider state of the “board”.
The primary players are typically framed in manners that never highlight their entire body (usually in medium shots) with the characters in the center of the frame (usually in the lowest vertical register of the frame at that) to emphasize the characters’ subjectivity and their current situation. In addition, these types of shot usually isolate the character by themselves, emphasizing their status as individual pieces. This makes shots where characters intercede in another’s space immediately evocative, suggesting that a “power play” is occurring even if the nature of the maneuver is not immediately apparent.
Tracking shots, both stable and handheld, follow the characters as they make specific decisions —movements on the board in order to strike the enemy down. The speed of these shots is perfectly calibrated, going as slowly or quickly as the moments need, carefully establishing just who really is in control of a situation.
Wide shots, which usually are the only such shots to reveal characters’ entire bodies, represent the results of the clashes by respective parties which is why they emphasize the totality of the players qua pieces and their surroundings.
The film oscillates between these visual registers, taking advantage of elliptical editing and the Kuleshov effect to visually depict how each respective party asserts their power within this (primarily) psychological space. We see them isolated thinking of their next move, privy to their pressing interests and their psychological states due to the symbolically rich and evocative mise-en-scène (in particular, the lighting achieved through the stained glass). We see the momentum of their agency as we see them proceed towards action. Then, the battlespace is revealed and we can re-assess who’s “winning” before the next “move” is played.
This flow in the film’s rhythm is what keeps it captivating, accentuating the poetic flourishes of the script’s dialogue and buoying the weaker such parts (usually involving either dialogue that’s too on the nose for it’s own good or, less often, line deliveries which bely the tone of the scenarios in which they’re spoken) with visual schemas that safeguard the tense, oneiric mood (even during basic shot-reverse-shot sequences). Even when the story goes slower, quieting its more traditional narrative in favor of affective mood-setting, the heart of the battle is always present within the frame, captivating any viewer willing to parse the piece’s form.
Even without the schematic underpinnings imbuing the frames with their respective meanings, Perkins and his cinematographer, Galo Olivares, achieve a fairy tale aesthetic that’s oozing in personality. Watching the film is akin to viewing a moving storybook, filled with breathtaking and nightmarish images that certainly dip their toes in surrealism to great effect.
The score operates in a harmonious (mostly) subdued sense, augmenting the mood but never overdetermining the moments with an unearned elicitation of feeling due to the music alone. The effect is one that surprises as we’re caught unaware when the sonorous stylings do rear their head during the profound moments when characters’ make legitimate headway in their strategies.
It’s no surprise then that the film has still struggled with finding its audience as its focus is less on the story and more on the nature of its telling; the fairy tale is merely a springboard to discuss the ideas inherent within the narrative form and the film’s exploration of these vis-à-vis the particular mode of film, the nature of the image and the ways they can have an impact on the psyche of the viewer through the way the assert implicit meaning and connection, allows the viewer to disappear within the world of the film, fully captured within texture of the frame. The measured pacing and lack of conventional narrative thrust intentionally forces the viewer to play the film’s game on its terms, a decision which may alienate those looking for a more propulsive, kinetic horror experience; however, by that same token, the confident formal and aesthetic decisions should also earn the film fans itching for a mood piece which reckons with genre in a lush, painterly manner as it excavates the darkness present within the popular childhood fable.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Gretel and Hansel is a beautiful looking, slow-burn telling of the Grimm Brother’s fairy tail with a feminist slant that plays perfectly within director Oz Perkins moody, evocative wheelhouse. While the script fails him at times, the depth he’s able to imbue through his direction, which prioritizes mood over narrative propulsion, elevates the piece and makes it a truly haunting experience for viewers willing to lose themselves in the film’s spell.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide Wilson/Red Winston Duke as Gabe Wilson/Abraham Shahadi Wright Joseph as Zora Wilson/ Umbrae Evan Alex as Jason Wilson/ Pluto
Note: This review contains spoilers regarding the first 40 minutes of the film as opposed to the site’s usual benchmark of 10-20 minutes. The same effort towards sustaining the intrigue and momentum of the film, especially in its second and third acts, is maintained in this review, and all plot details revealed are just meant to be a springboard to discuss the scope of the work in better detail. Nothing discussed should undermine the “best” portions of the film or the many mysteries that keep the story engaging.
