Something I Can Never Have: The Neon Demon

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. Updated 3/17/17.]

A young woman comes to the Big City with dreams of breaking into stardom. Throughout her brief life, she’s been told she has “It”: a singular beauty, an uncommon talent, an aura that turns heads when she glides into a room. The gatekeepers to fame and fortune can also discern her extraordinary value. They tell her she is going places, and make endless promises about the glamorous future that lies before her. She gets her Big Break and, seemingly overnight, she is ushered into a rarefied realm far removed from that of her old life. Her new world has a gangrenous underside, however, and she is gradually corrupted and drained by the unforgiving system like a vampire’s bride. The exhilaration of ascension eventually turns to blind narcissism, and then to panicked cruelty as her trajectory—exploitation, diminishment, replacement—becomes hideously apparent.

It’s a timeless story, perhaps even a clichéd one. The cold-blooded commodification of beauty is such a well-established and exhaustively explored phenomenon that any new iteration of the tale needs to offer something truly distinctive, either aesthetically or thematically, in order to justify its existence. Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest feature, the high fashion nightmare The Neon Demon, offers both. Visually and aurally, it’s an utterly fearless work: a lustrous acid trip spattered with indelible images of both unearthly loveliness and midnight-movie ghastliness. What truly makes Refn’s film so forceful and remarkable, however, is that its striking, often disconcerting imagery is utilized to portray a bent variation on a familiar babe-in-the-woods character arc, which is cast as an expression of a pervasive cultural virus. Critically, The Neon Demon is nothing as facile as a mere indictment of the fashion world’s superficiality—although some viewers will doubtlessly regard it as that and nothing more. It is, more meaningfully, a lament for the grotesque deformations inflicted on the human soul by the hunger for the unattainable.

The film’s opening credit sequence functions as an apéritif for the chilly, intense aesthetic that Refn maintains throughout. Bright text materializes and fades over a textured background of mutating fluorescent hues, while Cliff Martinez’ synth-drenched soundtrack layers melodic waves, ambient noise, and tinkling chimes over an urgent electronic beat. (One can immediately discern the ghost of Brian Eno’s late 1970s and early 80s studio albums, among other influences, in Martinez’ excellent score for the film.) As in Refn’s Drive, the exact year in which The Neon Demon unfolds is ambiguous, but from the outset, the film’s style often evokes the sights and sounds of a distinct mode of mass market West Coast 1980s chic. Here the walls are hung with Christopher Nagel prints, the hi-fi stereo blares synthpop and post-punk, and limitless cocaine fuels the late-night revelries. With mocking self-importance, Refn even emblazons the credits with his own retro designer label of sorts: a crest with the initials N.W.F.

The film then introduces Demon’s resident ingénue Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old who is freshly arrived in Los Angeles and painfully eager to make a name for herself in the modeling world. With her corn silk tresses, rosy porcelain skin, and vulnerable, almost boyish features, she doesn’t have the look of a typical runway denizen. It’s this novelty that seems to make her so beguiling to the industry figures she encounters, beginning with aspiring photographer Dean (Karl Glusman). Perhaps unwisely, Jesse has connected with him online and agreed to participate in a private photo shoot in order to build her portfolio.

Dean has Jesse made up like a candy-colored doll and then places her in a Grand Guignol tableau, sprawled on a couch with blood spilling from her slit throat. It’s exactly the sort of trite slasher-goth aesthetic that an “edgy” struggling artist might employ, and yet it still unsettles. Refn presents the shoot itself in a Euro-artsy register. Jesse is visually confined and isolated by quadrilaterals, like a messily pinned insect in a shadow box. He also accentuates the atmosphere of menace with shots of Dean prowling in the darkness, throwing hungry looks at his model. In truth, the sequence constitutes a bit of misdirection: Dean is later revealed as the most decent and forthright (perhaps guileless) person Jesse will encounter in Los Angeles, and he even initiates a chaste sort-of-relationship with her.

For Jesse, the more fateful meeting that occurs during the shoot is with Ruby (Jena Malone), a slinky makeup artist. This woman talks the friend-starved model into accompanying her to a late-night party, the sort of hip affair that includes video art installations and an acrobatic shibari performance piece. There Jesse is introduced to fellow models Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), lanky, cold-blooded blondes who haughtily enumerate their cosmetic surgeries as if they were achievements. In the ladies’ room, away from the deafening dream-pop and fuddling strobe lights, the pair’s veneer of cordiality vanishes the moment that Jesse fails to show them proper deference, and thereafter they dispose of her with a few caustic swipes. Gigi in particular slips in and out of Mean Girl mode with an unnerving ease, in a gauchely hostile echo of Charlotte’s more refined frenemy stance in The Last Days of Disco.

Ultimately, however, the nasty jabs of fellow models amount to so much anxious hot air, a measure of the threat that Jesse represents to the established pecking order of Los Angeles’ fashion world. Evincing unexpected self-awareness and mercenary pragmatism, she confesses to Dean during a date that she has no real talents, but “I’m pretty, and I can make money off of pretty.” Indeed, the people who stand to profit off Jesse’s beauty, such as modeling agent Roberta (Christina Hendricks) and fashion photographer Jack (Demond Harrington), are unfailingly smitten with her effortless, unconventional look. Perhaps due to her youth, Jesse also radiates anxious vulnerability, which only heightens her attraction to disreputable industry elements. In a dreamlike sequence, the aforementioned Jack closes his set for a one-on-one shoot with the plainly petrified Jesse, slathering her nude body with metallic gold paint in a manner that betrays both clinical admiration and nauseating exploitation. (The visual evokes Auric Goldfinger’s gaudy execution methods, and by extension the misogyny-tinted disposability of the myriad Bond Girls.)

In no time at all, Jesse finds herself standing expectantly in front of a casting director and an esteemed designer (an uncredited Alessandro Nivola). Like all the models who have appeared for the audition, she wears only underwear and heels, but whereas the Designer can barely be bothered to glance at most of the women, Jesse’s entrance stops him cold. Refn and Nivola present this encounter absolutely straight, as a rapturous moment for a man steeped in world-weary decadence. Fanning might be unequivocally beautiful, but the filmmaker appreciates that in narrative fiction, mere assertions of greatness—e.g., she’s a genius writer, he’s an exquisite dancer, she’s one of the finest painters in the world—are not sufficient to convey a character’s superlative qualities. It’s Nivola’s splendid slow-motion reaction rather than Fanning’s looks that persuade the viewer that Jesse has “It”. The director stages the scene as though it were a religious experience for the Designer. Like Saul, the scales fall from his eyes as he at least beholds true beauty. (The unspoken, discomfiting subtext is, naturally, that Jesse’s new life can only truly begin when a powerful man acknowledges her appearance.)

Equally significant from a narrative perspective, however, is the reaction of Sarah, who is auditioning for the same show and immediately precedes Jesse in the lineup. Irrespective of the viewer’s distaste for Sarah, it’s hard not to feel twinges of sympathy when one witnesses the slow and total collapse of her confidence when the Designer won’t deign to even look at her. The sight of an au naturel newcomer like Jesse being singled out is too much for Sarah to bear. Jesse later discovers her in the restroom, sobbing before a shattered mirror, her portfolio torn and slashed to shreds. Good-hearted naïf that Jesse is, she tries to offer Sarah reassurance, but to the latter woman, this just feels like contemptuous pity. When Jesse’s palm is accidentally sliced on a mirror shard, the film offers the first unmistakable sign that something more rotten that mere heartless capitalism lurks beneath the surface of this world. Sarah seizes Jesse’s hand and attempts to lap up her blood, as though her rival’s priceless “It” were a molecule that could be consumed and absorbed.

Indeed, there are whispers throughout the film that something is askew, that the world has gone monstrously out of order. Most memorably, Jesse at one point returns to her fleabag extended-stay motel room to discover that an intruder is lurking within. Threatening to call the police, she convinces the abrasive, leering manager Hank (Keanu Reeves) to do something about this unwanted guest. When he and a baseball-bat-wielding crony (Charles Baker) investigate, however, the trespasser is revealed to be a mountain lion that has wandered down from the hills. This slightly surrealistic aside establishes a sensation of perversion and intrusion—the pitiless beast slipping undetected into the civilized world. The menace is only amplified by Refn’s facility at conveying both Los Angeles’ glitz and its seediness, and then allowing the resulting dissonance to grow, cancerously, into something overwhelming. This same approach is on display in Drive, but here the director escalates it to an almost baroque levels: The grime is much thicker and the gleam much more dazzling. Indeed, even the banal spaces of The Neon Demon’s L.A.—the strip mall diners, anonymous alleyways, and cash-only motels—exude a distressing sense of the uncanny, much like the locales of the thematically adjacent Mulholland Drive. In truth, nothing feels familiar in Jesse’s new world, and she seems perpetually menaced by her surroundings, even in the most mundane situations.

