Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams Denise Bixler as Linda Sarah Berry as Annie Knowby
Release Date
1987
Language(s)
English
Running Time
84 minutes
If I’d have known how funny Evil Dead 2 was, I’m pretty sure I would’ve watched The Evil Dead a lot earlier. Somehow, Sam Raimi took everything good from the fist movie, removed the unnecessary clutter, slapped in some intriguing retcons, and amped the comedy up by a factor of bonker. The result is a one of a kind sequel that gives fans of the original everything they want and more , while feeling like its own story The scares are more interesting, the turns are completely out of left field, and the movie has a lot more fun with itself.
I knew the movie was going to be weird the moment the first scene started. The movie picks up on a “recap” of the events of the first movie, except this time everyone except Linda is missing. Missing as in Ash doesn’t even mention their existence.In his recounting, Ash explains that he went to the cabin for a romantic get-away with Linda (not the fun group bonding we were told in the first movie). Once there, a similar series of events lead to Dr.Knowby’s tape being played and the evil of the Necronomicon being summoned. Right off the bat, the movie forces the audience to come to its own conclusions. Did Ash experience so much trauma during the first movie, that his mind warped the perception of events to the most painful event he went through? Did burning the Necronomicon at the end of the first movie cause an alternative timeline where everyone else didn’t exist? It’s up to you to decide. After the”recap” concludes, Ash finds himself forced to once again deal with the hijinks of the cabin.
With each passing supernatural phenomena, Ash finds himself slipping, unable to differentiate between real events, his delusions, and the supernatural happenings. His experience and interaction with the world feels surreal. Ash is very clearly is experiencing some kind of trauma . Within the span of a day he’s lost his friends ( who may or may not exist), had to kill his girlfriend, been tossed around by supernatural happenings, experience a litany of physical injuries (many self inflicted through sheer clumsiness), and been incessantly mocked by deadlites. It’s enough to turn anyone bonkers, and Bruce Campbell proficiently demonstrates as much with his absurd and hilarious facial expressions. He constantly moves/messes with his eyes, eyebrows, and forehead making him feel unpredictable and energetic, like a switch has flipped in him that’s caused him to become a loose cannon. He really channels this raw chaotic neutral/good vibe that never slows down.
Ash’s (Bruce Campbell) crazy facial expression.
His descent into madness is equal parts terrifying and hilarious. This is a man who’s clearly lost control in his life. He didn’t sign up for any of this and awful things keep happening at breakneck speed forcing him to constantly fight for his life. Losing your mind on top of dealing with all of these issues sounds like hell, like an infinite void that will never let go. Thankfully, the whole experience comes off as a joke. As Ash loses his mind, he becomes more unhinged and cartoon like, going from a clumsy and sweet goof to bloodthirsty and confident. It’s not that the situations are any less serious. It’s just that the story lets you experience them without falling into some weird nihilism.
Everything you loved about the first movie look and feel wise is here and polished up. Fast paced camera chasing subject through the forest? Check. Chainsaw slashing through deadlite splattering blood everywhere? Check. Bruce Campbell’s eyebrows threatening to fight the enemy by themselves? Also check. The best part is all the effects have gotten even better and more polished. The practical effect work feels even smoother and works seamlessly. Possessions look more crisp and grounded as opposed to just nightmarish. My only issue is that ome of the stop-motion feels a bit choppy in the third act, but that’s a small complaint in the grand scheme of things.
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TLDR
Evil Dead 2 is honestly just one of those rare sequels that takes an winning formula and fine tunes it to near perfection. The comedic turn the franchise takes gives it a unique flavor and allows its horrifying elements to really shine. If you enjoyed the first movie and want to see more, check this out. It’s one of a kind.
Rating
10/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams Ellen Sandweiss as Cheryl Williams Hal Delrich as Scott Betsy Baker as Linda Theresa Tilly as Shelly
Release Date
1981
Language(s)
English
Running Time
85 minutes
This is one of the few western horror movies I grew up watching, so it’s near and dear to my heart. As a naive middle school student, I believed the reviews online that said it was cheesy and corny. The word funny was thrown around everywhere, so I went in thinking I’d be laughing a lot. After the movie, I was left horrified. Nightmares for days on end. Tons of high pitched cackling involved. I refused to go near it again. Then the soft reboot, Evil Dead, was announced. It looked scary and intriguing and I was immediately reminded of the terrors of my not so distant youth. I decided then and there, that I had to get over the movie eventually and immediately went and saw The Evil Dead. The movie still scared me, but because I knew what was going to happen, I could view the events with a certainty.I could sit back and just watch the madness unfold. Now that I’m done a few rewatches, I can confidently say Sam Raimi’s low budget horror movie is one of the best ever made. It manages to scare me, intrigue me, impress me, and make me chuckle a few times every time I put it on.