Thousands of tunnels exist underneath the Continental United States with no known purpose. A weather warning about a storm. An add for “Hands Across America”. Adelaide (Madison Curry) sees her reflection on the screen. An ad for the Santa Monica Beach. Adelaide (Madison Curry) wins the “11th” prize. After an introductory quote, the camera slowly pushes in towards a television which features a wide range of images on its screen: a weather warning, an advert for a charitable performance, a young girl’s reflection, and an advert for a beach. This initial tapestry will come to mean something far greater as the film continues.
The film opens with a quote explaining that there are thousands of tunnels underneath the Continental United States. Many of these passages have no known purpose and are thought to be empty. The quote disappears and the film cuts to a television screen which the camera slowly pushes in towards.
First, a weather report for an incoming storm plays. The number “11” is featured in the frame in three separate locations – a sign of things to come. Second, an advert for “Hands Across America”, a fundraiser meant to generate funds for the homeless via donation and a public demonstration of persons linking their hands across the country, proceeds in detail. The channel is changed by the viewer, a young black girl, Adelaide (Madison Curry), whose reflection can be seen on the screen temporarily. Finally, an advert for the Santa Monica Beach proceeds. Thus, the tapestry of the film is established: a storm, the number “11”, a mirror reflection, a symbol of unification meant to help the disenfranchised, and a beach for persons to enjoy a vacation in.
This image of the beach is replaced by the beach proper. Adelaide and her parents attempt to enjoy the festivities present at the location. Her father wins her the “11th” numbered prize, a Michael Jackson Thriller t-shirt, and the family unit departs to explore the grounds.
Adelaide (Madison Curry) heads towards the hall of mirrors. She drops her apple on the beach. Adelaide (Madison Curry) enters the hall of mirrors as a storm rages on behind her. Adelaide (Madison Curry) is forced to confront distorted reflections and is unable to find an exit. Adelaide (Madison Curry) comes face to face with her corporeal Other. Adelaide (Madison Curry) screams in terror. A rabbit stares into the camera. The blood red title card appears. A classroom of caged rabbits is revealed. The prologue continues to develop the meaning of the television images that came before in disturbing fashion. The “11’s” come to be associated with a Biblical warning promising terrible things to come. As the young Adelaide descends a staircase, drops her red apple, enters a maze of mirrors, and finds herself trapped by her reflections with no way out, the feeling of dread continues to get worse before bursting as she finds herself face-to-face with a corporeal doppelgänger. She screams but instead of showing a direct response to her cry for help, Peele cuts to the eyes of a rabbit and has the camera slowly track out – an opposite movement to the opening. The title card drops in a blood red that call’s back to the apple before the brand new environment, a classroom filled with rabbits, is shown with seemingly no explanations.
The trio splits apart and Adelaide finds herself roaming the grounds of the beach and its festivities by herself. She comes upon a man holding a sign reading “Jeremiah 11:11.” The Bible Verse in question proclaims: “Therefore this is what the LORD says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.” The preceding signs of “11” take an ominous tone, especially in conjunction with the aforementioned storm – something wicked is coming.
Adelaide descends a set of stairs and the mood gets eerier. She comes upon a Native American themed hall of mirrors titled “Shaman’s Vision Quest.” Thus, the indigenous is transformed into a commercial specter promising an internal revelation. The young girl drops her candy-coated apple – an Edenic symbol and a snack food associated with Halloween- on the shore before venturing into the abode. The foreboding feeling continues to build as a storm begins to rage outside – the ominous pieces showcased in the opening rear their heads in successive fashion.