It is a professional coup for Jesse to have been chosen for the Designer’s latest show, but it is the event itself that proves to be a true turning point, the threshold that divides Middle American innocence from a new communion with something cold and unholy. Gigi is in the show as well, flabbergasted and affronted that Jesse has been given a place of honor in the finale, but the woman’s limp jibes betray the intimidation she plainly feels. Refn’s stylized portrayal of Jesse’s experience on the runway reveal the event as a transformative and profound one. The other models and even the spectators are lost in perfect darkness as radioactive hues of pink, red, and blue seemingly baptize Jesse in light. (Here and elsewhere, Refn’s film echoes Suspiria, the bright colors evoking something unearthly and sinister rather than wondrous.) She is eventually confronted with a neon shape hanging in the void, like a burning glyph written by a divine finger. A triangle divided into four sub-triangles, this mark does not seem to be a mere symbol, but the manifestation—perhaps even the perfectly symmetrical face—of some inhuman entity. The invisible metamorphosis to which it subjects Jesse is a monstrous one: the removal of her guileless, gentle nature and its replacement with callous narcissism. As if to seal this sacrament, Jesse kisses her own reflections within a prism-like structure that has enclosed around her.

The scene that immediately follows illustrates the abrupt shift in Jesse’s demeanor that is triggered by the triangle’s malefic fire. (It is also underlined by a change in Fanning’s body language, from tremulous elation to languid arrogance.) Jesse shows her crypto-boyfriend Dean in through the back door of a restaurant, where a post-show dinner is underway with the Designer, Gigi, and other models. There, the Designer reveals himself as the closest thing in the The Neon Demon to a Satanic figure, although he is truly more of a mouthpiece for the being from Jesse’s hallucinatory runway walk. “Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” he pronounces magisterially, clarifying—with barely concealed disdain for Gigi and the show’s other models—that Jesse’s unparalleled natural looks are the pearl of great price in this ethos. Such beauty cannot be attained, only bestowed by the luck of genetics. When poor Dean pushes back against this superficial worldview, Jesse icily tells him to leave if he’s so bothered by such harsh truths. The mise-en-scène in this passage is marvelous stuff: Dean and Jesse sit at separate tables, the former serving as a feeble barrier between the latter and the others characters. (Tellingly, he has to turn uncomfortably in his seat to address the Designer, exposing his back to Jesse’s verbal stabbing.) When Dean crumbles and flees, Jesse is free to slide across the gap and join her new tribe.

Later, a drunk and exhausted Jesse returns to the motel and has an excruciating nightmare in which Hank enters her room and forces her to perform fellatio on a folding pocket knife. (This disturbing dream is one of several warnings, unheeded by Jesse, of the violent threat posed by the frustrated envy and lust of others.) Upon awakening, she hears someone (possibly Hank) force his way into the adjacent room and apparently assault the young woman within. Knowing no one else she can turn to, she reaches out to Ruby, who is house-sitting at a mansion in the hills. The latter woman takes pity on Jesse and offers her the use of a spare bedroom. Tellingly, one shot reveals that this residence features a stuffed and mounted leopard, calling back to the invading panther and hinting that the mansion is a place of animalistic peril.

Indeed, the luxurious residence proves to be no sanctuary from the sexual aggressions of others. Ruby mistakenly assumes that her not-so-secret desire for Jesse is requited, and that her generosity entitles her to the young model’s affections. Vehemently rejected after attempting to force herself on Jesse, Ruby succumbs to a kind of enraged, self-loathing breakdown. During the course of her day job as a funeral home’s cosmetician, she pleasures herself with a female cadaver while fantasizing about her house guest. Jesse, meanwhile, having discovered that she is truly isolated and surrounded by grasping predators, withdraws even further into hard-hearted vanity. (She never dares to reach out to the spurned Dean, who, unbeknownst to Jesse, has paid Hank for the damages inflicted on her room by the mountain lion.) When Ruby finds her wandering by the mansion’s drained pool the following evening, Jesse espouses a matter-of-fact superiority: “I know what I look like... Women would kill to look like this.”

These words prove prescient, for it is at this point that The Neon Demon reveals itself as horror cinema not only in spirit, but in flesh and bone. Ruby, it seems, has invited Gigi and Sarah over to the mansion, and together the three women unleash a violent reckoning on Jesse for the sin of being beautiful and unattainable. Their assault culminates in Jesse’s fall into the empty pool, where she lies fatally broken, staring up at stars that seem to form the unholy triangle of her runway vision. Ruby, Gigi, and Sarah regard their dying victim coolly, watching her dark blood spread on the tile with hungry fascination.

The Neon Demon could very well have concluded with this tragic moment: the innocent unjustly murdered and her green-eyed nemeses triumphant. A dire ending, perhaps, but not one that feels especially rebellious in its depiction of human rapacity and spitefulness. Refn’s feature, however, achieves something far more discomfiting and transgressive by continuing to push the narrative forward. Instead of flickering out with Jesse’s life, the film rolls on, bearing witness as her murderers reap the rewards of their bloody deed—and learn its price.

In the aftermath of Jesse’s death, Gigi and Sarah shower blood and bits of flesh from their bare bodies while Ruby lazes motionless in a bathtub filled with gore, her pale face caked in scarlet. It’s a startling image that evokes numerous horror features (Carrie, The Descent, Trouble Every Day), as well as the baths of virginal blood in which real-world serial killer Elizabeth Báthory purportedly indulged, at least according to folk tradition. As this scene implies and later ones confirm, Ruby and her fellows have plunged beyond mere murder and defilement: They have embraced cannibalism as a means of absorbing Jesse’s youth, beauty, and vitality. The Neon Demon’s third act swerve thus reveals the film as a po-faced, Vanity Fair remix of Antonia Bird’s anthropophagical black comedy Ravenous.

For Ruby—the only member of the murderous trio motivated by romantic resentment—her abominable deeds have in a twisted sense secured Jesse’s eternal proximity, albeit at the possible cost of the makeup artist’s sanity. She is later observed masturbating on a moonlit floor as a distressing quantity of blood gushes from her vagina, and then later still lying placidly in what is apparently Jesse’s unmarked grave. In the case of Gigi and Sarah, the fallout from their actions is much more clearly expressed and far more horrific. While accompanying Gigi during a shoot at a stunning seaside house, Sarah catches the attention of the photographer, Jack—the same man who was once so enraptured by Jesse. Struck by Sarah’s looks, he asks her to substitute for another model. This appears to confirm the notion that the consumption of Jesse’s flesh has bestowed her killers with a portion of her youthful power. Sarah is pleased, and for a moment it seems as though the villains have emerged victorious, the boons of their crime at last emergent.

Then Gigi begins to cough and excuses herself from the photo shoot, to the consternation of the crew. Sarah searches the house for her and discovers Gigi huddled in a small room, gagging and retching. Seemingly hypnotized, Sarah can only watch impotently as Gigi vomits up a partially digested eyeball, its iris still a perfect icy blue. “I need to get her out of me,” Gigi wails, before suddenly and repeatedly stabbing herself in the abdomen with a pair of scissors and slumping over dead. (Partly concealed by designer sunglasses, Sarah’s reaction is almost completely blank, with the exception of a tiny twitch of disgust at the edge of her flawlessly painted lips, a detail that is deliciously performed by Lee.) After considering Gigi’s corpse for a beat, Sarah slowly crouches down, picks up the eyeball, and swallows it, wiping away a tear in the process. She then turns on her heel and returns to the shoot.

It’s a terrifically effective and brazen conclusion, and one in keeping with Refn’s aforementioned tactic of relentlessly pushing forward to observe all the awful consequences of Jesse’s murder. This approach creates a splendidly squirm-provoking pall of doom over the final minutes of The Neon Demon. Each shot and gesture signals what follows, with Refn allowing each terrible expectation to gurgle for a few sour moments before fulfilling it. (“She’s not going to pick up the eyeball, is she? Oh, God, she’s picking it up. Wait, she’s not going to…?”)

Beyond its potency as an almost cheekily sadistic horror sequence, however, the ending brings the film’s thematic ambitions into clear focus. While Refn refrains from painting Sarah, Gigi, and Ruby as overtly sympathetic characters, the film does elicit some sliver of sympathy for them. They might be murderous cannibals, but these women are also systematic victims, as are virtually all the women depicted in The Neon Demon. The muddling of deadly sins in the film’s psychological landscape—envy, pride, greed, lust, and gluttony—is significant. It directs the viewer to a broader and higher vantage point, from which one might gaze downward into the film’s earthly inferno and discern the ubiquitous handiwork of a malevolent power. Not Lucifer, in this instance, but want itself.

The abrupt, atypical end to Jesse’s star-is-born arc—inasmuch as she has an arc at all—might seems narratively perverse, but it’s as much necessary collateral damage as it is mischievous subversion on Refn’s part. Although Jesse is The Neon’s Demon’s protagonist and her initiation into the cult of commercial beauty is the backbone of the story, the bulk of the film’s emotional energy is directed towards her. To be sure, the viewer is witness to Jesse’s terror, ecstasy, and vanity as she is introduced and acclimated to the modeling world’s twisted norms. Yet the film regards her less as a tragic heroine than as a vehicle for the portrayal of a profane emotional process. Namely, a woman’s indoctrination into a misogynistic system of commercialized desire.

