Delete Your Account: 'Friend Request'

The odds were stacked against director Michael Verhoeven’s horror feature Friend Request from the beginning. The film is a German production shot in South Africa with a stable of English-speaking actors. Combined with a sub-$10 million budget, that Frankenstein provenance results in a predictably non-specific setting. It’s implied that the film unfolds in a posh Southern California coastal city, but the necessary geographical caginess and the generally chintzy production values give the whole enterprise a glum air of disposability. The film’s zeitgeist-pandering central conceit—a Facebook-mediated haunting—not only promises tedious Luddite moralizing and kludgy imitations of post-Millennial slang, it’s also virtually guaranteed to age poorly. Indeed, Verhoeven’s feature was shot in 2014, and given the present pace of Internet culture's evolution, it already feels faintly dated, a relic from the hoary days of the Ice Bucket Challenge, the potato salad Kickstarter, and “Let It Go” parody videos.

It’s therefore pleasantly surprising that Friend Request isn’t a complete pile of dogshit. Sure, it’s inarguably lazy, recycling plot beats and design elements from 20 years’ worth of American J-horror clones. It’s stupid as hell, weighed down by a screenplay replete with tin-eared corporate approximations of How Kids Talk These Days. Perhaps most obnoxiously, the film proffers precisely the smug messaging suggested by the trailers: Anyone who is introverted and socially awkward must be a murderously insane necromancer, especially if their personal aesthetic can be described as "black and slightly darker black." Still, Verhoeven’s film is low-rent ghoulish fun, and even intermittently inspired in terms of its visual and sound design. For all its insipidness, Friend Request is rarely outright boring, and whenever it briefly lurches from Entertainingly Bad Movie to Annoyingly Bad Movie, it generally rights itself with its schlocky, R-rated haunted house shocks.

The scenario is pure thirty-second studio pitch material, and if one has seen the trailer, one already knows everything essential there is to know about the plot. Sophomore psychology student Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is pretty, outgoing, and popular, as evidenced by her 800-plus Facebook friends. (The film is never entirely clear whether the social media friend count as a yardstick of personal success is meant to be taken satirically or not, although given the screenplay’s overall brainlessness, one suspects the latter.) Laura lives off-campus with her flamboyant friends Olivia (Brit Morgan), Isabel (Brooke Markham), and Gustavo (Sean Marquette). She is currently dating handsome surfer and medical student Tyler (William Moseley), and rounding out her immediate social circle is tattooed computer geek Kobe, who, not incidentally, harbors an unrequited crush on Laura. 

One day an offhand smile at her reclusive classmate Marina (Liesl Ashlers) nets Laura a Facebook friend request. Marina is something of an amateur video artist with a goth bent—her timeline is dense with ravens, dead trees, and severed doll heads—and Laura initially takes a shine to her talent, even though the girl has (gasp!) zero Facebook friends. Laura accepts the request, but in short order she regrets that fateful click. Marina is needy and aggressively unctuous, bombarding Laura with posts and direct messages as though they were suddenly best friends. When Laura lies about her birthday party to spare Marina’s feelings, the latter girl unsurprisingly spots the evidence on Laura’s timeline, resulting in a public confrontation and virtual unfriending. This proves to be too much for the fragile Marina, who subsequently commits suicide by hanging and self-immolation, filming and auto-posting this final act online.

A little thing like death isn’t much of a deterrent to a truly determined cyber stalker, however. It turns out that Marina’s ritualistic suicide is the opening move in an elaborate revenge plot against Laura, a scheme that seems to have two prongs. First, Laura’s friends and family are soon plagued by terrifying hallucinations, most of them involving swarms of black wasps, a pair of mutilated boys, and a decrepit, demonic incarnation of Marina’s spirit. These visions gradually drive the people in Laura’s immediate social circle to commit suicide, one by one. Meanwhile, Laura’s Facebook profile is hijacked by a mysterious presence, which proceeds to post videos of her friends’ gruesome deaths and otherwise make her look like a horrible person. Laura swiftly finds herself under investigation by university and police authorities, and—the horror!—ostracized by outraged Facebook friends, who abandon her in droves. (Her steadily dropping friend count recurs as an animated, on-screen flourish.)

The most vexing thing about Friend Request’s plot is that it feels like a missed opportunity for a much more ambitious and ruthless horror film. At risk of indulgently imagining the story that might have been, Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Phillip Koch could have easily expanded Marina’s death list to include everyone on Laura’s friend list, instead of confining the ghost-driven suicides to her closest pals. The ghastly spectacle practically writes itself: montages of dozens of suicides, from the crude to the baroque, as the 800-plus digital connections Laura has made become the proverbial mark of damnation. (And fuck you, Friend Request, for eliciting this thought: The Happening did it better.) The mass exodus from her friend list would thereby take on the urgency of a hysterical mob fleeing a burning building, rather than, say, the mere disgusted unfriending of an old high school classmate with a pro-Trump meme on their timeline.

Verhoeven is primarily interested in hewing to the template of a slasher-informed vengeful ghost story, bumping off Laura’s closest friends one at a time in spooky set pieces laden with jump scares. Laura’s pals are little more than hastily sketched clusters of attributes, and as such the hallucinations that Marina inflicts on them aren’t custom-tailored in any meaningful way. She just relentlessly pummels them with spectral shocks, reducing each person to a frazzled, hollow-eyed wreck who ultimately surrenders to the hypnotic lure of death. It’s an unimaginative but solid enough approach to the story, and Friend Request benefits from the director’s facility for said jump scares, which feature enjoyably off-kilter timing, potent sound design, and some creepy digital and makeup effects. It’s pedestrian as can be, but executed skillfully enough to be grisly fun rather than a dreary slog.

Nothing about Friend Request stands out as truly memorable, but there are stimulating flashes in the story and design that lend the proceedings some vigor, at least in the moment. The underlying occult conceit is admittedly clever, positioning the blank computer screen as the 21st century version of a diabolist’s black scrying mirror. The second half of the film essentially follows The Ring’s road map, as Laura and Kobe dig into Marina’s troubled history and try to determine the secret location where she filmed her suicide. Fortunately, these Nancy Drew passages compliment rather than water down the hallucinatory set pieces, and Verhoeven blessedly resists wedging a contrived, late film twist into the secrets that Laura uncovers. (There is a third act plot swerve, but it’s both plausible and neatly foreshadowed while still managing to shock.) The film makes liberal use of the animated pop-ups that have become a mainstay of post-iPhone filmmaking, but it does so with a fleet, almost impressionistic sensibility that doesn’t visually distract. Occasionally, the filmmakers even deliver some downright marvelous aesthetic touches, such as the way that Gary Go and Martin Todsharow’s score suggests the distinctive sound of cellular interference with audio equipment whenever Marina draws near.

When one moves beyond the proximal scares and formal polish and into the underlying thematic territory, however, Friend Request starts to unravel. Given the speed with which Laura’s online friends huffily abandon her, Verhoeven and his co-writers seem to be commenting on social media insta-outrage and the fickleness of the Internet mob, but what exactly that comment might be is anyone’s guess. The film’s overall ethos has a whiff of lazy cynicism. Broadly speaking, Friend Request seems to proffer a facile anti-technology pessimism, the same sort of tongue-clucking that drives countless, insipid “Are We Addicted to Social Media?” think pieces and (ironically) hand-wringing memes about Kids Today and their damn smartphones. Yet the film’s attempts to critique and satirize digital culture are clearly half-hearted, as if Verhoeven doesn’t really buy into this Luddite finger wagging, but is obliged to advance it because of his story’s fundamental premise. (The recent Ingrid Goes West is far more cunning and pitiless about pushing the curated lies of social media to their reductio ad absurdum limits, and it ultimately emerges as a much better horror film, if a stealth one.)

