Malleus Maleficarum: The Witch

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. It expands upon my original review of The Witch which appeared at St. Louis Magazine on February 17, 2016.]

If American horror cinema can be provisionally assumed to have an evolutionary path, the ingenious, massively entertaining 2011 feature The Cabin in the Woods represents a cul-de-sac of sorts in the genre’s phylogeny. By recasting all the myriad monsters, mutants, and maniacs of the genre as mere cogs in a Lovecraftian ritual, the film punctured the mythic potency of those terrors. Following two decades or more of arch, self-aware horror films—arguably commencing not with Scream in 1996, but with director Wes Craven’s more gratifying and frightening New Nightmare two years earlier—Cabin seemed to present the definitive, gleefully bleak last word in “meta-horror”. (Last year’s Final Girls mashed up a similar premise with The Last Action Hero, but proved to be an inferior work compared to Cabin.) Once horror fans have witnessed seemingly every ghost and goblin of legend reduced to mere props in a choreographed playlet of bloodletting, where does the genre go from there?

The response implicitly advanced by director Robert Eggers’ colonial tale of terror The Witch is that American horror must discard its drollness and engage with primal fears in a wholly sincere manner. There is a cyclical logic to this approach: Having pitied, romanticized, and deconstructed every bogeymen the night has to offer, the genre has little alternative but to return to first principals. It is obliged to unearth now-familiar monsters and explore what made them so frightening once upon a time. Crucially, The Witch undertakes this rehabilitation within a historical context, asking the viewer to align themselves with the demon-haunted worldview of a Puritan family in 17th-century New England. In contrast to the abundant winks that many contemporary horror pictures direct at the viewer, there is nothing even vaguely sardonic about Eggers’ film. (The auteur that he most resembles in this respect might be Darren Aronofsky.) The Witch is essentially a wordy, unhurried, mud-spattered period drama, albeit one about black magic. This may create confusion for viewers who are expecting a more conventional horror feature in Colonial Williamsburg drag. Make no mistake, however: The Witch is a terrifying and deeply unsettling vision, the kind that squirms restlessly in the mind long after it has ended.

The film opens at the conclusion of a trial, in which William (Ralph Ineson) is found guilty of “prideful conceit” and banished along with his entire family from the New England plantation where they have resided since crossing the Atlantic. Exactly what doctrinal line William crossed is never elaborated upon, but it’s evident that his self-righteous conviction is equal to that of his judges. However, the film isn’t concerned with the particulars of William’s “more-orthodox-than-thou” pissing match with the plantation’s elders. His exile is a means to separate the family from the perspective and support of a larger community, and to establish the depths of William’s stubbornness. (He would rather risk his family’s lives in the wilderness than admit error and grovel before his accusers.) This is but one of many correspondences that The Witch shares with The Shining, a feature which also requires that the family unit first be isolated before it is riven along its natural fissures by a supernatural malevolence.

The clan featured in the film includes William’s wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), their adolescent daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), preteen son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and young fraternal twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson). At various times, the perspective of each family member (save the twins) is afforded a substantial chunk of screen time. However, if the film can be said to have a protagonist, it is Thomasin. Not incidentally, the film’s first shot is of her face as she listens to the verdict in her father’s trial, her brown doe eyes round with apprehension beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Thomasin is present for most—though, crucially, not all—of the film’s significant events, and that proximity eventually serves as a burning mark that lures her family's suspicions when misfortunes begin to mount.

For a time, however, William and his clan thrive reasonably well on their own, their segregation from the plantation notwithstanding. In a meadow alongside a tangled wood, the family constructs a tiny wooden cottage and barn, plants a modest plot of corn, and raises up a little herd of goats for milk. Their hopes for the future are given a tangible form when Katherine bears a fifth child, Samuel. Yet despite the passages of rustic simplicity that characterize this stretch of the film—father tending the fields, mother nursing the baby—the viewer is never completely at ease, due in large part to The Witch’s remorseless and fantastically discomfiting soundscape.

From the moment that the family departs the plantation, Mark Koven’s score begins droning, tapping, and whining out a hellish din of ambient noise that scrapes the nerves raw. Meanwhile, Adam Stein’s fiendishly uncanny sound design pushes all the wrong elements to the film’s aural foreground. Case in point: When the family kneels at the site of their new homestead, holding aloft their arms in ecstatic worship, the sound mix emphasizes the buzzing of insects. It is a moment of Christian thankfulness, and yet one is put in mind of plague and putrescence, and of Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, the demonic prince named in Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress. As the camera slowly pushes in on the rustling, green-gray trees of the nearby woods, the score rises to a keening crescendo. The message in unmistakable: Something evil is lurking nearby, watching and waiting for the right moment to strike.

That dreadful moment arrives one day while Thomasin is minding Samuel at Katherine’s behest. In the space of only a second or two, the child vanishes. A rustling at the edge of the wood is the only trace left in the immediate aftermath of his disappearance. The family searches the forest in vain first for days, and then weeks. Eventually, William settles on a hungry wolf as the likely culprit in the baby’s abduction, but no one in the family seems to a wholly accept this explanation, even William himself. The viewer, however, is allowed to witness Samuel’s ghastly fate: By firelight, a naked crone slays the babe with a blade, then smears her body and her staff with a concoction derived from his blood. She is briefly glimpsed rubbing the staff between her thighs in a quaking trance, and later, under a swollen moon, she seems to float into the night air.

Narratively speaking, Samuel’s murder is The Witch’s decisive turning point, the event from which all ensuing conflict and agony subsequently flows. (Or, at least appears to flow. Some woes, such as a blighted corn crop, may simply be unlucky coincidences.) Katherine’s grief keeps her abed day and night, where she whispers sobbing prayers that solicit God for the wisdom to understand the reasons for His evident cruelty. She unfairly but perhaps understandably turns a frigid eye on Thomasin, who, as Samuel’s caretaker at the moment of his disappearance, is naturally faulted when no other explanation for the crime is forthcoming. Thomasin in turn unwisely exacerbates her situation by spinning a sadistic lie in order to terrorize Mercy, a fantasy in which she is the “witch of the wood” who slew and ate her little brother.

Meanwhile, Katherine’s teeth-gnashing mourning makes it problematic for William to come clean about his own deceit, involving the illicit sale of his wife’s cherished silver cup for needed animal traps. William brings Caleb along on a secret dawn expedition to check said traps, and the lad’s pressing questions necessitate that the father fold the son into his conspiracy. This collusion in turn prods at Caleb’s nascent sense of responsibility towards his family, prompting him to later mount his own trap-clearing search with Thomasin, which leads to his capture by the witch, now cloaked in a comely illusion. And so it goes, as a cascade of ill-fated events and dubious choices drag the household downward into increasingly dire and hysterical circumstances.

Eggers’ choice to provide a third-person peek at the witch is a crucial decision, as it signals to the viewer that the film is not just a psychological thriller about panicky, mistrustful people colliding off one another. An eldritch and menacing presence is indeed lurking in the woods, and it thinks nothing of using infanticide as a mere token in its unholy rites. However, it is also crucial that such glimpses of black magic remain relatively uncommon for most of The Witch’s running time. Until the film’s final act, Samuel’s ritual murder and the later attack on Caleb are the only events with obvious supernatural aspects. The presence of flying ointments, enchanted trickery, and demonic possession mark the film as a work of magical realism. Yet it is also a psychological thriller about panicky, mistrustful people colliding off one another.

Indeed, the witch is generally incidental to the plot, in the sense that the family’s damnation is to a significant extent self-inflicted. The crone is truthfully more catalyst than predator. Much as the Overlook Hotel’s spectral tentacles worm into Jack Torrance’s weak points in The Shining—his rage, resentment, violence, alcoholism, and smarmy sense of white male entitlement—the witch’s bloody art is just a pebble that starts a landslide. It’s perhaps overly glib to describe Eggers’ film as “The Crucible, if the witchcraft were real,” but aside from their commonalities of milieu, The Witch and Arthur Miller’s play share broad thematic similarities. They are both works about people responding in all the worst possible ways when fear clenches them in its talons

As much as any feat of dread-inducing atmospherics, one of The Witch’s most conspicuous achievements is how potently it functions as both a deliberately estranging work of historical realism and as a salient contemporary critique of the American mind. On the one hand, the cast and crew go out of their way to render 17th-century New England as a place that is wholly uncanny to the modern viewer, no matter how cursorily familiar the setting might be from half-remembered textbooks. Some of this is attributable to visual design. The eastern Ontario exterior locations (subbing for New England) establish a skeletal wilderness of brown grasses and thin, scabby tree trunks. The film’s daylight shots are washed in a ghostly gray that lends even nominally handsome landscapes a chilly, unwelcoming severity. Meanwhile the high-contrast night scenes of black and gold evoke the chiaroscuro paintings of contemporary Dutch artist Gerard van Honthorst, as well as the enveloping candlelit interiors of Barry Lyndon, but without that film’s splashes of lush romanticism. The Witch’s New England is not quaint or pastoral. It looks dry, cold, and half in its grave.