Inside, Adelaide is thrown off guard first by a random power outage which forces her to traverse the darkness, a mechanical owl that frightens her, and then by a series of mirrors which distort her reflection and make the exit to the attraction impossible to locate. Her journey inwards transforms into a reflective labyrinth with no way out. Afraid, she starts to whistle the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in an attempt to calm herself down. But as she proceeds to try and find through the maze of mirrors, she runs into a doppelganger – a corporeal copy of her instead of a reflection in glass. Her face breaks out into shock as the camera closes in on her expression before quickly cutting to the gaze of a rabbit staring into the frame.
In contrast to the opening push in on the television, the camera pulls back from this new visage, as though concluding the initial movement and tying the two together, and reveals a host of rabbits, all of which are trapped in sequential cages spanning the entire room. The blood red title card drops, calling back to the dropped apple from earlier and signaling an impending sense of violence.
The composition of this new room seems to be a classroom setting but outside of desks and rabbits there are no identifiable markers to make sense of where we’ve been transported to or why Adelaide’s scream has been answered with the gaze of an animal. The words of Jeremiah make this jarring edit all the more concerning. Is the cut to caged animals a deified sign of abandonment in response to Adelaide’s horror or something else entirely?
The camera goes over a forest……and settles on a car driving along. An image on the back of the car reveals the family’s backdrop before we even see them – we know their makeup. The camera moves over trees to the back of a car; an image of a family informs us of our lead characters before we get a chance to see them.
Instead of an answer, the momentum from the camera pulling out continues as the film cuts to a view of a lush, green forest. A car is seen driving through the greens. A sticker on the back of the car informs us that a family of four – a father, a mother, a son, a daughter – are traveling together. The symbolic representation of the family conveys all the information that’s required to understand this unit’s breakdown, but the camera cuts to reveal the individual persons behind the figures, imbuing the symbols with a content that personalizes them. A grown up Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), are taking their kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright) and Jason (Evan Alex), to their beach house for a fun-filled vacation.
Adelaide arranges a host of toy animals “hand-to-hand” across a sandy plane, recreating the “Hands Across America” image. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is transfixed by her past. A spider runs past its inanimate Other looming over it and casting a shadow. Adelaide’s trauma stays at the forefront of her mind and sings from her past linger like a puzzle for her to solve.
However, while things appear to be normal within the family, it’s apparent that the past still haunts Adelaide. While her family engages in a variety of shenanigans that helps us get a feel for their respective personalities – Jason is a playful trickster, Zora is a moody teen, Gabe is an energetic and playful father – Adelaide drifts from the present to the past, reliving her confrontation with her doppelganger and its aftermath. At first, she recounts the therapy session her parents took her to following the event. It’s revealed that she lost her ability to speak following the encounter with her Other self and built a line of toy animals “holding” each other’s “hands” across a beach-like backdrop; this image of unity, a reference to the “Hands Across America” advert from earlier was her object of focus in the face of trauma. Suddenly, she snaps back to the present and notices a spider crawling under a larger, inanimate model spider – an “itsy bitsy” spider and its unalive Other casting a shadow over it.
Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) stares at a stuffed bunny in adoration. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) looks at an image from her past. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) sees her younger self dancing in front of her. She can’t escape her fate as her past bleeds into her present and the symbols and their respective relationships continue to develop – a confrontation is coming soon.
Later on, she curiously picks up a stuffed bunny and looks at it with affection – a perplexing connection given the nature of the cut from her encounter with her Other self to the caged rabbit. Despite seemingly not encountering the creature herself, her encounter having ended with the confrontation and never approaching the hidden room containing the furry creatures, the animal has a hold over her. Along with the doll, she finds a picture of her from her youth in dance garb. This younger self materializes in the present, bringing her trauma to the forefront of her psyche and cementing the connection between the furry creature and the past that still haunts her. The web of symbols continues to get more intermixed amongst one another.
When Gabe mentions wanting to take the family to the Santa Monica Beach for the evening, Adelaide quickly refuses. She fears giving her trauma more control over her psyche via a confrontation with the arena in which she experienced it. Yet, her family’s, namely Gabe’s, passionate pleas get her to acquiesce to a short visit.