Cheap cynicism is easy enough to overlook in the horror genre, but the most distressing aspect of Friend Request is its absurdly blinkered treatment of anyone who seems strange, awkward, or non-conforming in some way. Verhoeven’s film poses, with a straight face, the notion that introverted weirdos are all deranged, damaged monsters who, if given half a chance, would eagerly use black magic to kill happy, successful, popular people. It’s petty high school bullshit of the crudest sort, rendered downright silly by the film’s conflation of the Movie Version of goth sub-culture (Skulls! Poe! Marilyn Manson!) with the darkest evil imaginable. Paradise Lost should have invalidated such nonsense forever, yet here it seems intended to elicit a shrug or even a nod of agreement.

What’s more, Friend Request advances that Laura’s original sin was not in spurning Marina, but in taking an interest in the clingy, creepy outcast at all. In the film’s conception, any kind of creative expression is a friendship red flag—unless, of course, it generates dollars, fame, and clicks. (It bears noting that Marina creates her animated videos primarily for herself in order to cope with horrible childhood trauma.) Art doesn't count, apparently, unless it's Shared. Ultimately, the film’s perhaps unintentional yet repugnant message is that one shouldn’t even acknowledge someone who lacks Instagram followers, because that person is almost certainly unstable.

Feminine Mystique: 'mother!'

[This post contains minor spoilers.]

Earlier this year, it seemed a certainty that Gore Verbinski’s lavish gothic nightmare A Cure for Wellness would be the weirdest wide release from a major studio in 2017, and probably for many years to come, given its dismal box office. As it happens, Wellness’ reign only lasted six months. Director Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting multiplex audience. It’s the kind of film that leaves the viewer dazed and fumbling for words, wondering how it was ever greenlit, let alone brought to life. It embodies the nervy, go-for-broke species of filmmaking that elicits excitement simply by existing. It is also utterly deranged, a work that comes perilously close to being unintentionally funny. For this writer, it did not, but it is perfectly understandable if some viewers gape in disbelief and irritation, muttering “Are you fucking kidding me?”

The less said about the plot, the better, so a sketch of the opening scenario must suffice. In a remote, sprawling house, a middle-aged poet (Javier Bardem) dwells with his wife (Jennifer Lawrence), who is at least twenty years his junior. (In the first of many touches that signal Aranofsky’s allegorical aims, these characters are never named. Taking a page for Antichrist, they are simply listed as “Him” and “Mother” in film’s credits.) Originally His childhood home, the house was mostly destroyed in a fire, but it’s since been rebuilt and refurbished in a faux-rustic style. This remodeling is due to the painstaking efforts of the Mother, who views it as her role to create an idyllic space for her husband’s work. There doesn’t seem to be much of said work going on, however. He disappears for long stretches in between bouts of staring impotently at a blank page, fountain pen in hand. She gives him apprehensive but encouraging smiles, and carries on with preparing meals, doing laundry, restoring furniture, and painting walls.

There are early signs that not all is as it seems in this bucolic world. Some are subtle, such as the curious absence of roads connecting the house to the outside world. (The surrounding landscape is simply a ring of green, rustling grass, giving the house the feeling of an isolated prairie homestead.) Other are less so, such as the Mother's repeated visions of a throbbing, heart-like organ deep within the walls of the house, or the rattling, plaster-loosening thud she hears behind a bricked-up niche in the cellar. Aronofsky gives these early scenes an unmistakable atmosphere of squirming horror. Something is wrong, but what that something might be is maddeningly indefinite, to both the viewer and to the Mother.

The film ruthlessly adheres to the Mother's viewpoint, and in light of the director’s 2010 feature Black Swan, the viewer is naturally inclined suspect that she may be an unreliable protagonist. Pointedly, the Mother suffers from ringing migraines that can only be relieved by imbibing a yellow powder dissolved in water, a solution that doesn’t resemble anything a doctor would prescribe in the 21st century. Nonetheless, it eventually becomes apparent that mother! is unfolding on a stage where the usual horror and thriller twists—she’s dreaming / dead / insane / a computer program / whatever—are rendered irrelevant. Aronofsky is working in the realm of Old Testament nightmare, and, befitting his po-faced storytelling style, he never once reveals his hand or cracks a grin. The optimal way to experience mother! is to assume that what one is seeing is “real,” no matter how batshit it becomes. (And hoo boy, does it ever…)

Eventually, the couple’s isolation is disrupted by the arrival of an older Man (Ed Harris), purportedly a surgeon in search of a bed and breakfast. The poet invites him to spend the night—without consulting with his wife, naturally—and soon the two men are conversing into the wee hours over drinks like old friends. Not incidentally, the Man confesses that he is a huge fan of the poet's work, and this bit of ego stroking is all the lubrication needed to embed the Man in the house, like a chain-smoking, ill-mannered tick. The next day his wife the Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, and she is similarly negligent, brusque, and presumptuous, with a twist of vodka-soaked WASPish venom. The mysterious presence of these strangers is plainly a source of anxiety for the Mother, who gradually grows to feel like an impotent trespasser in her own home. She is eyed contemptuously or outright ignored, and yet somehow, she always seems to be saddled with the work of cleaning up the guests’ heedless messes. (This too becomes a source of hallucinatory horror, as when she glimpses some fleshy Cronenbergian vermin lurking in the depths of a clogged toilet.) Unfortunately, the Man and Woman are only the first of many visitors who will invade the house.

That’s all that it seems prudent to say about “what happens” in mother!, in the plot sense. Increasingly, the film devolves into a symphony of nerve-wracking chaos, as a catalog of humanity’s ugliest impulses slithers and shreds and smashes its way into the house. The third act is one long, jaw-dropping descent into apocalyptic hell, as the Mother is battered bodily by waves of invasion and destruction. The final 30 minutes or so of the film are such an unhinged, uninterrupted spectacle of pandemonium, the viewer will find themselves afraid to blink.

Aronofsky draws inspiration from a range of psychological and supernatural horror films, including those directed by the likes of De Palma, del Toro, Kubrick, and the aforementioned Cronenberg. There’s more than a little of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls in mother!’s lineage, and dribbles of The Conjuring and its ilk as well. The most immediately salient influence, however, is undoubtedly Roman Polanski’s informal “Apartment Trilogy” of horror features: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant. Rosemary’s fingerprints are conspicuous enough that one of mother!’s poster designs is an explicit riff on the iconic poster for Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece, but Aronofsky’s feature touches on motifs and themes from all three films.

One component lifted from Polanski that is vital to mother!’s mood is the anxiety of losing control—not of one's self, but of one’s situation. Like Rosemary Woodhouse, Repulsion’s Carol, and The Tenant’s Trelvoksky, the Mother is reduced to a miserably passive role, swept along by the schemes and appetites of the people around her. However, where Polanski’s vulnerable protagonists are pursued and remolded by others, the Mother is simply ignored. Although mother! is an unabashedly phantasmagorical work, its surreal heights are underlain by a foundation of real-world anxieties. (Women’s anxieties specifically; more on that in a moment.) The film’s horror is rooted in impotence and invisibility: Much of mother! consists of Lawrence screaming herself hoarse at people who simply won’t listen. In isolation, many of the film’s scenes resemble archetypal nightmares about the challenge of asserting oneself and drawing boundaries: There were strangers in my house, eating my food and using my toilets and taking my things, and I shouted for them to leave, but no one paid any attention to me. (In this, the film resembles an inside-out revisionist take on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.)

Aronofsky’s film is so dense with potential allegorical readings, there will doubtlessly be some who accuse mother! of being a hodgepodge of vivid imagery that looks meaningful but doesn’t convey any coherent meaning. The validity of this criticism is undercut by the richness of any individual metaphor the viewer chooses to pursue. Different viewers will gaze into the pulsating depths of this dark prism and see different things, but every vision is stark and terrifying. The possible interpretations are manifold: the monotheistic God as self-absorbed sociopath; the history of human civilization compressed into two hours; the cyclical bedlam of pop culture consumption; or a lacerating portrait of an artist’s self-loathing, to name just a few. These and other readings are all fruitful veins of exploration. (It will fall to other writers to psychoanalyze the film’s seething disgust for the male artistic ego and its need for adulation.)