However, it is the screenplay and the performances in particular that scratch thick boundaries between the experiences of the The Witch’s characters and those of the modern day viewer. This is in part due to the sheer Otherness of their austere, Calvinist worldview—at least as expressed in the script—in which sins such as pride and idleness are among the worst offenses imaginable against God and His creation. Apart from the archaic details of matchlock rifles and the like, the film’s characters respond to the events around them in ways that are doubtlessly peculiar to a secular, 21st-century American. The most obvious example is the way that their Puritan minds leap straightaway to witchcraft upon encountering anything inexplicable. Yet the distancing aspects of the film extend even to the particulars of the characters’ vocabularies, accents, and cadences. (Ralph Ineson’s deep, grumbling tones alone give him the seeming of a visitor from another era.) Through such elements, The Witch continually reinforces the notion that the people, culture, and time period depicted are just plain different than anything with which the viewer is familiar.

And yet… all of these alienating aspects notwithstanding, The Witch is also very much an acidic depiction of the timeless and reliably feverish American response to external threats. Less gauchely allegorical than M. Night Shyamalan’s flawed but fascinating post-9/11 fable The Village, Eggers’ feature shares with that 2004 film a sharp sense of the sociological dimension of fear. The Witch’s 17th-century New England setting is not merely for picturesque ambiance: It provides a glimpse of American angst in its embryonic form. In this time and place, what critic Mark Breitenberg calls the “anxious masculinity” of the English Renaissance collides with stern religiosity and frontier hardship. This nexus can be observed in William’s insecurity about his relative fecklessness as a Puritan patriarch. He seems to fear Katherine’s disapproval as much as he does any Satanic minion, and the most cutting jibes that Thomasin flicks at him relate to his failure to provide for and protect his family. His sole on-screen attempt to fire a rifle literally backfires in his face. As Susan Faludi described in her essential study of American anxiety, The Terror Dream, a cowardly, ineffectual man was the most wretched creature in the colonial New England imagination:

Puritan men might be “brides” of Christ, but they were expected to be paternal protectors in their own households: as Christ guarded them, so they were expected to shield their wives and dependents. In a society that regarded the home as the “little commonwealth,” the foundational model for the state, the effective performance of husbands was a matter of profound public import. Yet the story of the Indian raids was plagued by episodes of botched male protection—of sentinels who failed to sit sentry, of husbands who were absent when their wives and children were seized or slaughtered, of townsmen who hid in the woods, of militia who refused to give chase.

As Faludi later elaborates, such anxiety is closely linked to conceptions of manhood and virility in the Puritan mind. She quotes minister Increase Mather hand-wringing about the “strange degeneracy” afflicting the allegedly craven second generation of Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers, as well as a military chaplain, who in 1678 lamented that “[a] tender, softly, effeminate People is a curse and a misery.” The Witch illustrates such sexual subtext in subtle but insistent ways. When William is haunted by his inadequacies, he goes to the woodpile and begins splitting logs, a distinctly phallic activity that nonetheless seems to lack direction. (Said woodpile accumulates to a ludicrous scale, providing a looming visual metric of William’s anguish.) Such compulsive hewing echoes not only the aforementioned Jack Torrance’s bloody axe-play in The Shining, but also the campy but under-appreciated 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror, in which creepy, ghost-addled stepfather George Lutz labors menacingly at the chopping stump. Late in The Witch, William is fatally gored by the demonic he-goat Black Phillip—a humiliating and feminizing penetration—and is then half-buried by his own collapsing woodpile, as though finally done in by his own neurotic idleness.

In a stridently patriarchal culture such as Puritan New England, of course, there is no more vicious an insult than to equate a man with a woman, that weakest of creatures. Indeed, given that a meek, obedient woman who quakes before God and husband alike is the feminine ideal in the Puritan society of The Witch, it’s unsurprising that the titular villain is such a terrifying figure. Few things could embody a perverse reflection of the film’s severe, male-centered Protestant worldview like a woman living independently in the forest, her formidable power flowing not from her relationship with an earthly husband but from a voluntary compact with the Prince of Darkness himself.

As historian Carol S. Karlsen advanced in her groundbreaking work The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, one of the distinguishing features of the New England witch hysteria was that its victims were drawn from a more prosperous middle class background than the marginalized peasant women typically targeted in medieval witch hunts. A woman who could accumulate wealth, own property, and bring lawsuits—as some Puritan women did, particularly widows—represented a subdued but insidious threat to the inseparable religious and sociopolitical foundations of colonial New England. In light of this historical context, William’s theft of Katherine’s silver cup—her sole possession of significant value—represents far more than a noble lie. Desperate to provide for his family and thereby affirm his masculinity before God, William’s larcenous gambit targets the single household treasure that is definitively his wife’s property, thereby robbing her of her remaining sliver of economic independence.

While this betrayal and its narrative ripples are critical to the film’s story, the tensions between Katherine and William involve issues more unsettling than matrimonial power struggles. The most destabilizing variable in the household is Thomasin herself, whose emergent womanhood threatens to throw the entire clan into a crypto-incestuous tailspin. It is implied with the utmost delicacy, but a sexually transgressive electricity surrounds the interactions between William and his eldest daughter. It can be observed in the furtive glances between the pair, in the way that Thomasin dutifully but deftly removes her father’s filthy clothes as Katherine looks on, and in the way that William holds his daughter in an agonized, crushing embrace when he comes to suspect that she is the source of the family’s woes.

Accordingly, Katherine’s mounting antipathy for Thomasin extends beyond the girl’s role in Samuel’s disappearance. With her first menstruation, Thomasin is transmuted from a beauteous child into a potential temptress in Katherine’s eyes. The fact that the only adult male in the vicinity is the girl’s father renders her sexuality all the more menacing, as it threatens to upend the household’s God-given order in the most abominable way imaginable. For Caleb, who is utterly isolated from any other examples of virginal femininity, his older sister is evolving into a source of shameful, erotic curiosity. He seems uneasy around Thomasin, nervously stealing glances at her cleavage, his once-benign sibling having become something at one mesmerizing and repellent. Little wonder, then, that the witch exploits the boy's agony by taking the form of a crimson-cloaked siren in order to ensnare him. The film’s discomfiting undertones of juvenile sexuality also emerge once Caleb is returned, finding expression in the boy’s pseudo-orgasmic grunts and cries as a possessing spirit first torments him, then releases him into Christ’s waiting arms.

And what of that barely-glimpsed witch? Her attributes seem plucked from the feverish anecdotes of an inquisitor’s handbook rather than any real-world depiction of pagan or folk magical practices. Eggers’ film is certainly not the first horror feature to exploit this “demonological” conception of the witch in an earnest manner. Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy—Suspiria, Inferno, and The Mother of Tears—is perhaps the most renowned example, although those films arguably owe more to the director’s earlier giallo features, to Disney’s Technicolor fairy tales, and to the eschatological conspiracy theory of late 20th-century Christianity. An icily modern restatement of the witch is found in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. In that film, a feminist scholar’s grief pushes her to internalize the misogynist, Manichean worldview critiqued in her studies, ultimately sending her into a frenzy of self-loathing violence. Although indebted to Argento’s trilogy, Rob Zombie’s woefully under-valued The Lords of Salem closely resembles The Witch, in that it assumes that the worst fears of the Puritans were well-founded. (Both films also conclude calamitously, with copious innocent blood shed and evil reigning victorious.) Zombie, however, places his Satanic brides in a contemporary setting, where widespread unbelief in their existence gives them the upper hand.

Eggers’ film, in contrast, situates the demonological witch in her natural habit, as it were, surrounded by fearful Christian men and women who see the Devil’s hoof print everywhere. Not that the vigilance of Thomasin and her family matters in the end, as Satan ultimately uses their divisive suspicions to his advantage. The overtly malicious acts that the witch commits tend to be of a corporeal rather than magical natural—the snatching and slaying of Samuel, for example. It is Satan himself who seems to use supernatural means to propagate the most vicious mischief. It is his demons that wriggle into Caleb’s soul once the witch’s charms render the boy vulnerable. It is he who whispers falsehoods in Jonas and Mercy’s ears as Black Phillip, sowing further discord and confusion within the family. It is he who sends blissful visions of lost children (and the precious silver cup) to Katherine, permitting his raven to tear away her nipple as she laughs euphorically. And, of course, after Thomasin is the only one left standing amid the slaughter and ruin, it is Lucifer who comes to her, dressed as a hissing, dandyish highwayman and proffering a book that begs for the girl’s signature.

Ultimately, perhaps the most cunning and captivating aspect of The Witch is the superbly balanced character of its tone, which captures with darkling precision the sensations of both tragic folly and inexorable doom that swirl about Thomasin’s family. Eggers’ film posits a world in which a genuine mystic evil exists, but where frantic overreaction to that menace is arguably a more substantial threat to the family’s safety and stability. (To paraphrase Joseph Heller, just because witches are out to get you, doesn’t mean you aren’t paranoid.) At risk of straining a War on Terror analogy, if Samuel’s murder is 9/11, then most of what follows in The Witch is the self-inflicted clusterfuck of worthless security theater, trodden civil liberties, and endless military quagmires.