The plot is campy if you look at it from today’s standards but you should keep in mind the movie came out back in the 80’s and was considered one of the scariest back then. It was ahead of its time and dared to go to some awful, depraved places. The story follows a group of five teenage friends – Ash, his sister Cheryl, his girlfriend Linda, their friend Scott, and Scott’s girlfriend, ,Shelly – as they go off to a cabin in the woods to party and enjoy themselves. From the moment they step foot in the area, things are off. When Scott goes to open the door, a swing repeatedly knocks into the wall of the house, almost as if another entity is trying to enter. Once our group opens the door, the knocking stops creating a sense of impending doom. After a series of events leads to an incantation from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis being chanted , things quickly go south as malevolent supernatural entities come to play.
The movie is very much a story of an unfortunate group of “kids” who are only partially to blame for their situation. They barely have time to do anything because the action st arts almost immediately, and the actions they do end up taking are heavily influenced by the supernatural. It’s almost like they’re doomed into a situation. This is made all the worse because the story takes time to develop the characters, so watching them get tortured is hard. It’s a few moments here and there, but character motivations are fleshed out and almost everyone feels like they have a purpose in the story. Yes, the story is mainly about Ash, but that doesn’t mean everyone else just exists as a prop. The story makes use of these relationships to create horrifying, gut-wrenching, and comedic moments.
It’s easy to tell there are production issues. Yes, Raimi didn’t have a ton of money to spend to make this look realistic. So he doubles down on the absurdity of the situation and makes the action and horror sequences bloody, over the top, and disturbing all at the same time. Makeup is on point. It gets bloody and really shows the damage the supernatural events are having on the group. As evidenced by below, it can get pretty real.
Makeup is on point. The Deadites look absolutely horrific.
Embracing the over the top gore makes the movie both horrifying and comedic. The production issues feel like intentional ways of showcasing the absurdity of whatever is going on. In the face of absolutely nightmarish situations it makes so much sense to laugh, because taking it seriously would make you go crazy (which is more Evil Dead 2). The humor doesn’t come from overt jokes. It comes from the juxtaposition of ineptitude with the horrific nature of what’s going on. Bruce Campbell goes full klutz as Ash. He finds a way to fall or crash in every scene, and puts his full energy into each and every tumble. You can feel the incompetence seep out of him. Add on some crazy facial expressions with his distinctive eyebrows, and suddenly every situation becomes a bit funnier. The spirits haunting the cabin also have a sick sense of humor. They love laughing in horrific sounding cackles and joking about everyone’s darkest fears. They actually relish just making people suffer. It’s funny in the moment, but every time I stop and think about the reality of what’s going on, I shudder. There’s a lot of messed up stuff here that I laughed at because taking it seriously was too off-putting. One scene involving Cheryl has stuck with me ever since I saw it. I have no idea how it got in there, but if sexual assault scenes that are visceral in nature are too much for you, you might want to watch it with a buddy.
To add on to all of the visual splatter and horror, the movie employs a lot of surreal/abstract imagery. There are recurring motifs that are fun to track throughout the movie that have you questioning their real purpose. These scenes are my favorite because I love that weird ambiguous artsy stuff that has you analyzing and re-contextualizing constantly. There are some more obvious symbols/icons that are also used to great effect, so the movie manages to balance the abstract with the “grounded” really well. It lends to a well crafted horror movie that has scares for multiple groups of people.
The camera movement is also exceptional and highly effective. Raimi knows exactly when to do close-ups and every time he does one it feels purposeful. No movement ever feels wasted. When the supernatural force is hunting down the members of the group, the camera moves frantically showing it choosing its next victim. It’s almost like the air and everything around the cabin is tinged with a negativity that seeks to envelop everything.
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TLDR
The Evil Dead is a movie that manages to be hilariously over-the-top and horrifying at the same time. The humor is dark and absurd in nature and is used to counterbalance the violence and splatter-fests the movie ventures off into. If you can get over the “dated” feel and/or watch the movie as if it’s 1981, you’ll get swept up in one of the scariest horror movies made. A surreal nightmare turned black comedy.
Rating
9.8/10
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 .
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 .
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 .
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 .
The camera pushes out on the Annabelle doll.The nurses tell the figures flanking them about their haunting experience. The nurses throw the Annabelle doll away. Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) comes into view.Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren are now revealed. It’s revealed we’re watching a video. The opening scene transports us into the world of demons and mysticism, firmly placing us within the Warren’s camp without us even knowing it.
We open on a shot of a doll, Annabelle, staring directly at the us. The camera pushes out as we hear a pair of nurses recount their story regarding the doll to two unseen figures who flank them from both sides. The nurses explain that the doll asked for permission to move in with them, they gave that permission thinking the doll was a ghost, and then they experienced hauntings due to it. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, they cannot get rid of the doll. They ask the unseen figures to help.
These figures, Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren finally come into frame; they explain that the nurses are dealing not with a ghost but with a demon. We see a repetition of the first shot; the nurses are still being flanked by the Warrens on both sides, but this time the Warrens are visible. Their presence has come into effect and they’re in “control”. We cut once again to the face of the Annabelle doll before the screen gets grainy, and it’s revealed that what we’ve been watching is actually a tape recorded by the Warrens for presentation purposes in a classroom setting. Without knowing it, we’ve adopted the Warren’s point of view and been sucked into their world.