For this writer, the most evocative approach to mother! is a feminist one. (Confoundingly yet predictably, the film’s righteous loathing for the exploitation of women is already being willfully misconstrued as misogyny in some quarters.) Early in the film, Aronofsky devotes a significant amount of screen time to the Mother’s daily housework and long-term rehabbing projects. Creating the perfect home is manifestly a labor of love for her, but it’s a love that is ultimately channeled towards an (allegedly) Great Man. With almost impressionistic gestures, the film illustrates the colossal effort that the Mother puts into the four-course, Instagram-worthy meals she prepares. It then gracefully draws attention to the way that He swoops in, devours them, mutters his gratitude, and then flits away to devote more time to the writing that his is obviously not doing. No horror film in memory has scrutinized the unacknowledged, uncompensated physical and emotional labor of women with such remorseless resentment. It’s not a portrait of the artist as an abusive brute, but as an ordinary self-absorbed, negligent man.

Despite mother!’s mythic sensibility, the film’s depiction of gender roles is unexpectedly realist, not to mention bitterly critical. Remarkably, this element of modern socio-political commentary is not diminished by the film’s absorption with ghastly gothic motifs or Biblical symbolism. (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and other Old Testament dyads are frequently alluded to.) If anything, they lend mother! an added dose of “same as it ever was” pessimism. This sentiment is underlined by the way the film ultimately loops in on itself—much like The Tenant, as it happens—suggesting a never-ending cycle of exploitation.

Aronofksy’s film will likely be a deeply uncomfortable experience for some male viewers. Part of that discomfort is visceral, stemming from how closely the film follows the Mother’s viewpoint as she endures a marathon of psychological and physical mortification. (Reverse Maniac, one might call it.) However, as with Richard Yates’ blistering novel of midcentury discontent, Revolutionary Road, what truly disturbs about mother! is how easy it is to discern oneself in the entitled, churlish male characters. It’s psychologically repellent in a way that hurts, and it hurts because it contains a sliver of truth. In mother!’s nightmarish conception, patriarchy isn’t so much a despot as a gluttonous maw, devouring everything that women can give: their labor, support, attention, adulation, bodies, and children. When there’s nothing left, it tosses them aside and reaps all the rewards (and credit) for their invisible contributions. Male power is, counter-intuitively, portrayed as a lumbering succubus.

The sinewy intelligence of mother! lies in its astonishing capacity for nuance, despite its garish and gory metaphors. Underneath the film’s thick slathering of terror and rage, Aronofsky conveys the myriad complicating dynamics that make patriarchy a lumpy slurry of dispiriting grays rather than a black-and-white tale of male villainy. At various points, mother! touches on the way that women can be revered even as they are exploited; on women’s participation in and perpetuation of misogyny; and on the vicious, mercurial criticisms directed at women who are public figures. (Including celebrities like—wait for it—Jennifer Lawrence.)

None of this is to say that Aronofksy’s film doesn’t invite other, equally compelling readings. Nestled within mother! is a desolate parable about the birth, life, and death of works of art, to cite just one example, and that story dovetails with its feminist outlook in evocative ways. Nor is it the case that a feminist interpretation is entirely fitting. There are a handful of frustrating gestures that undercut this reading, such as the Mother’s eventual willingness to play the role of a selfless, self-annihilating martyr. What’s so stimulating about mother! is that it invites this sort of reflection rather than demanding a clear-cut reaction. Its ideas are emergent rather than painted-on, which makes it doubly frustrating that it’s exactly the sort of film that will inevitably (and inaccurately) labeled as pretentious. Pretense implies an arrogant intellectual posturing that weakens a film’s principal obligation to tell a compelling story. mother! is just the opposite. In the moment, it's a riveting work of cinema that rattles the senses. In the days and weeks that follow, it urges the viewer to ruminate on what exactly they glimpsed in that whirlwind of blood and fire.

Send in the Clown: 'It'

Pronouncing that a book is “unfilmable” is a dicey move, if only because it’s proven to be such a flimsy label. Over the decades, allegedly intractable works ranging from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch have inevitably yielded to filmmakers who found an appropriate, often unconventional angle of approach for the material. If such eccentric “anti-novels” can be molded into narrative cinema, then certainly an evocative pulp horror masterpiece like Stephen King’s It can make the leap from book to screen. Nonetheless, the novel form is so essential to the potency of It as a redolent, rambling work of doelful fiction, any attempt to adapt the story to film faces an uphill battle.

Of course, King’s novel has been adapted, first as a two-part television miniseries originally broadcast on ABC in 1990 and now as a two-part theatrical feature helmed by Argentine director Andrés Muschietti. However, it is arguable whether either work constitutes a successful adaptation of King’s tale. The question is not whether It’s bulk can be squeezed into three or four hours of cinematic storytelling, but whether one should. A colorable argument could be made that the deformations necessary to achieve this translation necessarily turn the story into something markedly divergent (Not-It?). The debacle surrounding The Lawnmower Man—wherein a pagan-themed short story penned by King was rather bafflingly transmogrified into a hokey science-fiction thriller—illustrates that a shared title is no guarantee that the source material will be even remotely honored by the filmmaker.

Certainly, director Tommy Lee Wallace’s three-hour 1990 telefilm was generally faithful to the novel while also making quite an unforgivable hash out of it. The blame can’t be laid entirely at the feet of Wallace and co-writer Lawrence D. Cohen, however. The series was positioned to fail from the beginning, given its constraints: the PG-13-level content restrictions of network television; a budget that was far too meager to fulfill the story’s ambitious scope; the limits of visual effects technology in 1990; and the commercial necessity of appealing to a mainstream prime-time audience assembled in their living rooms.

Purely in terms of polish, Muschietti’s film is playing in a league several levels above that of the 1990 miniseries. The formal aspects of It’s latest incarnation—particularly the cinematography, production design, and visual effects—are executed at the high level one expects of a wide release horror film based on a cherished property. The performances are also superior, anchored by a charismatic cast of child actors whose work here ranges from solid to downright dazzling. However, these assets do not necessarily equate to a first-rate adaptation. In terms of translating the staggering emotional robustness of King’s masterwork, Muschietti’s It is a double rather than a home run, but still a heartfelt, handsome, and feverishly spooky work of cinema.

The Stand or the Dark Tower series are perhaps more likely to be cited as Stephen King’s magnum opus, but It is a singular achievement, arguably the closest the author has ever come to bridging the divide between a genre lit page-turner and the Great American Novel. Fundamentally, It is a midnight monster movie as a Bildungsroman. Over the course of the summer of 1958, seven 11-year-old misfits in the town of Derry, Maine develop a friendship. Gradually, the members of this self-styled “Loser’s Club” of tween outcasts discern that they are each being terrorized by the same shape-shifting monster, an entity that feeds on fear. Eventually, the Losers delve into the creature’s subterranean lair and destroy it, or so they believe. Here King effectively puts the standard coming-of-age tale on pause for 27 years, as the Losers grow into successful (yet troubled) adulthoods, move away, and gradually forget their harrowing experience. Eventually, the monster resurfaces, compelling the now middle-aged Losers to return to Derry and reunite, with the goal of eradicating the malevolent “It” for good. (There is, needless to say, quite a bit of subtext in King’s novel regarding the arrested development and unsettled traumas of the Boomer generation.)

Despite its extensive cast of characters, recurrent digressions, and 1,000-plus-page length, It is not truly a sprawling epic in the same vein as The Stand. Most of the novel’s events unfold over a relatively short period (one summer in 1958 and a few days in 1985), and the action is confined primarily to Derry and its surroundings. However, the scale of the book feels enormous, in the same way that a momentous summer vacation can dilate in one’s memories until it achieves a Tolkien-level mythic density and moral starkness.

In part, this is due to King’s customary attentiveness to the nuances of setting—more evocative in It than anywhere else in his work—as well as his fulsome yet agile engagement with the points-of-view of secondary and tertiary characters. It’s most conspicuous formal feature, however, is doubtlessly its hopscotching structure. The author leaps back and forth in the story’s chronology, entwining the past and present in a way that not only reflects the psychological realities of trauma, but also examines the bizarre gestalt of reverence and denial that characterizes American attitudes towards history.