The crushing guilt and existential horror of the Puritan worldview are appalling enough, as illustrated by Caleb’s runaway panic at the thought of poor, unbaptized Samuel roasting for eternity in hellfire. Arguably just as grueling and destructive, however, is the perpetual state of spiritual siege produced when people obsesses ceaselessly over the prospect of outside attack. When Thomasin finally joins the witches of the wood in their nocturnal flight, her rapturous laughter is as much about the burdens she is leaving behind as the delicious delights promised by the purring Devil. What the crones and their Prince offer is not just power, but freedom from the sort of enervating, uncontrolled terror that can split families, communities, and entire nations asunder.

Whims and Inconsistencies Do Divert Me: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The immediately striking thing about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is how much of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel the film retains. Much like the shambling corpses that have overrun the American South in The Walking Dead, P&P&Z’s cadavers are a narrative catalyst and ubiquitous background element, rather than the focus of the story. The feature is adapted from Robert Ayscough’s well-received mashup novel of the same name, and the film’s events follow those of Austen’s original work with a faithfulness that is unexpected given the overall campy, adolescent tone of the proceedings. The addition of the living dead notwithstanding, P&P&Z is still essentially the tale of the Bennet sisters’ search for matrimony in Regency England, and specifically the story of wily, fiery Elizabeth Bennet’s (Lily James) animosity-cum-courtship with standoffish bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy (Sam Riley).

The film’s screenplay by director Burr Steers somewhat awkwardly tries to have it both ways. It wants to be a relatively straightforward retelling of Austen’s iconic satire of class and gender mores, with all the perceptive humanism, waspish wordplay, and starry-eyed romanticism that entails. Yet P&P&Z also strives to be a horror-tinged iteration of the standard PG-13 action blockbuster. To that end, it’s stuffed with gruesome visual effects, over-choreographed martial arts throwdowns, and “strong female characters” (i.e., young, thin, attractive women who massacre zombies with abandon). There might be a way to stitch these two tonally divergent concepts together such that the result is astute and cohesive, but Steers’ script doesn’t come close. There are some lively moments of fusion here and there, such as a room-wrecking brawl between Elizabeth and Darcy that follows the pattern of their verbal quarrel (evoking both Howard's End and Kill Bill in spots). Mostly, however, the drawing room romance and zombie apocalypse halves of the film simply lie next to each other, twitching in some dismal mockery of discourse.

In a weird way, the problems with the film’s Austen and Romero sides are complementary. Scrutinized strictly as a staging of Pride and Prejudice, the film is, at best, pleasant and serviceable. Neither the screenplay nor the performances of P&P&Z find some hidden, discerning angle that went unexplored in the novel's many prior interpretations. (The 1995 British telefilm and 2005 theatrical feature still stand as the most sensitive, absorbing adaptations, for the record.) However, perhaps one shouldn’t expect penetrating literary insight from a work whose entire raison d'être is the juxtaposition of dissonant generic conventions. The film’s screenplay trims and shuffles Austen’s story sparingly, but its overall tenor is kitschier than most adaptations. Matt Smith’s shtick-slathered take on the pompous, preening Parson Collins serves as the unpleasant embodiment of this comically broad approach.

Still, the Austen side of P&P&Z gets enough right to pass the sniff test. James is the clear standout in the cast, giving a sincere, charming, and (yes) sexy performance that is far better than the surrounding film deserves. While her portrayal fails to convey Elizabeth’s emotional fission and flip-flopping with any genuine depth, James is still an alluring presence that brightens up the screen, at least compared to her co-stars. Riley is not in her league, and his Darcy is too much of a whey-faced brooder, not the graceless grouch of Austen’s book. Still, he holds his own when obliged to verbally spar with James, and their characters’ caustic-then-sweet chemistry of mutual respect is more credible than any of the feature’s other relationships. (As are their fistfights and sword duels.)

Reeves’ direction and Remi Adefarasin’s cinematography are most effective when unobtrusively following the rhythms of the gentry’s tart social clashes, while simultaneously drinking in the richness of the period setting. While the film’s computer-conjured vistas of a zombie-ravaged England are feeble, phony stuff, the broader Austenite design of P&P&Z is hard to fault. The film’s southeast English locations, Naomi Moore’s sets, and Julian Day’s costumes are all lusciously on point, giving the setting an unmistakable Regency atmosphere that also has an appealing comic book flair, owing to prudent gothic and proto-steampunk embellishments.

On the Romero side of the equation, the variables are more intriguing in concept than in their execution. The film’s alternate history is elucidated via an animated credits sequence that mimics the grotesque style of English political cartoonists of the period, such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. In the years since the zombie menace arrived on her shores, most of Britain has fallen, with a fortified London and its surrounding counties serving as the Empire’s last homeland bastion. The landed gentry have sequestered themselves in their country estates, carrying on with their profligate ways despite the biblical plague unfolding in the world outside. The most significant development in upper class social norms is the expectation that well-to-do children live abroad in East Asia in order to train in the martial arts, so as to better defend themselves from zombies. Much is made of the fact that the Bennet girls were educated at Shaolin Monastery and wield jian—traditional Chinese double-edged swords—marking them as lesser, borderline bourgeois ladies. (The truly elite apparently dispatch their children to Japan, although how this cultural exchange squares with the historical realities of the late Edo period is never explained.)

P&P&Z’s living dead are an unusual subspecies, more akin to contemporary cinematic vampires than mindless walking corpses. The zombie infection can go undetected for some time, which permits plague carriers to play Typhoid Mary within the aristocracy’s parlors and bedchambers. In an early scene that contains shades of Sherlock Holmes and The Thing, Darcy pinpoints one of these “passing” zombies at a card party by employing carrion-loving flies as living contagion detectors. Later it is revealed that the zombies are actually becoming organized and developing their own culture, complete with a funereal religion that features brain-eating sacraments. The film’s living dead are therefore similar to an enemy people who threaten English soil—the real world corollary in the Regency period would be the reviled, grasping French—rather than an unnatural disaster.

All of this world-building doesn’t amount to much in practice, other than laying the groundwork for a few drearily predictable plot developments. Reeves fails to establish any kind of evocative relationship between the film’s traditional Austenite impulses and its undead cataclysm backdrop. By all rights, there should be potential in such cross-pollination of genres, and P&P&Z makes some half-hearted attempts to employ its speculative muscle in more thoughtful ways. (The idea that an exigent national crisis can flatten gender roles and shift social priorities, for example, is lightly fiddled with, then discarded.) In the main, Reeves simply utilizes the zombie half of the story to graft monotonous, unremarkable hack-and-slash action sequences featuring beautiful women onto what is otherwise a middling Austen adaptation. There’s little that’s aggressively objectionable about P&P&Z, but it still feels like a worm-eaten waste of a premise.

Snips and Snails: The Boy

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

The most intriguing aspect of The Boy is how slippery it is regarding exactly what sort of story it's telling. The film’s marketing suggests a chiller in the “Evil Doll” subgenre populated by the likes of Magic, Dolls, and Childs Play, but this is something of a fake-out. Indeed, the film itself contains a handful of similar feints, swerving this way and that through a flurry of horror cinema modalities, never quite settling into its final form until the last 15 minutes or so of its running time. In another feature, this fickle character might be regarded as a weakness, an indication of indecisiveness or sloppiness in the underlying screenplay. However, what’s impressive about The Boy is how smoothly these shifts occur within the context of the story. Stacey Menear’s script—which closely follows the heroine’s viewpoint and thus her evolving understanding of What the Hell Is Going On—is arguably the most distinctive component of a feature that is otherwise a middling collection of musty design elements and stock spook story beats.

American nanny Greta (Lauren Cohan) has come to the United Kingdom in the hopes of hiring on with Mr. and Mrs. Heelshire (Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle), an elderly couple who dwell in a gloomy Scottish Baronial mansion. The position is unusual, to say the least: Greta’s charge-to-be is the Heelshires’ young "son" Brahms, who turns out to be a life-sized doll. Most applicants would likely back away slowly upon learning that they will be caring for a child made of porcelain, but Greta—notwithstanding some initial bafflement—eventually agrees to look after Brahms while the Heelshires are away on an extended holiday. The position does include room and board, after all, not to mention the run of the Heelshires’ enormous home. What’s more, the weekly grocery order arrives courtesy of handsome deliveryman Malcolm (Rupert Evans), whose English boyishness charms Greta straightaway. Most significantly, however, the position puts an ocean between Greta and her abusive ex, Cole, a vicious creep with a penchant for stalking.

For Greta, these merits overcome her reservations about her strange duties, but only marginally. Without a hint of jest, Mrs. Heelshire provides a detailed schedule for Brahms’ daily routine, as well as an extensive list of do’s and don’ts. (“2. Don’t cover his face.”) Mr. Heelshire, for his part, seems to understand how bizarre the situation must seem to an outsider, ruefully remarking to Greta in private that the doll might have been a harmless fantasy once, but has since swollen to consume the couple’s lives. Malcolm later fills in the family’s history for Greta, explaining that there was once a flesh-and-blood Brahms, but that the boy perished in a fire at a young age. The doll subsequently became a surrogate child for Mrs. Heelshire, who goes so far as to dress it in her deceased son’s clothes and prepare meals for it that go back into the icebox, uneaten. Her expectation is that Greta will evince a similar mindfulness and devotion when looking after Brahms.

