You Don't Win Friends with Salad: Raw

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

There’s always a risk of narrow-mindedness when one examines a horror film (or any film, for that matter) through the lens of metaphor. One needn’t look any farther than the documentary Room 327—which profiles various interpretations of The Shining, some of them supported solely by extratextual conspiracy theories—to appreciate how far into error one can stray when a specific reading of a film becomes the only permissible reading. However, sometimes a particular allegorical approach to a film to so glaringly obvious, that to pretend as if it isn’t relevant would border on critical malpractice.

Such is the case with French director Julia Ducournau’s staggeringly confident debut feature, Raw, a horror picture about cannibalism that is also quite plainly about transgressive sexual desires in young women. It isn't even necessary to see the film to arrive at this conclusion. It can be deduced from a nickel summary of the plot: A young woman who has been a lifelong vegetarian heads off to college, where she discovers a craving for raw meat that eventually escalates into a compulsive hunger for human flesh. What do you need, a road map? What’s remarkable about Raw, however, is that while its clearest figurative reading pulses just beneath the surface, the film isn’t the least bit simple-minded or condescending. On the contrary, Docournau has crafted a work of bracing intelligence. Raw is at once thematically sophisticated, aesthetically arresting, and straight-up terrifying—albeit frequently in unexpected ways.

The film’s unfortunate anthropophagus is Justine (Garance Marillier) the younger daughter in a family of Belgian veterinary doctors. Like her father (Laurant Lucas), mother (Joana Preiss), and older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), Justine is a strict vegetarian. She is also following in her clan's professional footsteps: When the film opens, she is about to begin her first year at the prestigious veterinary school that her parents once attended, the very same school in which Big Sis is currently enrolled. The physical environment of this institution is a compelling character in its own right. It features the kind of severe, monolithic concrete architecture that seems to actively convey miserable inhospitality. The campus certainly doesn’t suggest an esteemed Belgian college—more like an abandoned Cold War military academy in some lesser Soviet republic. Granted, many of the film’s locales are visually striking, but none of them could be described as appealing or handsome. The school is so oppressive in its charmless functionality, it’s a miracle that the students are able to learn anything at all.

The dissonance created by these grim surroundings is only exacerbated by the school’s fill-tilt party and hazing culture, which would give even the rowdiest state university frat house in America a run for its money. The intensity, cruelty, and sexual undercurrent of the abuse heaped on first-year “rookies” keeps Justine off-balance from the first night  in her awkwardly coed dorm room. (“I asked for a girl,” she protests to her new roommate Adrien [Rabah Nait Oufella], who pleasantly observes that assigning her a gay man was likely someone’s clumsy notion of a joke.) During the wee hours, the rookies are menacingly herded out into the hall in their underwear while their rooms are vandalized and their mattresses are tossed into the courtyard. Things only get more questionable from there: Carrie-style deluges of fake blood; absurd, rigidly enforced speech and dress codes; humiliating sexual games; and compulsory attendance at numerous late-night parties, studies be damned. And that’s just over the course of Raw’s brief time frame, which spans the seven days of the school’s opening “Rush Week”.

More distressing to Justine than these harsh rites of passage, however, is the standoffishness exhibited by her sister. Alexia doesn’t display much interest in socializing with her younger sibling, and in her role as an upperclassman “elder,” she evidently must refrain from showing Justine favoritism where the school’s hazing traditions are concerned. It's a moot matter anyway: Alexia’s word is not sufficient to excuse Justine from one of the more revolting rituals, in which the younger sister is obliged to eat a hunk of raw rabbit kidney. Although Alexia pops a bit of the offal into her mouth to demonstrate that a vegetarian can make exceptions, the meat instantly provokes a retching fit in Justine, and later it seems to trigger a severe allergic reaction. A scarlet, scabrous rash that resembles the world’s worst case of psoriasis breaks out all over her body. Suddenly she finds that she is always hungry, no matter how much she eats. Only raw chicken breasts, wolfed down in guilt-ridden midnight visits to her roommate’s fridge, seem to satiate her appetite, however briefly.

The strangeness of Justine’s symptoms and her accompanying discombobulation intensify from there. However, to detail Raw’s plot much further would undermine the dizzying sensation of revolted, gaping disbelief that the film is so adept at evoking. Suffice to say that Justine’s cravings eventually escalate to the point that only human flesh will satisfy her. Once that cannibalistic Rubicon is crossed—in one of the film’s most gleefully appalling and seat-squirming scenes—things go from bad to worse to nightmarish quite rapidly. It would go too far to assert that Raw has a big plot twist, per se, but the story does take some unusual, rancorous turns. These are rather cunningly hinted at through low-key clues, some little more than seemingly prosaic touches in the film’s sets, props, and costumes.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Raw is that it isn't a satire of vegetarianism. In fact, it never really wades into the more contentious aspects of food politics or animal rights in any meaningful way. Viewers who are expecting a film that ridicules the herbivorous lifestyle will have to look elsewhere; no self-righteous vegan straw men get pummeled here. The closest the film comes to this is a cafeteria scene in which Justine rather clumsily defends her views on primate sentience to her fellow underclassman. However, the principal takeaway from this exchange is that the other students are ill-informed about rudimentary medical and zoological facts—which is a bit worrisome given that they are supposedly Europe's future veterinary elite.

Raw is quite decisively a film about sex, rather than food, although the two topics are inextricably intertwined at a metaphorical level in the film’s lexicon. It’s certainly no coincidence that Justine’s emergent cannibalistic compulsions are accompanied by an apparently uncharacteristic turn towards sexual self-confidence and heated erotic experimentation. In contrast, when she first arrives at the school, Justine cuts a figure that is almost asexual. Boyish in face and frame, she navigates her oversexed new surroundings with the cringing unease of an embarrassed preteen or sheltered Mormon adolescent. Obliged to wear a skimpy dress and heels as a part of her hazing, she looks and moves as awkwardly as a little girl playing dress-up. It’s not surprising in the least when she confesses to a nurse that she is still a virgin.

However, Justine’s eventual embrace of a human-based diet is tangled up with an overdue sexual awakening. Once she's made her carnivorous turn, she dances indulgently in front of a mirror to the post-feminist horndog rapping in Orties’ “Bitchier Than Any Bitches”, leaving lipstick kisses on her reflection. During a hazing trial, she is doused in azure paint and shoved half-naked into a bathroom with a male rookie covered in yellow, and the pair are ordered to stay in until “you’re both green." It doesn't end well: Justine emerges a short time later with a bloody chunk of the poor sap’s lip between her teeth. Eventually, she betrays an unabashed, ferocious lust for her half-aroused and half-disgusted roommate, culminating in a predictably brutal sex scene where—in a whirl of ravening confusion—Justine actually starts to devour her own forearm.

Justine’s increasingly reckless and bizarre behavior isolates her from the rest of the student population. Their stance towards her evolves from amused to contemptuous seemingly overnight after a particularly demeaning incident. (Owing to an alcohol-fueled blackout, Justine doesn’t even remember this night of shame, but YouTube never forgets.) On top of everything else, a succession of mishaps and betrayals sends her relationship with her sister into a downward spiral of animosity, robbing Justine of the only remaining ally who might have been understanding rather than disgusted with her new habits. Raw’s final, blood-slicked destination carries an otherwise uncommon tinge of narrative conservatism. However, it's also presented with such a potent aura of monstrous tragedy that one can forgive a late-game lurch into crime drama cliché.

Horror cinema has produced a handful of audacious and thematically thorny features about cannibalism in recent years—We Are What We Are, The Neon Demon, and the underrated The Green Inferno among them—but the anthropophagus has been a genre fixture since roughly the mid-1960s, when lurid cheapies like Two Thousand Maniacs! and Blood Feast began to appear. Indeed, cannibalism has been front and center in stone-cold genre masterpieces such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, as well as marvelous cult curios like The Hills Have Eyes, Motel Hell, C.H.U.D., Parents, and of course the Italian cannibal features of the 70s and 80s, including the notorious Cannibal Holocaust.

In most cases, however, anthropophagia serves primarily as a source of lethal peril for the protagonist. Who wants to wind up someone else’s dinner, after all? (Stephen King’s 1982 short story “Survivor Type” is perhaps the only work of fiction to cleverly and remorselessly turn the scenario in on itself, placing the the hero in a situation where he must consume his own flesh to subsist.) Alternately, cannibalism is sometimes presented as a glorified character trait, a shorthand means to establish the abominable evil of the villain or monsters. What distinguishes Raw’s treatment of such culinary transgression from that of most films is its forthright engagement with the cannibalistic urge as both a disturbing logistical problem and a heady metaphor. Only Ravenous and Eating Raoul come close to approximating Raw’s distinct approach, although in those films, cannibalism is still presented as a means to an end. Furthermore, their horror is leavened (Ravenous) or completely replaced (Raoul) with black humor. Raw’s angle is rather more pragmatic and straight-faced. It presents cannibalism as an idiosyncratic biological craving that can be accommodated with some creative and disciplined problem-solving.

On balance, however, Raw is skewed a bit more towards metaphorical matters rather than the concrete details of how exactly a cannibal might go about satisfying their perverse hunger. In part, this is attributable to the faintly surrealistic atmosphere that pervades the film, a chilly Euro-artiness that Ducournau implements with a droll touch and a discerning eye for arresting visuals. The film’s marginal preference for metaphor over realism is perhaps advantageous, given some nagging plot implausibilities. (Justine’s desires prove quite difficult to conceal, but covering up her crimes seems curiously hassle-free. Maybe this is a subtle statement on the normalization of campus sexual assault?) At any rate, it’s best not to dwell on the unrealistic elements in a film where a finger is chopped off as easily as the tip of a boiled carrot. While it evinces a horror fangirl’s ghoulish glee at spurting blood and savaged tissue, Raw ultimately prefers the terrors found in the psychological and social dynamics of transgressive tastes. The film is written in gristle, but its vocabulary is one of emotions: fear, desire, scorn, and guilt.

Raw presents an intense, empathetic depiction of the way compulsive behavior can direct and deform a life, in a manner that not incidentally recalls Steve McQueen’s grim portrait of sexual addiction, Shame. It speaks to Ducournau’s storytelling talents that no matter how many mistakes and depravities Justine commits, the viewer is perpetually terrified on her behalf, lest her deplorable cravings be discovered. That sort of sly sympathy redirection requires a steady hand, but the film’s success in this respect is also due to its setting. By surrounding her cannibal protagonist with narcissistic twits, conformist cowards, and misogynist jerks, Ducournau stacks the deck in Justine’s favor. Critically, she does so while resisting the urge to turn her heroine into an inhumanly alluring fiend in the mold of Hannibal Lecter. It’s ultimately pity that motivates the viewer’s affinity for Justine. She has spent her young life flattening and neglecting her wants in order to meet the expectations of others—sometimes willingly, often reluctantly. There’s a twinge of gratification in seeing her enthusiastically indulge appetites that are wholly her own, regardless of how monstrous they might be.

This points to the film’s feminist bent, and in particular to its bitter exasperation with the treatment of women who exhibit sexual desires and behavior that do not fit socially acceptable norms. Apart from its dim view of slut shaming and other overt manifestations of misogyny, Raw is a critique of the way that the fine contours of women’s libidos are policed for deviancy. Granted, the broad terrain of socially permissible lusts is constantly in motion—lesbianism being nominally tolerated in a contemporary European secular society like Belgium, for example. However, just as human desire seems dizzyingly multifarious, divisible into sub-sub-urges that continually fragment and coalesce, so too does disapproval seem to mutate into limitless forms. If one were a cynic, one might surmise that patriarchal societies will always find a way to render value judgments on female sexuality, no matter how superficially permissive and liberalized the dominant culture might become. If one were a cynic.

