Film Review: The Changeling

Film Review:

The Changeling

A changeling, in traditional folk tales, is a child stolen by the faerie folk and replaced with a fairy child. It's a cuckoo for humans, and likely came about as a way of explaining post-natal depression in an era before, well, psychological science. It is absolutely not - take note YA authors - another name of a shape shifters.

The Haunting of Changeling House

Composer John Russel (George C. Scott) lost his wife and daughter four months ago in a car accident; now he's ready to start working again, and start living again. He takes up a position in a university at Washington and moves into a house that could not be more clearly haunted from the moment that you set eyes on it. Russel doesn't, however, have the foresight to know that he is in a horror movie, so settles in to his new life. Doesn't take long before his new life throws up a surprise or two...

You've seen this movie before, you've read this book before; you've crouched fireside with a torch under your chin and told this story before. This is a haunted house story at its most essential. A guy lives in a house, spooky things happen, he investigates and it turns out the ghost of a wronged soul dwells within the walls. What makes The Changeling absolutely worth watching is how well-realised it is within that very well worn framework.

The House Talks

The Changeling moves at a slow clip. It takes its time. He doesn't move into the house for the first fifteen minutes, and there are no horror set-pieces. The filmmakers assemble the pieces slowly and carefully, lulling the audience into the world in an understated way. There's a patience to it that is gratifying. As such, tension simmers and the creepiness - well, it creeps slowly but surely under your skin.

One of the focuses of the story early on, as it motors at a sedate pace, is the surroundings. The film is filmed with a great emphasis on place, especially within the house itself. Wide shots aplenty. Many of the shots are either from low or high angles, making them seem small in the house, or making the house tower over them. It is the star of the show, and it is shot like the star of the show.

Aesthetically, the house itself is just a perfect piece of casting. It screams haunted house. It looks like how I imagined the house in The Haunting of Hill House - the original adaptation of which (The Haunting, 1963) is no doubt a key inspiration. Early on especially, it feels like the house itself is the malicious, malevolent presence. Banging doors, noises in the pipes, running taps: classic staples of haunted housery.

Deja-Vu

One of the things that struck me very strongly during watching The Changeling is the similarities that it bares towards many of the key films in the eruption of J-horror that happened during the noughties. One scene specifically surely has to have had some influence on Ringu - the source novel was written over a decade after The Changeling hit theatres.

The iconography is very similar too, and very good to boot. Much of The Changeling's most memorable moments are not what happens so much as the images. Whilst the story may be deftly hitting familiar beats, the power of the visuals and the lightning help The Changeling feel like its own beast, and lend power to what could otherwise be tired and generic. The wheelchair, especially, is a haunting image, and one that is borrowed to this day in haunting house stories - the modern Hill House adaptation, to call back to early, is a good example of this.

The other thing that The Changeling has in common with J-horror is that your dear narrator, man of iron nerves, actually found it genuinely creepy in a way I haven't since I watched Ju-on (The Grudge) as a teenager. Whatever it was, there is a quiet power to the visuals, the score and the pace, that really had me on edge.

Big Endings

And then the end happened. In every sense it is absolutely the right ending to the film - it ties up the plot points and escalates both the set pieces and imagery in scale. Both in terms of the storytelling and the filmmaking the decisions made are the right ones.

Unfortunately, it overplays its hand and really than ratchetting up into horror, descends slightly into farce. It becomes the silly and generic spookfest that the premise suggests it should be. It's all very well done and fun in a schlocky sense, but it is does not fit tonally with the understated and genuinely creepy movie it was capping off. A shame, because otherwise The Changeling smashes it out of the park.

Film Review - Audition

Film Review:

Audition

WHEN a film director has over one-hundred directorial credits to his name, they're either an artistically bereft journeyman or an idiot savant. The former is doomed to a filmography of basic competence, uninspired mediocrity. The latter? You'll get incredibly entertaining badness, or streaks of genuine genius.

Audition is genuine genius.

Have You Ever Had Loveless Sex?

AOYAMA is a widower – his wife died when his son was still a child, and now he’s middle aged and his son and friends are convinced that he it is about time he found himself a new wife. His friend Yoshikawa has a plan. He’s a film producer, and a new cheap film his company are producing are auditioning women who may be suitable for Aoyama. With this in mind, he co-opts the auditions as a job interview for Aoyama to find his new wife.