The discomforting character of the The Boy’s early scenes plays upon the awkwardness that hovers near any expression of private grief. Politeness urges one not to question the methods that others have adopted to cope with a loss, no matter how strange those stratagems might seem. The Heelshires’ transference of their parental affections onto a doll represents the reductio ad absurdum of this principle, in that it constitutes a mourning behavior so unmoored from reality, only the promise of a paycheck allows Greta to smile through the inanity it all. One is reminded of how Rebecca and Tyler hand-wave away their grandparents’ distressing behavior in The Visit as mere senior eccentricity, or the way that John du Pont’s billions secure the silence of his friends and lackeys in Foxcatcher, even as his actions become dangerously erratic. Being both old and wealthy, one can assume that the Heelshires are accustomed to others taking their unusual child in stride.

Greta empathizes with the Heelshires’ grief—however peculiar its manifestation—but once the couple has departed, it’s clear that she doesn’t intend to play along with their delusion. She pays no attention to the doll, and instead wiles away the days drinking wine and flipping through magazines. Before long, however, curious occurrences begin to accrue. Objects vanish and then turn up elsewhere, while strange sounds reverberate through the house, as though someone were creeping through its endless halls and rooms. The film thusly presents a fairly classical horror scenario: an old dark house inhabited by the unquiet dead, which slowly ratchet up their efforts to terrorize an interloper. The Boy mostly adheres to a straightforward, PG-13 haunted house model of horror cinema during this phase. Director William Brent Bell focuses on slowly establishing the sensation that the Heelshire mansion harbors an unwholesome presence, one with an obsessive but ambiguous attachment to Greta. It’s broadly effective, but also undistinguished and unmemorable. It amounts to little more than a succession of familiar jump scares and appearing/disappearing tricks, given a bit of visual oomph by the house’s Gothic Revival spaces.

Although these phenomena unnerve Greta, she is initially inclined to dismiss them as the routine puzzlements of an old country estate fighting a losing battle against vermin and the elements. Once the mysteries begin to escalate, however, she is obliged to consider the preposterous possibility that Brahms is somehow responsible for them. Greta never witnesses the doll walking around on its own accord, but Brahms keeps moving when her back is turned, as though the pair were playing a demented game of “Red Light, Green Light.” (Here there are shades of Stephen King’s novel The Shining, with its stalking topiary animals.)  The viewer is permitted to see a bit more than Greta—for example, when an unseen hand seems to filch her dress and necklace while she showers—but the majority of Brahms’ alleged mischief is performed just out of sight.

One night, Greta’s foolhardy exploration of the attic culminates in panic and a nasty fall when someone slams the door shut behind her, locking her in until Malcolm arrives the following morning. This ordeal is something of a breaking point for the nanny, who eventually comes to believe that Brahms’ restless soul is attached to the doll, and that it is trying to reach out to her for cryptic reasons. In the interest of mollifying the child’s spirit, Greta soon begins to adhere to Mrs. Heelshire’s previously disregarded lists, treating the doll with a newfound, downright creepy maternal fondness. Whereas she once longed to escape the confines of the mansion and Brahms’ lifeless, unsettling gaze, Greta comes to embrace her role as the doll’s de facto parent, cheerfully singing it songs, telling it stories, and kissing it goodnight. This understandably concerns Malcolm, particularly given that Brahms is seemingly hostile to anyone who could divert the nanny’s attention or affections. With some creative thinking, Greta convinces Malcolm that something supernatural is at play by staging practical experiments designed to demonstrate the doll’s comings and goings. The larger question of what Brahms’ spirit ultimately wants, however, is not so easily discerned.

Greta’s newfound belief in Brahms’ lingering presence triggers a shift in the nature of the story. Instead of a tale in which the heroine is harried by a malign spirit, The Boy becomes kind of low-key supernatural tragedy in which the heroine’s attachment to said entity deepens into something troubling. The disquiet that attended the film’s opening sequences emerges once again, save that it is Greta who is now immersed in a morbid fantasy, rather than the Heelshires. The narrative’s momentum dissipates, but the film paradoxically acquires an electric aura that hints at further upheaval. Greta seems resolved to remain at the house indefinitely, caring for Brahms for as long as she is able. (The Heelshires, it is eventually revealed, are never returning.) Purely based on running time, however, it’s clear that the film has not reached its dramatic conclusion, and several nagging questions remain. Greta seems to have negligently forgotten the rumors about the living Brahms that once vexed her. As Malcolm earlier observes, the “polite talk” in the local village was that Brahms was a sweet little boy, but the “pub talk” was that he was a strange, unnerving child, a child whose only playmate happens to have died under suspicious circumstances. Then there is the matter of Greta’s dirtbag ex, Cole: Like a walking Chekov’s gun, he is the destabilizing factor that is virtually guaranteed to enter the story eventually, if only because he was so prominently acknowledged early in the film.

The final sequences in The Boy feature a narrative upheaval of the most spectacular sort. If there is a singular element in the film that leaves a searing mark, it is the moment where the film’s central twist is revealed. It’s not that the reversal is itself particularly cunning or original: The film thereafter plunges into a well-worn set of horror conventions, executing them in a manner that ranges from gratifyingly thrilling to drearily silly. An attentive viewer may even see the story’s U-turn coming, as one particular line of dialog offhandedly reveals the film’s sleight of hand. What makes The Boy’s twist so striking is the remarkable intensity of the actual moment when it occurs. For about 20 to 30 seconds, Bell and his performers deliver a moment of uncommon flesh-crawling potency, where reality itself seems to fracture and the mind is plunged into the icy waters of utter, nauseating uncertainty. Even the best horror filmmaker would be hard-pressed to maintain such a dizzying high, and Bell just lets the remainder of the film play out according to a hunt-and-chase playbook that was dog-eared decades ago.

This highlight aside, The Boy is ultimately a modestly moody but forgettable film. Some of the feature’s blandness falls on Bell’s shoulders, but a share of the blame is attributable to Cohan. Most of her performance is, at best, dully functional. The actress is a welcome presence as the hard-bitten but vulnerable Maggie when surrounded by the The Walking Dead’s sprawling ensemble cast. However, she just doesn’t have the wattage to sustain a feature film where she is often the only performer on screen for long periods of time. Moreover, a horror heroine—even one who is a hardened abuse survivor—demands a bit of ingenuousness, and Cohan is all lithe self-possession. The one exceptional gesture in her performance occurs when the Heelshires first introduce her to Brahms. Cohan wordlessly ushers her reaction through amusement, uncertainty, alarm, apprehension, and finally carefully arranged pleasantness. It’s a crucial, potentially ludicrous moment in the story, and Cohan nails it with admirable precision.

Darkness Risible: The Forest

[Note: This review contains minor spoilers.]

It is possible to make a searching and cathartic horror feature about suicide. Director Jörg Buttgereit’s experimental anthology film The Death King demonstrated that. It’s possible to make such a film that specifically wrestles with the relatively high suicide rate in contemporary Japan. Sion Sono’s contentious but undeniably blunt Suicide Club illustrated that. It may even be possible to set such a film in Japan’s Aokigahara forest—a notorious real-world suicide site for at least half a century—without stooping to cut-rate exploitation. Unfortunately, director Jason Zada’s debut feature The Forest is the not the feature to achieve this distinction. The film, which takes Japan’s infamous “Sea of Trees” as its central locale, ultimately proves artless, wearisome, and a tad dehumanizing.

In a foreword that unnecessarily and somewhat confusingly cuts between past and present, the viewer is introduced to Sara Price (Natalie Dormer), an American woman who has recently learned that her identical twin Jess (also Dormer) has vanished. An expatriate who teaches English in Tokyo, Jess reportedly disappeared during a field trip to Aokigahara forest. (This seems like an oddly morbid destination for a school excursion, but, then again, American middle schoolers are routinely shuttled to battlefields where soldiers have been slaughtered by the thousands.) When she did not reappear by the next morning, the Japanese authorities concluded that Jess had likely taken her own life, given that this is the usual reason people withdraw into Aokigahara’s embrace. However, Sara harbors an absolute conviction that her sister is still among the living, and promptly sets off for Japan to track her down.

Following a stop at Jess’ school and apartment—as well as some gallingly lazy moments of “Japan Is Weird” gawking—Sara proceeds to the ominous forest near the base of Mt. Fuji. (Location filming in Aokigahara is not permitted, so a Serbian forest serves as a credibly lush, misty stand-in.) There she bumbles about for a bit, having unsettling encounters that are (mostly) attributable to nerves, before conveniently running into another English-speaking foreigner. That would be Aiden (Taylor Kinney), an Australian travel writer who just happens to be planning his own foray into Aokigahara’s wilds. He has made arrangements to accompany Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), a ranger who uses his free time to search the forest for the remains of the recently departed, and for the occasional living soul who is wavering about their fateful choice. After hearing Sara’s tale, Aiden convinces the ranger that she should be permitted to tag along. For his part, Aiden admits that his magnanimity is mostly about getting a juicy story for a new article—and a little bit about getting into Sara’s pants.