Tellingly, almost every other character in the film wants something from Jesse: professionals like the agent, photographer, and Designer see a means to wealth and fame; Dean yearns for the romance and constancy of a girlfriend; Ruby daydreams of passionate sex; Hank wants cash and a fearful “Lolita” he can abuse; and Sarah and Gigi hunger to devour Jesse’s beauty and claim it as their own. The film’s air is thick with heedless, almost manic longing. The Neon Demon highlights the commonalities that run through these various desires, appealing to the viewer’s empathy, at least with respect to its women characters. Humanity, Refn advances, is snared in a fractal of repeating and endlessly fragmenting wants, a triangle subdivided down to the quantum level. Even a cannibal and would-be rapist like Ruby ultimately longs for something quite human—the physical affection of a Special Someone. Like most Americans, she has been tragically encultured to believe that everyone is guaranteed such intimacy.

There is no need for Refn to hammer the point with depictions of the downstream reaches of the fashion industry and all its allied sectors—cosmetics, weight loss, plastic surgery, marketing, and countless others. He trusts that the viewer will hear the fortunes sloshing when he presents a limitless cavalcade of indistinguishable women in their underwear, shuffling and trotting like so many thoroughbreds before the eyes of an influential man. From a rejected model sobbing in a ladies room, one can trace a dotted line through the oligarchic avarice of the owners, designers, and taste-makers, back to the burning itch of want created by a fashion magazine ad. Even the violence-backed sexual cravings of Ruby and Hank resonate with and personify this system, their stomach-turning specificity the mirror image of the impersonal exploitation of the capital-fueled fashion world. (The unseen Lolita in the room next to Jesse’s is another collateral victim, embodying the limitless female dreamers and runaways who never wriggle free from the first sleazy abuser they encounter when they step off the westbound bus.)

One needn’t be a Marxist theorist to observe how this global scheme of monetized want distorts and mutates society, forming a vortex of emotional and physical agony as individuals hand over their dollars in a never-ending search for the unattainable. Mature acceptance of the reality of the human experience—that one can’t always get what one wants, whether beauty, success, wealth, sex, or love—would slow the wheel's turn. Relief from the itch of need can therefore never be permitted to last too long. The Neon Demon bears witness to the direct effects of this cycle on women like Jesse and Sarah, while also echoing it in the dehumanizing revolving door dynamic in which models are used and then replaced like some endlessly renewable resource.

With The Neon Demon, Refn extends the principals of this rotten system to its reductio ad absurdum conclusion. The film’s final scenes portray the deranged behavior that would be permitted—nay, mandated—were all other concerns sublimated to the need to be the youngest, prettiest, thinnest, and most desired. This, ultimately, is why the aura of grisly inevitability that clings to the film’s conclusion is so overpowering. Deep down, one knows intuitively that it isn’t madness for Sarah to pop that regurgitated eyeball in her mouth and swallow, no matter how physically repugnant it might seem. It’s what she has to do in order to attain everything that she wants and to be everything that the world wants. If those are the stakes, is it really a choice at all?

Woman vs. Wild: The Shallows

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

Efficient, effective thrillers like The Shallows don’t come along that often. A lean, mean, 104-minute dose of primeval tension and terror, the film is blessedly light on—although not completely free of—narrative flab. The opening fifteen minutes or so establish all that the viewer needs to know about heroine Nancy (Blake Lively), a Texas surfer and Baylor grad who has journeyed to Mexico for reasons that are both adventurous and sentimental. Wavering on whether or not to drop out of medical school, she is seeking a nameless cove where her recently deceased mother rode the waves many years ago, shortly after discovering she was pregnant. In true Ugly American fashion, she is embarrassingly open about this personal odyssey with Carlos (Óscar Jaenada), the amiable local driver who has agreed to convey her through the forest to this elusive beach.

Once they arrive at the cove, Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra allows the film to break free from the almost claustrophobic close-ups that dominate within cab of Carlos’ truck. The sumptuous, blindingly bright widescreen digital photography captures the beach in all its white and aquamarine glory, resembling nothing so much as pristine paradise found. (Except, of course, for the two male surfers who are already enjoying the waves and documenting their exploits with a helmet-mounted GoPro camera.) While The Shallows is not remotely a “surfing procedural,” Collet-Serra provides an inspired depiction of Nancy’s meticulous preparations in a series of quick cuts, giving landlocked viewers just enough detail to appreciate that she is no-nonsense and capable when it comes to her sport. Thereafter, the film indulges in a montage of luscious surfing footage, devoting as much attention to the hypnotic curl of the waves as it does to Lively’s lithe, leggy figure. While a tad shameless, this slick revelry in the light, color, and motion of the surfer’s experience handily conveys Nancy’s exhilaration, providing validation for her quest—and contrast with the horrors to come.

After taking a break to video chat with her father (Brett Cullen) and younger sister (Sedona Legge) to confirm that she is alive and well—and quarreling with Dad vis-à-vis her mother’s death and her own future—Nancy returns to the surf. The film’s tone unmistakably shifts at this point, leaving behind the sun-kissed elation of the earlier footage for something more ambiguous. The score switches into a distinctly ominous mode, and Collet-Serra slides in more gloomy underwater shots angled up towards the surface, where the silhouette of Nancy’s surfboard suddenly seems terribly small and exposed. As the day wears on and her two ad hoc companions are preparing to leave, Nancy elects to remain behind and catch a few more waves. While this fateful choice will seem foolhardy in hindsight, the nightmare that ultimately descends on Nancy is less attributable to poor judgment than to freak occurrences beyond her control. Most critically, the currents have recently carried a rotting humpback whale carcass into the cove, drawing predatory species that would not normally be encountered in the area.

What unfolds next is an ocean-phobe’s worst fear: An enormous great white shark rams Nancy’s surfboard and delivers a gruesome bite to her left leg. The attack, although brief, is easily the most visually arresting sequence in the film, owing particularly to two stupendous images. The first is a dazzling slow-motion shot of Nancy sliding into the tube of a breaking wave, just as the colossal shadow of the shark materializes within the wall of water to her right. In the second instance, underwater greens and blues erupt with dark blooms of blood as the maimed Nancy flails in terror, the entire frame eventually glowing an unnaturally deep red that would do Dario Argento proud. Despite her panic and pain, Nancy manages to claw her way onto the whale cadaver, giving her just enough of a respite from danger to turn her surf leash into a makeshift tourniquet, and then to comprehend the ugly reality of her situation.

This is where The Shallows truly begins to shine as a horror-tinted thriller: Nancy is effectively thrown into a fearsome, single-minded arms race not only with the hellishly determined shark, but with the implacable forces of the sun, cold, current, and tides. Similar to other top-shelf thrillers of recent vintage such as Buried, Gravity, and The Revenant, Collet-Serra’s film succeeds in large part due to the stark nature of its conflict. Nancy only has one goal: survive. Naturally, the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema stack the deck in favor of the film’s heroine. As a pretty white woman (and a Final Girl of sorts), Nancy is clearly going to live through her ordeal. However, the film is nonetheless able to evoke punishing tension from the moment-to-moment uncertainty of how exactly she will outmaneuver each new complication and mini-catastrophe. Her tactics rely on both her knowledge and pure happenstance to exploit every possible advantage within the confines of her desperate situation. Case in point: Her surgical training permits her to jerry-rig her barbed earrings into sutures for her mutilated leg, in a scene reminiscent of Hugh Glass’ cauterization of his torn throat in The Revenant.

Ordinarily, an oceanic survival tale would entail perils related to sea’s trackless expanse and abyssal depths. The brutal irony of The Shallows’ scenario is how constrained the physical location proves to be. Nancy’s entire world is suddenly defined by a triad of objects, all within 40 or so yards of each other: the whale carcass, a stationary buoy, and a nub of rock with barely enough space for her and an obdurate seagull. Moreover, she is trapped a scant 200 yards from shore, seemingly doomed to perish within sight of the beach she traveled so far to surf. Like an army in a castle under siege, her sanctuary from her enemy is also her prison. (In this, The Shallows resembles the third act of Jaws, although in Nancy’s case she never has any illusions that she is the hunter.) Collet-Serra employs the simplicity of his tale’s locale to fine effect, repeatedly emphasizing that Nancy’s fate hinges on cold, quantitative factors such as distance, duration, and velocity. She doesn’t have the luxury of time to wait out her prehistoric foe. Thirst, gangrene, and the tide demand that she act to save herself sooner rather than later. Underlining the point, the luminescent face of Nancy’s marine watch periodically appears on screen, marking not only the time, but also the minutes remaining until low and high tide.

