In short: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

I’m not writing about TV and streaming shows here very often – the play by play format best for this sort of thing just doesn’t work for me – but I do have to make an exception for house favourite Mike Flanagan’s final outing at Netflix, before he is going to fight those other Elder Beings at Amazon.

Usher turns out to be quite the high note to go out on, mixing every single thing that has always been great at what Flanagan’s doing in and with horror – the emphasis on character and the exploration of themes while still keeping the shocks and the dread going, his love for working with a recurring ensemble of actors, his disinterest in “realistic” dialogue and following interest in the stylized and the actually interesting and so on and so forth – with a surprisingly complex critique of modern capitalism I didn’t expect in quite this form.

He’s certainly aiming for the obvious, blunt targets a lot, but there’s also room for talking about how money and consumerism changes the small, human relations in the show.

As a Poe piece, the show is closer connected to its source material than Flanagan’s two Haunting ofs were to theirs. Apart from the names, the deaths and the quotations visual and verbal, and so on, the show often manages to drag the actual mood of Poe into a very contemporary setting, turning the hypermodern gothic whenever possible. Thematically, this isn’t terribly interested in Poe’s personal fixations, but uses them, and the way he expressed them in his works to talk about the things it is interested in – apart from capitalism also the vagaries of family - of course, this being by Flanagan –, the opioid epidemic, and the toxic nature of quite a lot of things.

Even the decidedly non-naturalist acting style the ensemble goes for this time around fits perfectly into Poe’s aesthetic world – Flanagan’s patented monologues and his clear love for letting actors actually go to town in ways usually only theatre directors do clearly draws out the best from a cast that’s pretty damn brilliant even in lesser circumstances, bringing characters and ideas to life not by imitating how real people are and talk, but by very consciously intensifying and stylizing.

This and Flanagan’s other shows are pretty much exactly how I wish more horror TV would be, without the empty posturing and boring maximalism of something like American Horror Story, with an eye, a brain and a heart instead of an “irony” gland.

In short: Hush (2016)

After a bad break-up deaf mute – and no, happily the film’s not just using this as a gimmick - writer Maddie (Kate Siegel, who also co-wrote the film with her husband, director Mike Flanagan) has moved into the splendid isolation of a house in the woods. It’s not quite as out of the way as these houses often are in horror films: the nearest neighbours (Samantha Sloyan and Michael Trucco) are in walking distance, there’s working Wi-Fi, and even the police seems to be relatively close.

Nonetheless, Maddie soon finds herself in trouble. A serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) wants to play home invasion with what must look like an easy victim to him; turns out the bastard just might have bitten off more than he can chew.

So, Mike Flanagan’s a bit of a great director, isn’t he? Leaving the supernatural elements of his earlier films behind, this one’s a splendid variation on the home invasion movie, though spiced up with more siege elements in the classic Carpenter (or classic-classic Hawks) style, and avoiding everything I dislike about most home invasion movies. So the subtext about the evil of poor people is replaced by some rather more interesting commentary about various kinds of isolation, the suburban yuppie vacuum protagonist by a deftly written author who is actually likeable, and the sub-genre’s love for sadism is replaced with less unpleasant yet sturdier thriller gestures.

That last point doesn’t mean Hush is a film that pulls its punches: Maddie and the other characters still go through a lot of horrible stuff but Flanagan has such a tight control over the material he reaches greater effect through being less sensationalist. This tightness is one of the film’s greatest strengths and feels very much like script and direction working in perfect concert at keeping things lean but never too lean. There’s something fearsomely effective about the handful of scenes the film uses to introduce Maddie, with no wasted line in the script, no wasted gesture in Siegel’s – rather fantastic – performance yet still the film avoids the impression of simplifying overmuch.

That’s really Hush in a nutshell: sharp writing that doesn’t need to make its characters stupid, and tight yet elegant direction meet excellent acting (Siegel’s opponent as portrayed by John Gallagher Jr. is nearly as impressive as she is, and stays threatening even though he’s never played as being superhuman) and turn the film into something which transform quite a few played-out tropes into something that feels alive again.

Absentia (2011)

Callie (Katie Parker) arrives at her pregnant sister Tricia's (Courtney Bell) small house in the suburbs to help Tricia finally end a very difficult time in her life. Tricia's husband Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown) one day seven years ago just disappeared, leaving Tricia's life something of a shambles. Not that Callie's life is a bed of roses. She has a history of drug abuse and bad life decisions, as well as the tendency to just pack up and disappear when things get too rough for her.

Still, troubled as their relationship may have been at times, both sisters are trying to be there for each other. So Callie is doing her best to help Tricia make the final steps in having Daniel declared dead in absentia, and attempts to finally move Tricia out of the house she shared with Daniel, convincing her to start living again.