Gabe’s boat presentation doesn’t go as well as he hopes. The police take the body of the man who held the “Jeremiah 11:11” sign. The Wilson family casts long shadows on the beach. Jason (Evan Alex) walks past the mirrors. A red frisbee perfectly covers an image of a blue circle. Jason (Evan Alex) sees a bleeding man on the beach. No sooner do they she leave the house do creepy coincides start to arrive – 11:11, shadows, the house of mirrors, replacement, and a spectacle that causes fear. The past is starting to repeat.
He calls the family out to bask in his new boat purchase, albeit one that barely works and seems far from pristine, before the group leaves for the beach. His short-lived material celebration starts the journey on a dour note. The mood shifts towards a jovial attitude as Luniz’s “5 on It” plays on the car radio, prompting the family to sing along and share in the experience – fitting given the lyrics’ emphasis on paying one’s fair share (for drugs). However, as they get closer to the supposedly serene vacation spot, they notice police officers dealing with a deceased person. The camera lingers on a sign in the corpse’s hand just long enough to reveal that this is most likely the same person from Adelaide’s past who held and is still holding the Jeremiah 11:11 sign.
It’s not just her repression coming back into fold within her psyche, but the event itself seems to be repeating – a beach, then the quite literal sign from Jeremiah. If the pattern follows, confrontation with the Other is next. Fittingly, the soundscape transforms and an eerie chorus takes charge with a background chant. The sound of drums introduces a sense of discord as the family makes their way across the beach, casting large shadows, doubles, against the sand.
The mood turns temporarily jovial again as the group makes contact with their wealthier friends, the Tylers, who immediately engage in frivolities, boasting about their materialistic interests and highlighting the still-present class differences between the two families; even with a summer-home and a boat, the Wilson’s still experience a disjunction between their expectations of “wealthy life” and their reality. However, a series of unnerving coincidences continue to prop up during the groups dialogue, becoming increasingly disconcerting for Adelaide, who stays on a razor edge the entire time, watching over her family and ensuring that nothing happens to them.
Soon after, Jason momentarily disappears going towards the bathroom, passing by the same hall of mirrors his mother went into years ago during her fateful encounter. However, the location has gone through a transformation, and the indigenous décor has been replaced by European iconography; the Native American mascot has given way and been replaced by the wizard Merlin as it’s the European stand-in who now promises to reveal one’s “true” self. This seemingly innocuous transformation imbues the idea of the “Other” as a double that the film has been building with newfound colonialist undertones. This idea is accentuated when a red frisbee randomly falls onto the towel Adelaide is sitting on; an image of a blue dot is completely covered with a physical red circular object- a callback to the dropped Edenic apple from her youth and a repetition of the double as a replacement.
When Jason returns from the bathroom, the pressure building up culminates in a violent experience: he sees a loner bleeding out on the beach, seemingly unaware of the world around him. The air is rife with malevolence and it seems that something terrible is about to happen as history is on the verge of repeating. But Jason is immediately “rescued” by Adelaide, who refuses to allow her son to go through the same trauma she did when left to her own devices all those decades ago. The Wilson family quickly departs and leaves the scene before anything else can threaten to happen.
Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) reaches out to Jason (Evan Alex). The clocks hits “11:11”Adelaide realizes Jason’s seen too much – the violence is imminent. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) looks at her reflection while recounting her past.The power goes out after Gabe tries to “lighten” the mood. The Wilson’s doppelgängers stand in silhouette holding each others hands. Try as she might, Adelaide can’t hold back the past’s encroachment and comes face to face with the doppelgänger she’s spent her whole life running from. Thus, the confrontation with the shadow Other begins (again).
Adelaide tries to reestablish a sense of normalcy back at the home. She reaches out to Jason and holds his hand, showcasing a sense of affection and solidarity with him given his off-kilter experience. But then the clock hits 11:11. Jeremiah’s warning refuses to go away and no number of assurances can hold back the tide of problems he prophesizes to come. Adelaide knows as much when she sees Jason’s drawing of his extreme encounter; violence is on the way and it can no longer be stopped or ignored.