This is one rare respect in which the 1990 miniseries more closely follows the source material than does Muschietti’s film. Opting for the most blunt and reductive approach to such a massive story, Warner Bros. has elected to split the novel’s events into two discrete halves, one depicting the Losers as children, and one revisiting them as adults. This straightaway removes one of the novel’s most distinguishing features, although given the clumsy way the prior adaptation handled the two timelines, perhaps it’s for the best.

The first of the new It films is accordingly the story of the Losers’ initial confrontation with Derry’s protean boogeyman. The screenplay pushes these events forward from 1958 to 1989, which allows the studio to set the second feature film in the present day. (A-level production design naturally being cheaper for one period piece than for two such films.) Not incidentally, this approach also places the first film squarely within the formative years of today’s middle-aged viewers, the exact cohort that snuck first-edition copies of the notoriously violent and sexually explicit It off their parents’ bookshelves.

Muschietti is blessed with a sharp ensemble of child actors in the roles of the seven Losers: lanky stutterer Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), the group’s informal leader; home-schooled African-American farm boy Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs); obese, bookish “new kid” Ben Hanscomb (Jeremy Ray Taylor); scrawny, hypochondriac Eddy Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer); impoverished tomboy Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis); bespectacled wiseass Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard); and rabbi’s son Stan Uris (Wyatt Oleff), the group’s anxious skeptic. As the nominal lead and the sole Loser with a personal vendetta against It—the creature abducted his little brother George one year prior—Lieberher's Bill is given more screen time than the others. Unfortunately, consistent with the novel and the 1990 miniseries, Mike and Stan are not as well-characterized as the other five Losers, and Jacobs and Oleff consequently don’t leave a strong impression, through no particular fault of their own. That said, there isn’t an obvious weak link in the bunch, performance-wise, although there are some standouts. Wolfhard absolutely runs away with every ensemble scene, tossing profanity-strewn insults and dirty jokes in the exact manner of a junior high class clown who’s trying a bit too hard. Lillis is the real discovery, however, a sparkling presence who shifts smoothly and convincingly between Beverly’s two poles: sharp-tongued, quick-witted tough girl and cringing, conciliatory abuse victim.

The Losers are It’s heart and soul, but the star of the show is, of course, Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård), the grease-painted shape that It seems to prefer when hunting Derry’s children. The new film’s frilly, 19th-century design for Pennywise is far afield from the Bozo-like figure described in the novel and featured in the miniseries. There’s a little Pagliacci and commedia dell'arte in the costume as well, and the overall impression is distinctly fusty and effeminate, as though Pennywise were a life-sized doll who had clambered from some Victorian child’s toy chest. Physiologically, there is something distressingly abnormal about the clown, as evinced by his bulbous forehead, rodent overbite, and unruly eyes that never quite seem to follow each other perfectly. In short, he’s creepy as hell, but he also seems a bit too obviously designed to be creepy, which would seem to undercut the entire point of a “friendly clown” façade. In short, this Pennywise looks like a horror movie perversion of a clown, not an actual clown that one might find twisting balloon animals at a fair. Just as it’s difficult to imagine any little girl voluntarily choosing to play with the Annabelle doll, one can’t envision any right-minded child approaching Skarsgård’s Pennywise, unless they were dragged there kicking and screaming.

Skarsgård’s performance will inevitably be compared to that of Tim Curry, who portrayed Pennywise in the 1990 miniseries, but their takes on the character are so divergent it’s hard to assess them side-by-side. Curry’s approach to the clown was devilishly campy but perhaps too human, his croaky threats sometimes wandering away from “puffed-up Disney villain” and into “angry, abusive gym teacher.” In contrast, Skarsgård portrays Pennywise as a restless bundle of childish giggling, snorting, and muttering, as though he were a demonic Little Lord Fauntleroy working himself into a fit over a promised sweet (or a kitten to burn). It’s such an outrageously high-strung performance that it takes a minute or two for the viewer to attune themselves to Skarsgård’s unstable wavelength.

This sort of over-the-top portrayal pays unexpected dividends, however, when one starts to pick up on the subtleties that Skarsgård doodles between the lines. At times, Pennywise abruptly seems to glaze over or lose track of what he is saying, as though he had gone into momentary mental vapor-lock. It’s the huge red, toothy smile that truly unnerves, however. It mostly alternates between a naughty-boy leer and a manic Joker grin, but occasionally something more disturbing peeks through, as though an alien were attempting a hideous approximation of a human smile. Such cues suggest that for all It’s predatory cunning and supernatural insight into its victims’ fears, there is some elusive aspect of humanity that It is not able to emulate.

The film’s screenplay is credited to Gary Dauberman, Chase Palmer, and Cary Fukunaga, the latter attached to direct until he allegedly parted ways with the studio over that old chestnut, creative differences. However, the result is still a snug story, lacking the palpable seams that would indicate numerous script overhauls. If anything, It’s most conspicuous flaw is that it feels too streamlined, pitilessly compressing events that took hundreds of pages to unspool in King’s novel. The author’s notorious verbosity notwithstanding, the time spent slowly steeping in the exuberant and harrowed lives of the Losers is essential to the book’s appeal. The reader grows to know and love this gaggle of misfit kids—and then to fear that, for all their bravery and planning, they are still alarmingly outmatched by the monster.

In comparison, Muschietti’s film has expurgated the story to the point that its emotional foundations feel noticeably undernourished. The plot isn’t perfunctory so much as hasty and graceless, with an outline that could be scrawled out on a cocktail napkin. The film introduces the Losers, and then serves up roughly one scary set piece per kid. They quickly piece together what’s going on, and thereafter head into the sewers to slay the proverbial dragon. Intertitles attest that the film’s events take place over three or four months, but there doesn’t seem to be any practical reason It should take that long to unfold. Given the simplicity of the film’s A to B to C trajectory and the ruthlessness of the pruning performed on the source material, it’s a two-week story, tops. Of course, it would have been preferable if the filmmakers simply hadn’t condensed the plot so aggressively to begin with. One can envision a cinematic adaptation that would allow King’s story the necessary breathing room to achieve its full emotional and spiritual potential, but that film is an 8- or 12-hour limited series, rather than a pair of theatrical features.

Some of the minor revisions made in the transition from novel to screenplay are puzzling. The Losers are one or two years older than they are in the book, a change that slightly but meaningfully alters the story’s wistful tone, not to mention the dynamic between Beverly and the boys. Similarly, the film leans a bit more strongly than the novel did on the unspoken romantic triangle between Bill, Beverly, and Ben. The film does not derive any discernible benefit from such alterations to King’ story, which raises the question as to why they were made in the first place.

(The only excision that is obligatory is the removal of the so-called “kiddie-kiddie-bang-bang”: the notorious, gratuitous, thankfully non-explicit passage in which 11-year-old [!] Beverly decides, apropos of nothing, to have sex with each of the other Losers. It’s a horribly misconceived scene of jaw-dropping bad taste, pushing King’s novel dangerously into child pornography territory.)

While It’s story weaknesses are hardly insignificant, Muschietti and his crew unequivocally deliver when it comes to horror fundamentals. The creepy, rattling set pieces in which Pennywise takes repulsive delight in scaring the absolute beejeezus out of the Losers are terrific stuff. Strictly speaking, these sequences aren’t exactly scary. A seasoned horror aficionado will see every jump coming, and, with a few exceptions, the film doesn’t employ any tricks that haven’t been used before, in countless monster flicks and ghost stories.

What’s exceptional about It is that the film manages to make it scares such delicious fun, in the style of a first-rate haunted house. Appropriately enough, the overall tone of Pennywise’s approach is that of the over-enthusiastic player in a R-rated carnival funhouse. The Losers themselves are unequivocally terrified by It’s illusions, which often reflect their deepest fears. However, the viewer’s reaction is likely to be anxious tittering and exhilarated screams, accompanied by the vaguely pleasurable gooseflesh that a spooky campfire story elicits. The central achievement of Muschietti’s film is that manages to be a thoroughly entertaining horror tale without ever losing the novel’s essential atmosphere of hyper-real childhood dread and suffering.