Under the title card resides a window encased in shadows. From this window we can see the Perron family. Roger (Ron Livingston) tries to persuade the family dog, Sadie, to come in. Wan is incredibly efficient in his filmmaking, choosing to naturally fade in from the title card to the window of the haunted house the story will take place in. He drops us in from behind the window and as the camera moves and “chases” the family, it almost feels like we’re in the house’s POV. In one fluid camera movement, we know that things are going to go poorly for this family.
It’s at this time the title crawl pops on the screen, informing us of the Warren’s history and the fact that what we’re about to watch is “based on the true story”. The camera continues tilting down past the title of the movie to a window right beneath; a seamless transition that lets us know that we’re entering the horror immediately. The darkness around the window fades away while the camera pushes forward, revealing a car and a moving truck driving towards the house. We see a the Perron family come out; we know that their upcoming journey will be one of terror. The camera tracks left to follow the family as they make their way in through the front door; the way the camera moves from the window to the door makes it feel like the house is alive and waiting for its upcoming owners.
Most of the family, a set of parents and five daughters, makes their way into the house. However, their dog, Sadie, refuses to come in. The camera moves down towards the floor, and hones in on the dog who refuses attempts to be coaxed into the house. Even if you didn’t know about the horror tropes regarding dogs being able to sense the supernatural, this disagreeable behavior is more than enough to confirm what we already know: bad times are coming.
Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) calls out to April. April (Kyla Deaver) finds a music box under the tree. The light around April (Kyla Deaver) becomes darker. The moment a hint of normalcy is put in, the windchimes, it’s supernaturally charged counterpart makes its appearance, the music box. This is made more apparent by the change in lighting, which goes from light and cheery to shaded and gloomy.
The Zombie’s “Time of the Season” plays in the background as Wan employs a fantastic tracking shot showcasing the family moving into the house. The eerie mood that’s been set up gives way for a few moments, while we get a “tour” of the entire house. One of the kids, Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) looks around for her windchimes to place at the front of the house; an source of music tries to establish its place . As she puts them up, she calls out to her younger sister, April (Kyla Deaver), to come into the house. Unbeknownst to her, April found a music box hidden under an ominous looking tree. She plays the music box at which point “Time of the Season” stops and the lighting becomes much darker; a nefarious source of music usurps the light and takes control.
The girls eat dinner and then play a variant of clapping hide-and-seek where the seeker has to place a blindfold on and gets to ask the hiders to clap up to 3 times to figure out where they are. The innocuous game meant to facilitate the girls finding one another fails, as instead, the girls end up finding the dark curse embedded in the house by cracking a barrier sealing the basement. This dark, grimy, underbelly of the house is thus unleashed and the “fun” truly begins.
Like his previous foray into the supernatural genre, Insidious, director James Wan’s The Conjuring also functions as a facelift of an older titan, or in this case titans, of the supernatural horror genre; this time he’s updating The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Exorcist instead of Poltergeist. From The Amityville Horror, he takes idea of a haunted house terrorizing a family, the theatricality of the haunting, and the subtext of economic plight in relation to haunting. There are multiple comments from the the father of the family, Roger (Ron Livingston) indicating that the family’s money is tied to the house and they have no way out, which solves any practical concerns we could raise to the family staying in such a location. From The Exorcist, he takes the notion of treating the supernatural as grounded and the idea of a metaphysical evil fighting a metaphysical good. Especially by the ending, it becomes clear that Wan is trying to introduce a notion of God and “true goodness” as a way to elevate the status of the haunting. The end result of combining all these factors would be a serious haunted house story with plenty of subtext to go around.
However, the end-result lands a bit ajar from this expectation. Unlike The Amityville Horror, The Conjuring is missing a scene of “honest” drama that ties the Perron family’s financial woes directly to the nature of the haunting. As Stephen King says, “Everything which The Amityville Horror does well is summed up in that scene,” whose implications make the connection between the haunted house and the financial troubles of the family clear. [1] King, S. (2010). Danse macabre. Gallery. Furthermore, the gravitas of The Exorcist arises from both the documentary-like shooting of the movie, which helps ground the horrific nature of the haunting and the honesty and severity by which it wrestles with the ideas of God and the divine. The theatricality Wan is going for runs against this and makes the depth he’s trying to achieve feel forced especially near the end of the film which is more focused on spectacle rather than spiritual catharsis.
But by pushing these ideas together and presenting them with his knack for dynamic set-pieces, Wan has still ended up creating one of the best horror movies of this side of the century and a blockbuster at that. By grounding the possession story via two families – one regular and powerless and the other spiritual and powerful – Wan is able to ensure that the hauntings, while not as thematically rich and textured as their base ideas would allow, have enough of a thematic throughline to develop on.