It soon becomes clear that Aoyama, however, having already read through the applications for the role, has only one woman in mind: the quiet and shy Asami. Despite Yoshikawa’s misgivings about the mysterious woman, Aoyama begins a relationship with her.

Much of the early tone of the movie is funny. In many ways, it plays out like a romcom that doesn’t understand how deeply creepy and misogynistic its premise is. It would not be the first either.

Audition isn’t a romcom.

To Scar a Generation

THE mid-00s saw rise to what seemed to be the culmination of sensationalist violence in horror cinema (and fiction in general): torture porn, or gornography. A sub-genre of cinema whose use of shock tactics are tuned up so high that they literally use torture to titillate audiences. The Saw franchise and the films of Eli Roth are the most obvious and well-known examples of the sub-genre.

Seven years before Roth's Hostel and six years before the first Saw film, Takeshi Miike's Audition scarred an audience by avoiding such excesses. It is often listed amongst the great torture porn films, and one set-piece is infamous for its gratuity, yet Audition is an exercise in restraint. That one of the founding films of this genre is bloodless should tell you a lot about the power of its imagery, and the director’s control of tension.

No Safety

IF the horrific climax of the movie is the part that everyone remembers, it works so well because of the set-up. So much of the movie consists of not much happening, and somehow it’s a tough, tough sit.

Everything that creates this feeling is very quiet and subtle. There’s no jump scares and little scary music, and not horror set-pieces and a lot of quiet emotional discussions. Audition feels incredibly unsafe without ever doing anything that feels unsafe, exactly. It’s all so subtly wrong, so off, so simmering. When Audition hits like a truck, it is because it has spent the runtime softening you up. It’s a testament to the fact that any emotional or memorable moments in stories are defined more by the rest of the story than they are by the power of the visuals.

Singularity of Purpose

ALTHOUGH Audition successfully uses a fairly diverse cocktail of tones (at times going so far as being funny), it is a very focussed and simple story. It takes care to introduce us to the internal world of the characters, as much through visuals as through actual plot points. It has a slight plot; not particularly much really happens. Big revelation and twists happen within the context of the final scenes.

Some stories are all about a single scene or moment. Most obviously are twist movies in horror or psychological thrillers – it was all in their head all along. Shamylan’s Sixth Sense came out the same year as Audition and is one of the most recogniseable examples of this. In a totally different medium, Final Fantasy 7 is another contemporary of Audition’s that does this effectively. Audition, of course, does this too. Big emotional moments and narrative slight of hands are saved for the correct moment and, to repeat a phrase I used earlier, it hits like a train. 

Film Review - Society

Film Review:

Society

"A matter of breeding Milo."

IN our times of economic instability, politics that is swinging globally towards fascism and a rampant pandemic, the slogan "eat the rich" - and all that it connotes - seems more and more relevant. In 1989 when Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) bites into an apple at the start of Society, he finds it infested with worms. Little does he know where it'll take him...

High Society

BILL'S convinced he is adopted, that his blue blooded parents and sister are not his real family, and that there is something strange going on. He's your typical jock framed in a very saved-by-the-bell high school drama - star football player and soon to be year president. The girls want him and the boys from the other big clique resent him. His world is dumped on its head when his sister's ex (Tim Bartell) turns up at a date and plays him a tape recording of what appears to be an incest orgy,  seemingly confirming his paranoia around his familial situation.

Much of the movie happens in a bright, flatly lit manner much befitting of a daytime American soap opera. It's been compared to Ferris Bueller gone wrong. It's a high school drama in the most insubstantial of ways, portraying the petty irrelevance of a glamourised teenage life with a sense of absurd importance. Everything, however, is off. Part of this, admittedly, is just a clumsy script and some bad acting - at points it works quite nicely and feels intentional, other times less so.

Underdeveloped

AS a protagonist, Bill leaves rather a lot to be desired. The bare bones are there - his motivation and paranoia are well defined by the movie, and he has a number of relationships that have potential for development. Said development is lacking. Severely lacking. At a number of points, both love interest Clarissa and best friend Milo go out of their way to either do things for Bill or to get his attention, and it's never properly established why exactly. The movie is in love with Bill, and demands very little proactivity or anything -actually- interesting from him. Milo spends a lot of the movie stalking Bill and pranking him, in order to provide transparent red herrings for the audience and be there in case the plot needs him.

