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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.

Posted on November 2, 2015

The Final Girls (2015) Film Review

Elizabeth Erwin

The Final Girls (2015) directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson is a curious horror film. On the surface it is an homage to all the ridiculous tropes that made 1980s slasher films so irresistible. But lurking beneath this campy homage is a heartfelt sentimentality that works because it is so unexpected. The end result is a horror film that manages to break new ground tonally while still providing the gasp-worthy moments sought after by fans.

Fueled by memorable performances, most notably by the criminally underrated Malin Akerman, The Final Girls features way better acting than we would expect to see in a slasher film. The story revolves around Max, a girl whose recently deceased actress mother is a cult star of a slasher film. When a series of events pull Max and her friends into the fictional world of the cult film, the teens must figure out how to avoid the knife-wielding killer.

Posted on October 29, 2015

Game Horror, Circle (2015), and Lifeboat Ethics

Dawn Keetley

Circle (2015), directed by Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione, is the latest entry in the horror sub-genre I’m calling “game horror,” one perhaps best exemplified when Jigsaw, villain of the Saw franchise, uttered those now infamous words, “Want to play a game?” In this sub-genre, a group of seemingly random people are brought together by some unknown person or entity and forced to play a not-very-fun “game.” Sometimes the rules are made very clear; sometimes the players have to figure them out as they go along. Sometimes the game really is arbitrary and the players random; sometimes, though, the players are there for a reason—one they must figure out if they want to survive.

“Game horror” originated in 1939 with Agatha Christie’s mystery novel, And Then There Were None (made into a very good film, directed by René Clair, in 1945), in which ten people are invited to an island and are, one by one, accused by their absent host of the crime of murder. The host uses a gramophone record to lay out his guests’ crimes—a direct antecedent of Jigsaw’s recorded messages to the “players” in his games. Needless to say, in And Then There Were None, as in Saw, punishment ensues.

Like much horror, game horror also has roots in The Twilight Zone, specifically the 1961 episode, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (season 3), in which five characters wake up in a large metal cylinder and have to try to find a way out before they starve to death. This plot anticipates the many subsequent films (Cube, Saw, and Circle) in which characters wake up in a strange place, disoriented, and with no memory of how they got there.