In short: Static (2012)

Warning: I'll have to spoil the film's sort of plot twist. Again.

Writer Jonathan Dade (Milo Ventimiglia) and his wife Addie (Sarah Shahi) are still reeling from the accidental death of their three year old son Thomas, and have basically locked themselves away on their huge estate in the country. While Addie is trying to keep the trauma at bay by fleeing into drink, Jonathan has opted for burying himself in his work and making mopey-Milo-Ventimiglia facial expressions.

One night, a young woman calling herself Rachel (Sara Paxton) appears on the couple's doorstep. She says she's fleeing from a group of masked men, and could really use some help. The Dades do of course take her in, but something's clearly off about Rachel. She knows a bit too much about the Dades and their dead son for comfort, and she's acting more than a little strange.

One thing soon becomes clear: Rachel's masked men are pretty real.

I'm not much of a fan of the home invasion sub genre. I suspect it's a bit of a class thing for me, what with most of these films being about oh so lovely bourgeois or just stinking rich people being attacked by those 'orrible poor, with only a few entries of the sub-genre using this set-up to then explore issues of class instead of taking the poor as cheap human monsters.

Consequently, I should be more than happy when a film like Todd Levin's Static attempts to use audience expectations towards how a home invasion movie works to construct its twist (even though the film's not interested in talking about class at all). I generally do love this sort of thing but in Static's case, the actual execution leaves me quite cold. That's probably because Gabriel Cowan's script goes for the old "they have been dead all along!" chestnut, a trope used in more horror movies than I'd care to count, and which I'd - if I were the king of scriptwriting (lucky for anyone else I'm not) - expressly forbid any filmmaker to use unless she or he will do something wildly original or moving with it.

Static, alas, is neither very original nor very moving, nor is it all that wild. Instead, it's merely competent, neither doing anything more than averagely clever with its big idea, nor going really deep in its exploration of the Dades' grief. In fact, using the death of a child as the catalyst here seems to me the cheapest way to get an automatic emotional connection between the characters and the audience without the film actually having to work for it. Again, it's not as if Static did anything horribly wrong here, it's that it doesn't do enough that's truly right or interesting.

On technical level, Levin's direction is perfectly fine, too, and the actors are doing their best - which is quite a lot in the cases of Shahi and Paxton, not terribly much in Ventimiglia's case.

Again, Static is a film suffering from being highly competent but lacking that final element - be it intellectual, be it emotional, be it the virtue of being plain crazy - to make it anything special.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,in short,todd levin,milo ventimiglia,sarah shahi,sara paxton

In short: Enter Nowhere (2011)

One by one, three people strand in a cabin in the deep dark woods. First there's Tom (Scott Eastwood), a young man with no discernible character traits. Then comes Samantha (Katherine Waterston), newly pregnant and rather timid and proper. Finally, Jody (Sara Paxton) arrives. Jody's rather cynical and rude, and, as we know thanks to the film's beginning, has shot a man in a botched gas station robbery with her boyfriend.

The trio is trapped in the middle of nowhere with freezing temperatures at night that would make an escape very difficult, and really no good idea how to get back to civilization. But something's not right about their situation anyhow - whenever they try to leave, even taking the straightest line through the woods leads them back to the cabin, as if something just didn't want them to leave there. Once they get to know each other the three realize other peculiarities about themselves and their situation I won't spoil here. Just let it be said that they have something in common and will possibly have to do a life-changing deed.

Jack Heller's SF-in-the-Twilight-Zone-sense-of-the-term movie Enter Nowhere comes as a pleasant surprise to me, seeing as this specific format seldom seems to work well for full-length movies. It's also a film I find difficult to talk about without spoiling some of its - well-placed and well-paced - plot twists; which would be alright if what I had to say were of especially deep insight or important to warn other potential viewers about.

It's not even as if these plot twists were all that surprising. In fact, I called much of what was going on in the movie about thirty minutes in. However, I called it because the film is playing fair with the information it gives its audience and its characters, and not because it's badly constructed. Heller also manages to let the characters take much more time to get to the core of what's happening to them than the audience needs without letting the characters feel slow or dumb. Unlike us, the characters don't know they are in a movie of the fantastic persuasion, and one doesn't generally expect the weird to hit one quite as heavily in daily life.