Wan spends a just enough time letting us breathe with the Perron’s, namely the girls, as they get try and adjust to the house. We get to hear some of their bickering and get a feeling for what their sisterly dynamic looks like. By the time the supernatural rumblings start, we have a good understanding of their personalities along with a few of their quirks – just enough to latch onto when the theatrics take hold.
The crux of the character work comes from the other family, the Warrens, who are given nearly as much, if not more, screen time than the haunted family themselves; this move is an improvement on even Insidious, whose attempts at giving the “exorcist” type character a more textured backstory is one of the better narrative pivots in the supernatural genre. The reason this usually never happens ,sans the best cases like The Exorcist, is because movies usually wants to spend their time building up our attachment to the subject of the hauntings so we care about what’s happening to them. As a result, there’s usually never time in the screen-play to develop the spiritual-type character to a level we care about.
Wan side-steps this issue by splitting screen-time between the two families and having their stories run in parallel to one another: usually, when something horrific happens to the Perron’s, we cut back to the Warrens. These cuts not only give the time needed to get to know and care about the Warren’s involvement in the story but also give Wan a way to neatly exposit to the us without it feeling ostentatious. He disguises the rules of the supernatural genre in scenes like interviews and college lectures; these movements not only give Via Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, the movie’s best two actors, time to show their chops, but they also help make sense of the hauntings proper. In one key scene transition, the Warrens explaining the sequencing of a haunting: infestation, oppression, possession; this is a perfect mapping for the three act structure of the movie and helps clue the audience in on how to interpret the “why” for the spectral occurrences.
Now, while I personally don’t enjoy the more grandiose spectacles The Conjuring goes for, I can appreciate the craft behind them, especially in the way they’re built up. By using longer than average takes and moving the camera along with the characters as they venture the house, Wan is able to generate a sense of constant paranoia; the stakes are apparent but there’s no way to escape the stifling tension. When the theatricalities begin, there’s little reliance on the distracting CGI that plagues many similarly plotted movies with many of the sequences utilizing in-camera tricks and practical effects. These make the the monstrosities feel like they have a physical presence which in turn exacerbates the feeling that the characters are always in a genuine danger.
This commitment to genuinely scaring the audience is why The Conjuring endures almost a decade after it’s release as a common favorite among the masses. In spite of narrative issues, the film manages to follow a distilled horror formula that emphasizes authenticity in the spectacle while remaining fun throughout it’s runtime. Wan knows how to distinguish the movie in just the right places, ensuring that the scares are well-earned and leave a lasting impact.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
The Conjuring is confirmation of Wan’s talent in the horror genre and is proof that highly polished horror blockbusters are possible. The movie is technically precise and features gorgeous camera work that one can’t help but admire and get wrapped up in. Though the story isn’t Wan’s most memorable, it manages to serve as a more than serviceable vehicle for lulling and scaring the audience; in other words, it’s a great time.
Rating
8.8/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3to view this review’s progress report .
A lightbulb appears.The camera flips around the lightbulb.The camera tracks down to a young boy sleeping. A spirit shows up against the wall. An Old Woman smiling menacingly holds a red candle with a burning light as darkness surrounds her. Insidious’s red title car drops. The intro sequence shows the house. The intro sequence shows the clock. A specter shows up in the frame. The camera pushes in on a clock. Renai (Rose Byrne) sleeps as the frame stays in black-and-white. Renai (Rose Byrne) slowly gets up as the color comes back in. The intro sequence sets in play the key motifs: the color red being associated with malevolence, the weight of time, the control of which direction the light is coming from. The opening swiftly moves through its series of images starting on a lightbulb, moving to a spirit holding a candle, and then showing location shots of where the hauntings the story will explore will take place. The transition from black-to-white back to color lets us know that the Lambert’s rendezvous with horror is just beginning.
We open on a large lightbulb before the camera flips itself around 180° – the world we’re entering is not one that plays by our expectations. The camera tracks revealing a young boy sleeping before moving right to traverse the rest of the house. Discordant strings rise in the background as a shadowy figure shows up on a wall – a confirmation that we’ve entered a whole new world. Finally, the moves past the figure to reveal a Woman in Black, smiling and standing still in the center of the frame; in her hand, she holds a red candle with a bright flame – the only light in a screen full of darkness.
The screech of the strings reaches its apex as the bright hellish red title card comes onto the screen. Every other image after in the title sequence features a black-and-white image of a location and red font that slowly fades away as an ethereal gray wisp spelling the same words comes out of the initial word, almost like the spirit of the words taking leave. Many locations and objects show up multiple times, priming the viewer for their future appearance’s. Some of the frames reveal ghostly figures hiding in the shadows while others showcase spectral happenings like chairs moving by themselves. This seemingly innocuous presentation is anything but and primes the audience for spectral encounters to come by sowing the seeds with an assortment of images whose meanings are yet to be shown.