She starts to come undone as her walls break down; the trauma of her past cannot be compartmentalized any longer. Suddenly, she finds herself telling Gabe about her history on the beach and her fateful encounter with her doppelganger; despite being able to get away from her Other, she lives in fear of eventually being caught by them and subject to something heinous. Gabe tries to lighten the mood with some humor, but the power, as if in response, goes out; just like the funhouse all those years ago, Adelaide is forced to traverse the darkness and find a way out, this time with family in tow.
But try as she might, she can’t run away from her destiny and finds herself face-to-face with a group of doppelgangers, one matching each of her own family members. This group, fully unified in a hand-to-hand embrace, stands in shadowy silhouette, ready to confront their “other” selves, our protagonists. For close to 40 minutes, Peele has let the respective elements – rabbits, reflections, shadows, Jeremiah’s warning, doubles – build up against a vantage point alluding to systemic violence – classism and imperialism – before finally allowing the battle between the self and its Other to “truly” begin in explosive fashion.
At a surface level, this story about doubles is unnerving in its own right and comes replete with its own associated motifs and undercurrents – the ideas of the loss of self and the encounter with unsavory elements that one tries to repress. And at this level, Peele certainly allows genre elements to play out in visceral, brutal fashion as the encounter marks the start of a series of escalating, violent clashes between the mirrored selves. However, the beauty of Us, stems not from these identifiable moments of subjective violence but from the way such moments reveal the “zero-level standard” of an “objective” violence that operate unseen in the background [1] Zizek, S. (2008). The Tyrant’s Bloody Nose . In Violence. introduction, Picador. . By placing identical but completely different persons, objects, and musical choices against one another and intermixing between them, Peele forces us to confront the ideological basis we use to categorize similar looking phenomena into completely distinct categories.
The ever-present doubling necessitates a navigation as every reflection brings with it its own set of questions. Characters don’t just meet their doubles at an individual level, but they also experience that double at a familial and social level – every structure, big and small, is presented with its mirror image which becomes more fragmented the bigger it gets. This makes the opening of the film before the confrontation all the more relevant, as even subtle characterizations become pivotal in examining the way differences bleed from the micro to the macro and become terrors that must be confronted.
Even the musical choices – inspired tracks which include the Beach Boy’s “Good Vibrations”, Fuck Tha Police by N.W.A, and the aforementioned “5 on It” by Luniz – play into this introspection as the context in which they play changes and symbolically restructures the nature of what the lyrics are getting at, sometimes within the same scene in which they’re introduced. No sound-image is as simple as its initial presentation and the constant juxtapositions force the viewer to navigate a maze of reflections, much like Adelaide did, in order to find the “truth” within.
It’s only by the end of the film that the nature and power of this “truth” is revealed as it operates both as a structuring mechanism within the narrative as a whole and as the grammar the film proper utilizes in jumping from scene to scene, demonstrating that the true horror comes not from an identifiable subject acting maliciously as much as it does from our symbolic interpretation of that violence qua violence – horror is what we make of it.
However, this message becomes muddied in the final act. Unlike Denis Villenevue’s Enemy, another doppelgänger horror thriller which commits emphatically to a surreal and less grounded worldbuilding in its storytelling approach and opts to use symbols as points and counterpoints to guide the viewer forward in a maze of meaning, Us bizarrely pivots to trying to ground its narrative in a sense of realism that immediately makes it seem absurd. We’re so attuned to the interplay of the symbols and the nuances behind them because of Peele’s dedication to getting us to engage with the film in a more cerebral manner that the film’s decision to explain the mystery in more concrete, definite terms ends up distracting us from what came before. Focus becomes split as suddenly the concern shifts from trying to understand the way violence operates vis-a-vis said symbols to the mechanics behind the way the narrative unfolds – a regrettable choice as its in this latter section that Us is far better at showing than explaining. It’s like reading poetry, filled with metaphor and analogy, and then being interrupted by mechanic prose which disrupts the melody; consequently, the poignancy of what came before feels less so.