Raw apprehends the perilous terrain that young women in particular traverse as they become sexually self-aware. That topography is strewn with "shall" and "shall not" landmines placed by reactionary and radical forces alike. A little deviation in the name of being adventurous in the bedroom is acceptable, as long as it's not, you know, too much deviation. The dark elegance of the film’s central metaphor lies in its universality. In Raw, cannibalism stands in for almost any non-conventional sexual state, mode, relationship, taste, or kink that might unnerve the straights (or the queers). It’s all of them, all at once: bisexuality; asexuality; non-monogamy; exhibitionism/voyeurism; BDSM; or any more outlandish proclivity, fetish, or paraphilia one might dare to contemplate. (Furries? Tickling? Cake sploshing? You bet!)

Yet Raw’s cannibalism remains stubbornly resistant to identification with any specific sexual identity or behavior, in part because its implicit non-consensual violence is at odds with the primacy of consent in the secular liberal sexual ethic. It’s not that cannibalism is like bondage, or that bondage is like cannibalism. Rather, society reacts to a woman who enjoys bondage—when practiced outside tame, narrow permissions—in the same way that it would react to a woman who enjoys eating people. The trickiness of the symbolism doesn’t seem to be lost on Ducournau, as the aforementioned discussion about primate sentience reveals. When Judith asserts that sexually assaulting an ape would be as morally monstrous as a similar crime perpetrated against a human, another student indignantly asks if she is seriously comparing a raped woman to a monkey. One can easily envision a comparable outraged accusation being directed at the filmmaker at a Raw screening Q&A.

Still, it’s challenging to misconstrue Ducournau’s meaning when Raw is so densely layered with imagery that resonates with Justine’s plight and the theme of erotic transgression. Among the film’s recurring motifs are animals that are helpless and confined, their diseases and defects displayed for the students’ examination. Justine is similarly on display, hyper-conscious of the judgment of her classmates with respect to her sexual attractiveness, experience, and overall “normalcy". As Justine looks on in wide-eyed fascination, the film attentively documents the elaborate preparations necessary to sedate and hoist a horse for a surgical procedure—a process that’s presented with such fetishism for the myriad tubes, straps, buckles, and chains involved that it’s difficult not to be put in mind of BDSM play. Her repeated encounters with single-car crashes on the road to the school suggest the deviancy portrayed in David Cronenberg’s Crash, in which the characters eroticize the twisted metal and mangled limbs that result from car accidents. And then there’s the film’s most indelible shot: Alexia standing with her arm elbow-deep in cow’s rectum. It's a sight so unexpected that it brings Justine to an embarrassed, screeching halt, as though she thoughtlessly neglected to knock before barging through a shut bedroom door. As George Carlin once quipped, “You don’t have to be Fellini to figure that out."

A Case of the Mondays: The Belko Experiment

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 3/30/17.]

The film’s marketing is doing its level best to convince potential viewers otherwise, but director Greg McLean’s The Belko Experiment doesn’t really work as a horror-satire. The film isn’t particularly trenchant in its depiction of a white collar workplace-turned-abattoir, and it doesn’t skewer any aspects of contemporary office culture that haven’t been skewered far more effectively elsewhere. Certainly, there are tongue-in-cheek bits that do work, some of them understated, most of them sledgehammer-obvious. However, Belko is first and foremost a survival horror picture, and assessed on its merits as a specimen of that sub-genre, it’s a respectable entry with some gloriously nasty moments.

Unfortunately, the film’s fundamental problem is that it seems to be striving towards a droll and incisive Grand Statement about the corporate world of the 21st century, yet it never bothers to articulate anything of the sort. It’s a one-joke film. The premise itself—a bunch of officer workers are locked in their place of business and coerced to murder one other—is the satire. To their credit, McLean and screenwriter James Gunn (of Guardians of the Galaxy fame) play fair with that premise. Assuming that one can accept the ludicrous, Saw-esque contrivance of its scenario, The Belko Experiment unspools credibly, revealing an essentially pessimistic view of humanity.

The bloodbath unfolds in the Bogotá, Colombia branch of the Belko Corporation, an American non-profit entity that walks and talks like a for-profit business. Ostensibly, Belko is an NGO that facilitates the recruitment of foreign employees for the Latin American operations of multi-national firms. However, the company’s megalithic office building looks like a typical militarized neo-colonial enclave, complete with razor wire and a thousand-yard buffer zone separating Belko from the rest of Bogotá.

On this particular morning, the segregation is even sharper, as all of Belko's arriving Colombian employees have been turned away at the gates, allegedly due to some vaguely described “security threat.” This leaves the building half-full of Americans and other expats, who attempt to go about their daily routines as if nothing is amiss. McClean pointedly presents the office’s environment as one of dreary corporate anonymity, indistinguishable in its general rhythms and textures from any paper-pushing outfit anywhere in the world. The less familiar, more invasive aspects of life at Belko seem to be largely taken in stride, whether the bomb-sniffing dogs, the omnipresent cameras, or even the GPS tracker embedded in the neck of each non-Colombian employee. (This is due to the high risk of kidnapping posed to foreign workers, or so they are told.)

Things take a swerve for the bizarre when a voice crackles over the building’s public address system, announcing that employees must kill two of their number in the next 10 minutes, or else two people will be killed at random. The workers are mostly just perplexed, until armored barriers suddenly slam shut over the exterior windows and doors, trapping the 80 people currently in the building. Anxiety begins to ripple through the ranks, even as Barry (Tony Goldwyn), the branch’s Chief of Operations, assures everyone that their confinement must be part of some elaborate prank. When the initial 10 minutes expire, however, two individuals’ heads explode with a bang and a squelch of blood, bone, and brain. The initial, panicked assumption is that these unfortunates were slain by a sniper. However, a gooey examination reveals a more horrifying reality: The “tracker” implanted in each employee is, in fact, a remote-detonated explosive.

Its absolute authority now messily apparent, the Voice on the PA announces a new, more ruthless ultimatum: 30 of the remaining 78 Belko employees must be dead in two hours, or 60 will be killed. Thus begins the squealing meat of the film’s conflict, in which the Belko workforce divides into two rough factions. The first, loosely led by Mike (John Gallagher Jr.), is determined to find a non-violent path out of their predicament, or, at minimum, to simply refuse to play along with the Voice’s twisted game. The other group follows Barry, who initially presents himself as the voice of calm civility. As the clock ticks on, however, he evolves into a cold-blooded Darwinian executioner, resolved to eliminate the weak so that the strong can survive.

Mike is theoretically the “hero” here, or at least the victim who has the most screen time and who is the most obvious point of viewer identification. One of The Belko Experiment’s fumbles, however, is that it injudiciously divides its attention between myriad stock characters, rather than focusing on developing the inch-deep Mike into something more than a bland, anxious twerp. (Or more than the cunning Man of Action into which he inexplicably evolves in the final 30 minutes.) Before the bloodshed begins, the film quickly introduces an array of “colorful” secondary and tertiary characters, all of whom are sketched with just enough detail that they come off as lazy caricatures: the well-dressed flamboyant gay guy (David Del Rio); the rotund, wisecracking black security guard (James Earl); the sweet, older middle-aged lady (Rusty Schwimmer); the conspiracy-theory-spouting stoner (Sean Gunn); the pragmatic blue collar trouper (Michael Rooker); the twitchy, obviously unstable dude (David Dastmalchian). None of these characters are given sufficient depth for their inevitable deaths to register as affecting. The meager human component is thinly scraped over too much film, as the saying goes. Meanwhile, McLean’s sheer indifference towards these clichéd characters lends an irritating glibness to their individual demises.

Then there’s Mike’s girlfriend Leandra (Adria Arjona). It's a mystery what could have possibly attracted her to a colorless, disheveled whiner like Mike. Certainly, the viewer doesn’t learn much about her other than the fact that she is the Girlfriend Character, which apparently means that she must naysay every plan that Mike suggests. Scratch that: There’s also the fact that she detests the harassing attentions of the leering Wendell (John C. McGinley), who, in fine red pill jackwagon fashion, apparently thinks that any woman who rebuffs him is a cockteasing bitch. (Which hardly counts as characterization for Leandra, since no woman would find Wendell’s creepy “flirting” to be charming.) It should come as exactly zero surprise that the eventual homicidal free-for-all turns into a stage for Wendell and Leandra to act on their resentment and loathing, respectively.

This kind of cut-rate, sophomoric drama is The Belko Experiment’s meat and potatoes, and it gives the whole enterprise a tiresome dimension. In terms of inter-character dynamics, almost nothing unexpected happens in the film. It’s cogent, but not penetrating or revealing, like the cinematic imitation of a half-baked reality show storyline. That said, at least Gunn’s script is lucid and McLean's direction is enjoyably lurid. That’s more than one can say of the dour, muddled conflicts trotted out in the various Purge films, which purportedly engage with similar themes, yet seem to occur in a reality where human behavior only loosely resembles that of the real world. Wendell might be a cartoonishly vile asshole, but that cartoonishness makes it crudely satisfying rather than morally troubling when his sneering mug meet the business end of a fire axe.

Narratively speaking, the walking sore thumb in The Belko Experiment is Dany (Melonie Diaz), who has the bad luck of starting her employment with Belko on the same day that the Voice unleashes their lethal game. The film generally treats her as a co-protagonist, following her on a snaking path through the building’s stairwells, sub-basements, and crawl spaces as she adheres to a canny “evade and hide” strategy. Unfortunately, Dany is even less developed than Mike—she’s practically a tabula rasa—and it’s not apparent why the viewer should give her fate any thought, beyond the fact that she is young and pretty. It’s as though Gunn and McLean realized that they had short-changed the Latina girlfriend character (in a Latin American setting, no less) and decided that the proper corrective was to awkwardly wedge another Latina into the plot.

These sorts of storytelling failures are exasperating, but fortunately not lethal to The Belko Experiment’s bedrock purpose of gruesome, nerve-wracking spectacle. The film functions effectively on the latter score, in part because Gunn’s script approaches the scenario with a kind of rational ruthlessness. The characters might be simply drawn and their conflicts might be unimaginative, but there’s still a wicked electricity in watching the employees’ mutual fear disintegrate into selfish carnage, “kind of slowly at first… and then very, very suddenly” (as Archer’s Lana Kane would say). In short, the film treats its conceit respectfully, if not its characters. The Belko workers make some dumb mistakes—they are the expendable meat in a horror movie after all—but those errors consistently resemble the blunders of panicked people in unthinkable circumstances, rather than mere clunky plot contrivances.

McLean bestows the story with an attitude of ineluctable doom, less through formal atmospherics than sheer momentum and gore. (Visually and aurally, Belko is fairly unremarkable, although the design of the “exploding head sound” is wonderfully revolting, like an M-80 firecracker detonating inside a rotten pumpkin.) Insipid characters notwithstanding, there’s a genuine and overpowering sense of danger that suffuses The Belko Experiment. The rigidly circumscribed nature of the murder game (and the opacity of its purpose) lends the film a bit of Cube’s industrial remorselessness, but the “inhumanity of humanity” angle makes it closer kin to the likes of Lifeboat, The Mist, and Green Room. Belko compromises its tone by drizzling in moments of comic absurdity and frequently snickering at its characters, but what ultimately makes the film memorable is that (mostly) searing aura of mortal peril.

