Past Misdeeds: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After the death of his mother Rosalind (Vanessa Redgrave), Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) comes to her house looking for something like closure, or at least to confront parts of the past he shared with his mother. They had been estranged for years, without visits or phone calls, because Rosalind suffered from a kind of mania that drove her to pressing her religion on Leon, playing "games" bordering on child abuse.

Rosalind's house - not the one where Leon grew up in - is a strange place, full of antiques, and statues and statuettes of angels, many of which Leon acquired for Rosalind in his profession in the antiques trade without knowing whom he bought them for. The longer Leon stays the more he is hit by a feeling of something strange, something malevolent even, going on, as if there were some truth to Rosalind's Christian cultish beliefs, and now something were about to punish Leon for his conscious decision against belief. Things seem to move where there shouldn't be movement, Leon is inexorably pressed into confrontation with elements of his mother's beliefs that seem to have taken on life and reality, and something is prowling around the house. Only time will tell if ghosts, wrathful angels, or just Leon's still bruised mind are the cause of the strange happenings.

Rodrigo Gudiño's The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is the kind of film that easily divides opinions, not just because Gudiño is the publisher of Rue Morgue mag (never trust a journo - or blogger - making movies, right?) but because it is a film that combines a lot of elements people usually either love or hate in movies, depending one their temperaments.

It's a slow moving film with comparatively little outward action, utterly dependent on the creation of mood through set design, sound design, camera work, and acting. The Last Will tells its story in a way that not quite answers the question of the reality of what Leon encounters in the house, and consciously keeps parts of the plot's background ambiguous. Seeing that this is also a film circling questions of belief and disbelief via the weird and influences of classic supernatural tales, it's no surprise certain people will find the film boring or pretentious. As with all things mood-based, it's a matter of being compatible with the feeling the film is going for, and if you don't feel it, you just don't feel it, though I'd really wish people would more often differentiate between things that aren't for them, and things that aren't good.

To me, The Last Will is a little wonder of a movie, with a lead actor in Aaron Poole who can carry a film all on his own, never sharing the screen with anyone else. Other actors make their appearances as voices on the phone, in a small bit of video footage, and in form of a long-ish monologue by Vanessa Redgrave that really pulls the film together thematically. But really, the film is centred on Poole, with not a few scenes only showing him exploring the house.

One could argue that the house - on the outside built in a mock-medieval castle style, on the inside a living space reimagined as an angel-obsessed antiques store - really is the film's other main actor beside Poole, as it is the main source of the film's increasingly oppressive mood. The way Gudiño films it, the house is a place probably once meant to fill Rosalind's loneliness through an accumulation of stuff, but now has become something different, a kind of graveyard of emotions and an attempt at keeping a past alive so that it can never truly turn into a new present. In short, it's a place that seems custom-built to create its own ghosts; and Rosalind had turned herself into a ghost even long before she died, it seems. This mood as well as Rosalind's turn of mind might very well have something to do with intellectual influence the Christian sect Rosalind belonged to had on her, but then neither Leon nor the audience ever really learn if they had an active role in the proceedings that caused the house's haunting, or if they just provided more of the emotional trouble Rosalind was looking for.

In fact, the film only ever completely accedes the existence of Rosalind's ghost to be real; we never learn how much of what happens to Leon is caused by her, how much of it is a product of his mental damage, or how much of it has another supernatural source. The film leaves room for various interpretations, if you're interested in them, so you can takes its hints about a cult awakening something supernatural that leeches onto Rosalind's and Leon's private pains at face value, or you can ignore them completely without losing out on much of the film's meaning either way. In the end, the film seems to say, there's really not much of a difference between being haunted by a ghost or being haunted by the past in its non-supernatural form - both things can kill you one way or the other.

The Last Will is also one of the few films questioning the nature of belief and unbelief that doesn't feel the need to come down on either side while damning the other. Rosalind's ghost exists as a creation of her own beliefs, while Leon saves himself by reasserting his disbelief. It's unexpectedly satisfying, and definitely quite a bit less annoying than being petulantly preached at by another movie, quite independent of the direction the preaching comes from.


So, obviously, and not quite unexpectedly given my tastes, I come down on the side of those viewers who find The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh rather spectacular in its quiet, intelligent way. If it were a book, it would probably be published by Ash Tree Press or Tartarus Press, and if that sounds like a recommendation to you, it most definitely is.

In short: The Void (2016)

On a slow night, deputy Sheriff Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) picks up a hurt and bloody man from the side of the road. The closest emergency room is run by a skeleton crew in a hospital that’s nearly abandoned after a fire some time ago. As luck will have it, Daniel’s separated – they lost a child - wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) is working there this night. These personal problems won’t be the worst thing on Daniel’s mind for long, though, for soon enough he and the handful of other characters in the emergency room, will have to cope with much worse things. A gang of white-robed knife-wielding cultists surrounding the hospital not letting anyone leave or make contact with the outside world will turn out to be the least of their troubles.

I am not at all surprised that Astron-6’s Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski made quite a film in their first “serious” outing (and without the Astron-6 moniker), seeing as their more parodic work demonstrated not just surface knowledge of genre cinema as a whole but what looks like a lot of deep understanding, enthusiasm and talent, certainly all things they demonstrate here in great amounts.

After hearing The Void described as a Lovecraftian film, or at least one of cosmic horror, I did expect a much slower film as the one I got. Properly defined, The Void is cosmic horror and Lovecraft filtered through Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Lucio Fulci and body horror, which means its psychologically grounded cosmicism finds a dancing partner in huge amounts of practical effects that suggest a diet of the aforementioned directors and the best of the Silent Hill franchise. The monsters and the effects get going much faster than I had expected, too. Fifteen minutes in, and things become gooey and grotesque and never stop for long from then on out, very much to my satisfaction.

The pace does get – rather appropriately – weird after some time of the directors playing with something of an inverted siege scenario (nobody seems to want to get in to hurt the characters, they’re just not allowed to leave because of something locked in with them). Once parts of the cast make their way into a cellar that acts as a place where the layers between our reality and something much grimmer have grown thin through abuse, things turn ever more dream-like, visions and hallucinations breaking the until then classically plotted movie’s timing until it turns strange. At first, I was a bit displeased by how this approach seemed to throw the film out of whack, further thought and exposure convinced me it is actually a rather brilliant way to let the audience share into some of the psychological effects of the characters’ contact with the Cosmically Weird, while providing even more opportunity for these fine effects.

On Exploder Button: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

There aren't all that many horror films standing in the same tradition as less on-the-nose and ambiguous contemporary literary horror. I'm not surprised, for doing this sort of thing well must be exceedingly difficult in a medium that is by nature not as easily turned towards interiority and ambiguousness as fiction is. Even worse, even if your film achieves its goal well, a lot of people will still hate it just for its insistence on things other than plot or blood.

Rodrigo Gudiño's The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is one of these films, and it achieves its goals admirably. My column over at ExB explains how.

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