Compared to his Peele’s previous effort, Get Out, which has a far smaller scope in what it wants to target but is far more concise in getting there, Us can feel haphazard, but the ambitions behind what it wants to say make it just as interesting, if not more so, to discuss and analyze. If one is willing to suspend their sense of disbelief for just long enough, they’ll walk away just as changed as the characters do by the end of this shadowy encounter.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Though it stumbles in its worldbuilding by the final act, the ambitions behind this doppelganger story offer far more than meets the eye as its examination of violence and the way its conceptualized reveal the source of “true” terror.
Rating
9.6/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Ruth Wilson as Lily Saylor Paula Prentiss as Iris Blum Lucy Boynton as Polly Parsons Bob Balaban as Mr. Waxcap
Release Date
2016
Language(s)
English
Running Time
87 minutes
When I heard that Oz Perkins was releasing his next film I was more than excited. Despite having heaps of garbage, Netflix has a surprising number of gems, and under Perkins’ deft hand, I hoped one more could be added to the library. Thankfully, I was right. Perkins had taken the slow burn elements from his first movie, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and amped them up to create a surreal almost ethereal audio-visual experience. This is not the movie for people who want jump scares, answers, or a clear story-line. It’s thought provoking, suspenseful, mesmerizing, and pays off in the way it executes its ideas rather than being a spectacle for spectacle’s sake.
The movie follows the intersecting tales of three women and their independent yet related interactions within a house. It opens up with a narration from Lily, a nurse who informs us of her incoming death in the house, as a specter. She recounts her journey in the house from the beginning, when she came in as live-in-nurse to help famed horror author, Iris Blum. As strange things happen in the house, the audience joins Lily through a visceral, strange, and out of bounds journey that always raises questions, but rarely answers them in direct ways.
Wilson does a great job as the lead. As the narrator she channels a strange melancholy aura . It’s eerie and hearing her solemnly narrating her eventual death makes that feeling even more intense. However, as her corporeal self, she’s just a poor nurse trying to do her job in a wonky household. She’s not looking for trouble and comes off as endearing. Despite being different, both performances are believable and knowing where Lily’s eventual journey is going to go, makes analyzing her narrative intonations that much more interesting. Wilson makes you want to know why it happened.
The movie fascinated me in its exploration of death and the way it furnishes a source of meaning between people. Everyone has an impact on each other, so even when they die they never vanish. There’s an impact to their existence that pervades and expands, filling out cracks and crevices. The movie makes that idea more literal by having a spectral Lily narrate portions of the movie. There’s a strange perverse pleasure in knowing that the lead you’re following is dead and talks about their death as though they’re still very much there. This is also why the ending worked so well for me. It’s not grandiose in a traditional sense, but it really pulls together all the thematic and story threads in a neat package.
Despite being only 87 minutes, Perkins also knows how to create a sense of dread and eeriness. Shots are slow and diverse. There are gorgeous panning shots and zoom ins that highlight how alone/not alone Lily really is in the house. The camera lingers on the faces of our actresses in a way that flips a masculine gaze. A pretty thing in the frame, but it’s framed for something tragic and otherworldly, rendering it as something that’s difficult to process. There are also no cheap jump scares. Things come into frame and linger. Their presence is what’s terrifying. Not some crazy noise that tells you to be scared of it. That being said, I thought some of the shots felt excessive. I wished there were a few more scenes thrown in that showed more of the mystery of the lives of our lead women ( I would talk about them but that’d be a spoiler). The movie could have swapped out a few of its longer tracking shots for those. I think it would’ve added to the nuance of the themes, without revealing more of the “mystery”.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is not a movie for everyone. If you want something like The Conjuring, with nice jump scares and a straightforward plot, you won’t get it. This movie thrives on atmosphere and mystery (sometimes a little too much). It comes off as poetic, almost like an Edgar Allen Poe story come to life. It’s provocative, mesmerizing, and will have you genuinely thinking about your impact on the world .
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 .
The title card evokes The Shining. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) sleeps with hands clasped. The winter abyss. The opening sets the stage with an evocation of Kubrick’s The Shining, a tale of alienation and madness set within a wintery backdrop, a shot of a young woman on the edge of sleep and prayer, and a shot of a wintery backdrop which looms ominously.