Everything up to the point where Sara, Aiden, and Michi journey into Aoikigahara proper is essentially a glorified prelude. What follows is a series of encounters with supernatural entities who are apparently bent on scaring Sara shitless—while also luring her deeper into the woods. The restless dead admittedly don’t have to work too hard at this endeavor. Sara’s adamant certainty that her twin still lives functions as kind of will-o’-the-wisp: a slim hope that flits just out of reach, coaxing her into increasingly perilous situations and foolish decisions. By the time she defiantly declares that she will spend the night at Jess’ abandoned campsite on the off chance that her sister will return, it’s clear that Sara has progressed from sisterly instinct to something like grief-fueled monomania.

This certitude that Jess is alive—a belief that is resolute at first, then desperate, then farcical—is the only defining feature of Sara’s character, and a shallow one at that. Even in its flashbacks and dream sequences, the film doesn’t present much substantiation of Sara’s allegedly intimate bond with her sibling; it is urgently declared but not otherwise buttressed by the screenplay. This leaves Dormer flailing: There’s nothing for her to engage with other than Sara’s obsession and, at a distant second, her Ugly American disdain for Japan. Accordingly, Sara emerges as a rather uninteresting and unpleasant protagonist. Dormer can be a beguiling performer with the proper material. Her tragic two-season arc as Anne Boleyn in Michael Hirst’s The Tudors is one of that series’ standout acting achievements. However, The Forest largely abandons her, and the resulting wreck of overcooked neuroses and clumsy histrionics is tedious at best and painful at worst.

Admittedly, there’s a murmur of potential in the the film’s screenplay, which is credited to Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai. In an anemic sort of way, the script at least acknowledges the connection between self-harm and mental illness, and its depiction of trauma’s deforming effect on the mind gives the film’s generally puerile tone a needed dose of adult complexity. The moral conveyed by The Forest’s late narrative swerves is a noble one, at least: Namely, that one cannot identify a suicidal individual by appearance or even by stereotypical melancholic behavior. In what is possibly the solitary revealing moment for an otherwise underfed character, Sara unconvincingly revises her parents’ gruesome murder-suicide into a car accident when relating the story of their deaths, highlighting the societal shame that so often clings to mental disorders.

Such smatterings of intelligence are few and far between, however. Mostly, The Forest just utilizes Jess’ evident suicide as a disingenuous plot device. The viewer learns little about what precipitated the woman’s chronic depression and previous self-harm episodes, beyond the vague assertion that she is “troubled” for reasons connected to the deaths of the twins’ parents. (A murder-suicide? Who wouldn't be?) Jess’ disappearance is merely a means to compel Sara to delve deeper into the haunted wilderness, despite all omens that this is a Bad Idea. At bottom, then, The Forest is a fairly conventional horror flick about a hapless victim being gaslit by ghosts, which makes the paper-thin suicide conceit (and the Aokigahara setting specifically) all the more puzzling.

Befitting its PG-13 rating, The Forest’s ambitions are plainly pitched towards the psychological end of the horror spectrum. Notwithstanding one or two gory moments and some indisputably startling jump scares, The Forest strives to be nervy thriller that gradually constricts the heroine in its coils. It’s perhaps telling that the film's better sequences have nothing to do with the unquiet dead. Unsurprisingly, Aiden is eventually revealed to have been less than truthful about what brought him to Aokigahara. Once the cracks in his story begin to show, the film quite skillfully conveys Sara’s creeping, chilling realization that she is in the middle of nowhere with a strange man who could easily physically overpower her. Some of the screenplay’s few bright spots revolve around the cat-and-mouse games that Sara and Aiden play as mutual mistrust starts to swirl around them.

The writers and director Zada maintain a coy ambiguity about whether the terrors that Sara witnesses are the work of undead spirits or simply figments of her fatigued and panicked mind. There’s a certain Jungian appeal to the notion that Aokigahara gives form to one’s unsettled fears, much like the fetid cave where Luke Skywalker confronts a phantasmal Darth Vader with his own face in The Empire Strikes Back. There are also shades of John Baxter’s wanderings through a sepulchral, crumbling Venice in Don’t Look Now, led by glimpses of what appears to be his deceased daughter. Writer Antosca is no stranger to this sort of heightened symbolism, as he had a hand in successfully re-translating Thomas Harris’ twice-adapted seminal pulp thriller Red Dragon for the final season of Hannibal.

Praise where praise is due: Several of The Forest’s jump scares are executed with the precision of an icepick to the brainstem. Even this jaded horror movie aficionado found himself flinching in terror at the film’s more frightful jolts. However, The Forest lacks much in the way of vitalizing substance between these sporadic heart-pounding highs. The film’s scares often amount to mere seconds of funhouse exhilaration, surrounded by minutes upon minutes of thickheaded dialog and ponderous plot. Moreover, Aoikigahara’s apparitions seem to have no clear motivation beyond frightening Sara out of sheer spite, leaving one with the distinct impression that the filmmakers simply threw arbitrary creepy elements at a wall, and then assembled a movie out of the parts that stuck. The whole affair feels weirdly uneven and unsatisfying: flickers of technically spot-on horror filmmaking in a gray expanse of dreary, bleary storytelling.

While it is hardly the film’s fatal flaw, The Forest’s faintly racist depiction of Japan and the Japanese people is probably its most obnoxious and embarrassing trait. Early scenes traffic in an off-putting Lost in Translation-style exoticism: “Oh, those wacky Japanese and their funny ways!” Zada even slips in a bit of gross-out gaping at a plate of still-wriggling raw cuisine, indicating that in some circles at least, cinematic depictions of Asian cultures still haven’t progressed much beyond Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Far too often, the film’s jump scares rely on the assumption that non-Asian viewers will find a grimacing or cackling Japanese countenance inherently frightening. Japan isn’t a developed nation-state in The Forest: It’s an otherworldly, modern-yet-backwards realm where even rational authorities like teachers and police whisper portentously of the restless dead. There’s something perplexing about a mainstream 2016 film that is more retrograde regarding a non-white culture than Wes Craven’s 1988 voodoo exploitation chiller The Serpent and the Rainbow.

This writer is normally loath to lecture filmmakers on their artistic choices—the perennial critical game of “I Would Have Done It Differently” is a pet peeve—but it’s sort of remarkable how much more appealing The Forest might have been had the Price twins just been written as Japanese-American women. Ditching the ungainly white protagonist might have permitted the film to more frankly explore the controversial topic of Japan’s alarming suicide rate. Moreover, the contrast between the twins might have been sharper and more germane to the plot had Sara been conceived as the assimilated sister and Jess as the Japanese revivalist who travels to her ancestors’ homeland in order to plan her final exit. Reconfiguring Sara’s outsider role as one characterized by simultaneous ethnic identification and cultural disconnection might have transformed the film’s stranger-in-a-strange-land conceit into something much more textured and intriguing. Alas, one is left with The Forest as it is, not how one might wish it to be.

A War of All Against All: The Green Inferno

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 1/23/16]

It’s tempting to dismiss Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno as little more than a horror enthusiast’s tasteless homage to the Italian cannibal films of the 1970s and 1980s, with a dollop of gleeful hippie-bashing thrown in for flavor. Like that of its antecedents, the marketing for Inferno promises grisly acts of violence perpetrated on hapless captives by an isolated, indigenous tribe. Roth’s film adds a twist of cosmic irony: Said victims are idealistic college students who originally traveled into the wilderness to “save” their captors from rapacious developers. Superficially, Inferno’s entire raison d’être is to immerse its viewers in stomach-churning cruelty, to push their tolerance for animal terror and abattoir-level gore to the breaking point. A moral scold would not even need to delve into the film’s reliance on discomfiting racial tropes—more on those later—to characterize Inferno as a nasty, exploitative feature.

Granted, Roth seems to pride himself on nasty, exploitative works. His feature debut, Cabin Fever, borrows themes and motifs from numerous sources—Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Last House on the Left, The Crazies, The Evil Dead, Outbreak—but the freak show appeal of the film stems from its (literally) skin-peeling body horror. His Hostel and Hostel: Part II duology, meanwhile, is regarded as one of the touchstones of the mid-00s “torture porn” trend in English-language horror cinema. Compared to the Rube Goldberg absurdity that came to characterize James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw series, the Hostels are relatively straightforward stuff. Where the seemingly endless Saws quickly lost their way in a pointlessly convoluted plot and mythology, Roth’s films stand up reasonably well as blunt, repulsive tales of survival and revenge. There’s nothing Grand Guignol about the Hostels: They are ugly, ugly films with an aesthetic that can best be described as anonymously dank. Their sophomorically transgressive character rests primarily on copious carnage, and secondarily on their blending of The Most Dangerous Game’s high concept with echoes of historical Nazi and Soviet atrocities.

At their worst, Roth’s films are little more than shallow endurance tests, wherein the characters are subjected to grueling abuses and the viewer is double-dared to keep their eyes open. The Green Inferno resembles this sort of feature initially, but it slowly reveals a brainier and more philosophically knotty side. Its significance within Roth’s small oeuvre should not be understated: Beneath the juvenile gags and grindhouse shocks, the film engages sincerely with political and moral concepts that were merely toyed with idly in the Hostels. The Green Inferno is not just Roth’s most fascinating and morally sophisticated feature to date (a low bar, admittedly). It also represents the kind of tough-minded rumination on violence that director Tom Six claims to be striving for with his vacuous Human Centipede series.