In general, the plot's touch with characters isn't great. Neither does it have a firm grasp of structure: it feels like it cuts out a lot of the first act and fails to establish the characters paranoias properly. At the start of the movie, he tells his therapist his issues - we don't ever see it or feel it. The final act is also about a third of the movie (although this turns out to really be a blessing in disguise). The narrative structure, the dialogue and character work, the plotting - it's all rather on the shaky side.  

Beautiful People

Society draws many obvious comparisons - the uncanny hidden darkness of the world of Blue Velvet, the shallow awfulness of American Psycho, the paranoia coupled with a blandly pretty lick of paint of Stepford Wives. Recent Oscar winner Parasite flickers at the edges of vision. In a certain sense, it is a profoundly unoriginal - a social satire but how the rich seem weird and gross? Seen it, been there. It's definitely been done better.

Everyone in this movie except Billy, Milo and Clarissa is absolutely awful or grotesque in any manner of ways. Maybe the sister is introduced as not an unlikeable character, but before long she's loathsome too. The movie is transparent and blundering almost in how much its clear we should dislike its slimy and smarmy cast of characters, lacking the guts of something like American Psycho to even follow a main character who is among the worst examples. This is particularly clear with Billy's girlfriend at the start of the movie, a vapid harpy who he discards for the seductive and mysterious Clarissa, and the movie doesn't bat an eyelid. This is meant to make him seem more real, not less.

Dancing With the Audience

EARLY on, Society asks the audience a question - is Bill crazy, or is something untoward going on? Well, the film is very poor, from the outset, at really cementing that ambiguity.Society's script lacks the elegance and narrative slight of hand to really pull off that tension.

More than that, thematically it wouldn't make sense were the movie to be all a psychological fugue state on Bill's part. Society, from early on, is very clear that it is satirising the life and attitudes and entitlement of the rich. During the mad finale, one of the major characters even draws direct comparisons with the Roman Empire, evoking the likes of Caligula. The film is always straddling the line of farce and once it reaches its explosive finale, it commits. Hoo boy, does it commit.

All's Well That Ends Well

If this review has been rather negative so far, it's because Society isn't exactly great until the finale. As aforementioned, the structure of the movie is totally unbalanced, and roughly a third of the movie is taken up by the final act. This is a good thing. This is a very good thing.

Director Brian Yuzna was, prior to Society, best know for his work with the now deceased Stuart Gordon (very Scottish name that one). Gordon is best known for Re-animator and Into the Void (or possibly some cult film called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), both of which are big silly extravangzas of ridiculous special effects and Lovecraft inspired visuals. Society sets this up with moments of incredibly idiosyncratic body horror that almost feel like they really didn't happen. This is an unusual bit of filming subtlety, and it pays off dividends with the bombastic and absurd conclusion. The sunny soap opera visuals of the earlier film when compared to what happens later? It's beyond absurd and is 100% what makes the movie worth watching.

Society is one hell of a ride that's worth it at the end - there is some fun and funny stuff along the way, and the movie does move at a decent pace, but maaaaan. Quite the ending.

Film Review: Gerald's Game

Film Review:

Gerald's Game

LOOKING to spice up your long dead marriage? Got some unresolved childhood trauma? Well, does your quasi-abusive husband have a holiday for you!

Handcuffs included.

Picturesque Woodlands

WHEN you're in the middle of a Stephen King adaptation you're not on solid ground, but when you start off driving through rural woodlands probably safe to say you've not got a tremendous time ahead of you. That's where Jessie and her husband Gerald find themselves, however. They're on a holiday retreat to revive their ailing relationship. In a cabin in the middle of nowhere they look to rekindle their romance in the bedroom - but after Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, he suffers a heart attack and - rather rudely - dies, leaving her chained to the bed.

It's a smashing premise. The setting is has an eerie beauty to it, Flanagan's style feels like a nice de-emphasis of style that allows drama and character focus. Subtlety is a bi-word that I'm going to keep going back to because it's so much of what is great about the movie, and when that subtlety goes away?