Perhaps the most inspired aspect of Belko’s story is its tacit acknowledgement that the experiment is inherently unfair—not to mention biased to provoke violence. That might sound facetious, but if the Voice's game is indeed an experiment, it's one that is terribly designed. Perhaps more accurately, it's one designed to obtain a particular outcome. The parameters of the experiment railroad the subjects into just two possible paths: ruthless violence or cowering passivity. Tellingly, every time Mike pursues a “sideways” path out of the game—e.g., slicing out his tracker with a utility knife, or hanging S.O.S. banners from the roof—the Voice announces that such tactics are a violation of the (previously unmentioned) rules and that employing them will result in execution. In this way, the Voice betrays their motivation. They’re not interested in whether any of the test subjects can wriggle out of their puzzle box; they just want to see the bodies pile up. The veneer of scientific inquiry can’t conceal the Voice’s underlying barbaric impulse, any more than elegant Derby Day hats can turn animal abuse into a Sport of Kings.

Fresh off his dreadful and shockingly inept ghost story The Darkness, McLean reasserts that he can, indeed, make an engaging horror picture when he puts his mind to it. Nothing in The Belko Experiment approaches Wolf Creek—still his best feature—but occasionally McLean injects some of the latter film’s shocking, left-field violence into the former, momentarily and mutinously perturbing the otherwise conventional plot. There’s a particular late film death that occurs so suddenly and in a manner that so thoroughly sabotages the audience’s expectations, the moment elicits perverse delight rather than resentment—once the viewer’s brain has processed the uncanny shock of it, that is.

There’s also something to be said for the pure, shattering horror of a banal workplace mutating into an armed madhouse in practically no time at all, not due to the influence of demons, alien parasites, or a viral epidemic, but ordinary human savagery. It’s a bit like watching The Lord of the Flies on fast-forward, and while Belko’s social commentary is comparatively flimsy, the speed of the office’s devolution into an everyone-for-themselves gladiatorial arena is itself a source of dizzying dread. The premise has some antecedents, being something like a mashup of the prisoner’s dilemma, the trolley problem, and various “lifeboat ethic” thought experiments. While the Belko game is as nonsensical and overcooked as any Joker scheme or Jigsaw death trap, Gunn wisely refrains from drawing profound meaning from such Philosophy 101 contrivances. Near the film’s conclusion, it is revealed that Belko is not testing any grand hypothesis, but merely gathering data as a part of a wide-ranging investigation, which it hopes will someday result in advancements in the social sciences. (If there’s a successful satirical element to be found in Belko, it’s in the film’s mild mockery of the methods and culture of modern scientific research.) Shrewdly, the film turns one of its weaknesses—its relative political toothlessness—into a broader, Coen-esque illustration of meaninglessness and Sisyphean folly.

And, in truth, while Belko lacks the scathing, whip-smart integration of racial, sexual, and economic anxieties that one can observe in horror features like Compliance and Get Out, it still manages flashes of resonance with respect to the corporatization of American life. When Barry, pistol tucked ominously into his waistband, begins coolly dividing up the employees into the valuable and the worthless, one can detect echoes of a dictator’s liquidation of “unproductive” citizens, but also the cost-benefit analyses and actuarial tables of the business world. Much like the capitalist judgments driven by such dollar-based evaluations, Barry’s pitiless culling of his co-workers is presented with a fig leaf of “hard choices." However, no one seems to notice that their boss doesn’t have to justify his survival at all. His value is assumed.

Taking the Waters: A Cure for Wellness

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers. It expands on my original review of A Cure for Wellness, which appeared at St. Louis Magazine on February 17, 2017. Updated 3/17/17.]

Gore Verbinski’s superlative 2002 J-horror remake The Ring unexpectedly revealed that the director of forgotten drivel like MouseHunt was capable of crafting chilling and sinfully stylish cinema, at least when paired with the right screenplay and the right cinematographer. The latter being Montenegran lensman Bojan Bazelli, who created The Ring’s distinctive, melancholy look—a water-logged aesthetic that seems to consist entirely of teals and deep gray shadows. Verbinksi’s subsequent helming of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films established that he could also successfully captain a colossal franchise into preposterously profitable waters, diminishing critical returns notwithstanding. (Not in this writer’s eyes, however. The Pirates series is a personal guilty pleasure because of, rather than despite, its manic, bloated outlandishness.) Between those films and the mind-numbing belly flop of The Lone Ranger, however, Verbinski seems to have been constrained by commercial expectations, finding few opportunities to showcase the cinematic verve expressed, however modestly, in The Ring. Even Rango, arguably the strangest film ever to amble off with a Best Animated Feature Oscar, is still a kid-friendly cartoon populated by funny animals with celebrity voices—the very definition of safe, middle-of-the-road multiplex product.

No such charge can be leveled at A Cure for Wellness, Verbinski’s auspicious return to the horror genre after 14 years, and the most unlikely major studio release in years. The film seems to have been crafted for a ridiculously narrow category of viewer. Namely, cinephiles who adore the campy gothic horror pictures of the middle 20th century and who long to see the R-rated 2010s incarnation of such a film, complete with tits, gore, and an absurdly hefty budget (given the genre). How exactly Verbinski convinced Regency to bankroll his gloriously mad $40 million picture about a spa of the damned is one of those Hollywood mysteries for the ages. No matter: Aficionados of pulp horror should simply savor the fact that a work of cinema as nutty and extravagant as A Cure for Wellness exists at all. It is unlikely that the world will see anything like it for some time, given the film’s dead-in-the-water commercial performance.

The plot is a loose reimagining of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in the style of a Roger Corman chiller. Both Mann’s enigmatic novel and Verbinski’s film follow a prosperous young man to a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps. Although this visitor initially intends to meet with one of the spa’s patients, the institution seems to possess its own strange gravity, and through an unfortunate turn of events the man himself is soon admitted. The malevolent twist that Verbinski and writer Justin Haythe add to this scenario is that the spa in question conceals a Terrible Secret of the mad science stripe, in the fine tradition of all horror settings ostensibly dedicated to healing. Although A Cure for Wellness necessarily shares some of its DNA with other genre pictures set in hospitals and asylums—the film has notable affinities with Shock Corridor, The Ninth Configuration, and Shutter Island—its closer spiritual kin are the pulpy horror pictures produced by American International Pictures from the mid-1950s to early 1970s. Had it been one AIP’s low-budget gothic creepfests from this era, A Cure for Wellness would have unquestionably starred Vincent Price. Indeed, the film shares some features, plot-wise, with the Price vehicles House of Usher (1960) and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), which roughly bookend the most fecund period for AIP-branded gothic horror. None of the performers in Verbinski’s film replicates Price’s inimitably luscious flavor of hammy B-movie acting, but, in its favor, Wellness does conclude with the villain’s lair burning to the ground, in fine AIP fashion.

In contrast, the film opens with a comparatively mundane (if ominous) calamity: While working through the wee hours, the star trader (Craig Wroe) at a white shoe financial firm suffers a fatal heart attack. Although presented with sinister shading, the man’s death is a bit of a red herring, merely serving as the catalyst that allows the story to ensnare its protagonist. “Hero” seems inapt, given that Wellness’ corollary to The Magic Mountain’s Hans Castorp is Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a slick junior trader whose face is affixed with a perpetual and eminently punchable expression of unearned smugness. (Straightaway, Verbinski distinguishes his film from past B-grade horror pictures, even as he honors them. Lockhart would have been a secondary character in a cheapo 1960s gothic, perhaps a slimy barrister or a lovelorn creep who is predictably bumped off by the second act.) Presented with evidence of his recent sub-legal financial chicanery, Lockhart is effectively blackmailed by the board of directors into subbing for the recently deceased trader on a secret endeavor. Namely, he is ordered to journey to the remote Alpine spa where the firm’s CEO has permanently entrenched himself, if the man's bizarre, rambling letters are to be taken at face value. Lockhart is tasked with force-marching the CEO back to civilization, so that the man can be relieved of his position in above-the-board fashion.

In short order, Lockhart is being chauffeured up the winding mountain road to the massive sanatorium, which looms like Frankenstein’s castle through brief, periodic gaps in the evergreens. First it's here on the right, then there on the left, as Lockhart cranes his neck and presses his face to the window. In this, Verbinski foreshadows the inscrutable, puzzle-like character of the plot that subsequently unfolds. Lockhart will catch repeated glimpses of the spa’s monstrous secret as he explores the grounds, but they are mere fragments of a whole. He can discern the trunk, tusks, ears, legs, and tail, but can’t assemble those impressions into the proverbial elephant until his fate has already been sealed. Such an analytical failure is understandable, given that the film is relatively frugal about doling out genuine revelations, as opposed to pure atmospherics. However, Lockhart’s slow-motion entrapment within the spa is primarily attributable to failures of intuition and imagination rather than logic. (A Cure for Wellness is practically a public service announcement for heeding the inexplicable prickle that Something Isn’t Quite Right.) It’s an ironic flaw for an alpha male twerp who has made an illicit fortune by means of opportunistic manipulation of figures. Lockhart snakes between the lines rather than rigidly adhering to them, which is perhaps why, despite his defects, he ultimately manages to bring down the spa even after being imprisoned within it.

Overseeing the facility is Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), whose unflappable satin manner can’t conceal that fact that he is played by Jason Isaacs, and is therefore not to be trusted. Volmer gives lip service to the notion that Lockhart’s wayward CEO, Pembroke (Harry Groener), can leave the spa at any time if he so wishes. However, the staff throw up subtle roadblocks as Lockhart attempts to track the man down within the sprawling institution. The patients are perpetually being hustled to and from various hydrotherapies per an esoteric schedule, and the young trader repeatedly "just misses" the executive. Eventually, Lockhart corners Pembroke in the steam baths, whereupon the older man flatly refuses to return to his old life. Lockhart is not deterred: He resolves to forcibly remove the CEO from the institution, heading back to the nearby village to arrange for the return trip to the U.S., this time for two passengers. However, misfortune intervenes. During the ride back down the mountain, a darting deer results in a spectacular, end-over-end car crash into the trees. A battered Lockhart awakens days later back at the spa, his right leg encased in a plaster cast. Leaving is no longer an option in the short term, but Dr. Volmer assures him that the facility’s therapies will do wonders for him during his recuperation. (Cue evil chuckle.)

Now wearing the white bathrobe and slippers of a patient—the lines marking him as an outsider already alarmingly blurred—Lockhart awkwardly explores the facility on crutches in the days that follow. He has several strange encounters with the blissed-out patients, almost all of whom are wealthy and elderly, as they contentedly wile away the days playing bridge and croquet, in between physician-mandated therapies. (The crutches are a brilliant touch, hobbling Lockhart so that his mobility is more in line with the spa's geriatric guests.) Most significantly, Lockhart meets Mrs. Watkins (Cerlia Imrie), who has an amateur historian’s fascination with the spa’s colorful, centuries-old history. “Colorful” being the tactful adjective used to denote perversity and bloodshed, of course. The spa, it turns out, was built on top of the ruined fortress of a notorious early 19th century baron, whose unwholesome medical tests and even more unwholesome relationship with his sister eventually earned him the wrath of a village mob, complete with pitchforks and torches. These and other details regarding the site’s storied past are of course quite germane to Lockhart’s present circumstances, although he is slow to comprehend as much.