The film’s protagonist and obligatory Final Girl is Justine (Lorenza Izzo), an idealistic freshman at a New York City college. She and surly roommate Kaycee (Sky Ferreira) are awakened one morning by the chanting of campus activists, who on this particular day are campaigning for the labor rights of the college’s maintenance workers. Kaycee has only vehement contempt for such do-gooders, whom she regards as guilt-wracked poseurs, but Justine is intrigued, partly by the group’s principles and partly by their dreamy leader, Alejandro (Ariel Levy). Justine has her own admirer in smitten activist Jonah (Aaron Burns), who urges her to check out the organization. However, when Justine drops in on a meeting, Alejandro rebuffs her by harshly questioning her motives and dedication. He later walks back his misgivings, however, offering Justine a place in the group’s upcoming trip to the Peruvian Amazon. The goal of this expedition is purportedly to protest a natural gas development that is threatening a nameless indigenous tribe. Alejandro warns that these rainforest people will likely be hunted down and murdered by corporate mercenaries, all for daring to resist the tacitly government-approved theft of their lands.

Justine agrees to join the cause, disregarding the advice of her roommate and her father (Richard Burgi), a prominent attorney affiliated with the United Nations. Soon Justine is stepping out into the blazing heat of tropical South America with a gaggle of fellow activists. These starry-eyed global citizens are mostly anonymous background props, but a few are named and distinguished by a single trait: pothead Lars (Daryl Sabara), bad girl Samantha (Magda Apanowicz), and so forth. As the group travels through towns and then upriver to the leading edge of the gas company’s swath of destruction, Alejandro elucidates his plan for direct action. Disguising themselves in the corporation’s jumpsuits and hardhats, the activists will surreptitiously chain themselves to trees in the construction area. Hacking into the company’s satellite communications, they will then use their smartphones to stream their protest to the world as it happens. 

Alejandro claims that the presence of a live video feed will dissuade the security forces from making any rash moves against them. In reality, things go south quickly: Alejandro’s green-eyed girlfriend Kara (Ignacia Allamand) secretly gives Justine a defective padlock, allowing the mercenaries to quickly unchain her. One on these soldiers-of-fortune then put a pistol to the terrified young woman’s head and seems prepared to summarily execute her—until Alejandro smugly reveals Justine’s familial connection to the U.N. The protest thereafter ends almost as quickly as it began. The activists are detained, turned over to Peruvian police, and packed onto a puddle-jumper plane to fly them out of the region. Alejandro and the others are ecstatic about the exposure that the protest has gleaned (“We’re blowing up Twitter!”), but Justine is understandably angry at being used as a human shield. She doesn’t have long to ruminate on her feelings of betrayal, however: Shortly after takeoff, the plane’s engine suddenly explodes, sending the aircraft plummeting into a crash landing deep in the rainforest.

There’s no getting around the fact that, prior to the plane accident, The Green Inferno is a tiresome, faintly obnoxious film. Its palpable eagerness to get to the cannibalism results in a first act that uncertainly juggles elements of a travelogue, Third World thriller, campus melodrama, and repellently “edgy” comedy. Several aspects of the screenplay are downright unpleasant, from the way that Alejandro’s self-satisfied dickishness is presented as charming, to the sheer venomousness of Kaycee’s disdain for the very notion of progressive activism. Roth’s dialog has a mannered tackiness that might have been salvageable by the right actors, but The Green Inferno’s D-list cast simply isn’t up to the challenge.

Still, the ham-fisted writing and acting are occasionally redeemed by an unexpected twist on a stock situation. A prominent example is a Chekov’s gun scenario in which an anxious Lars gingerly takes a loaded pistol ashore for protection during a bathroom break. When the film throws in an enormous tarantula, the viewer is primed to expect a fatal mishap. Instead, Lars simply shoots the poor arachnid several times and runs back to the boats in a panic. This transforms a moment of R-rated Scooby-Doo hokeyness into a withering aside on American overreaction to trifling threats. It also echoes Chef’s encounter with a tiger while mango-gathering in Apocalypse Now, one of several situational and thematic allusions to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film that Roth drizzles into his feature.

The Green Inferno finds its footing once the activists’ plane plummets out of the sky. It’s not that the slimy dialog or the plastic performances improve substantially—they don’t—but that Roth is plainly much more comfortable with the tangible darkness of blood and gristle. It helps, certainly, that the narrative’s sudden left turn into a twisted National Geographic nightmare permits the filmmaker to play in a genre sandbox he clearly admires. As the aircraft dips below the tree line and the fuselage rips asunder, sending passengers hurtling out to certain death, it’s all too easy to envision Roth rubbing his hands with relish, muttering, “Okay, now the real fun begins…”

Naturally, Justine and the seven other named activists are the only passengers to survive the crash, and their situation quickly turns from bad to worse. Drugged by blow darts fired from the dense foliage, they are abducted by a band of indigenous hunters and taken further upriver in canoes. Led by a fearsome bald warrior (Ramón llao) who is covered from head to toe in black pigment, the party soon arrives at a riverside village. The tribe that dwells there—identified much later as the fictitious Yagé people—speaks no English, but it’s clear that they aren’t interested in discussion, any more than they would parley with the peccary piglets that trot about underfoot. Upon arrival, the terrified captives are scrutinized by a sinister Matriarch (Antonieta Pari) who has one milky blind eye and skin painted a hideous jaundice hue. The activists are then herded into cages, save for poor, oblivious Jonah, who is singled out for a horrendous fate that leaves no doubt as to the Yagé’s intentions.

Some narrative back and forth aside, the remainder of the The Green Inferno consists primarily of one extended sequence of imprisonment. Far from slowing the proceedings down, the activists’ capture is the point at which the film truly picks up steam. Given that this is a Roth joint, it goes without saying that the film’s bloody practical effects are as nauseatingly peerless as the CGI is laughably phony. However, as pure horror cinema, Inferno is surprisingly slow-burn in character. As the captives are plucked out one by one to satisfy the Yagé’s hunger and the Matriarch’s murky ritual needs, a cold-sweat torment settles over the story. Roth excels at utilizing the activists’ situation to create gut-twisting dread. While it quickly becomes apparent that they have little hope of escape, the grisly details remain unclear until the actual moment of agony arrives. Lacking a shared language with their captors, Justine and the rest are left to contemplate all the horrific possibilities as they watch the Yagé sharpen hooked bone knives and tend the embers in a voluminous claystone oven. Indeed, while each captive is subjected to a fresh flavor of suffering—the activist who is hobbled, staked, and baited to lure swarms of stinging army ants actually gets off easy—the stretches of time spent stewing in the cage are somehow more agonizing that the most gruesome evisceration.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the appearance of the village is where the ghastly design of The Green Inferno shines. The production design team, overseen by Marichi Palacios, is plainly aiming to approximate the look of the apexes of the cannibal film subgenre, Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust. The village’s structures appear to be those of an indigenous Amazonian people, but the film overlays the environs with a slathering of gore. Human bones ornament every nook and cranny, and rotting heads top the village’s wooden palisades. There are no carefully maintained midden heaps, just bones and bits of viscera strewn about like detritus, while flies and clotted blood cling to seemingly everything. The entire settlement has a repellent vermillion cast, as though untold quantities of blood had soaked into every fragment of wood and stone. What’s more, most of the Yagé wear a cinnabar pigment that matches their gruesome surroundings. Not incidentally, this permits the yellow Matriarch and her ebon enforcer to stand out from the other villagers in the film's wide shots. It also contributes to one of the most stunning images in the film: the captured activists in their fluorescent yellow jumpsuits, surrounded by a surging sea of scarlet bodies. 

While Inferno presupposes a familiarity with racist colonial fairy tales about savage cannibals skulking in the world’s equatorial regions, whether or not the film sustains and reinforces such myths for a contemporary audience is difficult to say. Certainly, it is discomfiting that there are barely any indigenous peoples depicted who are not cannibals. While it seems disingenuous to argue that Roth should have made a nuanced ethnographic study out of his horror film, the mere decision to make a cannibal feature in 2015 seems, at the very least, irresponsible. There’s something a little distasteful and (dare one say it?) privileged about a white director going out of his way to keep the myth of the feral jungle anthropophage alive in the public’s imagination. Roth previously defended his depiction of Slovakia in Hostel by comparisons to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, asserting that no reasonable viewer would glean from the latter film that all white rural Texans are serial killers. However, this retort is less salient to The Green Inferno. Context matters: The race-based colonial history of South America renders the politics of the white-authored The Green Inferno distinct from those of standard slasher fare. (Now, a cannibal horror film made by an indigenous South American director? That would be something to see.)

For this viewer, the most repugnant aspect of the film is its use of female genital mutilation as a threat against a captive white woman. Shoehorning the predominantly northeast African practice of FGM into a story about indigenous Amazonians betrays Roth’s willingness to substitute reality with racist fiction if it titillates. (“Primitive brown people do this, right? Let’s throw it in there.”) Quite apart for the racial angle, however, it’s a move that at once trivializes a genuinely horrific issue while also finding a way to backhandedly dehumanize millions of FGM survivors. Obliged to dream up the most appalling fate imaginable for an American woman, Roth went right to the disfigurement of her sex.