What Tricia doesn't tell Callie is that ever since she's started the process of declaring her husband dead, she's been having nightmares and hallucinations (or are they?) of a very angry Daniel. This sort of thing can of course be explained by trauma and stress, but soon enough weird things begin to happen to Callie too.

Everything that happens to the sisters seems to be connected to a nearby pedestrian tunnel and the unreasonably high number of disappearances of people and animals in the area, but is really something supernatural at play, or are people just leaving behind their troubles one way or the other?

Now, if every piece of indie horror were like this instead of being a part of a seemingly never-ending series of bad gore movies (I'm making unfair generalizations, I know, and apologize to all indie horror filmmakers who make more inspired films), I'd probably dedicate my whole blog to indie horror, never to look at anything else; at least for a week.

But honestly and in all appropriate enthusiasm, Mike Flanagan's Absentia is a film that hits all the right notes for me, a film that plays as if it were written by someone with a direct line to my brain. As it is in cases like this your mileage with the film at hand may very well vary even more than normal (after all, no two persons ever see the same film anyway). So it's probably best if I just indulge myself and count all the ways in which Absentia is awesome, without any pretence of critical distance.

First and foremost, there is Flanagan's direction and editing, inventively and with great intelligence keeping a film that in large parts plays out in three rooms and a tunnel into something visually dynamic and interesting without ever falling into the trap of getting showy with it. Flanagan has a fantastic sense for building up mood, treating the moments of dread and horror with the same sure hand he uses for the moments of intimacy. The latter does of course make the horror moments even stronger.

I was also pretty much floored by the film's sense of place. Sure, we're talking about a film taking place in the most quotidian suburb imaginable. However making such a place believable not only as a place where people could believably live quiet, quotidian lives but also one where the layers between the day-to-day and the outside - and possible the layers between people's inner lives and what is surrounding them - have literally and figuratively grown thin is an achievement all of its own.

Absentia also shows some very convincing acting, with especially the lead actresses being as flawed and sympathetic as one could wish for in a film like this. Again, there's a complete lack of showiness in their performances. I'd use the dread word "authenticity" if I weren't conditioned not to. Suffice it to say that Parker and Bell (as well as the actors in the smaller roles) do a fantastic job selling Absentia's more difficult moments, leaving the audience not much room to doubt the strange things happening to them.

The script is just as good as the rest of the movie too. The film's idea of a supernatural menace is clearly influenced by the Weird Tale tradition of horror (with nods in the direction of Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood, and I don't use these names lightly), yet Flanagan's film does not stop at the point of imitation, and instead places (like many of the best writers of the contemporary Weird Tale do) the concepts of the classic Weird Tale in the context of contemporary urban life and the experiences of contemporary people. That's a fine position to explore concepts like loss, the wish to leave everything behind, and the horrors of what leaving everything behind might actually mean from, and Absentia knows well how to use it.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: GHOULISH! GORY! GHASTLY!

Drive (2011): Well, I doubt anybody needs me to fall in with the chorus of praise for Nicolas Winding Refn's film; its class, the excellence of Ryan Gosling's (with the rest of the cast certainly not to be ignored) performance and the quality of Refn's direction are self-evident. What isn't as often mentioned when talking about Drive is how perfect a fit Refn as a director is for adapting a James Sallis novel (despite the changes). Both excel at telling sparse seeming, yet complex stories who only look minimalist when you're not looking at them closely enough. Both men's work reminds of poetry, if you can imagine poetry that's as shockingly and horrifyingly violent as Drive becomes during its second half. I don't generally call films masterpieces (because I don't believe in them or the canonical order in art their existence implies), but with this one I'm really tempted.

Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan (2006): Despite its awkward title, Mike (Absentia - my write-up of that film will be coming up shortly) Flanagan's short film about a man (Scott Graham) haunted by his demons, a white room and an evil mirror is a really excellent piece of work. Tight, weird with a capital W, and as dynamically directed (and edited) as anything taking place in a single room - and, one could argue one person's mind - can be, it's the sort of thing I'm bound to enjoy. It's also the sort of thing that could only work as an independently produced short film - adding anything to it on a budgetary level or in the number of script pages would only reduce the film's tenseness and focus.

Red Balloon (2010): Another short film (available to see here), but of a very different style than Oculus. This film about the dangers of babysitting is slick in a Hollywood way where Oculus seems more personal, pushing all suspense buttons with professional care and craft. Actually, it's the sort of short that seems made as a demonstration that yes, one can be trusted with money for a larger production, and less because there's a story to be told for which the short format is ideal. It's hardly the fault of the two directors I'm temperamentally inclined to find exactly such a thing very, very boring, even if it is very, very well crafted (which Red Balloon is).

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,in short,crime,horror,thriller,nicolas winding refn,ryan gosling,mike flanagan