Not all the spa’s residents are in their autumn years: Roaming the grounds is Hannah (the odd-looking but lovely Mia Goth), a young woman who appears to be perpetually in a semi-fugue. Childlike in demeanor, she always seems to be humming eerie doggerel and padding around barefooted, her steps betraying both nimble familiarity and bruised fearfulness. Exactly why Hannah resides at the spa is a mystery, although Dr. Volmer speaks of her with a mixture of affection and pity, as though she were the facility’s most unfortunate soul. Lockhart is drawn to her, and she to him, but their hesitant friendship has an unmistakable aura of peril and transgression. When he coaxes the girl to slip out for a beer at the village tavern, Hannah’s tremulous wonder at banal marvels (Jukebox! Lipstick!) can’t conceal the smothering sensation that something Very Bad is going to occur as a result of the couple’s foray.

Any further summary of Lockhart’s experiences at the spa would diminish the potency not just of the film’s narrative revelations—which, in the end, are mad science boilerplate with a twist of R-rated ickiness—but also the whole work's uncanny, nightmarish character. Verbinski and Haythe have created a startlingly novel species of horror cinema, in which the design components and overarching story are hoary genre artifacts, but the film nonetheless manages to feel sickeningly, magnificently volatile. The viewer might have a strong suspicion as to where the plot is ultimately headed, but, moment-to-moment, A Cure for Wellness pulses with an elixir that is exceedingly rare in contemporary horror: a genuine sense of danger.

This aura stems in large part from the film’s willingness to sacrifice almost anything—coherence, brevity, momentum—in the name of unnerving imagery, blood-curdling set pieces, and the limitless darkling potentiality of a waking nightmare. Consider a scene where Lockhart investigates a bothersome toilet flush, whose persistent midnight rattling has previously been shown to have no apparent cause. On this occasion, however, he removes the toilet tank’s lid and finds the interior squirming with a solid mass of eels. (Eels are a recurring motif in Wellness, almost to the point of absurdity.) When he recovers from his shock and looks again, however, the fish have vanished. This perplexing discovery does nothing to advance the plot, but it is exactly the sort of bizarre detail that one might recall from an awful dream. Indeed, the purpose of this scene (and countless others like it) is one of mood, not narrative. For Lockhart, such moments undermine his already shaky grasp on sanity, hissing that he cannot trust in the reality of anything he has experienced within the spa’s walls. For the viewer, they elicit the heightened fight-or-flight response that is a constant feature of the worst nightmares. By illustrating that horrific (if often inconsequential) events can happen at any moment and without rational explanation, Verbinski suffuses every corner of his setting with dreadful possibility. In this way, A Cure for Wellness places the viewer’s reptile brain on high alert, and doesn’t let up for 143 harrowing minutes.

Indeed, the film’s story and setting are custom tailored for such purposes. Verbinksi laces his tale with myriad fears plucked from the collective unconsciousness, assembling a sort of greatest hits compilation of common nightmare scenarios. Drowning is unsurprisingly prominent, given the prevalence of water in the spa’s therapies, but the film touches on numerous elemental terrors: confinement in small spaces; bodily invasion by alien substances and vermin; the consumption of tainted food or drink; ghastly, involuntary medical procedures; and the Cronenbergian phenomenon of loose, disintegrating teeth (an oddly widespread motif in human dreams). Occasionally, the film shades into surrealism and outright malicious mindfuckery. When Lockhart loses his way in a labyrinth of steam baths, doorways seem to vanish and every room begins to look the same—and that’s before the elk appears, wandering through the white vapors.  (One senses a bit of Cube’s matrix of inscrutable death traps in this scene, particularly when Lockhart discovers to his icy panic that a chamber he just entered has, paradoxically, no exit.)

Occasionally, Wellness tosses aside any pretense of common sense to put some particularly ghastly sight on display, like a pickled horror in a sideshow’s cabinet of curiosities. Indeed, Lockhart at one point stumbles onto a chamber where comatose patients are exhibited in just such a manner, floating like prized specimens in a sea-green liquid—and without any apparent source of breathable air. Later, Lockhart himself is glimpsed within this monstrous museum, similarly submerged behind glass. What is the point of this room? How are the victims kept alive? Does it matter? The point, Verbinski might assert, is that it looks fucking creepy. And, in truth, it does look fucking creepy.

The director keeps both Lockhart and the viewer off balance by periodically tweaking chronology and causality, letting “all a dream” suspicions simmer without educing them directly. In one utterly horrifying scene reminiscent of Marathon Man and Jacob’s Ladder, Lockhart is strapped into a cruel set of metal restraints and subjected to a tooth drilling that seems to have no point besides the infliction of pain and disfigurement. Later, a pulverized incisor is clearly missing from Lockhart’s mouth, but, later still, it appears again. Did the dental torture ever occur, or was the nightmarish incident in fact a genuine nightmare? Wellness never smirks from behind its sleeve to signify one or the other, for to do so would rob the film of its peculiar black magic.

The film’s storytelling methods could be described as scene-centric, or less charitably as rambling and confused. Verbinski is manifestly preoccupied with transforming each sequence into its own little skin-crawling horror short, and trifling matters like pacing and parsimony wind up unceremoniously smothered with a pillow. The film is almost defiantly arrhythmic: Individual scenes carry on as long as necessary to achieve whatever disturbing psychological effect that Verbinski has in mind, even as the dramatic stakes often recede into the background haze. This sort of indulgence makes for a plot that’s wobbly as hell, not due to implausibility—this is pulp horror, after all; of course it's implausible—but due to the hiccuping, digressive way the film moves from one scene to the next. It’s not exactly wheel-spinning, as the film is simply too goddamn unsettling to ever feel sluggish, its running time notwithstanding. Rather, it’s a function of Verbinksi being so absorbed with the stylish scares unfolding at any given moment, he doesn’t seem to spare much thought for how (or whether) it’s all adding up. This, of course, simply underlines Wellness’ kinship to the pulp gothics of old, which also routinely tossed out pacing and narrative clarity for anything that seemed appropriately eerie and shocking. Verbinski’s methods are equal parts William Castle funhouse mischief and Mario Bava unapologetic luridness, with a dose of sub-Lynch nightmare logic stirred in for good measure.

Of course, no one’s nightmares have ever benefitted from Bojan Bazelli’s sumptuous cinematography or the jaw-dropping production design overseen by Eve Stewart. They make superb use of Wellness’ dazzling German locations, which include Hohenzollern Castle and a former sanatorium and military hospital complex in Beelitz-Heilstätten. Dovetailing with the story’s preoccupation with not-so-buried history, Stewart’s approach to the film’s design is markedly retro. She populates the spa with vintage furniture, decorations, and equipment: the patients play badminton with wooden rackets and sweat out “toxins” in personal sauna boxes; the nurses prep glass syringes, pill vials, and IV bottles; and the technicians fidget with the controls on iron lungs and an EKG machine the size of an Eisenhower era computer. The textures of the facility signal modernity, but it is the modernity of five to ten decades in the past. Other than rubber tubing, there is very little plastic observable at the spa, and nothing that possesses miniaturized electronic circuitry. When Dr. Golan wishes to communicate with a patient locked in a “therapy” chamber that resembles a two-story Victorian diving bell, he speaks into a huge microphone fit for crooning jazz standards. The spa’s nurses swoop about in starched white uniforms, recalling the imperious Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while the hidden wings and deepest sub-levels of the facility resemble environments that Dracula’s Dr. Seward would find familiar.

Despite the film’s surreal qualities, the overall fussiness that is apparent in its evocative design is a telltale sign that A Cure for Wellness is more beholden to midcentury pulp horror cinema than to the character of real-world dreams. While components of the visuals and story seem plucked from a nightmare, the film is far too classical and straightforward in its style to be called dreamy. There’s no room for Malickean collages of sight and sound in Verbinski’s aesthetic. His approach is one of music video polish and precision, in the manner of David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, and Tarsem Singh, with the latter’s outlandish dreamscapes and fantasies a close cousin to Wellness’ gothic tableaus. (In fact, the spinning Sufi dervishes who appear at a wedding in Tarsem’s masterpiece The Fall are echoed unnervingly in Verbinski’s film, albeit at a much more blasphemous celebration.)

For all its deliberately unsettling weirdness, A Cure for Wellness is still deeply embedded in a well-worn gothic horror vernacular. One could practically author a completist’s checklist of tropes from its screenplay: a mad doctor in a (sort of) castle; profane experiments that subvert God’s creation; secrets hidden inside conspicuously locked rooms; cadavers being smuggled under cover of darkness; a mob of vengeful peasants; a guileless youth held captive. (Speaking of Dracula, few critics seem to have noticed that Lockhart’s pursuit of Pembroke mirrors the novel’s theatrical and cinematic adaptations, in which Jonathan Harker’s journey follows in the footsteps of the Count’s previous solicitor, Renfield.) It is a film that unabashedly savors horror clichés; or, more specifically, savors the fulsome realization of horror clichés with all the resources that contemporary big-budget filmmaking can muster.

While nothing in a human nightmare ever looked as gorgeous as Verbinski’s film, neither did any of the pulp gothics of the 1950s to 70s. Directors working under the AIP system, for example, were constrained by ruthless schedules and budgets, but they always seemed to find ways to counterbalance chintzy sets or visual effects. Roger Corman was quite adept at this, capable of successfully redirecting filmgoers’ attention with galvanic flourishes, such as the proto-psychedelic costumes and lighting in The Masque of the Red Death. A Cure for Wellness is essentially an entire film built from such demented gestures, because why not? The only feature in recent decades that comes close to matching Wellness’ opulence is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, the gallows humor and operatic eccentricities of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film seem almost charming when laid alongside the macabre sights administered in A Cure for Wellness. Verbinski’s feature is B-grade pulp gothic distillate sans camp. That might sound like a recipe for exasperating gloom, but in truth the result is a triple dose of the kind of hallucinatory lavishness that only comes along once or twice a generation in the horror genre.

This Is About Some Kid Down a Hole or Something: Rings

[Note: This post contains moderate spoilers.]

Whatever else it gets right or wrong, Rings has one definitive tick mark in its favor: It is a better sequel than The Ring Two. This is not to say that Rings is particularly good, or even that successful at the essential responsibility of a horror film, frightening the audience. What it does mean is that the new film’s trio of writers—Akiva Goldsman reworking a script by Jacob Estes and David Loucka—watched Gore Verbinski’s striking, seminal 2002 feature The Ring and put some genuine thought into how the story might have continued and evolved in the subsequent 13 years. (The film was originally slated for a November 2015 release, but was delayed three times; never a good sign for any feature, especially in the horror genre.)

This is more than can be than can be said for 2005’s forgettable The Ring Two, in which director Hideo Nakata and screenwriter Ehren Kruger exhibit zero regard for conceptual logic, seemingly adding plot points arbitrarily until they arrive at a target running time. Perhaps their aim was to create the air of a fever-born nightmare, but the actual result is a film that feels indefensibly woolly, yet simultaneously indistinguishable from any other hackneyed ghost story. Although The Ring Two retained investigative reporter Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her sensitive son Aidan (David Dorfman) as protagonists, it largely discarded one of the most distinctive aspects of the original film (and that of its Japanese forebear, Ringu): the centrality of video technology to the story’s events.