As important as it is to acknowledge and criticize the fundamental recklessness of The Green Inferno, it’s also vital to address how the film actually portrays its indigenous bogeymen. Far from serving as proxies for real-world Amazonian tribes, the Yagé are presented as stewards of a culture that has gone monstrously askew, deformed by contact with a ravenous global corporate empire. Like Colonel Kurtz’s patchwork tribe of Cambodian forest people and AWOL Americans in Apocalypse Now, or the degenerated Austronesian culture of Skull Island in King Kong, the tribe of The Green Inferno is not a Stone Age remnant, but a reactive mutation. (Similar to Kurtz’s clan, they revel in gore, something few real-world hunter-gatherer societies would contemplate, given the diseases it would invite.) The activists are no innocents ensnared by devils, but naïve fools caught in the crossfire of a shifting economic and cultural conflict. Underlining the point, one activist observes that it is their gas company disguises that doomed them once they fell into the Yagé’s clutches: “They think we’re the enemy.”

Ultimately, the script by Roth and Uruguayan filmmaker Guillermo Amoedo approaches every faction—native, activist, corporate, governmental—with an acidly skeptical eye. Cannibal Holocaust might have been a significant influence on The Green Inferno, but Roth’s feature contains neither the older film’s then-innovative found footage conceit nor its accusatory jabs at the viewer for gobbling up depictions of sensationalistic violence. This makes the new film a much less audacious work, but also evades the hypocrisies that cling to Cannibal Holocaust. Roth and Amoedo are more interested in undermining the viewer’s faith in an abundance of institutions and movements. Often, the screenplay flirts with a cheapjack species of omni-directional South Park-style cynicism, with a corresponding penchant for sneering at liberal activist strawmen. 

That said, the film’s swipes at activist Norteamericanos are often pointed. While they talk a good human rights game, most of the activists are motivated by less altruistic concerns, and for some the Peruvian protest is plainly a glorified vacation. (Given that she is the Final Girl, guileless but kind-hearted Justine is the exception.) Their ballyhooed direct action amounts to little more than a weekend stunt to rake in social media attention. Even prior to their abduction, the activists’ concern for the Yagé seems paper-thin. Paradoxically, there’s a kind of quasi-colonial tone to Alejandro’s scheme: swoop into a foreign country, extract some resources (Twitter mentions), and then return home while cracking open beers and back-slapping each other for bravery. Tellingly, none of the campus do-gooders bother to learn anything about the people they claim to be defending, and once in Peru their sympathies seem to shift to the forest ecosystem rather than its inhabitants. (One added knife-twist to the activists’ unfortunate situation is that knowledge of even a few words in the Yagé tongue might have saved them.)

Such disregard is consistent with the sanitized “rainforest chic” that peaked in liberal circles in the 1990s but still lingers on. It's an ostensibly green mindset that fetishizes the flora and fauna of the equatorial world while erasing its indigenous human inhabitants. Indeed, the fallacious bifurcation of the physical world into “nature” and “humans” is a theme that emerges from almost all stories about cannibalism, The Green Inferno included. Disgust-based social taboos are often predicated on artificial categories, after all. To both the animistic hunter-gatherer and the post-Darwin rationalist, humankind is indivisible from the natural world. Meat is meat.

Initially, it appears that The Green Inferno might be aiming for a facile, “plague upon both your houses” nihilism that plays to the vanity of the armchair curmudgeon. The worldview that the film eventually settles upon, however, is more reflective, akin to a broad sociological pessimism. The Green Inferno sees no nobility in humankind, just competing claims on property and lives that can only be effectively resolved through warfare between political entities. It’s a vision that, weirdly enough, echoes the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his opus Leviathan, absent the fussy Christian sectarianism that preoccupied much of the seventeenth-century Englishman’s writing.

Hobbes described the natural condition of humanity as one of anarchic violence, where thievery, rape, and murder prevail. In such a state, civilization would not be possible, and every moment would be characterized by unremitting fear and peril. Human life would be, as he memorably described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a “war of all against all.” Hobbes believed that humankind could only ascend out of this state by organizing into social groups under democratic, aristocratic, or (ideally) monarchial leadership. To achieve harmony, our species must abdicate its natural freedom for a muscular government, preferably one invested with absolute power.

At first glance, one might assume that the Yagé of The Green Inferno embody the vicious, atavistic state that Hobbes posited as the factory mode of our species. Unquestionably, a cannibal presents a vivid contrast with the sentimental conception of the “noble savage”—even though they are actually complementary caricatures on the same racist coin. However, a moment's consideration reveals that the Yagé lead an existence that bears little resemblance to Hobbes’ conception of the primeval condition. While the tribe is engaged in a brutal war with the world beyond their village—most conspicuously with the corporation that aims to seize their land—their attitude towards one another appears to be peaceful. There is no significant evidence of intra-tribal violence in the film, and under the unconditional rule of the village Matriarch, in-group harmony appears to be the rule. Indeed, the ritualized acts of cannibalism that consume the luckless activists serve as a social glue for the Yagé, providing opportunities for religious devotion and village-wide socialization. Revealingly, The Green Inferno lingers on banal scenes which could have been plucked from a documentary on indigenous peoples: village women talking and laughing blithely as they chop tubers and salt freshly slaughtered cuts of “long pork.”

The solitary cannibal might be a murderous savage, but a village of cannibals is a polity, albeit one with traditions that put it in inherent conflict with all outsiders (who, as a rule, prefer not to be eaten). Hobbes used the term Leviathan to refer to a powerful European nation with imperial ambitions, but the word could easily be extended to any organized group of people that asserts its political sovereignty. The Yagé certainly fit the bill, as they do not appear to acknowledge the authority of either the Peruvian government or its grasping corporate allies. Under Hobbes’ formulation, anything a Leviathan does to protect the wealth and lives of its people is de facto ethical—presumably, up to and including cannibalism. (Nourishment, intimidation, and social cohesion: It's win-win, really.) While The Green Inferno drapes the Yagé in a kind of bestial exoticism, there is little suggestion that they are intrinsically evil. Their consumption of human flesh is, rather, an adaptation to extraordinary circumstances in which their nemeses give no quarter. The gas company might be fighting over wealth, but the Yagé are battling for their very existence. In such a scenario, the most shocking sorts of asymmetric warfare are not only permissible, but mandatory, at least according to Hobbes. For the Matriarch to not gouge out a captive's eyes and gobble them up would void the social contract with her tribe, resulting in the forfeiture of her position. In its roundabout way, Roth's film seems to advocate that fearsome shibboleth of American reactionaries, "moral relativism".

What emerges from The Green Inferno is therefore a decidedly grim vision: a world locked in ruthless conflict, with each self-styled Leviathan forced to adopt ever-more ruthless tactics. Underlining the point, Justine eventually extricates herself from the grasp of cannibals and soldiers-of-fortune alike by slipping through the gaps in their otherwise monolithic societies. While in the thrall of the Yagé, she coerces a village child to contravene the Matriarch’s wishes and set her free by appealing to a shared love of aesthetic beauty. She then stares down the corporation's mercenaries by threatening to stream her own execution live on a recovered smartphone, thus subjecting their paymasters to an embarrassing international incident. (A bitter twist: This was, of course, Alejandro’s original plan.) These imperfections in otherwise comprehensive systems of control are fortuitous for Justine, but the film hardly presents them as hopeful glimmers. Her escape is an isolated, exceptional event on a global battlefield in which escalation among numerous Leviathans is the norm. Indeed, The Green Inferno points to bleak but eerily plausible future in which a vast majority of the world’s population is subject to the rule of a “mega-Leviathan”: a hydra of collaborating authoritarian nations-states united under a capitalist ideology. In such conditions, “nano-Leviathans” such as holdout indigenous tribes, religious separatists, anti-government guerrillas, and other nominally sovereign partisans would be forced to adopt increasingly beyond-the-pale methods. When the alternative is annihilation, the choice to eat one’s enemy becomes no choice at all.

My Goodness, What Sharp Teeth You Have: The Visit

[Note: This post contains mild spoilers. Updated 9/21/15.]

Upon learning that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s first horror film since his laughable 2008 misfire The Happening is a faux found footage thriller, a cinephile could be forgiven for becoming wary. After all, the distinguishing features of Shyamalan’s more durable films are their aesthetic beauty and meticulous mise en scène. Witness the alternately idyllic and demon-haunted mists that suffuse the firelit gothic environs of The Village, or the proliferation of reflections and comic-esque quadrilaterals in Unbreakable’s steely blue visual vocabulary. Nine years into Shyamalan’s increasingly dire creative slump, what possible good could come from subordinating his once-striking cinematic aptitude to the jittery, willfully unpolished first-person camera gimmick?

Quite a bit, as it happens. While The Visit finds Shyamalan’s facility for striking visuals and cunning compositions at low ebb, it’s an unexpected showcase for his screenwriting talents. Indeed, in spite of its frequently cheesy horror methods, The Visit boasts the filmmaker’s most thoughtful and intricate script since at least The Village. However, unlike the latter film with its biting but overwrought allegory, The Visit is more content with the first-order business of delivering midnight movie creepiness. By relaxing his ambitions, Shyamalan paradoxically permits his sharper, multifaceted storytelling abilities to emerge. There’s a surprising amount of substance burbling gratifyingly beneath the surface of this demented little flick, which mashes up elements of Rosemary’s Baby, Burnt Offerings, and Motel Hell and then liberally seasons them with Grimm fairy tales.