This version of It is very much in the vein of Sam Raimi and Tim Burton, on those occasions when their work wriggles ambiguously in the murky space between horror and comedy. A scene where Ben is chased through the stacks of the Derry library by the headless, smoldering corpse of a child is pure Evil Dead in the best possible way, in that the viewer doesn’t know whether to laugh nervously or scream delightedly at the apparition’s herky-jerky movements. This slightly ridiculous, even kooky sensibility doesn’t detract from the film in the least. Indeed, it’s perfectly aligned with the way that an intense nightmare inevitably sounds silly when the dreamer later tries to explain why it undid them so thoroughly.

Funhouse scares are It’s most obvious strength, but it isn’t the only game the film knows how to play. Muschietti gradually allows a more explicitly alien horror to peek through the literal cracks in Pennywise’s mask, most memorably glimpsed in the gaping, needle-toothed Lovecraftian maw that he sometimes reveals. The film’s R rating allows Muschietti to indulge in some striking gore—as well as visceral violence perpetrated against children, normally a horror taboo—but what lingers most intensely is the terror of the grotesque. Pennywise is consistently creepy when on screen, but his most searing moments occur late in the film, when his façade begins to peel away in eruptions of spasmodic limbs, noxious excretions, and blubbering screeches. The Losers’ final confrontation with It echoes The Thing, The Fly, and even Terminator 2, as Pennywise oozes and shudders through his numerous forms, some of them previously seen by the kids and some suggesting more monstrous, unfamiliar morphologies.

It generally relies on standard horror film tropes—scary clowns, decrepit houses, fetid sewers, shambling corpses—although it executes those familiar elements with prodigious style. Much of the credit should go to Korean cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, a frequent collaborator with Chan-wook Park. Granted, nothing in It approaches the dazzling visuals of Park’s best features. After last year’s sensual, phantasmagoric The Handmaiden, also shot by Chung, Muschietti’s film almost looks drab. However, virtually every shot in It is a handsomely composed little marvel, whether it’s a sun-kissed snapshot of summer horseplay or a trembling look down a moldering subterranean passage.

Like Muschetti’s dour, muddled first feature, Mama, the film relies a little too much on a dank, putrefied aesthetic, but at least here it’s justified (Pennywise is a sewer monster, after all), and blessedly balanced with the warm, vitalizing colors of a New England summer. Although Muschietti and Chung are generally dependent on King’s novel for their set pieces, they find ways to visualize some key elements (e.g., the mesmerizing “deadlights” that Pennywise controls) in innovative ways. Occasionally, they even discover a strikingly original vista. Chief among these is Pennywise’s lair, a cavernous vault of gothic rot with a breathtaking centerpiece straight out of Guillermo del Toro’s twisted imagination. Around a hundred-foot tower composed of waterlogged childhood detritus—clothes, toys, books, bikes—a slow-motion maelstrom of little bodies float in midair, a trophy display for Pennywise’s discarded, fear-sapped victims. It’s the kind of chilling, spectacular image that almost justifies this cinematic adaptation of It all on its own.

Fetal Infraction: Prevenge

Pregnancy has been a vital plot element in horror cinema for decades—at least going back to Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned in 1960—but there are precious few horror films that are specifically concerned with the anxieties that attend the nine months of human gestation. The ur-text for this rare species of picture is inarguably Rosemary’s Baby, which rather ingeniously mingles two nominally contradictory fears. On one hand is Rosemary's anxiety that motherhood will mutate her formerly vibrant life into one of drudgery and insipidness. On the other is her uneasiness about her child’s well-being, which she comes to jealously regard as her exclusive purview, the doting of Satanic cultists notwithstanding.

Other horror features have occasionally exploited adjacent emotional territory with mixed results, although a few relatively recent films such as Inside and Proxy have discovered novel and harrowing natal angles to explore. What most decisively distinguishes Alice Lowe’s new entry in this narrow subgenre is that, like Roman Polanski’s demonic 1968 thriller, the deliciously-titled Prevenge is the rare film that addresses the experience of pregnancy with genuine depth and shrewdness. Indeed, it might be the first horror feature to explicitly tackle gestation as a psychological, emotional, and hormonal phenomenon. The director’s gender is not incidental to this, for while A-list male filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott have burrowed into the body horror potential of reproduction, Lowe comprehends that the mental mutations unleashed by pregnancy are just as fucked up.

Prevenge’s fascinating anti-heroine is Ruth (Lowe), a Welsh woman who is in the third trimester with her first child, a girl. Ruth is also a recent widow, her husband Matt (Marc Bessant) having perished in a gruesome rock climbing accident shortly after she learned of her pregnancy. This tragedy has left Ruth in an understandable morass of grief and rage; reluctant to carry on with her life and ambivalent about bringing a child into the world, even if that baby is the last physical remnant of her late husband.

Whatever resolve Ruth has retained is devoted entirely to cold-blooded murder. The film’s opening scene follows her as she talks her way into the back room of an exotic pet store and then slits the throat of shop’s manager with a handy boning knife. The film coyly and rather needlessly withholds the full story behind Ruth’s kill list until the final stretch, but as the title clearly signals, her murderous spree is not some random, deranged act of bloodletting. Ruth has a plan; her intended targets are inscribed in a notebook and embellished with the angry doodles of a goth teen’s poetry journal.

This might have been the stuff of a faux-feminist vigilante thriller (Mommy’s Death Wish?) but Prevenge’s maybe-supernatural hook is what elevates the film into sharply-observed psychological horror. It turns out that Ruth’s unborn child is goading her into the murders, and while the baby girl-to-be doesn’t seem to be outright directing or masterminding its mother’s crimes, it is playing the part of the devil on her shoulder (or in her womb, in this case). Plot-wise, Prevenge resembles any number of dubiously righteous R-rated revenge stories, but the relentless telepathic encouragement from the baby is the irresistible perversity that powers the film.

Lowe herself voices the fetus, delivering her lines in a squeaky, breathy coo that renders its misanthropic, profanity-laden incitements even more disturbing. There’s something uniquely unsettling about hearing the mutant spawn of Joanna Newsom and Moaning Myrtle seethe, Kill Bill-style, about the cunts and dicks it believes are responsible for the death of its father. “You see?,” the child sneers as an especially obnoxious victim obligingly reveals his boundless selfishness, “These are the sort of people we’re dealing with.”

Of course, only Ruth can hear her baby’s provocations, which—along with the fact that Lowe is essentially talking to herself—firmly sets Prevenge in the realm of the unreliable protagonist. Like Curtis in Jeff Nichols’ masterwork Take Shelter, Ruth is acutely aware that she may be losing her mind, but that cognizance only amplifies the horror of her situation. The decision to follow Ruth’s viewpoint exclusively, and with an almost claustrophobic intensity, augments the oppressive sensation that the viewer is trapped along with her, unable to shut out the bloodthirsty pestering of the thing growing in her womb. This, ultimately, is the dominant fear that pulses icily through the film: The fear of mental invasion, of not knowing if one’s thoughts are one’s own. For any woman who has experienced pregnancy-related bouts of cravings, sensitivities, distraction, forgetfulness, anxiety, depression, and more severe mental health symptoms, such fears are likely all too familiar.

Prevenge reveals little about Ruth’s pre-widowed career or living situation; her killing spree is pointedly planned and carried out from the anonymity of a Cardiff hotel room. The only remnants of her old life are the baby and her untrammeled rage towards the people she blames for her spouse’s demise—although she admittedly also seems to despise humanity in general. What value Ruth ascribes to her child is tainted by maternal fears. Instead of focusing on the joys that life with her new daughter will bring her after her bloody work is done, Ruth can only fume with panic at the thought of losing her child to vague malefactors.