My only real problem with Enter Nowhere is with its ending, which I found a bit too pat for my tastes, with a warm and fuzzy solution to the characters' problems that just seems a little too nice, as if it weren't enough for the film to fix the characters' very fucked up lives, but just had to turn them perfect instead of good. I'm sure it's meant to leave the audience with the warm feeling of things having been put right, but I would have preferred an ending that leaves the characters on a less Frank Capra level of happiness.

Fortunately, the way to that ending is paved with a solid script, tight direction of the subtly effective type, and solid acting performances, so there's no possibility of it ruining Enter Nowhere.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,jack heller,fantasy,sf,sara paxton,scott eastwood,katherine waterston

The Innkeepers (2011)

A hotel with the quaint name of "Yankee Pedlar Inn" is in the final week of its existence. Businesswise, there's nothing at all happening, so Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), the place's two remaining employees (its boss is using his ill-gotten gains for a holiday) look forward to a quiet and boring time, which is the thing you want when you have to sleep at your place of work for its closing down, and you'd really rather play around hunting the hotel's ghosts you don't actually believe in.

The hotel's only guests are a cranky mother (Alison Bartlett) and her little son (Jake Ryan), an old man (George Riddle) wanting to sleep in the honeymoon suite for reasons of nostalgia, and the former TV actress Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), so there's enough time and space for Claire and Luke to try and make contact with the hotel's resident ghost. Luke, who is more into the whole ghost hunting thing, or at least more experienced at it, has already encountered the ghost before, but during the course of the following nights, it will be Claire who is most determined to meet the dead.

Alas, as M.R. James taught, encountering a ghost can have dire consequences.

Last time I wrote about a film by Ti West I was more than just a bit exasperated by the director's seeming unwillingness to use his clearly great talents as a filmmaker for anything more than a piece of retro horror so retro it even copied all of the flaws of the films it imitated, instead of making the great Ti West movie he obviously had in him.

I'm happy to report this criticism doesn't apply at all to The Innkeepers. While the film is informed by a knowledge and love for older horror movies and ghost stories, it's not a slave to that knowledge and love, and instead uses them as a foundation on which to build something all its own, really turning it into the Ti West movie - that is, a film giving expression to a personal philosophy and style - I had hoped for.

This doesn't mean that West leaves behind everything he did before stylistically. As the director's earlier films, The Innkeepers is putting its narrative emphasis firmly on mood and characterisation, telling its story in a slow and deliberate way that is the complete opposite of the way ninety percent of modern horror movies tell their stories. I'm sure quite a few people will be bored by the film; I'm just as sure these people are missing out on one of the best ghost stories not filmed in Japan.

For West really is so, so good at creating mood. At first, the film stays tonally so light it could easily turn into an outright comedy (of the mid-brow indie type), but slowly, in ways expected and unexpected, the hotel and the things we see, those we nearly see, and those we only expect to see (not to speak of the things we hear - the film's sound design is decidedly clever), come together to create a mood first of tension, then of outright dread, until the film culminates in a climax that is as consequent (as in destiny) as it is ambiguous. Even though all the clues to understanding what's going on are in the film (which of course does not hinder certain types of viewer from not understanding because the exposition fairy didn't come and puke into their faces), there's still a lingering feeling of the inexplicable left after all is said and done, something, I'd argue, more horror films should try to produce.

I'm still not completely done swooning, for The Innkeepers does not just showcase West's technical perfection (apart from the sound design, his editing and Eliot Rockett's cinematography are something to behold in a subtle, not at all showy, way) applied to a very fine ghost story, it's also a film that shows of a small and very talented case without, you know, showing off with them. The three main members of the cast - Paxton, Healy and McGillis - are all highly sympathetic and manage to not just let their characters come to life - so as to keep the audience more wary of their final fates - but also present their hidden complexities in ways subtle enough to fit in with the rest of a film that is playing with perfectly open cards yet also wants its audience to be patient and attentive, or perhaps rather a film that knows that its audience is patient and attentive.

The Innkeepers is just an all around fantastic film, the sort of movie I'd call a future classic of horror cinema, if I were the kind of guy who made that kind of pronouncement.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,ti west,sara paxton,pat healy,kelly mcgillis