This is just one of the digital bells and whistles with which the director embellishes his frame. Texts and videos on Nancy’s phone also announce themselves with on-screen pop-ups. While such animated flourishes are at times distracting, their purpose gradually becomes clear as the film unfolds.  Ruthless momentum is crucial to the film’s potency, and while the action might occasionally downshift, Collet-Serra maintains a sense of ceaseless motion, reflecting the shark’s endless circling. (Seen from above, the creature’s silhouette becomes a second hand on a doomsday clock, counting out the remaining ticks of Nancy’s life.) Adding text messages and tidal countdowns as overlays prevents the need to cut awkwardly to close-up shots of gadgets, which would diminish the film’s energy. Not all of Collet-Serra’s choices are as judicious. The dollop of magical realism he adds to the film’s penultimate scene is likely meant to be touching, but it just induces eye-rolling. More egregiously, the film tends to treat its Mexican characters as featureless prey, or even outright stereotypes in the case of a thieving drunk (Diego Espejel) who declines to help Nancy and is relieved of a portion of his anatomy for his sins.

That said, The Shallows is essentially a one-woman show, and former Gossip Girl lead Lively acquits herself well. To be sure, Nancy is as thinly characterized as any horror protagonist, and the role doesn’t demand much of the performer in terms of emotional range or complexity. Certainly, Lively pulls off the tousled, sand-speckled bearing of a beach native, and also looks suitably alluring in a bikini—which is always going to be a prerequisite for a young female lead in a shark movie, one suspects. Indeed, The Shallows is fairly uninhibited about its male gaze, although the film’s gawking at Lively’s body often feels more aesthetic than sexual. However, it’s not the actress’ looks that are most salient to The Shallows’ success, but her ease with the role’s physicality and with its broad emotional beats. Far from distracting with her It Girl celebrity, Lively is credible as both an avid surfer and the sort of furtively tough woman who is accustomed to telling obsequious men that she’s just fine without their company, thank you. In short, Lively is convincing in a manner that permits her stardom to recede. The actress turns a paper doll heroine into someone likable and human: a confident athlete, a grieving daughter, and a terrified Everyperson in an hostile environment. Acting 101, perhaps, but it’s no small thing to be believable while also getting out of the way of the behind-the-camera talent—director Collet-Serra, of course, but also cinematographer Flavio Martinez Labiano and editor Joel Negron. Lively’s ability to nail exactly what The Shallows requires, no more and no less, is admirable.

Reach Hither Thy Hand, and Believe: The Conjuring 2

[Note: This post contains mild spoilers for The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2.]

The critical admiration bestowed upon director James Wan’s 2013 haunted house feature The Conjuring remains a puzzling phenomenon. The film is a shameless and utterly obnoxious helping of religious apologism, albeit one that is weirdly muddled in its advocacy for faith over skepticism. While one’s tolerance for such god-bothering hoopla might depend on one’s personal beliefs, The Conjuring’s gravest sin is more fundamental than its questionable worldview: It’s just not that scary. Nothing defeats a horror feature quite like a dearth of fright, and Wan’s film consistently confuses hackneyed spook story design and dismally predictable jump scares for authentic terror. What’s more, there is little connective tissue running through the feature’s myriad scenes of phantasmal shenanigans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its alleged inspiration in the case files of demonologists-slash-hucksters Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Conjuring unfolds less like a coherent story and more like a collection of fusty ghost-hunting anecdotes and stock urban legends.

The Insidious series has established Wan as a horror filmmaker who is capable of employing creaky genre tropes in gratifying and slightly off-kilter ways. Accordingly, one is disposed to lay some of the blame for The Conjuring’s narrative failures on twin screenwriters Carey and Chad Hayes (House of Wax, The Reaping) and producer Tony DeRosa-Grund, who shepherded the feature out of development hell in spite of zero experience with horror cinema. Regardless, the film’s missteps are partly rooted in its preference for the viewpoint of the ghost-sniffing Warrens rather than that of the Perrons, the terrorized family whose New England farmhouse has unfortunately become the lair of a vengeful witch’s spirit. As portrayed with unusual paltriness by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, Lorraine and Ed Warren are world-weary but steadfast in their religious convictions. With only small perturbations, their responses to every fresh swerve of spectral viciousness amount to moist-eyed resolve and tighter crucifix-clutching. Given that the viewer is more naturally aligned with the Perrons and their bewildered terror, the stiff-lipped, theologically ambiguous Warrens make lousy audience surrogates.

Accordingly, it was not particularly heartening to learn that Farmiga, Wilson, Wan, and the Hayeses had re-teamed for another ghost story purportedly culled from the Warrens’ real-world experiences. That said, The Conjuring 2 takes an approach to the sequel form that is relatively novel in the present era of horror franchises defined by elaborate world-building and breathlessly convoluted mythologies. (Ironically, that era was ushered in by Wan’s own Saw series, and further solidified by Insidious.) The Conjuring 2—which, like is antecedent, includes no actual conjuring—is only a sequel in the sense that its events occur after those of first film, and that it is similarly inspired by one of the Warrens’ purported paranormal investigations. The new film has nothing to do with the Perron haunting, and in this respect the Conjuring films more closely resemble standalone stories with the same protagonists rather than interconnected chapters in a multi-film saga. There’s something appealingly tidy and straightforward about this attitude, which lends each film the digestible simplicity of a Hardy Boys novel or an episode of a classic television series.

Like its predecessor, The Conjuring 2 opens with a prelude that appears to have minimal connection to the film’s primary plot. It is 1976 and the Warrens are in the middle of their most renowned case, the notorious haunting that supposedly afflicted the Amityville, Long Island home of the Lutz family. (This was later revealed to be a massive hoax, of course, but that hasn’t prevented the tale from inspiring at least one or two effective horror features.) During a séance, Lorraine relives the mass murder of the house’s previous inhabitants through the appallingly detached perspective of the crime’s perpetrator. It’s a disturbing sequence in which she mentally stalks through the darkened halls, methodically pumping an unseen shotgun as she “murders” each slumbering family member in their bed. What truly rattles Lorraine, however, is not the firsthand experience of this gruesome deed, but an encounter with a terrifying white-faced demon in a nun’s habit. This entity shows her a disturbing vision of Ed’s death, snapping Lorraine out of her trance with a jolt. In contrast to the first film, the initial impression that this prelude is unrelated to the subsequent story is slowly and steadily eroded. Eventually it becomes alarmingly apparent that the same foul forces are at play both in Amityville and in Enfield, north London one year later.

The latter is the home borough of the Hodgson family, headed by frazzled single mom Peggy (Frances O’Connor). She is struggling to keep four kids—from oldest to youngest, Margaret (Lauren Esposito), Janet (Madison Wolfe), Johnny (Patrick McAuley), and Billy (Benjamin Haigh)—fed and clothed in a moldering council row house while Dad is shacked up with his new family down the street. True to the haunted house movie formula, the paranormal disturbances that trouble the Hodgson clan start out relatively small in scale, albeit with an unambiguous aura of menace: nocturnal thudding, disembodied voices, and objects moving or activating on their own accord. Janet begins talking and roaming about in her sleep, often waking in a daze in the downstairs parlor. Her mounting anxiety seems to be centered on a decrepit leather rocking chair, where Peggy finds her sitting on more than one occasion.

Consistent with its predecessor, The Conjuring 2 is cursed with a shapeless plot that consists largely of a seemingly arbitrary assortment of ghostly shocks delivered with no particular sense of rhythm or direction. At times, the entity that bedevils the Hodgsons is remarkably restrained, playing mind games with the children in a manner that suggests psychological sadism as its ultimate objective. In other instances, its tactics amount to little more than crude spectral bullying aimed at driving the family away, as when the spirit abruptly appears as a gaunt, crooked-toothed old man who bellows threats at Janet, only to vanish just as suddenly.

Janet in particular has attracted the malevolent attention of the ghost, which is eventually revealed to be the lingering spirit of the house’s erstwhile misanthropic resident, Bill (Bob Adrian). The revelation that Janet’s poor soul may be in peril clarifies the story’s stakes, but doesn’t do much to correct the aimless character of the narrative. Even when the plot appears to move forward, nothing much changes. The local constabulary looks into the disturbances and is perplexed by the strange sounds and moving furniture, but can’t actually do anything about them. The physically and emotionally battered family moves across the street to escape the tormenting wraith, but the ghost finds ways to terrorize them anyway. The British media picks up on the story and the Hodgsons become the subjects of a sensational national news circus, but the arrival of parapsychologists and skeptical scientists doesn’t abate or intensify the spectral activity in any meaningful way. One gets the distinct sense that Wan is just killing time until the Warrens enter the picture.

The filmmakers never quite resolve what sort of horror picture they are making—a haunted house story, a demon possession story, or some kludgy hybrid of the two—and too often flit indiscriminately between subtle and vulgar scares. That said, many of the film’s paranormal scenes are terrifically chilling when regarded on their own merits, and in this the sequel is a clear improvement over the inert and uninspired The Conjuring. The fantastic sound design, credited to Eliot Connors, Joe Dzuban, and Peter Staubli, is a significant contributor to the film’s success on this score: The jarring thuds, squeals, and shrieks that reverberate through the sequences of ghostly havoc are downright blood-curdling, and pitilessly bombastic in manner that never devolves into wearying sensory overload.