When her midwife (Jo Hartley) suggests bringing in a social services worker to help Ruth address the strain of grieving while preparing for motherhood, she regards this as the first step towards a bureaucrat snatching her baby from her breast. The remarkable sophistication of Lowe’s screenplay and performance is revealed in this sort of complex emotional gesture. In a single passage Lowe succeeds in eliciting diverse and distinct responses from the viewer: pity at Ruth’s losses and her escalating mental breakdown; concern for a child about to arrive into the arms of a violent, unbalanced parent; and sympathy for Ruth’s plight as a solitary woman navigating a dehumanizing modern world still beholden to patriarchy. The latter is embodied in the film’s steady sensitivity to the countless little assumptions, hostilities, and humiliations that mothers-to-be are forced to endure, down to the uninvited hand of another person on Ruth’s swollen abdomen.

Lowe keeps any compassion the viewer might develop for her anti-heroine from growing too substantial through liberal use of black humor. She portrays Ruth as a woman with the dry, indiscriminate contempt of a weary stand-up comedian, just unpleasant enough that, even apart from mass murder, she seems like something of a tactless asshole. She has a compulsion for baldly disrespecting people in an off-handed way, such that it often takes the listener a few beats to realize that they should be insulted. The film’s dirty secret is that Ruth’s fetus doesn’t have to push all that hard to get her to lash out at the world. Her self-consciousness of her victim status combined with a lifetime of enculturation in the sanctity of motherhood burnishes her sense of self-righteous wrath. When a frightened victim attempts to stall her by gently observing, “You’re grieving,” she becomes piqued, enunciating mockingly, “I’m not greev-ing. I’m ges-tayt-ing!”

Visually and aurally, the film is more workmanlike than striking, befitting a lowish-budget indie shot on video in a matter of weeks. There are flashes of sensory richness in the film’s moody color correction and in the urgent, slightly threatening electronic score by Pablo Clements and James Griffith. Just as often, however, the film fumbles aesthetically, such as with cinematographer Ryan Eddleston’s dependence on handheld shots with sloppy framing and erratic focus.

That said, the film’s appeal lies in Lowe’s overall direction, writing, and performance, and those are sufficiently imposing that concerns about Prevenge’s formal sturdiness fall away. Along with the film’s general sensitivity to the psychological and societal nuances of expectant mothers’ experiences, what most impresses is Lowe’s facility for keeping the film dangerously off-kilter in terms of its sympathies. Given that she was in fact pregnant when she made Prevenge, these achievements are hardly surprising. While there are perils in asserting that “a man could not have made this film,” it’s undeniable that a male-directed Prevenge wouldn’t have turned out to be such a wicked, multi-faceted pleasure. Arguably, an auteur who hasn’t experienced a hostile takeover of their mind and body by a little parasitic pseudo-person would have delivered a far less stimulating horror picture.

You Don’t Know Why, But You’re Dying to Try: The Lure

Simply being a flashy, splashy novelty that defies categorization won’t carry a film to greatness all on its own, but as Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s stupefying feature debut The Lure illustrates, it can still take a film damn far. At the most reductive level, The Lure is a Mermaid Movie, but even that characterization is misleading, as it inevitably invites comparisons to Splash and The Little Mermaid (but hopefully not Aquamarine). Granted, the plot of Smoczynska’s film borrows from the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale only slightly less freely than did Disney’s 1989 animated feature. Furthermore, The Lure unmistakably alludes to Ron Howard’s 1984 fantasy romcom in certain shots. Substantively, however, Smoczynska’s film is not merely a different creature than its mermaid movie antecedents, but a wholly unique specimen.

The surest sign that The Lure is something bracingly imaginative is that it’s exceedingly challenging to describe exactly what the hell kind of film it is. Many of its vividly realized elements are taken directly from horror cinema, but the film is not scary in the least. It is only a romance in the loosest sense, given how disinterested it is in the emotional contours of its central romantic relationship. What little comedy exists in the film is distinctly dry and eccentric, less a product of the writing or performances than of some modestly amusing choices in visual composition and production design. The most accurate genre descriptor might be musical, as The Lure includes both Chicago-style diegetic performances—much of the film takes place in a Warsaw burlesque club in the 1980s—as well as more fantastical, non-diegetic numbers. Unquestionably, the tone of the film is damn slippery. Its closest cinematic kin might be the more demented yet po-faced subspecies of rock operas like Phantom of the Paradise, The Apple, and Repo! The Genetic Opera, although there’s also unmistakably some Cabaret in Robert Bolesto’s screenplay.

The story concerns two curious mermaid chanteuses, Golden (Michalina Olszcanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who venture onto land to immerse themselves in Warsaw’s decadent nightlife in the final, chaotic decade of the Polish People’s Republic. Their entry point into this world is the Fig-n’-Dates, the house musical act at a popular and slightly shady burlesque club. The band includes singer and keyboardist Wokalistka (Kinga Preis), drummer Perkusista (Andrzej Knopka), and bassist Mietek (Jakub Gierszal). It is Mietek’s acoustic guitar noodling while on a moonlit beach that initially draws Golden and Silver into this glittery, unsavory world. It’s also the young and handsome bassist that unsurprisingly upsets the bond between the two mermaids—the film is unclear on whether Golden and Silver are biological sisters—and threatens to derail their vague plans to travel to America.

Distilled down to its raw elements, The Lure’s plot is a standard-issue fairy tale in the romantic tragedy vein, although Bolesto and Smoczynska are to be commended for privileging the Grimmer aspects of such stories. The mermaids’ tails are unexpectedly grotesque appendages: enormous masses of muscle covered in grayish-brown scales and spines, more befitting a mudskipper than a tropical, coral-dwelling fish. Golden and Silver can assume a bipedal form—which disconcertingly lacks both vagina and anus—but a sprinkle of water will revert them to their true form. Most ghoulishly, the mermaids have a taste for human flesh, and while it is not portrayed as a necessity for their survival, this hunger for fresh prey proves to be a vexing distraction. (This, combined with the mermaids’ frequent nudity, unavoidably recalls the late Tobe Hooper’s “naked space vampire” spectacle Lifeforce.)

The Lure’s most conspicuous weakness is its narrative, in part due to Smoczynska’s refusal to settle on a single character for the film’s point-of-view. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if The Lure were merely switching back and forth between the perspectives of Golden and Silver, treating them as dual protagonists who experience the human world in subtly yet meaningfully different ways. However, Smoczynska seems to believe that the film’s secondary and tertiary characters, particularly the other members of the Fig-n’-Dates, also warrant a generous helping of screen time. While these characters might be compelling or at least modestly entertaining, the film doesn’t provide much in the way of story-based or thematic rationale for its digressions to check in on them. It’s most noticeable in the case of Wokalistka, whose cluster of middle-age anxieties regarding her looks, livelihood, and latent maternal urges is a source of fascination for Smoczynska, even though it does little to enrich the film’s story.

A related issue is the preponderance of extraneous subplots. One of these involves another dilettante mythical sea creature, Tryton (Marcin Kowalczyk), who is posing as the lead vocalist in a heavy metal band. (Not incidentally,  the scars from his amputated horns are less noticeable in that music scene.) He seems to be taken with Golden, and invites her to sing at one of his group’s performances, but thereafter his storyline just peters out. Ditto Golden’s cat-and-mouse games with the police detective investigating the recent spate of riverside murders. This rivalry abruptly twists into a heated mutual sexual infatuation, and is then abandoned by the film just as quickly.

In one seemingly pivotal passage, the human members of the nightclub's band come to blows over what appears to be a romantic rivalry, but is mainly attributable to some sort of lethal poisoning. They are saved from this toxin by one of the club’s burlesque singers, who administers an intravenous antidote while crooning them back to consciousness. Or something. Between the confusing editing and Smoczynska’s generally sloppy storytelling, it’s unclear what the hell is going on and what this scene’s relevance is to the rest of the plot. It’s tempting to hand-wave away this sort of apparent clumsiness as an expression of The Lure’s more surrealist inclinations. However, such excuses disregard how expertly attuned the film's surrealism is to the distinctive vibe of an acid rock opera. It’s kitschy, fanciful, and charmingly weird rather than outright absurdist, which just makes the fatally muddled passages even more frustrating.