Eventually the montage ends and the camera pushes in slowly on a clock surrounded by shadows before the screen turns completely black. A woman, Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne), happens to be sleeping. As she wakes up, the color in frame gradually returns. Sleep is over and the time for waking is here.
Renai (Rose Byrne) stands with a clock behind her. Rose puts up her books, one of which is titled: “Self Healing Through Music”. Renai (Rose Byrne) and Dalton (Ty Simpkins) talk next to a red lamp about the lack of Josh’s childhood pictures. Renai (Rose Byrne) tries to deal with all the kids in the morning. Rose’s books are on the floor. The camera tracks from left to right on the house. Renai (Rose Byrne) plays the piano as the baby monitor sits above her. Renai (Rose Byrne) reaches up to turn on the light. The furnace on the floor turns on in response. Dalton (Ty Simpkins) wears his red superhero cape as he tries to turn on the light. Renai (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Patrick Wilson) put Dalton (Ty Simpkins) to bed. A red lamp is next to the bed. Renai (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Patrick Wilson) talk about their hopes for their future. The clock starts ticking in hypnotic fashion. Kali sleeps in her room which is illuminated by a red lamp. The camera pushes in on Dalton (Ty Simpkins) as he sleeps. The camera pushes forward on the dark pane. Josh (Patrick Wilson) is unable to wake Dalton (Ty Simpkins) up. The camera tracks from right to left on the house. Every motif set-up in the introduction is expanded on here, leading up to the incident supernatural incident with Dalton. Renai tries and maintains some normalcy and then something unexpected happens. Books she puts up fall down. Music she plays gets interrupted. The ladder she uses to put on the light literally breaks. After a few warnings, the hypnotic ticking of the clock marks the “true” start of the Lambert’s nightmare and hints to the audience that the house contains within it some alternative agency.
Renai goes down the stairs. Behind her is the clock that’s been featured multiple times already – a harbinger of doom. She takes out some books from the moving boxes scattered around the cluttered study and puts them up. The title of the book in front reads: “Self-Healing Through Music.”
After putting the books up, Renai has to deal with her 3 children: Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor), and Kali, the infant in the group. She gets their affairs in order during a hectic kitchen scene where her husband, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), offers very little help. However, upon leaving the room she sees her books have now been scattered on the floor – a sign of things to come. Frustrated, she confronts her family who claims they had nothing to do with it. Unable to get any answers, she asks Josh to help with the kids and school – a request he denies to be apparently being busy. Her exasperation grows and the scene concludes with an establishing shot of the house, tracking from left to right.
Afterwards, the camera tracks onto Renai playing the piano. The books have now gained an additional purpose besides source of first supernatural sign: they are Renai’s work tools. She’s a musician trying to compose. Immediately it’s clear: this moment of musical creation is the overworked matriarch’s reprieve from her daily duties. Unfortunately, the specters seem to understand this as well and refuse to let her have her time. The baby monitor which has been creeping on the frame in the corner takes center place as the cries of the child interrupt the music and force Renai to come upstairs.
Upon ensuring Kali’s safety, Renai sees a door that draws her forward. She opens it and goes up to the attic of the house where she sees both a ladder and a lightbulb. A lightbulb starts the film and it appears here once again, enticing Renai to turn it on. She climbs the ladder and tries to grab the switch; upon doing so, the rung she’s standing on breaks. Immediately, a bright red-hot fire starts on its own from a furnace near the bottom of the floor. Just like the opening, the presence of a bulb is followed by the presence of an ominous red fire surrounded by blackness. It’s no coincidence that the bulb is above and the furnace is below; the use of red is evocative of hell and the flames associated with the damned location. Coming up here was a mistake – now the fire has started.
Nighttime comes and with it comes the start of the Lambert family problems. Dalton goes upstairs to the same room while wearing a red superhero cape. As any hero would do, he tries to bring the light; just like his mom, he gets up on the ladder to reach the switch, but unfortunately for him, the broken step in the ladder gives way underneath him and he crashes, falling unconscious momentarily. His parents realize he’s missing and run up to him to find him conscious but in pain. They get him all fixed up and put him into his bed before themselves retiring for the night. The couple finally unwinds as Renai talks about her music and her hopes for the future. The two laugh and call it a night.
Then the ticking of the clock starts; a momentum builds as the hypnotic rhythm cascades through the house. We see a series of images as the clock’s pulse continues: a leaking faucet, Foster asleep in his bed, Kali asleep in her crib with an ominous red light illuminating the room, Renai and Josh soundly asleep. Finally, we cut to Dalton and the hypnotic lull of the ticking clock stops. The camera pushes in slowly towards him and the darkness surrounding him. All the while the sound intensifies transforming from a low buzzing to a violent set of discordant noises – a callback to the title card’s ominous arrival.
The next day comes and Josh comes in to Dalton’s room to wake the still sleeping child. He repeatedly asks Dalton to awaken but comes to realize his son is unresponsive. A quick hospital later confirms that the aspiring superhero is in a coma like state with no apparent medical explanation. The narrative jumps forward 3 months as the camera tracks on the house again this time from right to left – the situation for the Lambert’s has changed once again as they find themselves taking care of their still-comatose son while eerie and supernatural events continue to pile up in their everyday lives.