In contrast, Rings might suffer from unmemorable characters and clichéd plot components, but it at least apprehends why the conceit of Verbinski’s film was so compelling. (Lamentably, neither sequel comes close to replicating the evocative, slate blue visuals that cinematographer Bojan Bazellli brought to the 2002 original.) The new film functions as a kind of thought experiment regarding the fate of The Ring’s malicious ghost, Samara Morgan: How would an undead spirit who claims her victims via VHS tape endure in a world where high-definition digital video is ubiquitous? At the storytelling level, Rings follows the spread of Samara's curse, but then swerves into the ghost's somewhat orthogonal endgame, illustrating that horror sequels benefit when they resist the temptation to simply be bigger and louder.

Rings largely scrubs away the events of The Ring Two, although the new film expands on the backstory that was briefly explored in the first sequel. Specifically, Rings recalls that Samara Morgan was once a living child with a biological mother, Evelyn (portrayed by Sissy Spacek in The Ring Two, here played by Kayli Carter in flashbacks). The matter of Samara’s paternity—a mystery that, when uncovered, is simultaneously triter and ickier than expected—is a key component of Rings’ plot. However, what makes the film’s screenplay a respectable little work of horror fiction isn’t its backstory bootstrapping, but the shrewd way that it echoes the structure of The Ring without feeling like a dreary retread.

In a prelude with only the thinnest narrative connection to the rest of the film, a man who has recently watched Samara’s malevolent video reaches his seven-day expiration date while traveling on a commercial airliner—with predictably disastrous results. Two years later, Gabriel (Johnny Galecki), a college professor and experimental biologist, purchases a VCR once owned by the victim. “I like vintage,” he explains with a grin to his student and girlfriend Skye (Aimee Teegarden), who fails to see the appeal of this outmoded flea market acquisition. Naturally, the machine happens to contain a videotape of Samara’s infernal film. Later still, the viewer is finally introduced to Rings’ heroine, college-age Seattleite Julia (Matilda Lutz), who has no defining traits to speak of other than her devoted relationship to boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe). In this, she is a poor substitute for Watts’ dogged journalist, even if Julia largely serves the same narrative role in the story. (With her angel-next-door loveliness, Italian model Lutz is reminiscent of a blue-eyed Jessica Alba, although her acting is not so dreadful, so she’s at least got that going for her.)

Julia and Holt have one of those shallow yet achingly earnest relationships that are pervasive among gorgeous young people in films. Holt’s departure for college in Spokane, some four hours away, is accordingly tough on the couple. This is particularly the case when, six weeks into the semester, Holt suddenly stops answering Julia’s calls and texts. A cryptic Skype message from another woman feeds Julia’s suspicions that something is dreadfully wrong, impelling her to drive out to Holt’s school in order to track him down. Snooping around his vacant dorm room and the classes he should be attending, she eventually uncovers a strange experiment in the biology department overseen by none other than Gabriel. Given that he is quite alive, the professor has plainly evaded Samara’s wrath by making a copy of her video and showing it to someone else. What’s more, Gabriel has devised an entire research project around the ghostly girl. Student volunteers watch the now-digitized video and document the effects of the haunting as it escalates over seven days, before finally handing off a copy of the file to the next volunteer, dubbed the “tail.” (Samara evidently regards the Quicktime file format as an acceptable surrogate for physical VHS tapes.)

How Gabriel first determined the cure for his spectral death sentence is never explained, although The Ring Two and its companion short film (also titled, confusingly, Rings) suggested that the urban legend surrounding the cursed tape spread quickly in the space of just three years. One surmises that by 2015, the remedy for Samara’s curse would be a perennial topic on, say, the creepypasta reddit. While there’s something faintly absurd about scientists studying the “Samara Phenomenon” in a laboratory setting, it also lends Rings a drizzle of realism that contrasts with its stock horror atmosphere, creating a dissonant uncanniness. It recalls, of all things, The Navidson Record, the documentary-within-a-book in Mark Danielewski’s postmodern novel House of Leaves. Upon finding themselves a house that seems to violate the laws of physics, the Navidsons do what few families in horror stories ever seem do: They ask a renowned scientist in a legitimate field to come investigate the phenomenon.

Observing evidence that Holt is participating in Gabriel’s experiments, Julia also bumps into and confronts the woman she previously glimpsed on her webcam. This turns out to be Gabriel’s girlfriend Skye, who has likewise watched the video and is in the final hour of her countdown. She is also in a bit of a panic, as the arrangement she made with her tail has fallen through. Skye tricks Julia into following her back to her apartment to watch the video, but she misses the deadline by a minute or two. Samara accordingly crawls forth to do her soul-stealing stare, leaving Skye a waterlogged corpse and Julia unequivocally convinced of the ghost’s existence.

Julia subsequently runs into the resurfaced Holt, who explains that he will soon be meeting with his tail. In an act of self-sacrifice that is more resolute than reckless, Julia watches the copy of the video that Holt has prepared. (There is an Orphic dimension to Julia's search for her lover and her willing acceptance of the curse, which the film unfortunately makes explicit rather than allusive.) Julia might be a paper-thin heroine, but the screenplay and Lutz’s slight but no-nonsense performance foreground the extent to which she is driven primarily by compassion and indignation rather than fear. Unlike the volunteers in Gabriel’s research, she expresses an ambition to (somehow) break the endless cycle of Samara’s curse, rather than simply passing the doom on to another person.

Holt begs Julia to show the video to a new tail, but the matter is soon revealed to be moot: The version of the video that Julia watched cannot be copied. What’s more, the file is significantly larger than its predecessor. With Gabriel’s help, the pair uncover subliminal images in Julia’s video, frames which occur in no other versions of the file. When extracted and reassembled, these frames reveal a second film embedded and hidden within the first. It depicts similarly surreal, disturbing, and heretofore unseen images, which Julia correctly surmises constitute a message meant solely for her eyes. (Just to be on the safe side, Holt and Gabriel turn their backs while she watches the new, pieced-together video.) Julia recognizes a shot of a church from a photograph glimpsed amid Gabriel’s research, and in short order she and Holt set off to follow a trail of breadcrumbs to the place where Samara’s story began.

Rings thereby sets up a scenario that resonates with The Ring. Like Rachel, Julia uses the video’s images in conjunction with historical records to trace Samara’s proverbial footsteps. Julia likewise brings along a male companion—a boyfriend in her case, an ex in Rachel’s case—who assists in her investigations and occasionally veers off on his own tangential inquiries. Significantly, Julia’s search picks up where Rachel’s own story left off, with the retrieval of Samara’s bones from the well where she perished. Lacking any living relatives who were not institutionalized, Samara’s remains were eventually re-buried in the church graveyard of a nearby town. Prompted by shots of burning bones in Samara's secret, secondary video, Julia is persuaded that exhuming and cremating these remains might finally break the curse. (The water-and-fire symmetry is never explicitly acknowledged, which makes it all the more evocative.) This quest for the last physical remnants of Samara’s demise paradoxically jostles loose the ghastly story behind the girl’s conception and birth.

As Julia draws closer to the truth, the pity that she feels for Samara grows, as does her resolve to release the girl’s spirit from the apparent agony of her restless half-life. For the viewer, however, it’s difficult to shake the uneasy sensation that one has seen this same misguided altruism before. The last time someone attempted to “release” Samara, it only solidified her unearthly power. Rings accordingly establishes a psychological tug-of-war between the lingering hope that Samara can finally be laid to rest and the sour-gut pessimism of experience, which whispers that Julia is blundering straight into a unholy ruse.

(It's worth noting that the film's trailers suggest a substantially different film, featuring subplots and set pieces that were ultimately abandoned. What's more, the trailers blithely reveal the story's ending. Viewers who have any interest in Rings would do well to avoid the trailers and simply approach the film that was actually released on its own terms.)

Spanish director F. Javier Gutiérrez strikes a deft balance with the story, calling back to the original feature’s plot without allowing Rings to tip over into an outright bargain bin clone of Verbinski’s film. Familiar motifs from Samara’s original video crop up, not as clues but as eerie reverberations: a scuttling centipede, an oval mirror, a fingertip impaled on a nail. Gutiérrez maintains an ambiguous, mounting sensation that Something Bad is going to happen when Julia reaches the end of the her journey, something far worse than a death or two. In its third act, Rings unabashedly enters a somewhat trite thriller phase, complete with lethal cat-and-mouse games in an old, dark house. Underneath the stark urgency of physical survival, however, something repulsive and uncontrollable seems to draw near as the film builds to its conclusion, heralded by the buzzing cicada swarms that shadow Julia’s search.

None of this nullifies that fact that Rings is, at bottom, a silly B-movie with a rather shameful deficit of decent scares. The film is often creepy and occasionally gruesome, but rarely frightening. Samara’s bag of tricks hasn’t varied much in 13 years, and there’s only so much horror to be wrung from a rotting little girl scuttling around on all fours and glaring through stringy black hair. The downside to portraying Samara as a phenomenon that can be studied in repeatable experiments is that it risks reducing her to a predictable, elemental force, the ectoplasmic equivalent of Old Faithful. Such primal connotations might work for werewolves and slasher film killers, but ghosts are all about personalized history, tragedy, and vengeance. Rings’ script at least seems to discern this dilemma, in light of the primacy it gives to the story of Samara’s parentage. However, this doesn’t rectify Gutiérrez’s main problem; namely, how to avoid repeating himself when it comes to the film's flashier haunted house gimmicks. In its worst moments, Rings begins to wander into The Ring Two territory, engaging in aimless, desperate creepshow gestures and uninspired genre pilfering—a bit of The Collector here, a touch of Final Destination there.

As a visual work, Rings is fittingly grim and dank-looking (this is a ghost story about water, after all), but there’s also nothing particularly memorable about it. (Comparisons to The Ring’s potent, indispensable aesthetic are inevitably fatal to Rings, as they would be to many contemporary horror features.) Cinematographer Sharone Meir at times neglects intelligibility in his enthusiasm for oppressively dim interior spaces, but in general his work is moody and handsome. If nothing else, Meir and production designer Kevin Kavanaugh do a proper job of transforming the film’s Georgia shooting locations into a credible drizzly Washington state. Particularly in the film’s latter half, editors Steve Mirkovich and Jeremiah O'Driscoll deliver some marvelously nerve-wracking cross-cutting between parallel subplots.

The performances range from functional to distractingly underwhelming. Only Vincent D'Onofrio does anything remotely stimulating with his role. His portrayal of a blind cemetery caretaker is broad as hell, which is arguably just what the second sequel to a 15-year-old horror film deserves and needs. (For this writer, D'Onofrio fills the niche that Nic Cage occupies for other cinephiles: an occasionally brilliant performer whose most mannered, ham-bone performances have a mesmerizing quality that makes them consistently pleasurable to watch.)

Indeed, nothing about Rings is outright awful, and some aspects of it are damn respectable, which is why the film’s overwhelming critical drubbing is a bit baffling. When an amateurish shit-smear like The Bye Bye Man pulls in a 37 at Metacritic to Rings’ 24, one is inclined to wonder if Gutiérrez’s film has attracted malice merely for the sin of not being the original The Ring. While Rings is a middling horror feature overall, it’s also fairly gratifying as a sequel, in that it advances the series’ story sincerely and thoughtfully without pissing all over the original film’s legacy in the process. Given that the filmmakers couldn't dissuaded from the dubious endeavor of producing a new Ring film a decade and half after the fact, it bears reflecting that the result could have been much, much worse.