The soundscape underlines the at times violent tone of the film’s poltergeist activity, which leans PG-13 while still providing an aura of lethal ferocity as furniture and humans are tossed about with terrifying supernatural force. Just as effective, however, are the moments of sustained, agonizing quiet, often involving a character (and by extension the viewer) staring with trepidation into a sea of threatening shadow. While the film evinces an affection for garish visual effects in some scenes, Wan and cinematographer Don Burgess also know how to employ the simple raw materials of extreme low light and negative space in expert fashion. Many of the film’s most superlative shots teeter brilliantly on the boundary between digital-assisted illusion and a mundane trick of the eye, as the viewer strains to determine whether they do in fact detect a menacing shape lurking in the darkness. Indeed, with respect to its methods, The Conjuring 2 often recalls no less a horror classic than The Haunting, with its wallpaper shadow play and hellishly jarring sound design—a worthy influence if there ever was one.

At times, The Conjuring 2’s haphazard tendencies even manage to pay crazed dividends in the moment. A stock scenario involving a dog barking at something unseen in the backyard suddenly morphs into a jaw-dropping scene of Burton- and del Toro-flavored fantasy body horror when Billy’s personal bogeyman the Crooked Man (Javier Botet) lurches forth on spidery, stop-motion limbs. It makes almost no sense in the context of the rest of the film, but damn if it isn’t pants-shitting scary in a way that recalls a childhood nightmare. And then there is the demon nun (Bonnie Aarons), an entity that skulks around the periphery of the story, casually terrorizing Lorraine while the screenplay works up the nerve to pull the Warrens into the Hodgsons’ tribulations. When scrutinized in the full light of day, the creature resembles Marilyn Manson in a sophomorically blasphemous Halloween costume, but Wan mostly keeps the figure swathed in shadow, accentuating its menace. The demon only has two modes—statue-like impassivity and shrieking madness—and it veers between them with an aggressiveness that keeps Lorraine and the viewer off balance. It’s sort of hokey, but also dreadfully effective at creating a sense of lurking, unholy danger.

Once the Warrens do arrive at Enfield to investigate, the film becomes slightly more focused and compelling, notwithstanding the blandness of the ghost hunters themselves and the ongoing directionless quality of the undead disturbances. As in the first film, Lorraine and Ed’s sober marital love and religious piety serve as bulwarks for the embattled family. The scenes of paranormal sleuthing are interspersed with those highlighting the cozy, calming domesticity that the Warrens’ presence bestows on the household. This pattern provides a welcome break from the ghost’s pitiless assaults and the weak-tea family drama of the Hodgsons in isolation, but it’s more obligatory than heartfelt. Farmiga and Wilson’s engagement with this sort of rote, forced humanism is conspicuously thin, but the Warrens are so one-note and underwritten as characters, it’s perhaps unfair to lay the blame on the performers. Scenes of Ed selflessly taking on the surrogate father role—performing plumbing repairs and strumming out an Elvis tune on an acoustic guitar to the delight of the kids—are particularly eye-rolling in their formulaic silliness.

Fortunately, the Warrens’ appearance at the Hodgson home also sets the stage for several gratifying horror sequences that showcase Wan's impressive directorial skills. These include: a claustrophobic thriller scene in a flooded basement that employs blocking and lighting to cunning effect; a mostly off-screen frenzy of poltergeist violence that demolishes a kitchen and culminates in a grotesque, shocking discovery; and, most prominently, a nerve-wracking interrogation of a ghost-possessed Janet that utilizes shallow focus to ingeniously skirt a scientific implausibility. The highlight of the film, however, is indisputably a climactic reveal that provides Lorraine with the means to save Janet and drive the malevolent force out of the Hodgsons' house once and for all. On the one hand, it’s a vaguely cheap twist that the viewer has little prayer of puzzling out on their own. On the other, it’s a revelation that is rather brilliantly signaled throughout the film, in a manner that elegantly skirts the line between a subliminal message and an Argento-style clue whose significance is apparent only much later. It’s at once ridiculous and utterly satisfying, prompting the viewer to mentally return to prior shots with a gasp, and all without the need for an in-film flashback to crudely hammer the point home.

Even if one were to set aside its structural and pacing problems, the film still suffers from many of the genre’ reliably exasperating flaws. It wouldn’t be a modern horror feature without foolish character decisions, questionable fudging of time and space, and a senselessly drawn-out climax. Moment-for-moment, however, The Conjuring 2 is decisively more capable and fascinating than its forebear, if only because it actually succeeds in spots as a work of creepy entertainment.

It’s a pity, then, that the film is larded with the same faith-based hogwash that made its antecedent such an irksome slog. If anything, the film’s ethos is pitched even more severely towards a smug loathing of skeptics and academics, who are unfailingly presented as tweedy twerps and dismissive sourpusses. It’s challenging to make a work of dunderheaded theistic agitprop like The Exorcism of Emily Rose look fair-minded and nuanced in comparison, but The Conjuring 2 somehow manages it. Even the blatant pandering of an overtly fundamentalist Christian feature might be preferable to the self-satisfied greeting card aphorisms that dot the Hayeses’ screenplay. The result is not so much a religious film as a snotty, flimsy jeremiad against any rationalist critique of supernatural claims.

The Warrens are understood to be Catholic—“the Church” receives copious sidelong name-checks—but the film is only interested in utilizing that faith’s sacred trappings for cut-rate funhouse gimmicky, such as crucifixes that turn themselves upside-down. Actual immersion in and engagement with the Catholic worldview would necessitate a thoughtfulness that The Conjuring 2 is incapable of sustaining. This, ultimately, is what is so unpleasant and insulting about the film’s disdain for rationality: It cloaks itself in Christianity but has no use for the faith’s potential as a storytelling substrate. The contrast with a film like The Exorcist—a profoundly, almost painfully Catholic film—could not be starker. William Friedkin’s 1973 feature plunges so deeply and expressively into Catholicism’s spiritual traditions of guilt, frailty, and redemption that even atheistic viewers such as this writer are unfailingly overwhelmed by its potency. What The Conjuring 2 traffics in, on the other hand, is the pop cultural equivalent of ceremonial piety: a pose calculated to provide a gloss of complacent superiority, sans any theological substance.

Things Could Be a Whole Lot Better: The Darkness

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Bad movies can be fun. One needn’t look further than the enduring cult popularity of 1990s film-riffing phenomenon Mystery Science Theater 3000, or the proliferation of midnight screenings featuring cinematic cheese from the classic (Plan 9 from Outer Space) to the contemporary (The Room). However, for a film to cross the threshold from not-good to amusingly terrible demands an element of artistic catastrophe. It isn’t sufficient for a feature to be merely shoddy: It must be tragic in its mesmerizing awfulness. The difference is akin to that between a stalled clunker sitting in the driveway and a spectacular twenty-car pile up in the middle of a six-lane expressway.

The Darkness is, regrettably, the former sort of film: bad, but not transcendentally bad. It is a work so relentlessly banal in its failures that one can’t work up the enthusiasm to despise it. Its worst sin is nicking 92 minutes of the viewer’s life, draining them away like some dreary cinematic vampire. Australian writer-director Greg McLean is perhaps best known for helming the vicious serial killer feature Wolf Creek, a film whose transgressive ugliness has made it something of a divisive cult landmark in the annals of 21st-century horror. Its moral worth (or lack thereof) aside, Wolf Creek is unquestionably a frightening film, one in which tension is sharpened through ruthlessly offhanded eruptions of violence. The Darkness, meanwhile, is like the dismal mirror image of McLean’s earlier film: a torpid blob of anti-drama that flails about without any notion of what the hell it is trying to accomplish or why.

The premise of the film is one of the more threadbare horror scenarios: A malevolent otherworldly entity invades the suburban domicile of a nuclear family and proceeds to wreak supernatural havoc. The clan in question here is the Taylors: architect dad Peter (Kevin Bacon); homemaker mom Bronny (Radha Mitchell); older teen daughter Stephanie (Lucy Gry); and tween autistic son Mikey (David Mazouz). During a family vacation to the Southwestern U.S.—Los Angeles fills in unconvincingly for the Four Corners region—Mikey stumbles into a grotto where five smooth stones are arranged purposefully on a primeval altar. Carved with stylized animal petroglyphs, the rocks naturally draw the attention of the boy, who pockets them without much regard for the nearby cave painting depicting five sinister, shadowy figures.