In 20 minutes, Insidious has established a family dynamic with nuances in the main members of the grouping and set in motion a series of visual motifs – the color red, lighting up dark spaces, the baby monitor, music, the “presence” of the house – that will build to patterns of terror all while never jumping the shark. Similar to Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, the driving force propelling Insidious is based on the anxiety that the “modern” family is unable to secure itself against outside forces that threaten it; in this case, the parents are unable to protect their son.
As the opening shows, the couple has made the move to provide a new start for their family. Renai is overworked but hopeful for change, Josh is supportive of his wife and children but isn’t the most helpful partner at home, and Dalton is a young boy looking to be an purveying hero. In spite of their struggles, they hold on to the hopes for a better tomorrow. This is why their son’s condition and the family’s subsequent trials are so cruel and poignant: the journey delves into dark places where the failures and traumas of the family, left unresolved, will come to roost among their unsuspecting children.
These fears are allowed to roost because Director James Wan is more than content letting the feeling of unease build up slowly in service of letting the genuine moments of fear terrorize the audience in poignant fashion. By setting up patterns and building up the tension and letting the spectral occurrences linger in ambiguous contexts, forcing the audience to stew in their nescience, Wan gives his film that quality which all the best horrors have – the ability to get under the skin without one being aware of the same. Motifs become patterns which anticipate a future without giving it away, so Wan is able to employ them in tandem to keep building up just until the right moment. This is also why Wan can go against expected evaluation of some of these patterns; because their teloses are unknown, they can be repurposed to pull off unpredictable story moves. By the end of the film, all these moving parts become intimately linked with one another and act as puzzle pieces for the viewer to finally piece together to come to an understanding, an understanding whose ambiguous underpinnings allow Wan to pull a Silence of the Lambs style moment that truly has to be witnessed first-hand.
It’s funny because despite borrowing so much from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, Insidious does much of what the former film did: offer a breath of fresh air on the “haunted house” story. Like Hooper, Wan pushes the boundaries on what hauntings can entail and do. In fact, I would argue that Insidious is a breath of fresh air for the genre and offers an overhaul on the “haunted house” story in much the same as Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist did. Hooper’s film offers a positive interpretation of the supernatural alongside a negative one and demonstrates the way that specters operate and link up in parallel with one another. In this way it ties the nature of its families hauntings to social happenings in a larger sense, serving as a larger take on the American Dream and the powers of family. As evidenced above, Insidious does much of the same but focuses less on the social commentary of the hauntings than on the metaphysical breakdown of how those hauntings occur and interact with the world.
The film’s key contribution to the cannon is its exploration of “The Further”, the film’s term for the supernatural realm that houses specters. At one point, the Lambert’s ask a psychic, Elise (Lin Shaye), to help them with their son and her crew, method of investigation, and treatment procedure which involve “The Further”. These scenes and the ideas visually present in them are distinct and evocative all at once, giving Insidious a wholly unique aesthetic and set of rules for supernatural engagement. There are more ideas regarding the supernatural in here than in 5 other lesser movies put together. Despite using Poltergeist and its ideas as a base, Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell don’t remain complacent and push the boundaries on what hauntings can entail and do.
Alas, Insidious is unable to fully tap into the potential its framework allows and settles for oddities that feel like they would have benefited more from structure. Ambiguity is great, but tying that ambiguity to thematic purpose on top of setting up narrative surprises helps those moments play more effective. They gain an emotional resonance because they speak to something larger and end up being more memorable. While Insidious does a great job at navigating the contours of its family’s personal struggles, it lacks the depth to make those struggles touch on other issues, reducing the story’s reach. Given just how much leverage “The Further” gives Wan and Whannell, it feels a tad disappointing that they don’t probe into larger questions.
Yet, Insidious has to be applauded trying something new and doing it with such technical fluidity. There’s a propulsion to the way the narrative unfolds and the pressure constantly ratchets up. Recurrent motifs and discordant strings help make the journey towards the eventual scares all the more dreadful as Wan allows the anticipation to build to a fever pitch before giving the audience a chance for release. There’s no cheap throwaway moment here and even if not all the pieces line up the way they should at all times, the extended durations showcasing when they do work more than make up for any disgruntles.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Insidious’s propulsive narrative, technically sumptuous filmmaking, and innovative takes on the “haunted house” story sets new benchmarks for what audiences should expect from “mainstream” horror films. Director James Wan effectively utilizes ambiguity in relation to genre trappings to prime the audience for spookier scenes which are further accentuated by the film’s distinctive mystical and metaphysical stylizations. Even now they give the film a distinctive texture and weight that helps Insidious stand against the crowd.
