2020, d. David Prior - crav
Let's start at the end, and work our way back and then jump around a bit.
I don't understand.
The last 20 minutes of this film, it's not that they're challenging, but literally I don't understand. There is a thread of thought versus reality that runs through this film from about the 25 minute mark through to its conclusion, one that I noted when it was mentioned, but didn't pick up on the multitude of visual (and otherwise) clues presented throughout the piece. Where it ends, it seems like where we began was not exactly what we thought it was.
It seems a cheat.
Back to the start. Well, the 22-ish minute mark.
James Badge Dale plays James Lasombra, our point-of-view character. He is, by all accounts is an ex-cop (undercover) and a widower, having lost his wife and child in the past year. He takes medication for insomnia (I looked it up). He runs a gun/self defence shop. When his neighbour's kid goes missing, he starts to look into it. He once was carrying on an affair with this neighbour. It's a source of guilt for him, because he was with her when his wife and son died. Apparently.
As he talks with the missing teen's friend, he starts hearing the tale of The Empty Man, who, if you whistle through a bottle on a bridge it will summon him. On the first day you will hear him, the next day you will see him and on day three he will touch you. Or so the local(?) children's(?) fable goes. The missing girl, this friend, and a group of others summoned The Empty Man, and now they're all missing. Bad things happen and are discovered. A lot of the warning signs point to the Pontifex Institute. I won't sugar coat it...it's a cult.
James gets some bad intel, he makes some disturbing discoveries out in the woods, he's chased and escapes, and the St. Louis cops...well, they certainly know how to dance in circles. James starts to think something really bad is happening, and the mental mojo unleashed upon the world seems to be fracturing him.
Back before all this, in the beginning times (the first 20ish minutes of the film), in the mid-90's in Tibet, an American tourist hears a whistling and falls in crack. There's some pretty strange stuff down in that crack. He's rescued but three days later his friends are very dead.
This film is a lot. There's a lot of mythos-building involved, though it's not exactly the mythos you think it will be. There are shades of dozens of horror movies within, but the mythos seems to be a Candyman riff for a little bit, then perhaps it's more of a thought virus like It Follows or it might actually be more ancient Lovecraft-style madness-imbuing entity. The cult aspect then warps it more into a Wicker Man fashion while there's also aspects of delirium , possession, hauntings, conspiracies and more.
Director Prior worked on many a behind-the-scenes featurette/documentary for various David Fincher films. I'm not sure if he counts as a protege, but it's a definite that Prior has learned from Fincher. He is a patient director who lets his shots breathe, he likes a visually clever scene transitions, he knows how to play with shadows (and in one particularly great sequence, steam), and his composition can be quite beautiful. But most of all, Dale's investigation in the film feels like it's channelling Fincher's Zodiac, the frustration of not finding answers, of facing an intangible evil that can't do much but weigh on your brain the more you explore and end up with more questions than answers.
In the end it's all tied back to James, it loops back in the opening short film in Tibet, and solves the mystery of the disappeared neighbour in a way that I just couldn't make sense of.
In a scene where James talks with the disappeared girl before she's disappeared, she tells him about her enlightenment. I rewound that scene multiple times, knowing, just knowing, that it was the thesis for the remainder of the film.
I don't really know what Prior is trying to say with this story. There's a sense of paranoia, that everyone is in on the cult, but then how to explain the moment in which James basically accosts a teen, pepper spraying him and throwing him in the back of his vehicle, only to look around the street and people everywhere are paying no attention to anything but their phones. But the whole "Empty Man" thing can't just be a critique of techonology, else how do you explain the events of the technology-free cold open in Tibet? And then who and/or what the Empty Man is...? Just shrug?
It's hard to tell, given how intentionally obfuscated the film is in its intentions and how it never settles into a particular space, but I enjoyed it...to a point...that point being the last 15 minutes where time and memories seem to loop back in on themselves, calling themselves into question. What is the reality of this film? What is our reality? Can we trust what we see on screen, or out in the world?
I guess the question, though, truly is ... is it horror?
It is. What kind of horror, is more the question. All kinds of horror, I suppose.
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