Once the Taylors return home with Mikey’s plundered stones unknowingly stashed in their luggage, the usual haunted house phenomena ensue: fleeting shadows, weird noises, moving objects, spectral handprints, and so forth. Mikey is initially thought to be responsible for these occurrences, an assumption fueled in part by the boy’s even-stranger-than-usual behavior. At first he's just having conversations with an unseen companion named “Jenny,” but Mikey’s alarming habits soon escalate to include arson and violence against animals. Fortunately for the Taylors, some uncannily plot-specific YouTube videos helpfully explain their predicament. The trespassing spirits are in fact a quintet of Native American demons that can assume the form of a bison, coyote, crow, snake, and wolf. Bound to five sacred stones, the entities were known to the ancestral Puebloans as cruel child-snatchers. They are also purportedly connected to that people’s “mysterious disappearance.” (The film uses the discouraged moniker “Anasazi” to refer to the ancestral Puebloans, and lamentably but unsurprisingly distills the complex, disputed history of that culture’s rise and decline into a spooky Injun legend.)

This knowledge is actually for the viewer’s benefit, not the Taylors’, given that no one but Mikey is even aware that he is in possession of the magic devil rocks. The spirits terrorize the family haphazardly for what seems like hours and hours of screen time before the obligatory climactic exorcism. This is overseen by Latina mystic Teresa (Alma Martinez) and her granddaughter Gloria (Ilza Rosario), who convey the seriousness of the situation by furrowing their brows earnestly and murmuring in hushed terror about an evil presence. (It’s unclear whether the absence of actual Native American actors in the film is a slight or a blessing, given that the film rather lazily employs distorted Native culture solely for atmospheric purposes.) Ultimately, Peter makes a selfless sacrifice on his son’s behalf, and Mikey in turn rouses himself to action in order to banish the demons back to the indigenous netherworld from whence they came.

The Darkness’ problems are multitude, but its fundamental flaw is how poorly it executes the concept of dramatic escalation. Haunted house features normally follow a succinct, well-established outline: The paranormal disturbances start out small, and then gradually intensify until climaxing in an effects-laden ghostly confrontation of some sort. Improbably, McLean and co-scripters Shayne Armstrong and S.P. Krause manage to bungle this simple model. From the moment the Taylors return home from their vacation, the film slumps into a plodding succession of hackneyed shocks that lacks any sense of mounting urgency. The ultimate goal of the demons is apparently to lure Mikey away to their spirit realm, but one could never discern that from the slapdash array of supernatural parlor tricks they serve up.  Even late in the film, the scares seem weirdly arbitrary: a humanoid shape rises up beneath Mikey’s bedsheets; shadowy arms grope forth from an ethereal portal; sooty handprints appear on Stephanie’s walls and clothes; Peter glimpses a hulking, demonic silhouette in a window. The result is aimless and formless, amounting to little more than horror movie gibberish.

What’s more, the film can’t be bothered to substantively develop any of the theoretically fertile concepts it halfheartedly tosses around. A venturous soul could make a case that The Darkness is a metaphorical reckoning for whites' archaeological plundering of Native sites, or even for the American genocide more broadly (à la The Shining), but there is precious little in the text to support such a reading.  There’s a germ of potential in the fact that the family’s latent, thinly concealed rifts make their household ripe for exploitation by demonic forces. The notion of the suburban castle rotting from within is a hoary one in horror cinema, but Bronny adds a novel touch of karmic dread when she voices her suspicions that the family’s demonic tribulations are cosmic retribution for their sins. That’s about the extent of the film’s engagement with the concept, however. McLean merely uses the family’s personal problems—a confessed affair, alcoholism, an eating disorder, etc.—to provoke trite, soapy melodrama that distracts from the already desultory creepshow elements.

This is emblematic of the film’s exasperating, almost enervating lack of ambition. One can visualize a version of the film that focuses on the festering undercurrent of deception, mistrust, and bitterness that runs through the Taylors’ lives, and the spirits’ wicked manipulation of that weakness. Or a version that approaches its off-the-shelf horror conceit from Mikey's distinctive perspective as a young, neurologically atypical individual. Or a version that fully commits to a richly realized Native American ghost story that reflects real-world folkloric traditions. The Darkness is too dull-witted for such approaches, however, preferring to cynically utilize elements like autism and Native American culture to shore up its careless, cut-and-paste screenplay.

Truly, there’s not much of anything to recommend about the the film. Unsurprisingly, Bacon is the only performer who can make the bland screenplay’s emotional beats sound convincing, although the character he’s been handed is nebulous and relentlessly dull, as are the other family members. It certainly doesn’t help that McLean can’t seem to resolve who the protagonist actually is, or who is supposed to elicit the viewer's sympathy. This ambiguity doesn’t smell like a calculated choice, but rather like a product of sloppy screenwriting. The only unexpected and humanizing moment in the script is a third act pivot on the part of Peter’s boss (Paul Reiser), an overbearing creep who softens when he comprehends just how thoroughly undone Peter has become by his recent “family troubles."

Most of the film’s visuals are unremittingly anonymous, although the design of the demons is genuinely eerie. Loosely informed by vintage photographs of traditional ceremonial dress among the Native Americans of the Southwest, the entities' true forms resemble enormous, shaggy humanoids whose partly bestial, partly skeletal features always seem to be out of focus. (The demons faintly recall Evil’s towering, goat-headed minions in Time Bandits, to fine effect.) It’s a nice bit of unsettling practical costuming in an era when ghost stories lean overwhelmingly on computer effects.

With The Forest, The Other Side of the Door, and now The Darkness, 2016 is shaping up to be a banner year for crummy horror movies about white families being menaced by non-white occult forces. Granted, McLean’s film doesn’t traffic in the same unpleasant Othering as the former two features. (The lack of living Native Americans in The Darkness sort of precludes it from doing so.) The film’s racism (and ableism) is vaguely obnoxious rather than baldly offensive, but the most egregious insult to be found in The Darkness is the film's ineptness. Presented with such a forgettable dud of a horror picture, any filmgoer should be affronted that an hour and a half of their lives were wasted in such a manner.

A City Upon a Hill: Zootopia

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. It expands upon my original review of Zootopia, which appeared at St. Louis Magazine on March 3, 2016.]

A simple fact needs to be cleared up straightaway: Zootopia is not an allegory. One could be forgiven for mistaking Walt Disney Animation Studio’s 55th feature for a thickly metaphorical story, assuming that error was based solely on the film’s reviews. Many of the feature's critiques—both positive and negative in their overall assessment—heedlessly throw around the words “allegory” and “allegorical." Indeed, quite a few reviews have grumbled that the film’s symbolism is of a particularly sloppy sort. Devin Faracai at Birth Movies Death echoes several other critics when he objects that “the muddled metaphors that permeate Zootopia can leave much open to interpretation.”

The glaring weakness of such criticisms is that they are premised on a faulty assumption: namely, that Zootopia is a strongly symbolic work. If one goes looking for tidy metaphor in a film that doesn’t traffic in such devices in a meaningful way, one will inevitably come up short. It’s a bit astonishing to this writer that any viewer could experience Zootopia’s 108 minutes and walk away with the impression that the film is neatly symbolic of anything. Perhaps it’s just that junior high memories of Animal Farm—with its one-to-one allegorical mapping of real world Russian revolutionary and Stalinist figures onto the novella’s talking barnyard creatures—still prompt some filmgoers to assume that anthropomorphic beasts must symbolize something whenever they rear their furry heads.

In a limited sense, Zootopia could be regarded as a cousin to one of Aesop’s celebrated fables, in that it is a moralistic story featuring animal characters. However, Disney’s film is as dramatically and thematically sophisticated as those archaic folk tales are ruthlessly terse. The dazzling world-building that undergirds the film is a substantial clue that Zootopia has aims beyond illustrating pithy adages about prejudice. The story of earnest rabbit police officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is foremost a fantasy story. While it might contain echoes of the real world—in both its tangible details and its portrayal of social dynamics— the universe of Zootopia is a self-contained reality. It is, in fact, a dizzyingly ambitious work of speculative fiction, one that imagines how an inter-species mammalian culture might function, and in particularly how it might manifest human sociological phenomena in novel ways.

At the story level, Zootopia is predominantly a buddy picture in the spirit of odd couple action comedies like 48 Hrs. Judy and fox con artist Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) are grudgingly partnered to solve a ticking-clock mystery in the titular animal megalopolis. However, the film also contains familiar elements drawn from noir detective fiction, as well as from numerous paranoid political thrillers in the vein of The Manchurian Candidate, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor. The structure of Zootopia follows a well-worn scheme, with Judy’s path mimicking that of countless heroes who have sought out the truth in the Big City. She begins investigating a relatively small scale crime—in this case, the disappearance of devoted family mustelid Emmitt Otterton—only to gradually uncover a more disturbing and wide-ranging conspiracy. Judy regrettably draws erroneous conclusions from this discovery, setting her up for disenchantment, epiphany, and an eventual third act triumph over the Real Bad Guys.

