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Posted on November 15, 2015

Emelie (2015): Reviews from #IIFFF

Dawn Keetley

Emelie is a strikingly unsettling film for about the first fifty minutes. The plot is fairly simple: parents Dan and Joyce (Chris Beetem and Susan Pourfar) go out to celebrate their anniversary. Their usual babysitter has plans so they hire a girl they don’t know, albeit one vetted by friends. Unbeknownst to them, however, a couple has kidnapped the girl who was supposed to be babysitting for them and the mysterious Emelie (Sarah Bolger) arrives on their doorstep instead. Dan and Joyce go happily out to dinner leaving their three children Jake (11), Sally (9), and Christopher (4) in the tender care of Emelie.

Emelie proceeds to do things no parent would ever want a babysitter to do. The film is brilliant in its slow slide from the arguably “normal” toward the truly perverse. At first, Emelie just seems a vaguely anarchic force, letting the kids eat what they want, telling the two younger children, who want to play dress-up, to be creative in what they wear. She tells them that they don’t “have to be a boy or a girl. You can be anything you want to be. You just have to pretend.” Pushing the boundaries of imagination soon turns into destroying valuable things for costumes and painting on the walls. “Sometimes it’s okay to destroy things for fun,” Emelie says. Then it turns a bit more sinister: there’s a bathroom scene involving Emelie, who has her period, and the emergent adolescent, Jake (Joshua Rush). Then Emelie decides Jake’s pet python needs a treat. And then Emelie declares that it’s movie time: let’s just say no child should have to see what Jake, Sally, and Christopher see.

Posted on November 15, 2015

Watching Horror Films in a Time of Terror

Dawn Keetley

Last night, Paris was attacked: news organizations are reporting that French President François Hollande has identified the terroristic violence as an “act of war” perpetrated by ISIS.[i]

Like many, I was transfixed to the news last night, horrified by what was unfolding in France. I happened to be away from home, in upstate New York for the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival. And watching the news from Paris made me wonder why I was here. Why watch and write about films—especially horror films—when there’s so much horror happening in real life?

Posted on November 14, 2015

Men and Chicken (2015): Reviews from #IIFFF

Dawn Keetley

Men and Chicken is written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, who also wrote and directed Flickering Lights (2000) and Adam’s Apples (2005). While I liked both of his earlier films, Men and Chicken is vastly better, my favorite film at #IIFFF so far.

It’s hard to categorize this brilliant film: it’s a family drama and a black comedy, as well as a horror film. It’s about a mad scientist (aptly named Evilio Thanatos) and about creating monsters. Men and Chicken inevitably evokes Frankenstein (as all mad scientist films do), but, still more directly, it echoes H. G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and the film based on it, The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932). The Island of Lost Souls, and Wells’ novel, deal particularly with a scientist bent on creating human-animal hybrids—also the project of Thanatos. His name (the word Freud used to signal the death drive) says everything about the success (and the costs) of his experiments.

In the aftermath of their father’s death, two brothers, Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Madds Mikkelsen), discover that he was not in fact their biological father. They travel to the Island of Ork to find their real father, but Evilio Thanatos, it turns out, is dead—which Gabriel discovers in a moment evocative of Lila’s discovery of Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho, another film about the creation of monsters. The three other sons of Thanatos—Franz, Josef, and Gregor (names evocative of Franz Kafka, the protagonist of “The Metamorphosis,” and Josef Mengele)—are still alive, however, and so Gabriel and Elias decide to stay with what’s left of their family, in an abandoned asylum that is also home to chickens, pigs, goats, rabbits, and a massive bull named Isak.

Posted on November 13, 2015

Sensoria (2015): Reviews from Ithaca Film Festival

Dawn Keetley

Synopsis: Sensoria follows a woman, Caroline Menard (Lanna Ohlsson), who moves into a bleak apartment, with some strange neighbors. It slowly becomes clear that she has suffered devastating losses—her husband left her, a child died (perhaps a miscarriage). She seems utterly alone with the exception of one friend, Emma (Alida Morberg), whose visit is crucially important to Caroline, although it’s clear that Caroline isn’t crucial to Emma, leaving her too early.

Sensoria is shot almost exclusively in Caroline’s ugly, sterile apartment building. The film builds suspense slowly, as Caroline walks in a slow, almost catatonic state through the routine of moving in, her senses and her affect clearly deadened. Strange things start happening—objects move on their own, act on their own; lights, electric toothbrushes, microwaves, turn on by themselves. Strange noises combine with the multitude of sounds of apartment living.

As the tension intensifies, however, its effect is undercut by the fact that we learn very early on that what haunts Caroline’s apartment is unequivocally supernatural. Given how damaged the Caroline is, the lack of ambiguity about what is happening to her seems like a missed opportunity.

Posted on November 9, 2015

Don’t Go Into the Woods: The Hallow

Dawn Keetley

Corin Hardy’s 2015 Irish folk horror film,The Hallow follows a couple, Adam and Claire Hitchens (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic), along with their baby, Finn, who go to stay in a house deep in the Irish forest, which has just been sold for development. They discover there is a frightening truth to local folklore about “the hallow”—fairies and other supernatural creatures who want humans to stay out of their woods.

I really wanted to like The Hallow, but while there are certainly some interesting aspects to the film, overall I have to say that it was a pretty big disappointment.

The Hallow is firmly in the folk horror tradition, the crucial components of which I mapped out in an earlier post. It is dominated by the landscape (beautifully shot, despite the film’s other limitations), located in an isolated community, and the narrative is driven by archaic occult beliefs. The film also, though, draws liberally from other kinds of horror. At times, it fairly self-consciously evokes creature features—Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982)—as well as what could be called the “possessed patriarch” films—The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Shining (1982). The creatures were also reminiscent of those in Neil Marshall’s brilliant The Descent (2005)—and the two films share something of a narrative trajectory. While horror films always draw on other horror films, though, The Hallow may do so a bit too wildly and without shaping its borrowings into something distinctively its own.