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?
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) sleeps. A black figure in the foreground obscures her.A Close on Katherine’s (Kiernan Shipka) face. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks up at this black figure which obscures half the frame. Perkins uses precise cuts to showcase the relationship between Katherine and the mysterious black specter which intervenes in her sleep state. It crosses her in the frame and we’re suddenly closer to her, as if encroaching within her dream. Then she “wakes” and stares at this figure which divides the frame’s space; the two entities are on opposite sides but the black figure is unknown to us sans Katherine’s declaration that it’s her “Daddy.”
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. Winter continues to push in. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) reaches one hand out. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) walks with “Daddy”. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) grabs a teddy bear. Katherine sees a black car. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) stares at the car with “Daddy “by her side. Katherine’s (Kiernan Shipka) hand trembles. the wrecked car. Katherine’s journey into the winter setting calls into question the reality of the situation. How did she get here and why is the “Daddy” figure still positioned out of the frame? We’re shown that this is a dream of sorts and the sequence intercuts between the oneiric and the real, using Katherine’s hands in the real world as analogs by which to frame the dream: it’s a cry for companionship, a prayer, a phenomena which defies the body. Whatever it is, the taste it leaves is one of despair.
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?
Katherine sits in silhouette. She looks at the calendar. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) moves closer to the calendar. She’s getting closer to her parent’s visit. The reaction to the vision is one marked by ambiguity because we can’t tell if Katherine is looking out at the wintery fields, a call back to the dream, or if she’s staring at the audience, a wall-break that accentuates the horror of the moment. We learn it was the latter and with that confirmation, we see her move towards a calendar and the sinking feeling portended by the vision becomes stronger: her parents aren’t going to be making this trip.
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.
Katherine from behind. Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) sits next to a cross. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) sits next to no one. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks over at “nothing”.Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) and Katherine are separated by the cross. The conversation between Katherine and Mr. Gordon is one that firmly confirms the former’s alienation and its spiritual nature. She enters the conversation from a vantage point that emphasizes the subjective nature of her issues but presents a mystery. Her conversation proceeds in a fashion that emphasizes the alienation she feels as she’s constantly shown being completely alone while the image of God seemingly lingers on the other side of her. Yet, her attention it is drawn not to this symbol but to an empty space next to it. By the time we cut to both characters in the same space, we’re concerned with what exactly Katherine is so concerned with.
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.
Rose (Lucy Boynton) enters the room. Rose (Lucy Boynton) walks by slowly. Rose (Lucy Boynton) gets seated. Rose (Lucy Boynton) smiles for the picture. The choice to introduce Rose in slow-motion is one that elevates her position within the scope of the film, imbuing her character with an importance that’s cemented by the nature of her image, one that evokes an Edenic peace. This image is elevated to an Apollonian ideal and will constantly be referenced throughout the run-time as its modal value is evaluated and questioned.
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.
Rose (Lucy Boynton) in silhouette. Rose (Lucy Boynton) in silhouette looks into mirror. Rose (Lucy Boynton) character card. Rose’s friend (Emma Holzer) listens to Rose (Lucy Boynton).It’s fitting that this image serves to prefigure the introduction of the character proper, one whose immediate aspirations and desires are clouded in an unknowability. We see her in near-silhouette from behind her head, an evocation of earlier shot choices used with Katherine, that reinforce that we’re entering the subjectivity of this young woman and we’ll be forced to piece together the mysteries lurking with her. The most pressing of these is her pregnancy scare, one which she plans on handling herself and takes full responsibility for. This self-reliance and foundational ego serve as a stark contrast to Katherine and the juxtaposition of their respective standings will color the form of the film.
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.
Cars arrive at Bramford. Katherine walks in the opposite direction of the rest of the students, partitioned against them by the trees. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) cries a tear. Katherine stares out into the empty winter wasteland. Katherine’s journey reinforces her newfound sense of isolation. She is separate from the rest of the students. She is separate from her parents. All that remains is the cold, wintery environment which gives her absolutely nothing. She sheds a tear at the realization that her vision is more likely to be premonition than a nightmare that can be ignored.