Clearly, striking originality is not a primary virtue of Zootopia’s plot, although the film does a bang-up job of knitting together the action, comedy, and mystery aspects of its story with minimal obvious seams. Ultimately, however, the screenplay—credited to Jared Bush and Phil Johnston, with story assists from a regiment of writers—isn’t especially preoccupied with luxuriating in genre tropes. The film’s employment of, for example, cop movie clichés is more utilitarian than affectionate. (Which isn’t to say that Zootopia lacks joyful enthusiasm; it concludes with an animal dance party, after all.) The film is rather unabashed about dusting off trite plot developments, such as a scene where cape buffalo police commander Chief Bogo (Ildris Elba) demands Judy’s badge in response to her loose cannon rule-bending. Yet such comforting generic signposts are crucial, not only because Zootopia’s setting is so outlandish, but also because the film is fundamentally more of a character drama than an urban mystery. The inner journey of Judy—and to a lesser extent that of her nemesis-cum-ally Nick—is what makes the film crackle so gratifyingly. The trope-cluttered plot just a reliable substrate for Zootopia’s surprisingly deft exploration of sticky relationships and cultural brier patches.

That Judy is a compelling, entertaining heroine is overwhelmingly attributable to Goodwin’s expressive, pitch-perfect performance. Judy’s bubbly energy and unflappable, 110% approach to life could easily have become grating, but Goodwin nimbly balances the character’s infectious earnestness with traces of self-doubt and glum fatalism. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Judy is arguably the most appealingly designed character in a film that has its fair share of striking creatures. Designed by Byron Howard and Cory Loftis, she is wholly a rabbit—even her bipedal running somehow suggests a lagomorph’s gallop—and yet ever-so-slightly coded as female via human signifiers, right down to the swoop of her hip line. (There are no Minnie Mouse eyelashes or parasol skirts here; Judy wears pointedly unisex clothing.)

Sweep away the confidence games and criminal conspiracies that characterize Zootopia’s surface plot and a more delicate story emerges, one concerned with Judy’s passage through a succession of outlooks. This journey is partly about her perceptions of own abilities and behavior, but also about her stance towards the multi-species society that surrounds her. The film’s prologue illustrates that Judy has always been a bunny with an itch for bigger things. Although born into an enormous clan of carrot farmers in the sleepy, majority-rabbit hamlet of Bunnyburrow,  she has longed to become a police officer since childhood. However, her ambition is not merely to serve as some country sheriff in her hometown, but to join the elite ranks of the police force that serves and protects the super-city of Zootopia.

The excitement and relative prestige of urban policing play a role this yearning, but Judy is also plainly a true believer in the idea of a diverse, equitable mammalian society. Much to the chagrin of her parents, she actually internalized her middle school lessons about the virtues of a liberalized, inter-species world. Judy’s outspoken belief in the shining ideals of Zootopia is rather embarrassing to the other inhabitants of Bunnyburrow. Children are obliged to repeat the platitudes of mammalian equality, and even to stage precious little plays advocating those principles, but to actually believe wholeheartedly in them (especially as an adult) is regarded as gauche and a little naïve.

Judy might have been sired in Bunnyburrow, but her heart has always belonged to Zootopia, and to the more liberalized outlook that its citizens ostensibly embody. Judy’s wide-eyed train ride to the city—accompanied by the bouncy vocalizations and heartening lyrics of Shakira’s “Try Everything”—is thus less of a journey into foreign territory and more of a spiritual homecoming. Judy exemplifies the unlikely progressive prodigal who originally hails from a small, conservative town. She believes that the Big City not only promises cultural vibrancy and opportunity, but also nurtures values that are more in line with her own.

This expectation is not unjustified. The political divide between America's liberal urban centers and conservative rural areas is well-documented and has only sharpened over time. As Josh Korn described in an Atlantic piece following President Obama’s 2012 re-election:

[V]irtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy—or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants.

Crucially, it is not so much that the accretion of liberal citizens renders cities more liberal, the immigration of progressive country folk like Judy notwithstanding. The causal relationship appears to flow the other way: Living in diverse, cosmopolitan communities tends to make people more tolerant. Astonishingly, the effect can be observed even at the neighborhood and street levels. The more integrated an area is, the less prejudiced its citizens become over time, an effect of the “passive tolerance” that results from countless small daily observations and interactions.

Zootopia projects this dynamic onto its fictional mammalian setting, while also reinforcing the relative attractiveness of urban life through the spectacular design of its city environs. Certainly, it’s hard not to share Judy’s elation at the sight of Zootopia’s gleaming high-rises, wondrous transit, and bustling street life. Initially, even the supposedly miserable realities of urban living—the cramped one-room apartment with noisy neighbors, for example—don’t phase Judy’s enthusiasm. She’s living her dream, and that’s all that matters. However, it doesn’t take long for the paradoxical isolation of the Big City to take its toll on her disposition. This is only exacerbated by the condescending treatment she receives from Chief Bogo and other ZPD personnel, not to mention her encounters with various cynical and prejudicial behaviors that puncture her positive assumptions about city folk.

While she experiences a few instances of overt inter-species bigotry—most notably in her own workplace—much of her disillusionment stems from her early run-ins with Nick Wilde. The fox is practically her mirror image: a venal realist and petty grifter who is not above exploiting do-gooder liberalism for his own mercenary ends. As the viewer eventually learns, Nick wasn’t always so ruthlessly contemptuous of multi-cultural kumbayas, having had his inclusive illusions shattered as a youth by a pack of fox-loathing herbivorous bullies. (This, of course, inverts a prelude sequence in which little Judy is terrorized and wounded by a local fox for daring to stand up his harassing behavior.) Nick’s cynicism has only hardened since this formative incident, and he has resolved to be the backstabbing sneak-thief that other species often assume him to be.

It is not merely Nick’s smugly contemptuous attitude that undermines Judy’s beliefs, however, but his penchant for tweaking her earnest liberalism. The pair’s visit to the sloth-staffed Department of Motor Vehicles to follow up on a clue makes for an amusing extended gag, but it also serves as a way for Nick to wheedle Judy for her guileless principles. “Are you saying that because he’s a sloth, he can’t be fast?,” Nick sarcastically chides, even as the DMV bureaucrats staple and stamp application forms at a maddeningly glacial pace. Zootopia’s multi-species society must necessarily contend with the realities of vastly different sizes, shapes, strengths, speeds, and abilities among its populace. Bromides about mammalian equality aside, the physical differences between, say, a lemming and a rhinoceros have practical consequences. This is a fact that Chief Bogo underlines as he attempts to convince Judy that her exile to parking ticket duty is nothing personal: “It’s not about how badly you want something, it’s about what you are capable of.”

This highlights the refreshing sophistication of Zootopia’s ethos, and its refusal to fit snugly within a tidy metaphorical box. Like its Disney Animation predecessors The Princess and the Frog, Frozen, and Big Hero 6, the film labors modestly but diligently to chip away at some of the more spurious cultural canards that Disney itself has spent decades constructing. (Bogo again: “Life isn’t some cartoon musical where you sing a little song and all your insipid dreams magically come true!”) Early in the film, Judy’s own parents (Don Lake and Bonnie Hunt) offer what is perhaps the bluntest indictment of the traditional Disney worldview. Sometimes, they caution, one can yearn for something desperately and work for it relentlessly… and still fail. Notably, their warning is not disproved by anything that unfolds later in the film. Judy’s closing voiceover even reiterates the sentiment: “Real life is messy. We all have limitations. We all make mistakes.” For an animated feature from the House of Mouse to present such down-to-earth truisms would have been unthinkable two decades ago.

The optimistic but guarded realism of the film’s moral universe is also mirrored in Zootopia's relatively positive but balanced stance regarding the virtues of urbanism. While the film ultimately portrays diverse, high-density living as a vital source of tolerance, empathy, and cultural enrichment, the depiction allows for ambiguity. Like any major city, Zootopia is shown as troubled by crime, decay, and economic disparities. Moreover, the metropolis is not presented as some paradise that is free from specist stereotypes and resentments. The uglier side of the city is illustrated by incidents such as Nick’s rough treatment in a de facto elephant-only ice cream parlor. (They don’t specifically ban foxes, of course; they just reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, and they just happen to refuse Nick.) Conversely, the film is generous towards its rural characters: It is amiable pie vendor and former bully Gideon Grey (Phill Johnston) who inadvertently provides the folk knowledge that re-opens Judy’s case.

Indeed, Assistant Mayor Bellweather’s (Jenny Slate) scheme to seize power is based on exploiting latent urban myths regarding the inherent savagery of predator species. Her master plan to poison the carnivorous citizens of Zootopia and thereby unleash their murderous “baser” selves merely adds malicious intent to a scenario that is eerily reminiscent of the real world saga of lead and urban crimes rates. As Kevin Drum documented in a seminal Mother Jones piece, the uptick in crime in the latter half of the 20th century appears to have been linked directly to childhood lead exposure. Kids poisoned by lead-containing gasoline and paint grew up to be adolescents and adults with serious impulse-control and aggression problems. Of course, by the time this connection was discovered, right-wing demagogues had long been blaming rising crime on the allegedly violent tendencies of urban black Americans in particular. (Even as early as 1965, conservative intellectuals preferred to attribute spiking crime to a supposed "pathology" in black culture, rather that risk flirting with outright scientific racism. Hence the popularity of the notorious Moynihan Report, which discovered a pseudo-respectable way to blame black single mothers for the crime in their neighborhoods.)