Fortunately, The Lure is such a bottomless source of dazzling style, it ultimately doesn’t matter that the plot is hazy and careless, or that Golden and Silver are portrayed without much psychological complexity. (In the film’s favor, they are cold-blooded creatures of legend, and therefore it seems appropriate that they are depicted as simultaneously unworldly and unfathomable.) The Lure is a story of simple-minded longings complicated by disobliging reality. However, the sort of unabashed pathos that invigorates most musicals isn’t a part of the film’s arsenal. Smoczynska is more attentive to style than to substance, but unlike, say, Moulin Rouge!, her film doesn’t compensate for its garish shallowness by diving headfirst into gooey, soaring emotion. Instead, the director maintains a bit of distance from her characters, preferring to allow the story’s mythical resonance, redolent design, and funky energy to do the heavy lifting. In short, the film might be light on genuine heart, but it boasts oodles of personality.

In this, The Lure is a somewhat startling success. Even though it has hardly any likable characters—Silver comes closest, but her girlish naiveté is more pitiable than charming—it’s nonetheless a preposterously fun film, drunk on both the dissolute glitziness of its setting and the broad potential of color, motion, and music. The Polish lyrics might sound a little awkward to American ears at first, but halfway through the first big musical number, the viewer will likely find themselves grooving on the distinctive Slavic rhythms and rhymes. This, ultimately, is what powers The Lure, in terms of both narrative and theme: the potent black magic of song. Perhaps it’s a bit on the nose for a film about supernatural sirens to revel in the contagious power of pop tunes, but no one ever has accused musicals of being a subtle genre. Smoczynska often uses a whale-like tone to indicate that the mermaids are working their mind-control mojo on a human. However, she pointedly leaves it ambiguous whether any literal magic is involved when, say, Golden and Silver’s Blade Runner-themed synth-pop number coerces everyone in the club, wait staff included, to unite in a gyrating throng on the dance floor.

Visually speaking, The Lure is a marvelously vibrant film, without descending into the kind of mannered sterility that sometimes characterizes self-conscious European art-horror fare. Smoczynska and her cinematographer Jakub Kijowski at times flirt with overly familiar aesthetic modes—late 90s nu metal music video here, faux-De Palma erotic thriller there—but they flit so weightlessly from one stylistic approach to the next that it feels more like exuberant sampling than triteness. Fittingly for a film that centers on the fleshy yet otherworldly sensuality of a pair of aquatic demon-nymphs, The Lure is visually balanced at the intersection of dingy urban verisimilitude and dreamy, bubbly illusion. The film’s production design possesses an appealing lived-in grubbiness that feels exactly right for its setting, while also lacking the historical self-consciousness that could have made it distracting. Strictly speaking, it’s not realistic, but unlike, say the over-elaborate East Berlin chic of the recent Atomic Blonde, it feels unforced. The burlesque club is a singular wonder of understated design, glittery and modern but revealing its late-period Eastern Bloc provenance in the slightly chintzy materials and haphazardly planned spaces. The flamboyant music fashion is likewise evocative, from the Fig-n’-Dates’ white-on-white suits and skinny ties to the black leather, chrome spikes, and ragged fishnets at Tryton’s punk-tinged metal show. (Nothing, however, tops Wokalistka’s curly, strawberry blonde Donna Summers wig.)

Meanwhile, Smoczynska often juxtaposes the neon glam and Communist gloom with a perverse sensibility drawn from the film’s horror pedigree. There’s more than a little David Cronenberg in the mermaids’ repulsive, amphibious morphology, but the film’s dominant mode is a mélange of the gothic and the gorehound. This is hardly surprising when the film’s monsters blend the characteristics of cinematic vampires and werewolves, but what makes The Lure’s imagery linger is the unpredictable ways that it expresses its weird gestalt of genre tropes.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than when Silver visits a black-market surgeon to have her fish tail amputated and replaced with a human donor’s legs. The scenario is a ludicrous, even by the standards of the film’s fantasy logic, but Smoczynska discerns its potent cinematic potential. And so, she delivers: Silver lies on a bed of chipped ice like a tuna steak, her body bisected horizontally just above the navel, her intestines spilling from her torso, surgeons milling around her, as she sings softly and longingly about the land-bound life that she imagines will bring her love and happiness. Brothers Grimm eat your hearts out.

I Grab My Pen and I Write Out a List: Death Note

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers. Updated 8/28/17.]

One of the criticisms that has been directed at Netflix’s numerous original series is that they sometimes feel needlessly drawn out to a dozen or more episodes, when roughly half of that number would have sufficed to tell the same story. This results in lots of sluggish mid-season wheel-spinning and aimless wandering through fruitless subplots, all with the evident goal of getting binge-watchers psychologically invested for the long haul. It’s the sunk cost fallacy as applied to pop culture consumption: A viewer who has devoted 12 hours to Season 1 is more likely to feel obligated to stick around for Season 2.

Netflix’s original horror feature Death Note—adapted from the manga series of the same name by writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata—has the opposite problem. It’s at least 12 hours of story crammed into 100 disjointed minutes that never allow a single plot beat to steep or simmer for even a moment. It charges through its story with the vaguely annoyed, half-assed attitude of an 7th-grade English student rushing through a presentation that they already know they’re going to fail. Much of the film has the unmistakable air of a slapdash assignment, where reductive boxes are dutifully checked to attest that, yes, this is a Death Note film, but without any regard for whether the assembled result makes a lick of sense.

It didn’t have to be that way, had Netflix at given Death Note the running time it needed to properly thrive. Obliged to not only Americanize Ohba’s epic-length comic series but also distill it down to less than two hours, the screenwriters—Jeremey Slater and brothers Charley and Vlas Parlapanides—were essentially set up to fail. It’s plausible that no one could have turned a Death Note adaptation with those parameters into a success, but the involvement of Slater, who scratched out the dog-awful The Lazarus Effect, certainly didn’t help.

The Death Note manga and its anime adaptation are deeply embedded in Japanese folk and religious traditions, but an American version of the story wasn’t necessarily a non-starter. No one ever lobbed credible whitewashing accusations at The Ring or The Departed, after all, and they actually managed to outshine their Japanese and Hong Kong antecedents, respectively. Picking up a story and moving it whole cloth to a different time, place, or cultural context is standard high-concept gimmicky. Shakespeare companies are the undisputed masters of this sort of milieu swapping, but Japanese director Akira Kurosawa might be cinema’s most famous practitioner. (He’s even been on both ends of this phenomenon, adapting Western stories and then being adapted in the West himself.) Still, any adaptation or remake needs to bring something original to the table: an approach or perspective that enriches the source material, or at least takes it in a heretofore unexplored direction. This is especially the case when it comes to non-white source material that is adapted into a white context, given the colonial-adjacent history of white culture swiping any exploitable non-white bauble that catches its eye.

Netflix’s Death Note is a big fat failure in this respect, as it awkwardly attempts to chart a middle way that comes off as lazy rather than sensitive. Ironically, the film ultimately doesn’t go far enough in its Americanization efforts, inexplicably retaining the manga’s Japanese death spirit (shinigami) villain and then re-embellishing the transplanted story with Japanese trimmings. Conversely, the Seattle setting just feels like a hideously generic “American city,” lacking any sense of regional character, economic history, or demographic identity. Death Note is accordingly the worst of all possible worlds: a white film that distractingly reminds the viewer of its non-white origins at every turn, while also refusing to take advantage of its cosmopolitan American setting to do something original with Ohba’s story.

In its favor, Death Note doesn’t dick around with unnecessary narrative ballast: A few minutes into the film, emo-bookish high school student Light (Matt Wolff) has come into possession of the titular artifact, an ancient journal inscribed with dozens of rules and a long list of names. (The book literally falls out of the sky, a cheeky, parsimonious gesture that puts the relic in Light’s hands without the need for a convoluted backstory.) After a few minutes more, the death demon Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe and physically performed by Jason Liles) appears and explains to how the Death Note works. If Light writes a person’s name in the book while visualizing their face, that individual will die. What’s more, if Light specifies the manner of their death, it will be fulfilled to the letter. He tests out this power by ordering the decapitation of a bully, and in short order a Rube Goldberg chain of freak occurrences separates said bully’s head from his body, Final Destination-style.