Early on, the film establishes a pattern: subtly and tensely establish themes or characteristics or conflicts that simmer, before coming out and having characters explain to the audience what was meant to have been conveyed already in case we have recently been lobotomised. The plotting is controlled and subtle, but the script often doesn't trust the audience - or, perhaps, doesn't quite know how to fill out its running time - so often undercuts those small moments and small ideas. Part of this might be a function the content of the source material.

To Film, the Unfilmable Film!

GERALD'S Game, the theory goes, is an unfilmable novel. Reading between the lines, as it were, the reason for this is the internality of the original story. It's a woman chained to a bed angsting and feeling hungry and sore. Not conventionally the stuff of escapism. Psychological thrillers often draw heavily from horror and crime set-pieces, as well as art-house cinema, to propel the story along and a story with a character just strapped to a bed doesn't allow for much of that. Instead, it's about an unspoken internal struggle.

Save for the fact that there is in fact plenty of talking. The moment the film should lapse into a quiet visual struggle for survival it never stops shutting up. It gives us a lots of details about the failing relationship, about the characters and especially Jessie's childhood. Most of these details are welcome, in and of themselves at least. The way they are reached is through exposition. The movie allows itself to be easy to watch and easy to follow by being so explicit and baldfaced about giving us such information.

As a horror fan, I'm not much of a fan of jump scares - jump scares are cheap and easy, but even worse they dispel the tension. They're a release. They allow the audience to get comfy in the fact that the horror has revealed itself and now either the protagonist escapes, wins or dies. It allows us a comparative level of safety as viewers. Mike Flanagan, to his credit, doesn't really do jumpscares (although there is one in this movie, and to be fair it's genuinely excellent). What happens with the dialogue, and the hallucinations that say the dialogue, is they help create a feeling of safety for the viewer. It's easier to watch a film because of it, and a story about a woman strapped to a bed whilst horrible things both happen around and rise from her past shouldn't be an easy watch.

Flanagan Back Again

BEEN a busy old few years for good ol' Mike Flanagan. As mentioned earlier, he's no James Won style jumpscarer or set-piece dependent horror filmmaker. He doesn't go for you Eli Roth shock tactics. His plotting foreshadows nicely, and his touch with characters is decent. Between a slew of well received horrors, the success of his King adaptations (he even directed Doctor Sleep, The Shining's sequel) and the way The Haunting of Hill House captured a digital audience, he seems to have taken the reigns on mainstream horror cinema for recent times.

Having seen 2019's largely excellent adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, I found it hard to separate that viewing experience from this. As a fan of the novel, the Netflix Hill House series always felt like it owed much more to both It and The Shining. A lot of the best and worst things about Hill House are also present in Gerald's Game, beyond just the shared cast. Dodgy acting, especially from younger actors, and an inability to write dialogue for children; great splicing together of the past and present, taking great pains to route character traits and decisions in their past. A restrained touch on traditional horror visuals and set pieces. A stark visual style, and a subtle expression of place as important; a tendency to over-explain and general overwriting, without letting scenes or ideas breath to percolate.

For what it is worth, Carla Gugino deserves a shout for an utterly fantastic performance. There might be shaky ones in there, but she's a titan and helps to elevate the film to a level it would not be at without her.

A Good Bone Structure

IT'S a shame that Gerald's Game is at great pains to point out how the themes and character moments connect, because there's a clarity and power to them that should have worked. From the ideas of blood and meet, to the stray dog, to Jessie's past and Jessie's present, from the Moonlight Man to the handcuffs it all works brilliantly until pointed out. Once laid so bare, it seems clunky. Artless.

For all of the talk of Flanagan's restraint, he does have moments of flair in the set-piece. Whenever the enigmatic Moonlight Man is on-screen the movie feels like it has an intensity that is not only excellent on a horror level, but feels like it is a meaningful character moment. He knows when to strike, and when he does it is effective.

WITHOUT wanting to properly wade into spoilers, the ending fell very flat for me. Like, to the point that it might have tipped the balance from a film with a lot of very good and kinda bad and surprisingly boring into just bad. Then again, maybe that makes him the perfect modern visual heir to Stephen King - perhaps lacking his idiosyncratic madness, but fully able to cover most of his unpredictable range in any given piece.