However, it bears repeating that Zootopia doesn’t present its plot and setting particulars as decisively metaphorical. The film’s story, gags, and visual design are too dependent on the fascinating peculiarities of its animal universe; there is not much daylight for allegory. Unlike real world humans, Zootopia's citizens must contend with sharp, undeniable differences in genetics and morphology. It's hardly specist to observe that all cheetahs are faster than all koalas, or that all giraffes are taller than all woodchucks. The film’s predator species did in fact originally evolve to stalk and devour prey species, and Zootopia is partly a thought experiment on how a multi-mammalian community could acknowledge that biological reality and still go about its daily routine with lions and gazelles texting side-by-side.

If anything, the remove provided by the film’s generously developed setting allows Zootopia to explore the broad phenomena surrounding prejudice without reference to any real world tribes. Far from sanitizing and neutering the subject, the film’s approach permits it to emphasize the absurd, insidious, and profoundly personal effects of bigotry. The absence of clear-cut real world metaphors—Are the predators or the prey supposed to symbolize racial minorities?—is a feature, not a bug. It allows the viewer to potentially see traces of themselves in any character at any moment, and thereby broadens the film’s empathetic reach.

Indeed, some of the film’s most memorable jokes involve reconfiguring familiar dynamics regarding race, sex, gender, and so forth in offbeat, amusing ways. Witness Judy’s hasty assumption that only the largest, most fearsome polar bear in the room could be notorious Tundratown crime boss Mr. Big. (The gangland godfather is actually an arctic shrew.) Or her gently reproachful clarification that “cute” is a reclaimed pejorative that rabbits use in reference to one another, but which no other species should utter. Or her admonishment to Nick that touching a sheep’s wool without their permission is entitled and intrusive, no matter how curious one might be about its texture.

Even more impressive is the way that the film slyly utilizes its story to reveal the myriad ways that bigotry manifests on a daily basis. At the personal level, for example, Judy and Nick’s falling out is exacerbated when she first thoughtlessly proclaims an ugly stereotype, then condescendingly reassures Nick that he isn’t like “those other” foxes. When she later return to Zootopia to offer Nick a sobbing mea culpa, it’s as genuine and heartfelt as any human reconciliation following an episode of obtuse tactlessness. Institutional bigotry is scrutinized as well. In one of the most closely observed moments in the film, Nick leaps to Judy’s defense by skewering the ZPD’s biased treatment of its “token bunny.” He points out the injustice of saddling Judy with a challenging task, inferior resources, and arbitrary time limit, and then using her inevitable failure as proof of her species’ inadequacy.

Zootopia is dense with these sort of remarkable exchanges: broadly familiar dramatic scenarios, metamorphosed cleverly for the film’s inimitable animal world. To regard this marvelous intersection of theoretical sociology and fantasy storytelling as clumsy allegory is a regrettable misreading of the film. Moreover, it prompts one to overlook the intelligence and wit of the film’s writing, acting, and design, which cohere superbly into one of the most stimulating works of studio feature animation in years.

2016 Classic French Film Festival: The Passion of Joan of Arc

[Note: This introduction to The Passion of Joan of Arc was presented on March 19, 2015 at the Webster University Moore Auditorium as a part of the 2016 Robert Classic French Film Festival.]

I have been privileged to introduce several features for the Classic French Film Festival in recent years, among them some of the most revered cinematic works of all time, in French or any language. From this podium I have been honored to preface such canonical films as Grand Illusion and Beauty and the Beast. Bear that in mind, then, when I say: The feature that will we will be screening tonight is a singular and revelatory experience. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent feature The Passion of Joan of Arc is widely regarded by film scholars as a masterpiece, and justly so. You do not need not to be a connoisseur of the cinema, however, to appreciate its striking visuals, searing pathos, and timeless lead performance by Renée Jeanne Falconetti. It is that extraordinarily rare species of film whose significance is almost immediately self-evident.

Prior to Joan of Arc, director Dreyer had made a respected name for himself in European film, helming esteemed works such as the Danish domestic satire Master of the House and the German romantic tragedy Michael, a milestone in early gay cinema. However, the works that are today regarded as his most formidable and groundbreaking—Joan, of course, as well as Vampyr, Ordet, and Gertrud—still lay years or even decades in the future. It is therefore all the more remarkable that a French production company would invite this Danish filmmaker to write and direct a feature about a beloved French folk hero: Joan of Arc, the maiden whose visions purportedly propelled France to its eventual victory in the Hundred Years’ War.

There had been renewed interest in Joan at the time that Dreyer tackled the project, owing to her canonization in 1920, an acknowledgement by the Catholic Church that her capture, trial, and execution at the hands of the English-allied Burgundian faction constituted a martyrdom. Dreyer also had the good fortune of having access to the recently published transcripts of Joan’s trial, which became the basis for his script.

There were earlier efforts to resurrect Joan for the burgeoning film audiences of late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The most notable of these is Cecil B DemIlle’s silent 1916 epic Joan the Woman, a perfectly handsome feature that exemplifies that director’s grandiose and at times didactic approach to historical drama. However, The Passion of Joan of Arc dwells on a rarefied plane that hovers far above Demille’s film. As Dreyer’s introductory notes for his feature make evident, he was keenly aware that he could have simply made yet another costume drama. He instead opted for a different path. When it premiered in France in October of 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc was unlike anything that had heretofore been witnessed in cinema.

Even a contemporary viewer likely has expectations for a work of fictionalized religious and political history. Dreyer seems to savor smashing those assumptions to bits in the film’s opening scenes. Eschewing depictions of Joan’s heavenly visions or military exploits, he begins at the end, with a pitiable, anguished woman in chains. Although the director dictated that a colossally expensive set be constructed to replicate the Castle of Rouen where Joan was detained, the film that he produced absolutely revels in close-ups. It is an approach that is all the more perverse given the near absence of movie star faces in the cast of characters. Sans makeup and often severely lit, Joan’s inquisitors and wardens glower and leer over her like grotesque parodies of piggish masculinity, all warts, jowls, and crooked teeth.

In comparison, Falconetti’s countenance is positively beatific. Also untouched by makeup, it teeters hypnotically between agony and ecstasy. Dreyer pushes his camera straight into the actress’ face in one uncomfortably long shot after another, as tears—those endless tears!—tumble down her cheeks. Falconetti was primarily a theatrical performer, but that is certainly not in evidence here. Hers is a face seemingly made for cinema, capable of conveying oceans of colliding emotions via the tiniest changes in expression. Her Joan is no placid saint, but a character of ferocious feeling, alternately joyous and terrified, morose and contented. She is a woman both devastatingly relatable and not wholly of this world, her pale eyes always appearing to focus on something that lies just beyond the earthly realm.

Truthfully, there is not much of a plot to be found in the film: Joan is questioned, deceived, tortured, mocked, degraded, and ultimately executed by being burned alive. There are no heroic rescues or last-minute pardons. As in a film about the Titanic or the 300 Spartans, we know how this story ends. The genius of The Passion of Joan of Arc is that the tale’s utter bleakness is crucial to is humane power. With terrific forcefulness and urgency, Dreyer places us squarely within Joan’s experience, demanding that we feel the grueling reality of her inexorable doom just as she might have felt it. This makes for a desolate cinematic experience, to say the least, but also one that elicits profound empathy.

The modern viewer is likely to view The Passion of Joan of Arc as a deeply political film, albeit one that is less about the particulars of 1920s France than about the persecution and destruction of deviant individuals through countless eras and cultures. Despite his political conservatism, Dreyer was a filmmaker who was fascinated with the monsters that threatened society’s rules, whether they might be gay artists, proud women, accused witches, mad prophets, vampires, or even the Devil himself. Joan too embodies such outsiders: a woman who would not submit to her male captors, and therefore had to be eradicated.

One final annotation: In its present, nearly complete form, The Passion of Joan of Arc comes to us by a strange, calamitous path. Despite Dreyer’s objections, the film was heavily edited for its initial release at the behest of government censors and Catholic leaders. The original uncut negative was unfortunately destroyed, and the director’s subsequent piecemeal reconstruction of the negative was also destroyed. Prints of several versions circulated in the ensuing decades, until one of those unlikely twists occurred that seem to characterize the history of film. In 1981, a Danish copy of the Dreyer’s original uncut version was found, of all places, in a janitor’s closet in an Oslo mental hospital. Although it differs from an alternate French print in relatively minor aesthetic ways, the Norwegian discovery has permitted audiences around the world to finally experience The Passion of Joan of Arc as closely as possible to the way that Dreyer intended it.