My Name Is Legion, For We Are Many: Split

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. It expands on my original review of Split, which appeared at St. Louis Magazine on January 19, 2017. Updated 3/6/17.]

Director M. Night Shyamalan’s Split is the uncommon thriller in which a fair-minded, substantive evaluation of its merits and flaws practically demands engagement with the film’s ending. Split goes a step further than most films with plot twists—including some renowned and notorious examples in Shyamalan’s own filmography—by holding the most fundamental revelation in reserve until the literal final shot. In fact, Split’s concluding swerve isn’t really a plot twist at all, but a genre twist. It so sharply re-contextualizes the film that to avoid any mention of it, or treat it as some kind of frivolous Easter egg, is to severely restrict fruitful discourse about the film.

Accordingly, rather than talking elliptically and therefore unproductively about Split, this post assumes that the reader is aware of the film’s most talked-about reveal: David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the indestructible hero of Shyamalan’s fourth feature, Unbreakable, makes a cameo appearance in Split’s final moments. At the most rudimentary level, this constitutes a realignment of setting. Split doesn’t merely take place in one of the “Weird Pennsylvania” locations that are pervasive in Shyamalan’s work, but in a particular one that the viewer has encountered before. To wit: Split’s Philadelphia is also Unbreakable’s Philadelphia. (This appears to be novel in the director’s oeuvre; unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino, there’s been little suggestion of a connected, multi-film universe in Shyamalan's work until now.) Not incidentally, this fact also changes the framework for the film’s genre components. Despite appearances, Split is not just a horror story, but also a superhero story—or more accurately, a supervillain story. While Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a.k.a. Mr. Glass, might have been David Dunn’s sinister reflection in Unbreakable, Split is the evil doppelgänger to Unbreakable itself.

In the moment, David’s appearance might seem like a self-reflexive gag, or, more charitably, a delightful curve ball that acknowledges the esteem in which Unbreakable is held among many cinephiles. (Indeed, it is unequivocally Shyamalan’s best feature—not quite a masterpiece, but still a splendid work of cinema and perhaps the best superhero film ever made, full stop.) Upon further deliberation, however, it’s remarkable the extent to which this seemingly throwaway callback actually enhances Split, both by casting its apparent weaknesses in a more agreeable light and by enriching its pulpy, titillating tone with a mythic resonance.

Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with a film that is “merely” a pulpy, titillating horror thriller, particularly when it’s executed with Split’s nasty zeal and striking formal artistry. Even the film’s prologue—in which adolescent girls Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are abducted by Kevin Crumb’s (James McAvoy) tightly-wound, obsessive persona Dennis—is a marvel of resourceful storytelling and eye-catching compositions. Shyamalan turns a somewhat musty crime thriller scenario into a quivering sequence of oblique violence and icy helplessness. (One of this scene’s wonderful details is a dropped stack of vermilion leftover containers, which fills the role of a telltale blood spatter.)

Indeed, the prelude neatly illustrates three essential reasons that Split works so marvelously as a crackerjack B-movie. First is its arresting aesthetic robustness. Notwithstanding his reputation in the popular consciousness for plot twists, the feature that most clearly distinguishes Shyamalan’s earlier films is their visual beauty and formal aplomb—particularly in the Unbreakable / Signs / The Village triptych. (Such verve is virtually absent in his recent neo-Grimm found footage thriller The Visit, but that’s the nature of the subgenre, not to mention largely inconsequential to the film’s virtues.) Granted, Shyamalan and cinematographer Mike Gioukakis (who lensed the masterful It Follows) have a lot more to work with after the film’s action moves into Kevin’s labyrinthine lair. However, the banal abduction locale—a suburban restaurant parking lot in broad daylight—is given a slathering of prickly menace through stimulating compositions and judicious use of shallow focus, slow dolly, and hard-hitting ruptures in the 180-degree rule.

Relatedly and secondly, the prelude illustrates Shyamalan’s estimable talent (not always evident in his works, unfortunately) for using mise en scène to efficiently convey information about his characters’ personalities and relationships. Split is a particularly strong outing in this respect: By the time Kevin has incapacitated the three girls and the opening credits have commenced, the viewer has learned quite a bit about the film’s protagonist, Casey, solely from the way that Shyamalan positions her, both within the frame and relative to the other characters in space. (Namely, that she’s an anxious, attentive loner who is accepting of her outcast status.)

Finally, the opening exhibits Taylor-Joy’s centrality to the film’s success. While McAvoy is plainly Split’s star, and his performative acrobatics in six-plus discrete roles are an essential component of the film’s appeal as a work of kitschy entertainment, it’s the 20-year-old actress’ presence that gives the film’s character drama a soulful weight. Taylor-Joy is the kind of performer who seems born for cinema. It’s not her voice that lingers—her line readings are mostly unmemorable—but her face. With her enormous, ensnaring brown eyes, she wields an uncommon, delicate expressiveness that can only be captured in close-up and only fully appreciated when projected on a massive screen. Her character’s thoughts are simultaneously unconcealed and faintly inscrutable, a contradiction that marks Casey as a more peculiar and fascinating hero than most teen protagonists, who unfailingly blurt out exactly what they are thinking.

Later, the girls awaken in a locked, makeshift bedroom of wood and drywall, quickly realizing that they’ve stumbled into one of those particularly icky double-length episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Dennis might be a balled-up bundle of neuroses, but he’s also rumbling with unconcealed sexual menace. Whatever their faults, none of the three girls are nitwits; they know how this story ends, even before Kevin’s alters begin muttering about “sacred food” for “the Beast.” They’ve seen what happens in movies where twitchy weirdos take pretty girls captive and lock them in dank rooms. (Casey is more cautious about jumping to conclusions than the other two, but it's only because she wants to identify the exact contours of their captor's state of mind before hashing out an escape plan.) It would go too far to label the girls’ blunt, pessimistic assessment of their situation as outright genre savviness, but both they and Kevin’s psychiatrist Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley) seem to possess an understated, fatalistic awareness of what kind of story they’re inhabiting. When Fletcher finally stumbles upon one of Kevin’s victims, she seems horrified, but not taken aback—as though the discovery had confirmed her darkest suspicions.

Particularly in contrast to Casey’s levelheadedness, it’s easy to sneer at Claire and Marcia, who spend most of their captivity alternating between cringing terror and fuming panic. However, the plans that they concoct—bum-rush Kevin as a group when he enters their room; brain him with a heavy object when his back is turned; rip through the thin ceiling to access a heating duct—all have a reasonable shot at success. Their strategies aren’t “wrong,” any more than Casey’s watch-and-wait approach is right. The other two girls are just unlucky, and perhaps a bit too dependent on sanguine assumptions vis-à-vis the ease of escape once their captor is incapacitated. Casey is more reliant on observation, patience, and endurance because this is how she approaches all problems, owing to her father’s formative deer hunting wisdom and the succeeding years of abominable sexual attention from her uncle. (In psychiatric parlance, she plainly displays the hypervigilance that is often associated with posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD].) For Claire and Marcia, Kevin’s multiple identities mark him as unpredictable, adding extra urgency to their escape efforts, but Casey instead discerns an opportunity for manipulation and exploitation that would not be in play were they the prisoners of an “ordinary” serial killer.

Shyamalan walks a fine line in Split with respect to the viewer’s sympathies. Kevin’s history elicits pity—his fractured identity being attributable in part to a briefly-glimpsed childhood of physical abuse straight out of Mommy Dearest—but the film does not beg the viewer’s indulgence with respect to the twisted worldview of his "evil" alters. After all, Kevin’s personalities were not beamed into his head by malevolent aliens. All of his identities originated in his mind and all are “him” in some respect, reflecting differing urges, obsessions, fears, fantasies, and even regurgitated pop culture. Inasmuch as this fragmentation was not his fault, his situation is wretchedly tragic. It is still his mind, however, that gives birth to the Beast. It's his mind that extrudes his blackest desire—to inflict pain rather than suffer it—into a monstrous chimera assembled the characteristics of zoo animals. Recalling Nola Carveth in The Brood, Kevin’s most vicious urges have been uncoupled from his core self, but they remain his urges.

Split is therefore consistent with the best sort of supervillain origin stories, such as X-Men: Magneto Testament, Doctor Octopus: Year One, and Paul Dini’s legendary Batman: The Animated Series episode “Heart of Ice.” Such tales render the villain as an understandable figure, but not in any way forgivable. Most monsters need this connection to recognizably human desires, problems, and weaknesses. The Jokers and Michael Meyerses of the world—the agents of elemental evil, spawned fully formed from the shadows—are terrifying only when they are exceptional. Unbreakable’s Mr. Glass and Split’s Horde establish what might be termed the Shyamalan Rule of Supervillainy: Heroes might be born, the fortunate sons and daughters of genetic roulette, but villains are made. They are ordinary people molded into the extraordinary at the nexus of pain and moral error.

In less capable hands, Split might have turned into little more than a stock captivity-and-escape thriller with a ridiculous, albeit disconcerting, hook. Long before it becomes apparent that the film is a supervillain origin story, however, Shyamalan has already invigorated its high-concept premise—man with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) abducts and murders girls—with small, gratifying complications. It’s not merely that one of Kevin’s alters is a violent, psychosexual predator, which would have been meaty enough for a more straightforward film. Split establishes that Kevin’s mental state of affairs is more convoluted, and in some ways more unsettling. The Dennis and Miss Patricia alters have actually staged a psychological coup, with the assistance of the naïve but exceptional Hedwig. (This 9-year-old identity is ironically the only alter that can seize control of Kevin’s body by force, shoving other personalities out of the way.) Dennis even manages to pull off a credible impression of a more benign alter, Barry, in order to deceive Dr. Fletcher. The other alters manage to reassert control only for the stray moments it takes to dash off S.O.S. emails—"WE NEED YOUR HELP”—to their psychiatrist. (Insufficient time, it would seem, to release the trio of captives imprisoned down the hall.) Fortunately, Dr. Fletcher has been treating Kevin long enough to quickly discern that something is off about “Barry,” and that this signals that Something Bad has happened.

The notion that a DID patient’s alters could engage in an unseen power struggle for control of the body is undeniably creepy, but hardly novel. Shyamalan’s take on the premise can be regarded merely an elaboration on the grand-daddy of multiple personality horror stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The stark simplicity of the dualism in Stevenson’s tale, however, is complicated in Split not only by the proliferation of alters, but by the addition of factionalism. Dennis and Miss Patricia have established a sacrificial cult of sorts to glorify the Beast that is slouching towards the world. In other words, the society of Kevin's mind has its own fringe religion. In contrast to the brutish, debauched Mr. Hyde, Dennis—the alter most given to violent sexual impulse—actually has to suppress his desires so that he and Miss Patricia can make the proper arrangements for the Beast’s arrival. (“He’s not allowed to touch you,” Miss Patricia reassures the girls, in a way that is not reassuring at all.) Glorification of the Beast demands discipline and self-denial, not to mention ruthlessness: Dennis and Miss Patricia have effectively thrown their 20 non-believing fellow alters into a mental dungeon while they make their ritual preparations.