Rating
9.2/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Talitha Bateman as Janice Lulu Wilson as Linda Stephanie Sigman as Sister Charlotte Anthony LaPaglia as Samuel Mullins
Release Date
2017
Language(s)
English
Running Time
110 minutes
Sketches for the Annabelle doll. The Annabelle doll takes center frame as Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia) makes its other body parts. Samuel brands the doll’s box. Esther (Miranda Otto) and Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia) tickle Annabelle (Samara Lee).The Annabelle doll starts innocent enough as a toy. It’s creator lives a happy life with his family and everything seems right.
A man begins to create the infamous “Annabelle” doll introduced in The Conjuring. He gets to work crafting the different parts of the toy; its hollow face takes center frame as it waits to be filled in and made whole. The finished doll is put into a box which the dollmaker, Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia), brands with his seal.
As he finishes, a note is slipped underneath his workroom’s door: “Find me.” Samuel gives chase; the note marks the start of a hide-and-seek game with his daughter, Annabelle (Samara Lee). He finds the young girl and promptly showers her with affection along with his wife, Esther (Miranda Otto). The loving parents dote on their daughter; the Mullins family is whole and their residence radiates with warmth.
The camera rotates and sweeps around the church……to reveal the Mullins family. The family waits on the road as their vehicle stalls out. Annabelle’s doll lays broken on the road. The title card is branded in with flames. The story moves 12 years forward – Annabelle’s gravesite becomes a threshold. But things turn for the worse very quick. The camera whips and flips around a church to signify the changing fates. Annabelle is brutally killed and the joyous mood collapses. The childlike innocence of the doll is broken in as the title card is “branded” in. The tragic site becomes the cursed threshold the orphans cross.
But these happy times are doomed to come to an end. The camera whips and flips around a church signifying the shift in fates while the family makes their way out of the service. On their way back home, their car stalls out and the trio waits on the road; something awful is about to happen.
A car approaches in the background. We notice it creeping in. Esther calls attention to the vehicle. The horrific realization of what’s to happen begins to dawn. Yet, when Annabelle runs in front of the car to retrieve a stray bolt and is promptly killed, the shock is all the same. Her broken doll occupies the frame: innocence has been destroyed. The title card is “branded” in with flames; the seeds of this horror story have now been sown. Then, the film cuts to 12 years later on a view of Annabelle’s grave-marker, and a bus of young orphaned girls passes by on route to the Mullins residence. Their crossing of the tragic threshold signifies the something sinister approaches them as well.
Janice and Linda hold onto their dolls. Janice (Talitha Bateman) uses the stair-helper. Janice (Talitha Bateman) is framed against the hellish glass-paned balcony. Janice (Talitha Bateman) sits by the stairs as Annabelle (Samara Lee) stands in the background. Janice and Linda’s invocation of the dolls draws a harrowing connection given Annabelle’s death and the nature of the demonic entity we’re familiar with. This feeling is confirmed as Janice explores the house. She enters an evil domain where what seems to be the spirit of the deceased Annabelle waits for her in the looming darkness.
However, the girls inside the vehicle are none the wiser to the horrors that await. They’ve struggled to find a place to stay while waiting to be adopted and the group’s caretaker, Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) sees the invitation from the Mullins to stay as a blessing from God. Meanwhile, a duo within the girls, Janice (Talitha Bateman) and Linda (Lulu Wilson), sit with their own dolls closely in hand, hopeful that the Mullins residence is just a stop on the road to their dream of being adopted together by a nice family.
They make their way into the residence and director David F. Sandberg gives us a tour of the abode in a James Wan-esque one-shot that sees the girls traverse their newfound home. At the end of the house tour, Janice gets into a stair-helper machine meant to help her manage her polio-related mobility issues and get around the house. Excitedly, she gets onto the machine and heads up the stairs to explore her new environment.
But as the camera pans from a hellish red-stained glass balcony that envelops the frame to reveal Janice emerging from the end of the structure, it’s clear her journey is going to evil places. The next shot confirms as much as a young girl that looks like the deceased Annabelle shows up in the looming dark space to the right of Janice which threatens to envelop her.
Far from being a godsend, the Mullins residence is a malevolent location fraught with demonic forces that seek Janice out from the outset. It’s from this backdrop that Sandberg and writer Gary Dauberman seek to not only explain how the Annabelle doll came to bewithin the larger context of the The Conjuring franchise while making sense of the convoluted logic of the previous franchise entry, Annabelle(also written by Dauberman), that attempted to do the same but also tell Janice and company’s story in a compelling manner in its own rite. Juggling one film is difficult enough but course correcting a former entry while maintaining a tonal consistency with it is a whole other task, and Creation deserves praise for mostly succeeding in its efforts.
The film improves upon its predecessors failures in two distinct fashions: first, it engenders a sense of goodwill towards its protagonist, Janice, by showcasing her personal struggles and developing her interactions with other characters to make her feel sympathetic; second, it streamlines the narrative to focus on Janice and her personal battle to furnish faith in a seemingly desolate world instead of trying to posture and tack on additional overarching, possibly conflicting thematic ideations.