In contrast to many found footage horror pictures, The Visit establishes a semi-believable rationale for its central conceit. What unfolds on the screen is presented as the documentary film project of aspiring filmmaker Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge), a precocious high schooler with appropriately over-inflated artistic pretensions. Rebecca and her younger brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are the product of their mother Paula’s (Kathryn Hahn) illicit adolescent marriage to her substitute teacher. That union caused a seemingly unrepairable rift with Paula’s parents, John and Doris, whom she has not spoken to in fifteen years. However, Paula's marriage eventually fell apart, and she has recently re-established tentative contact with her parents via the Internet. Given that they have never even met their grandchildren, Paula’s folks invite Rebecca and Tyler to spend the week at the family farm in rural Pennsylvania. This visit serves as the focus of Rebecca’s amateur documentary, but the teen’s ambitions are broader. She longs to unravel the mystery of what occurred the day her mother left home—Paula won’t elaborate, but hints that it was an ugly scene—and to hopefully persuade her grandparents to forgive their only child for her youthful lapses.

The Visit therefore consists of the footage shot over the course of the week by Rebecca and Tyler using the girl’s dual video cameras. (“Am I co-director?,” Tyler inquires hopefully. “We’ll say camera B Operator,” Rebecca replies with a scowl.) The film is murky as to whether the material shown constitutes raw or edited footage. The presence of bad takes and miscellaneous junk shots suggests the former, but Rebecca (or someone else) has clearly spliced the two-camera footage into cohesive scenes, added intertitles and dissolves, and generally sanded down the rough edges for audience consumption. Given the awareness that Rebecca exhibits with respect to documentary practice—the ethics of filming non-consenting individuals becomes a notable plot point—the most reasonable assumption is that everything in The Visit is there by her design.

From the moment that Rebecca and Tyler arrive at their mom’s childhood home, something seems a bit off about Pop Pop John (Peter McRobbie) and Nana Doris (Deanna Dunagan). They appear to be the picture of elderly folksiness, but their behavior carries a whiff of overcompensation. Cheerful Nana is perpetually baking up goodies in the kitchen, Pop Pop stoically tends to the farm’s never-ending chores, and the couple listens in respectful bewilderment as Tyler shows off his impressive improvised rapping talents. However, things start to get strange at bedtime, which arrives at the early hour of 9:30 p.m., to the disappointment of the WiFi-starved kids. Investigating weird sounds outside their room at night, Rebecca discovers Nana wandering about the house in her nightgown, vomiting prodigiously. The next day the kids observe Pop Pop repeatedly depositing small, mysterious parcels in the shed out back, and later they are maniacally accosted by Nana during an impromptu game of hide-and-seek—in the crawlspace under the house. Thereafter, the grandparents’ behavior rapidly escalates to the surreal, unsettling, and downright terrifying.

One of the more novel aspects of The Visit is how openly Rebecca and Tyler wrestle with the conflicts and uncertainties of their tense, increasingly perilous situation. Particularly in the found footage subgenre, the viewer doesn’t typically learn much about the mindsets of characters in contemporary horror features. The framework of Rebecca’s documentary—and her desire to understand the psychology of her family—means that The Visit can linger on scenes of brother and sister urgently discussing what the hell is going on, without seeming distractingly contrived about it. Given that Pop Pop and Nana are essentially strangers, the siblings have no basis for judging their grandparents’ bizarre behavior. Likewise, neither Rebecca nor Tyler seem to have much experience around the elderly. “They’re old. They’re just different,” is a mantra uttered by several characters, including Rebecca in a desperate attempt to convince herself that nothing is out of the ordinary. The yawning generation gap leaves the kids with little recourse but to Google terms like “dementia” and “schizophrenia” and make an educated guess about how much danger Pop Pop and Nana might pose to themselves or others. Unlike many horror films, the choices presented by The Visit are not easy ones: The kids’ terror at each fresh slice of menacing weirdness is at war with their genuine, familial concern that something might be seriously wrong with their grandparents.

The Visit’s success as a psychological thriller is helped immeasurably by the fact that DeJonge and Oxenbould have authentic sibling-like chemistry, enabling Shyamalan and his performers to gradually reveal more rounded personalities for Rebecca and Tyler, beyond their interest in documentaries and hip hop, respectively. Arguably the best scene in the film involves the siblings interrogating each other in makeshift interviews, wherein Rebecca coaxes he brother into talking about a formative moment of childhood shame, while Tyler zeroes in on his sister’s hidden self-loathing. Details from this scene later become relevant, not in the typically neat and tidy way of most Shyamalan plotting, but as a means of explaining behavior and creating poetic echoes. As characters, the kids aren’t always likable, but they are smart and good-hearted, and their situation, for all its outlandishness, is based on a cluster of relatable, real-world anxieties.

If the The Visit’s protagonists were middle-aged adults, the fears that the film plays upon would be more straightforward in nature. To a grownup, a senior citizen functions as a glimpse into their own future fate, and the elderly accordingly become vessels for the terrors of loneliness, illness, and mortality. For children such as Rebecca and Tyler, however, old people represent an alien Other: survivors from a far-flung time who eat, dress, and act differently than modern citizens of the world. The tension at the heart of The Visit is therefore partly one of cultural confusion. The initial challenge that that kids face is to decide whether they are over-reacting to innocuous events based on their ageist and ableist biases. Eventually, this mutates into the even thornier problems that many people face when dealing with an illness that makes their loved ones unpredictable, antagonistic, and even abusive.

These are sobering matters for a film that is otherwise a by-the-numbers (albeit modestly effective) exercise in jump scares and chilling imagery. Shyamalan unfortunately leans a bit too heavily on funhouse facileness, e.g., a disheveled old person suddenly popping into the frame. Such hokey methods can work when used sparingly, but the director is overly reliant on them, and dispiritingly eager to lazily reuse the aesthetic tropes of contemporary horror. (Are there hissing, stringy-haired figures skittering around on all fours? You bet!) Conversely, the most frightening sequences in The Visit are those predicated on the nerve-fraying uncertainty about Pop Pop and Nana’s behavior. For example, after their grandfather delivers an unprovoked beating on a stranger in an apparent moment of paranoid senility, the threat of explosive violence from Pop Pop makes Rebecca doubly wary about correcting his absent-minded mistakes.

Visually speaking, The Visit is just as undistinguished as one might expect given its found footage premise. This is not an implicit slap at cinematographer Maryse Alberti, whose résumé includes an impressive array of documentary features and the low-fi triumph The Wrestler, making her a judicious choice to lens this sort of film. Shyamalan, to his credit, seems to intuit that the low-budget sensory blandness of The Visit requires a complementary dose of subliminal uncanniness. Accordingly, he provides the film’s screenplay with a robust undercurrent of folk and pop cultural resonance to boost the hair-raising factor.

The entire film is, in essence, a riff on “Little Red Riding Hood,” complete with the unnerving notion of finding something unexpectedly and conspicuously Not Grandma sleeping in Grandma’s bed. More subtle allusions abound: the kids are warned not to linger on a woodland path, Pop Pop is observed chopping wood out by the barn, and it is mentioned ominously that Nana has something “inside her” trying to get out. Tempting treats are everywhere at the farmhouse, and Nana even sweet-talks Rebecca into crawling inside her cavernous oven to clean it, in a bit of “Hansel and Gretel” inspired creepiness. Like Bluebeard’s locked room, both Pop Pop’s shed and the allegedly mold-infested basement are forbidden to the curious grandchildren. Shyamalan even drizzles in chilling allusions to other genres and his own prior works. Pop Pop tells a disjointed story about being fired from his night shift factory job after he repeatedly witnessed a “white thing” with glowing eyes, which no one else could see. Nana later spins a rambling tale concerning invisible space aliens that live in a pond and send their victims into eternal slumber. These anecdotes suggest bits of The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water, but ultimately their purpose is not so much meta-textual cuteness as to inject an extra dose of eeriness into the film.

The one aspect of The Visit that is somewhat troubling is the film’s use of dementia and mental illness as a source of horror, in that individuals suffering from such conditions are presented as frightening and potentially violent. While Shyamalan’s script doesn’t assert that the elderly and/or mentally disordered are to be feared and shunned, The Visit’s moral could be construed by less attentive viewers as “old people are weird and dangerous,” or, more problematically, “mentally ill individuals are unhinged sadists who will kill you with little provocation.” It’s not necessarily that the film is glib or irresponsible, but that its depiction of an extraordinary situation could be construed as a bigoted generalization. (One is reminded of the viewers whose short-sighted takeaway from Gone Girl was “women are manipulative bitches.”) That said, the depiction of mental illness is a problem in essentially every horror film that involves a murderer slicing his way through hapless victims based on some deranged motivation. The Visit at least has the nerve to engage directly with the matter: the discomfort that nonconforming behavior elicits in the neurotypical; the distress that the mental degeneration of one’s elderly loved ones creates; and the maddening haziness as to what the right choice might be when health, safety, devotion, and pride are in multi-dimensional conflict.