One of Shyamalan’s less recognized traits as a screenwriter is his penchant for evocative descriptions and eerie turns of phrase, the sort of lines that elicit chills for lizard-brain reasons that are difficult to articulate. It Split this can particularly be observed in the language of the Beast’s mythology. “Sacred food” is unnerving as hell, conjuring Old Testament stories—the disparate offerings of Cain and Abel, or the manna of the Israelites’ desert wanderings—as well as ghastly fireside tales about cannibalism and lycanthropy. (One also thinks of Peloquin in Clive Barker’s Night Breed, proclaiming gutturally, “You’re Natural. And that means… you’re meat for the beast.”) The conception of Kevin’s DID as a circle of chairs and a single spotlight paints a vivid picture as well, and another filmmaker might have seized upon the opportunity to serve up a half-baked visualization of this metaphor, complete with “women” and “child” McAvoys. This is not Fight Club or Being John Malkovich, however, and Shyamalan astutely keeps the viewer grounded in the real world, partly so that Split doesn’t risk mutating into a Kevin Crumb character study, and partly to keep the focus on Casey’s plight. The eerie mental picture that “sitting in the light” arouses is suitably suggestive all on its own.

(Shyamalan is a frustratingly contradictory study in the “show, don’t tell” adage. One of the weakest scenes in Unbreakable involves an older employee at a school relating an anecdote about David Dunn’s childhood. It’s intended as a nudge to David’s memory regarding a vital plot point—namely, that his weakness is drowning—but instead comes off as a ponderous watch-checking moment, a misspent opportunity for an impressionistic flashback in a film that’s practically drunk on giddy visuals. Conversely, some of the creepiest sequences in the aesthetically colorless The Visit are the hair-raising, rambling stories about hauntings and aliens recounted by the grandparents. These miniature ghost stories have nothing to do with the film’s plot but nonetheless suffuse it with a bloodcurdling atmosphere of the weird.)

The Beast himself is a redolent phantom presence for much of the film, the invocation of his moniker prompting a shudder, if only because one knows that the fiend must appear before the credits roll. The description recounted by Dr. Fletcher paints a picture of a fearsome ape-man: enormous, strong, agile, shaggy, thick-skinned. The space he occupies is mental, not physical, but the verbiage used by the Horde to describe him nonetheless suggests motion and proximity. “He’s on the move,” Hedwig gleefully reports, and one is put in mind of a juggernaut, rolling mercilessly forward and crushing all its path. (Indeed, no less a beast than the pitiless, implacable Mr. Hyde was compared to the colossal sacred wagons of Jagganath Temple—the juggernauts—in Stevenson’s novel.) However, Hedwig’s crayon drawings of the Beast are more disquieting than any verbal description could hope to be, in part because their crudity distills the creature down to his predatory essence. The Beast is large, fearsome, and hungry. Does the rest matter? (Whether by dint of budget constraints or artistic choice, the viewer is thankfully spared from the sight of a CGI McAvoy Sasquatch. The Beast’s actual appearance is relatively non-monstrous: taller and more muscular that Kevin’s other alters, with densely veined, faintly greenish-bronze skin. This subdued design is unexpected at first, but it’s far more consistent with Unbreakable’s quasi-realist approach than any hulking, chintzy Underworld werewolf.)

Shyamalan’s canny approach to Split’s inherent silliness is to allow it to run wild, but only within the narrow confines established by the film’s sinister mood and broadly realistic setting. Split isn’t simply a throwback, but a kind of cinematic time travel or mind-swapping experiment. Shyamalan has transported a 1980s basic cable psychological thriller and an Atomic Age monster movie—the sort of daft, un-scientific 88-minute potboilers that Roger Corman and Burt I. Gordon tackled with glorious earnestness—into a survival horror picture. It’s kind of amazing to behold, but not always successful. McAvoy’s performance mostly remains on the right side of the line between delicious camp and outright goofiness, but as the Beast he delivers some dumb lines with such ludicrously over-the-top bellowing that the only possible reaction is a guffaw. The fantasy psychobabble espoused by Dr. Fletcher is also a distraction, particularly when it descends rather embarrassingly into the sort of vacuous abstraction that would make Depak Chopra envious.

Of course, the not-even-wrong absurdity of the film’s psychiatric exposition is mitigated by the discovery that one has, in fact, been watching a comic book film. This revelation doesn’t entirely give Split a pass on its more inane moments, but it does provide an ex post facto context in which the most outrageously purple dialog makes much more sense. (Put this line from Dr. Fletcher on the pages of The Vault of Horror, inside a word balloon edged in electric yellow and punctuated with triple exclamation points, and it abruptly goes from excruciating to lip-smacking: “AN INDIVIDUAL WITH MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES CAN CHANGE THEIR BODY CHEMISTRY WITH THEIR THOUGHTS!!!”) Purely in the name of fairness, Split’s superhero comic birthright argues for indulgence. No one but the most joyless pedant would take The Uncanny X-Men to task, after all, for wildly misrepresenting the elementary facts of human genetics.

More troubling than Split’s kooky premise is its debatably exploitative treatment of mental illness. For all the film’s successes, Shyamalan never takes even a moment to grapple with the potential imprudence of crafting yet another gaudy genre film about DID. It’s not so much that that the director made a DID horror film per se as he fails to at least intra-textually acknowledge that making a DID horror film is kind of tacky. One can certainly appreciate why speculative fiction, going back to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has long been so enthralled with the concept of a person manifesting two or more discrete identities. It’s a vivid, fertile basis for an exploration of the human mind, a hook that has endured numerous discoveries, refinements, and paradigm shifts in the field of psychology for more than a century.

None of which excuses the somewhat regressive, tiresome dimension to Split’s particular depiction of a person suffering from DID. Of course Kevin Crumb—sorry, Dennis / Patricia / The Beast—is the villain, because the DID patient is always the villain. And of course that villainy manifests as a desire to kidnap adolescent girls, hold them captive, sexually terrorize them, and eventually murder them horrifically. (Split adds cannibalism to the typical TV serial killer playbook: The Beast wants to literally devour the girls while they are alive and screaming.) The problem is not that Split’s story is rife with cliché—the enthusiastic embrace of tropes is practically a requirement in pulp horror—but that those violent, disturbing clichés are attributed to a mental disorder whose nature, causes, symptoms, and even existence are still hotly debated in psychiatric circles. DID is an extremely rare condition that is already disproportionately represented in pop culture, almost always in a specious, demonizing manner. Further muddying the ethical waters is the role that DID hoaxes and malingering played in fanning the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s, a hysteria that ruined livelihoods and devastated lives.

What’s more, DID has a chicken-or-egg problem, as it’s unclear to what extent the disorder might be created (or at least amplified) by specific psychotherapeutic techniques. Split subsumes this controversy deep within its text, providing faint hints that Dr. Fletcher’s indulgence of Kevin’s illness may have unwittingly helped unleash the Beast. (There are also insinuations that the divisions between Kevin’s alters are more fluid than Dr. Fletcher surmises. Miss Patricia’s fury over a crooked sandwich, for example, seems like a reaction more typical of the compulsive Dennis.) This question of DID’s origin echoes the more obvious narrative recursion at the heart of Unbreakable. Elijah proposes that comic books are modern myths, an effort by the collective unconsciousness to make sense of people with extraordinary abilities. However, David would arguably never have acknowledged his nature without Elijah’s influence, and Elijah in turn would never have pushed David to become a superhero if he hadn’t spent a lifetime thinking about comic books. So which is it? Do the heroes inspire the stories, or do the stories inspire the heroes? Or both? Similarly, is the Beast a “natural” reaction to Kevin’s abusive childhood, or an aberrant side effect of Dr. Fletcher’s flawed methods? Would the Beast have even emerged without the intervention of therapy?

Underlying any specific issues related to DID, however, is the larger matter of Split’s glib usage of mental illness for its narrative purposes. Perhaps most conspicuous in this respect is the film’s contention that trauma survivors are somehow stronger, or even “more evolved,” than individuals who have never known truly devastating pain. This isn’t exactly ableism in the usual sense, but one might regard it as a kind of condescending crypto-ableism, comparable to marveling at how nurturing women are or how studious Asian people are. Then there’s the startling positioning of Casey’s self-harming behavior—evidently triggered by a lifetime of sexual abuse that may still be ongoing—as the factor that ultimately saves her from the Beast’s ravenous power. As plot points go, it’s unquestionably audacious, but also somewhat problematic, as the kids say. Shyamalan’s not truly suggesting that adolescent self-harm is, on balance, a good thing, but it’s possible (and a little embarrassing) that even an attentive filmgoer might reach that conclusion.

While Split might be able to broadly flaunt psychological realism thanks to the parameters of genre, its facile, disconcerting treatment of mental disorders as plot devices is not so easily rationalized. The film’s employment of afflictions like BPD, PTSD, OCD, depression, and anxiety—illnesses from which tens of millions of Americans suffer—is at best, a tad cavalier. Moreover, the film is undeniably over-reliant on trauma as a causal factor in mental disorders. It’s one thing to lace a horror film with vacuous, un-scientific drivel, and quite another to explicitly lash that film to a reductive “Abuse = Illness” view that no real-world psychiatrist actually holds. Split doesn’t leave much room for genetics, biochemistry, or nuance in its rush to paint childhood trauma as the Grand Unified Theory of Crazy, which is in a way more reckless than stuffing its story with gobbledygook.

Still, there is a shrewd sensitivity in the way that Split weaves the particulars of living with a mental disorder into its story. For example, Casey’s multi-layered, baggy clothing is contrasted with the thinner, more revealing (and more gendered) attire that Claire and Marcia wear. This has functional consequences during the girls’ captivity, as any dirt on their clothing prompts the compulsive Dennis to demand the soiled garment. Like the losing players in a perverse game of strip poker, Claire and Marcia are soon reduced to standing around self-consciously in their underwear, keenly aware of Dennis’ gaze. Casey, however, keeps peeling off layers. By the film’s climax, she’s finally wearing just a camisole as a top, at which point the self-harm scars on her shoulders and abdomen are plainly visible to the Beast. It’s a fairly ingenious narrative maneuver that 1) reflects the real-world manifestation of self-injurious behavior (patients often conceal their scars), 2) presents a metaphorical echo of Casey’s state of mind (she’s swathed herself in layered defenses), and 3) gives Shyamalan a legitimate justification for keeping a major character trait hidden until the moment it becomes relevant.

There’s a certain off-center allure to the notion of strength in adversity, an idea located at the peculiar intersection of modern self-help positivity and the Puritan glorification of suffering. To its credit, Split presents this as a more nuanced concept than the insipid adage, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” (As the late Christopher Hitchens dryly observed in his cancer memoir, Mortality, what doesn’t kill you usually makes you easier to kill.) Rather, Shyamalan suggests that to view mental illness exclusively through the lens of victimhood is to minimize the fact that living with mental illness constitutes a discrete set of experiences. To have a mental disorder is to be shaped by that experience, and therefore to see the world in a particular way, just as one’s race, ethnicity, gender, class, and language shape one’s worldview. Like Casey, anyone might someday find themselves in an unusual situation where their idiosyncratic life experiences are essential to the bloody business of survival.

To most observers, “survival of the fittest” carries a sour whiff of eugenics when used in reference to the human species, but as any evolutionary biologist would be eager to point out, “fitness” is a neutral, circumstantial concept. A trait that is disadvantageous under Conditions A may provide an edge under Conditions B. Casey’s personal example walks back the social Darwinism of the Beast’s “triumph of the traumatized” delusions, as well as Dr. Fletcher’s simple-minded fantasy that the disordered are somehow responsible for all legends of the supernatural. In truth, the “broken,” as the Beast self-loathingly terms them, aren’t superior or inferior, just different. In some specific circumstances, those differences might provide an advantage. (In this limited respect, Split is oddly progressive, reflecting a bleeding-edge extension of the social and cultural models of mental illness to cover those disruptive disorders, such as PTSD, that even the most pugnacious neurodiversity advocate might be reluctant to embrace.)