Superficially, Death Note’s premise is the stuff of innumerable fantasy-horror tales about Mephistophelean compacts and the tragic hubris of humanity. What’s distinctive about the story's approach to these tropes is that it enthusiastically embraces its ludicrous high concept and quickly expands its scale beyond mere acts of petty adolescent revenge. After snuffing out the mobster who killed his mother in a hit-and-run, Light turns his attention from the personal to the societal. Rather naively letting his cheerleader crush Mia (Margaret Qualley) in on his secret, the pair scour the Internet for information on fugitive murderers, untouchable war criminals, and other assorted global nasties to add to the Death Note. Ryuk—who lurks about, invisible to everyone but Light—seems mildly taken aback by this do-gooder ambition, but also wickedly pleased at the obvious potential for a long, hard fall once Light’s self-righteous methods inevitably implode.

Rather than simply allowing the epidemic of accidents and suicides afflicting the world’s Bad Guys to remain a mystery, Light and Mia somewhat questionably devise a mythology for their vigilantism. The Death Note, they eventually discover, isn’t just a means to perform push-button murder, but a tool for straight-up mind control. By writing elaborate instructions into the book, they can dictate a victim’s behavior in minute detail up to the moment of their death. This includes, for example, forcing victims to write Japanese messages on the wall in their own blood, crediting their deaths to an entity named “Kira”. (The in-universe arbitrariness of this scheme, allegedly devised by Light to throw authorities off the scent, has an unpleasant whiff of retro white privilege about it. Need a scapegoat? Why not the devious Japanese?) In what seems like a matter of months—the film is weirdly ambiguous on this score, but it plainly takes place over less than a single school year—Kira-worshiping cults spring up around the world as violent crime plummets and evildoers adjust to the reality that they could drop dead at any moment.

At this point the film swerves into a X-Files-tinged duel of wits between Light and an eccentric government agent known simply as “L” (Lakeith Stanfield). A twitchy, quasi-psychic investigator who never appears to sleep and sustains himself solely on candy, L seems to have nigh-unlimited authority to direct the FBI, CIA, NSA, Interpol, and other agencies. He’s convinced that Kira is an ordinary person, and through Sherlockian deduction, he narrows the assassin’s location to Seattle. There his inter-agency task force absorbs the quixotic Kira investigation of local police detective James Turner (Shea Whigham), who just happens to be Light’s father. This connection might be laughably contrived—The man hunting for Kira is unwittingly investigating his own son!—but preposterous writing is the least of Death Note’s problems.

Even this Cliff Notes version of the original manga’s plot has a substantial number of moving parts, but Death Note is so ruthlessly flattened into a feature-length story that it feels ruinously rushed and jerry-rigged. The film is not especially hard to follow, but that’s because it speeds right past momentous plot points and papers over complex mythology with a kind of contemptuous inattentiveness. The viewer is hard-pressed to care because Wingard plainly doesn’t care. Incredibly, the film makes these dubious choices so that it can spend more precious screen time on, say, the unconvincing relationship drama between Light and Mia, or on what feels like a five-minute foot chase through Seattle’s back alleys. Long after Death Note ends, one is left wanting more details about, say, the sinister book’s previous owners through the centuries, or about L’s X-Men-ish origin as a government-created intellectual super-weapon. In the moment, however, the viewer is simply too shell-shocked by the heedless pace of Death Note’s plot to ruminate on its more compelling suggestions of a deeper mythos.

Not one story element in Death Note is given the space it needs to emerge and evolve organically. The film simply barrels forward from one incident to the next, never stopping for anything so trivial as constructing drama or establishing mood. In particular, Light’s change from an ordinary petulant teenager into a global vigilante with a god complex happens so fast, it barely feels like a transition at all. This sort of severe narrative compression isn’t just artless, but also frustrating, as it’s painfully apparent how dramatically intriguing this arc could be if it played out over three or four hour-long episodes, rather than a three-minute montage.

Interesting characters probably couldn’t save such a dashed-off muddle, but it surely doesn’t help matters that Death Note is saddled with a pair of uncharismatic leads. Wolff conveys a snotty, smarter-than-thou resentfulness from his first appearance on screen, which disastrously undercuts the ostensible tragedy of a cringing nerd’s transformation into a sanctimonious Grim Reaper. What’s more, Wolff has zero chemistry with Qualley. She portrays Mia as a prickly, manipulative bitch who turns into an outright sociopath once she gets a taste for blood. The blame for this falls primarily on the screenwriters, however, and it’s difficult to envision how Qualley could have salvaged such an unpleasant, emasculating cliché.

It falls on the supporting characters to lend Death Note some marginal color and pathos, and the performers succeed well enough in this respect. Whigham is in typically fine form in a role that plays to his strengths as a character actor; his widowed police detective is all aggrieved exhaustion with an undercurrent of righteous indignation. Stanfield is blessed with the most intriguing character in L, but the film’s pace and indifference mean that the actor is obliged to reduce him to a shallow collection of pseudo-autistic tics. Appropriately enough for his demonic character, Dafoe is the only performer who walks away totally unscathed from Death Note. This is partly because his presence is limited to his purring voice and devilish facial expressions, but it’s also because the casting is damn-near perfect. Sensibly eschewing any clumsy Japanese gestures in his performance, Dafoe portrays Ryuk as one-half the delighted, goading toadie to Light’s schoolyard bully, and one-half Faustian puppet-master who’s so assured in his absolute power that he never needs to proclaim it.

Dafoe’s total ownership of the performance raises the question of why a Japanese demon has been retained as the antagonist, as opposed to some region-appropriate substitute: Duwamish Native American spirit, Volga Germano-Russian trickster god, or even a skeletal, scythe-wielding Death straight out of a black metal album cover. Death Note just plops the source material’s original villain into an urban Pacific Northwest setting without any visible effort to explain or justify it. (Seattle’s not-insignificant Japanese-American population was interned in WWII, as they were everywhere; why not use that angle somehow?) This, as much as anything, gives the film a negligent dimension, as though Wingard and the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to finish translating the story into an American context. If Death Note is a genuine example of whitewashing—and it’s not clear that it is—it’s a depressingly lax sort whitewashing that draws attention to its own vacuousness and limited imagination.

As cinema, Wingard’s film is competent enough, and even formally sumptuous at times with respect to design, lighting, and composition. The colors pop in the film's more evocative locations: a winter high school dance; a neon-drenched Tokyo BDSM club; a decrepit, abandoned orphanage. Ryuk’s creature design is marvelously unnerving stuff, a canny blend of costuming, CGI, and old-school camera trickery. Wingard evades potentially phony effects shots through judicious use of blocking, shadow, and shallow focus, rendering Ryuk more menacing, given that the viewer can never quite get a clear look at him. In short, Death Note isn’t an amateurish train wreck; it's made by people who know how to make movies. However, like Wingard’s recent misconceived Blair Witch sequel, it face plants embarrassingly. The filmmakers reveal a poor understanding of the source material, or least an unwillingness to commit to the time, expense, and effort it would take to relocate and adapt Ohba’s comic effectively. This is doubly frustrating, given that Wingard has demonstrated he is capable of more: His 2011 feature You’re Next was an acidic satire of bourgeois overconfidence and sexist assumptions, and a damn fun survival horror film to boot.

Given the film’s myriad other problems, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Death Note never gets around to engaging with the original story’s nuanced themes of morality, power, and punishment, let alone its political implications in a contemporary world of extrajudicial drone strikes. The film’s limited interest in such matters is expressed through sparse world-building like messianic pro-Kira graffiti, or through petty teen melodrama that has all the philosophical sobriety of a slogan on a MMA T-shirt. It's the sort of film that signals the righteousness of Light’s moral reservations in the second act by having Mia repeatedly call him a pussy with unconcealed contemptuousness. Wingard’s film is more inept than outright stupid, but it sure thinks its audience is dumb.