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. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) plays the piano. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka), separated in the frame by the piano, looks out in the audience. Katherine’s parents are missing. Katherine’s piano performance marks the first encounter between Rose and herself. Rose looks up at Katherine but the older girl’s gaze is not met. Instead, Katherine looks out, while framed fully alone by her musical instrument, at the sea of faces in the crowd and pays attention only to the absent seats her parents would’ve filled if they had managed to make it. This interaction spells out the film: missing moments of interaction between persons both within and absent from a space spur alienation; Katherine does not see Rose and does not see her parents; she is condemned to be alone.
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.
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) and Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks over. Rose (Lucy Boynton) looks over. The first formal encounter between Katherine and Rose affirms the distance between the two young women. They both stare off in completely different directions while dealing with their missing parents. While Katherine’s parents are hinted to be dead, Rose’s parents are implied to be missing due to their daughter’s interference; the difference for the respective parental figures’ missing statuses thus marks the larger dichotomy separating the girls and their respective journeys towards resolving the alienation they feel.
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. A nurse (Elena Krausz) sits on the opposite side of the room while Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) finishes her call. Katherine’s attempts to call out to her parents is one doomed to fail, further cementing their portended status. The cut to the wide shot demonstrates just how alone she truly is, as even another person in the room feels miles away as the phone call disappoints and is unable to summon the presence which Katherine so desperately yearns for.
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.
Katherine places the spoon at an angle. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) obsessively looks at the arrangement. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) changes the arrangement. Katherine’s intense concentration with the dining table arrangement evokes the same discontent channeled by Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. Here his obsession with the Alka-Seltzer is channeled in her obsession with the arrangement that evokes a slight asymmetry. Like Bickle, Katherine’s behavior is disturbing in its severity and deviancy from the norm and her simple act of changing the arrangement speaks to something far greater and more insidious.
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. Rose and her boyfriend drive away as the snow pelts down. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) stares down at the couple from a window. Katherine stares at the idyllic image of Rose (Lucy Boynton) Lower angle shot of Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) staring. The phone in the hallway. Katherine’s schism with Rose sets the tone for what’s to come in their relationship. The young girl asks the older one to stay back and take care of her, a cry for help, a desperate last attempt to stay afloat with the visions of her parents’ death dragging her down. But instead, the could-be role-model absconds her duty and instead contributes only frightening, devilish tales for Katherine to hold onto. Katherine (framed apart from everything else) stares as the “pretty” girl drives away, obsesses over the image of this girl ( which is also framed apart from everything else) in a manner that hearkens back to the discomforting look she gave the kitchen utensils earlier, and we finally cut to the ominous payphone in the hallway of the school — the symbol of communication which will now dominate now that all other discursive avenues have been cast aside.
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. Doctors look down. Joan (Emma Roberts) makes a call which goes dead. An map of Bramfoard dissolves into Joan. Joan’s introduction is fraught with mystery. Her gaze into the mirror introduces flashbacks which only raise questions. Her desperate phone-call is a dead-end that goes nowhere. But we know she’s going to Bramford, the location where both Katherine and Rose reside. How will these characters’ journeys interact with one another?
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. Joan (Emma Roberts) looks down as a black figure, Bill, obscures half of the frame. The connections between the seemingly unrelated characters becomes stronger as Perkins uses the nature of the frame to connect Katherine and Joan: both girls are isolated in one half of the frame as a figure in black, father figures of different sorts, covers the other part of the frame. The difference in the images come from the side the black figure approaches and the perspectives of the young women in respect to the figure: Katherine looks up in an embrace while Joan looks away in rejection. The nature of this connection is one of many that the film will expertly navigate and unwind.
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?
Bill’s car drives away. A cut to black. Rose’s car drives back in. The black frame is used to traverse distances between characters, connecting two car rides going to different places in a manner that suggests that their journey is one in the same.
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
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