Like X-Men’s Magneto, the Beast regards himself as the exemplar of a new ethos of strength—"neuro-atypical supremacy," perhaps?—but he’s just a vainglorious sadist at heart, eager to inflict all the hurt that’s been inflicted on him. Profligate use of phrases like “more evolved” are the red flags of an absolutist bigotry that stands in opposition to Darwinism’s narrow, conditional statements of value. The world is too complex for the contemptuous simplicity of “superior” and “inferior”—although one might make an exception for the miracle of, say, a man who is born unbreakable.

I'm So Sick of Goodbyes: The Bye Bye Man

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Like it matters. Updated 2/1/17.]

The kindest thing that can be said of director Stacy Title’s staggeringly incompetent The Bye Bye Man is that it isn’t outright morally distasteful, unless one regards wasting 96 minutes of the viewer’s life to be an act of malevolence. Perhaps that’s an exceedingly low bar for a horror film to clear, but given the curious strain of racism in the features that the genre produced last year—looking in your direction, The Forest, The Darkness, and The Other Side of the Door—it’s what passes for a compliment these days. So let it be known that The Bye Bye Man does not elicit a longing to crawl home and take a scalding shower to rinse away the ickiness. Kudos to Title for that. However, The Bye Bye Man is a terrible, terrible film, in almost every way that a film can be terrible. It scores a 9.7 in the Shitty Horror Movie Olympics.

Where to begin? The story concerns three Wisconsin college students: brooding scholar Elliot (Douglas Smith, who is 31 fucking years old), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and his childhood friend, the model-handsome jock John (Lucien Laviscount). (John is African-American, a fact that would be refreshingly immaterial, were it not for screenwriter Jonathan Penner’s embarrassing conception of “how black people talk.”) One can tell that Elliot is brooding, incidentally, because he wears Joy Division and Violent Femmes T-shirts. It’s that kind of film. Anyway, the trio attend an anonymous community college that is unconvincingly pretending to be an esteemed university, and they are accordingly eager to move into off-campus housing. The furnished, slightly run-down house that they have just leased is massive enough to shelter an entire sorority, but apparently the rent is so dirt-cheap that three full-time students can afford to live there all by themselves. Perhaps this should have been a red flag that the property has unforeseen problems, but then again, Elliot, Sasha, and John—and this is essential to the plot of The Bye Bye Man—are morons.

Shortly after the trio get settled into their new digs, Elliot discovers that the inside of his nightstand drawer is covered with a repeating, scrawled message—DON’T THINK IT, DON’T SAY IT—and hidden underneath that are four words carved in the wood: THE BYE BYE MAN. This odd phrase sticks in Elliot's mind, supplemented by several strange phenomena that have been occurring around the house. Later, Sasha calls on her “psychic” goth girl classmate Kim (Jenna Kanell) to cleanse the house of unfriendly spirits, and in the ad hoc séance that follows, Elliot blurts out the Bye Bye Man’s name almost without thinking. This is Bad News, as simply speaking the words are sufficient to attract the malicious attention of the so-named spirit. This entity assumes the form of a waxen, hairless figure garbed in a black, hooded robe and attended by a ghastly, demonic hound. Over the following days, the Bye Bye Man plagues Elliot, Sasha, John, and Kim with vivid, terrifying hallucinations, eventually driving the fear-addled foursome to commit fatal blunders. Even as they are enduring the creature’s mind games, the victims struggle against the compulsion to name their foe out loud, as to do so would spread the psychic contagion of the Bye Bye Man to anyone who is listening.

This is an absurdly generous nickel summary of the The Bye Bye Man’s plot, which is so haphazardly assembled it’s challenging to parse what the living hell is happening at any given time. The film’s flaws are legion, but this narrative confusion is what makes it a fundamentally broken work of cinema. To be clear, the film’s essential failing is not the seizure-inducing intra-scene spatial unintelligibility of, say, a Michael Bay feature, but rather a maddening inter-scene incoherence comparable to listening to an utterly shit-faced drunk attempting (and failing) to tell an anecdote. Each scene is like a daft pocket reality with its own rules and stakes, possessing no particular dramatic relationship to the scenes that precede and follow it. The characters talk about things, but there’s not much incentive to pay attention, given that what they say will often be forgotten or contradicted in five or ten minutes.

Underneath the rank, suffocating stupidity of The Bye Bye Man, there’s a seed that could have made for an engaging horror feature. The film’s origin is surprisingly offbeat: Adapted from a non-fiction story by Robert Damon Schneck, a Fortean Times contributor and folklorist of Weird America, the story is based on a real-world urban legend that Schneck first encountered in Wisconsin. Even if The Bye Bye Man’s conceit isn’t completely original—it’s a hybrid of elements from Candyman, The Ring, Pontypool, and It Follows—there’s still something undeniably intriguing about a horror myth built around the white bear problem. Likewise, the concept of a name with dark magical power spreading into the world memetically has a certain primeval-meets-modern appeal. (This makes it doubly weird that the film conspicuously omits any reference to social media. Perhaps it’s just that the script doesn’t want to concede that the whole edifice falls apart if one of the characters were to talk about their plight on Facebook, thus unleashing the Bye Bye Man on the whole world.)

At least as presented in the film, the titular monster is a question mark, a devouring void of nondescript non-menace. By the time the end credits roll, the viewer still has no clue who or what the Bye Bye Man is, or what exactly his motivations, abilities, weaknesses, or backstory might be. Mostly he just stands around and points threateningly at people. Given that the film offers virtually no exposition (shown or told) about its villain, the specifics of the Bye Bye Man's design feel ridiculously arbitrary, as if they were written on slips of paper and drawn out of a hat. Why does he toss around antique gold coins? Why is his arrival preceded by the sound of a speeding train? Why is his companion a skinless monster dog? Why anything? (One is reminded of Crow T. Robot on Mystery Science Theater 3000, remarking on the randomness of the oversized kneecaps on Torgo, the greasy caretaker of Manos: The Hands of Fate: “How long did that decision take the director, a tenth of a second? ‘Big knees?! Fine, let’s go with it!’”)

The Bye Bye Man bedevils his victims with phantasmal trickery, but the limitations on this power, and what he intends to achieve by using it, seem to shift from scene to scene. His apparent goal is sometimes to provoke panicked mishaps, sometimes to set the characters at each other’ throats, and sometimes just to screw with their heads for his own amusement. Some of the illusions he generates make not a lick of sense—such as when Elliot has a five second hallucination that the old woman (Faye Dunaway) standing in front of him has accidentally set herself ablaze. Why? What does this accomplish? Who knows?

Oh, yeah: Faye fucking Dunaway is in this film.

After it becomes apparent to the characters that the Bye Bye Man can twist their senses in any way he pleases, they develop a curious amnesia about that fact. Like the not-so-bright cohort of rats in psychological experiment, they keep grabbing the food pellet and getting shocked every time. In what is perhaps the film’s most unintentionally comical scene, Kim spies from Elliot’s moving car what appears to be a bloody auto accident near a railroad crossing. She leaps from the car and runs directly towards the scene, shrieking “WE HAVE TO HELP THEM!!” Bear in mind, at this point, Kim knows full well that the Bye Bye Man is capable of making her see things. Elliot gives chase, shouting (correctly) that there is no car crash, that it’s a supernatural trick. Kim disregards his warnings and dashes right into the path of an oncoming train. It’s neither scary, sad, nor shocking—just ridiculous.

(There are so many inanities just in this one scene. Why doesn’t the Bye Bye Man at least compel Elliot to hallucinate the same scene, so that he is less likely to discern the trap and warn Kim? Why does Kim sprint directly towards a horrible traffic accident to “help,” instead of first pulling out her phone and calling 911? Why should the viewer give a shit whether Kim dies when it’s literally just been revealed that she has bludgeoned her roommate to death with a hammer and intends to do likewise with Eillot, Sasha, and John? For that matter, why would she take a break in the middle of her killing spree to be a Good Samaritan? Every scene in the film elicits questions like these.)

In a typical horror film, the characters would spend the second half of the story following leads regarding the monster’s origins, perhaps in the hopes of determining how it can be defeated. The Bye Bye Man has no backstory, so the viewer is obliged to settle for scenes of Elliot researching the entity’s last crop of victims from some five decades ago. This provides exactly nothing in terms of useful knowledge to the characters, but the 1960s flashbacks at least give production designer Jennifer Spence and her crew something stimulating to do with their time. Indeed, much of the film’s budget seems to have been devoted to the mid-century sets and costumes for these sequences, given how dreadfully chintzy the rest of the film looks. James Kniest’s cinematography is merely dreary and charmless rather than horrendous, which is what constitutes high praise where The Bye Bye Man is concerned. The film isn’t the least bit frightening, but here and there Title and Kniest manage a shot that is startling or unnerving. Perversely, these exceedingly rare flickers of cinematic competence just make everything else look much worse.

Virtually every performance is direct-to-DVD wretched, even Dunaway’s, but the worst offenders are Bonas and Smith. Bonas seems unable to deliver a single line convincingly, which gives John’s contention that Sasha is a “perfect woman” the stench of laughable delusion: She can’t even speak like the hu-mans do, for goodness’ sake. (The queasy, shuddering discomfort that Bonas exhibits when she is obliged to say “I love you” to Smith is an early contender for Worst Line Reading of 2017.) Smith, meanwhile, compensates for his feeble presence by playing things irritatingly over-the-top: sobbing piteously, wailing in anguish, throwing little tantrums, and gawking in goggle-eyed terror at one thing after another. The only poor soul to emerge with their dignity (mostly) unscathed is Carrie-Anne Moss, who shows up briefly as a police detective, delivers her dreadful lines with her usual steely self-possession, and then vanishes. (Alas, The Bye Bye Man will live forever as a humiliating mark of Cain on Moss’ IMDb page.)

There’s no camp enjoyment to be wrung from the The Bye Bye Man. The film is far too dreary, too aggravating in its brainlessness, and too earnest about cockamamie premises that it never bothers to explicate properly. There are a substantial number of perplexing digressions and eccentric flourishes in the film—such as an abandoned subplot about Mike suffering from erectile dysfunction—but not enough to propel it over the line that divides plain old crap from a mesmeric fever-dream of awfulness like The Room.

It’s hard to say exactly where things went so wrong in this sort of cinematic fiasco, but much of it unquestionably lies with the direction and screenplay, both of which are unspeakably ill-conceived and slapdash. The collaboration between Title and Penner, who are married, has spawned a mess that bears only a passing resemblance to a horror film. It’s tempting to blame editor Ken Blackwell for some of The Bye Bye Man’s incoherence, but in this case that feels a bit like blaming a chef for making a terrible meal out of the pea gravel and drywall screws provided to them. Mostly, however, one is inclined to direct an accusing finger at the producers and distributors, who looked at the debacle that is The Bye Bye Man and decreed that it deserved a wide national release. Creators fail all the time, even brilliant ones, and it’s certainly no sin to fail. What’s unforgivable is giving one’s seal of approval to a failure this dire and sending it out into the world.