By keeping the narrative and thematic throughlines easy to keep track of, the film is able to bracket its more generic supernatural set-pieces around a story that’s emotionally compelling enough to hold interest; simple parallels serve as markers that make tracking Janice’s journey through the otherwise contrived horror trappings easy to comprehend. Her friendship with Linda serves as a counterpoint to the potential possession by the Annabelle-like specter; one girl represents a path towards a fantasy while the other gestures towards nightmares. This dichotomy is extended through the presence of the film’s different dolls. Both girls have their own more innocent dolls and see them as extensions of one another. These figures represent a faith in a future where they’re together in the same home. Meanwhile, the Annabelle doll represents an evil that seeks to take refuge within, making a home out of its victim – an inversion of the idyllic dream shared by the girls.
However, the film does stumble occasionally when it shifts focus to the other girls – far less interesting characters who serve as little more than reminders of Janice’s alienation. Their segments create moments of temporary visceral engagement that leave little lasting impact, especially in the context of what the film sets out to do; the constant barrage of them, especially in relation to such tangential characters, end up raising questions regarding why the demonic forces present have not swiftly dealt with whatever they needed. When we see the evil entities wreak obscene havoc in spite of safeguards, it becomes hard to ignore when it then then pulls punches and leaves like the most obnoxious “practical joker” after getting a reaction. Cutting out these bloated sections would help the narrative maintain its momentum and avoid undermining the tension generated by the supernatural set-pieces related to Janice’s story.
Thus, while Creation is a step up from its predecessor and does a much better job at establishing the foundation for the Annabelle doll, it never becomes greater than the sum of its parts – a shame given Sandberg’s competence at building the set-pieces proper.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Annabelle: Creation, sees Director David Sandberg tasked with righting the mythos surrounding the Conjuring franchise’s Annabelle doll. While he manages to establish a background story that works, both as explanatory mechanism and narrative in its own right, the constant barrage of temporarily upsetting but overall unmemorable horror set-pieces drag the better parts of the movie down. It’s competently put together and features performances that will get viewers to care, but it’s a disappointment given the skill hinted at.
Rating
7.3/10
Grade
C+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Mckenna Grace as Judy Warren Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren Madison Iseman as Mary Ellen Katie Sarife as Daniela Rios
Release Date
2019
Language(s)
English
Running Time
106 minutes
I didn’t like Annabelle. I did likeAnnabelle: Creation. Both Wilson and Farmiga have been great in the other Conjuring movies they’ve been in, so when I saw the trailer for this movie I had real hope. The Warrens and Annabelle – maybe it could be as good as the movies in the main franchise. The movie even starts off with a bait, introducing Ed and Lorraine as they’re on their way back home with the Annabelle doll ready to be stored away. They get it in it’s iconic case and emphasize its power. Then they disappear from the movie and we get to the absurd mess that is the main story line.
The movie follows Judy, the Warrens daughter, and the mishaps that occur when her parents go off…to do something? Anyways, she’s left with her babysitter Mary for the day. Mary’s friend Daniela then comes over and opens and touches everything in the Warren’s demonic possession room. Then Annabelle gets loose and releases OTHER DEMONS to be menacing to the girls and the movie chronicles their miserably boring endeavors to fight them off. Another Annabelle movie where Annabelle doesn’t do anything of her own account. It’s like what’s the point of making these spin-off movies if you’re not going to actually expand on the character or make them more menacing in their own right.
Speaking of menacing- nothing in this movie is. All the “monster of the weeks” are poorly set up through lazy exposition and have no meaningful significance to any of the characters. They’re all just cheap attempts at recapturing the magic of creatures like the Nun or the Crooked Man but they don’t work. It’s sad because the movie is actually shot pretty well. There are some nice tracking shots that amplify the tension. If the scares took advantage of those the movie could have been so much more effective. There are plenty of great scenes early on where there are just scary apparitions in the background waiting- but the movie doesn’t know how to deal with them outside of fake-out jump scare. It gets repetitive which makes the 3rd act of the movie feel like the same scene happening in succession.
The whole movie just feels like a missed opportunity. So many cool ideas don’t get teased out properly.Exploring the life of a child ostracized because of her parents demonology background is interesting and I thought the movie would be a family drama centering around that issue. Instead, it’s ignored and never develops into anything meaningful. Exploring the Annabelle doll’s actual power? Nah, let’s let her summon other spirits instead. Have a good reason for someone to enter the room and do anything? Nah, we can just skirt around the issue and give her some vague sad backstory. It’s all just unsatisfying, especially when all the pieces to resolve these questions are present in the story. Heck you could even have the babysitter and her friend- just introduce them naturally and have the inciting incident be more believable. I don’t know – it just feels sloppy.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Annabelle Comes Home feels like a series of missed opportunities wrapped up into a generic feeling horror movie. The Warrens are barely in the movie , so don’t hold your breath if your expecting this to feel like The Conjuring. It’s just a sad imitation.
Rating
4.8/10
Grade
F
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
