Horror, Not Horror (again) pt. 3: the Benson and Moorhead trifecta

"Horror, Not Horror" are movies that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan, but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see.

Resolution - 2012, d. Justin Benson - amazonprime

The Endless - 2017, d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - netflix

Spring - 2014, d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - amazonprime

These films have been in the back of my mind since Toasty wrote about Resolution and The Endless years ago.  The problem is their utterly generic titles are so forgettable that I could never remember what they were called.  Like Coherence I would see The Endless (and, by proxy, Resolution) crop up on lists of "the best sci-fi films you've never seen" (having usually seen most of them).  These became "must watch" features for me, and yet, I think every time I came across The Endless on Netflix or Resolution on Amazon Prime the descriptions sounded so bog standard for a crappy low-budg horror film that they certainly couldn't be those great sci-fi horror movies I had hear about, right?

Armed with some free time, I finally double checked those names and discovered that both films were available on streaming services I had access to (it's pretty much a must watching them together to get the full breadth of the world, though each does stand alone as its own story).  Every article I read about these, again like Coherence, refused to give specific details on what made these films so great as horrorish-scifi, admitting that the discovery is worth it.

The set-up of Resolution has Chris, a crack smoking junkie, squatting at an unfinished cabin in a mountainous desert area about 50 miles from the Mexican border (it's never very specific where this is).  Along with a map to his coordinates, a video of Chris' crack-addled rambling and gun-shooting makes its way to Michael, his best friend since childhood. Mike's wife is a few months pregnant so he's going to make one last effort to help Chris get clean before he lets him go.  Mike shows up, chains Chris to a pipe in the wall and sets into helping Chris through the detox process. 

Mike starts exploring the cabin, and then the area, only to find a lot of wierd shit, film reels, cassette tapes, records, photographs, slides, journals written in French, and all sorts of A/V equipment.  Weird encounters with people from different areas nearby, and even closer encounters with people at the cabin all threaten to unsettle Mike's mission to help his friend, but he has focus and resolve, these other things are all just a curious distraction.  But what's on those tapes, and records, and videos would make anyone's blood turn cold.  Not that those are the only unsettling things, these strangers that keep turning up are their own level of creep factor.  Everything about this place is unsettling.  Chris is too burdened with the DTs to care, and Mike is juggling so much that it's hard for him to directly focus on any one thing other Chris.

It's a wonderfully constructed film, with a very natural rhythm to it.  It's score is gentle and doesn't overburden the picture or try to inform how to feel about what the viewer is seeing, it sits back and lets the performances dictate whether the audience is with them or not.  The pacing, the unraveling of information, is very well timed, negotiating many different threats helps make the more paranormal aspect of the story less intense, but it is more creepy because we're not focusing on it all the time.

The film does take a sudden turn in the last ten minutes, taking a few leaps in the explanation factor that it doesn't quite earn (we're basically with the characters in the revealing of information all the way through, but suddenly Mike seems a few steps ahead of us), but the film then manages to slow things down during this big intense resolution for perhaps the most affecting conversation between Mike and Christ to this point, and then just as rapidly ratchets things up in a bolt towards the finish.  It's really immensely fun, even if it leaves the audience hanging without a real understanding of what happened...but that very same feeling of confusion only invites and entices rewatching.

Or, just jump to The Endless.  While not a direct sequel, The Endless shares space with Resolution and, for lack of a better term, crosses-over with it. It's a shared world but in a way that both films miraculously can stand on their own.  They're very well thought out this way.

Justin and his younger brother Aaron were found as orphans by Hal and raised amidst a "UFO death cult" as he described it when they escaped 10 years ago.  They've been having a difficult time adjusting to the world outside the group, but Justin is just happy to be free of the cult, while Aaron only has positive memories of the compound and loathes the life he feels Justin is forcing him to lead outside of it.  A videotape from the group shows up in the mail and Aaron asks if they can go back for a night.  Justin reluctantly agrees (against the better judgement of their deprogramming counsellor)

At the compound they are welcomed back in, though Justin keeps his distance from everyone a bit.  With a fresh adult perspective, it's not like he remembered, and Aaron seems happy for the first time in years.  But he's skeptical of everything, and then he starts seeing and experiencing things he just can't believe.  Things he remembered from childhood but passed off as products of the fantastical imagination of youth. 

A lot of great dialogue exchanges are made from the dynamics of returning to these people who ostensibly raised Justin and Aaron, and the emotional benefit or toll of being with them again.  They feel like family, but as Justin says at one point, "on tombstones it says, like 'beloved brother', or 'beloved mother' and not 'beloved camp member'."  At the same time, Justin is looking for answers to what he's feeling and experiencing and these cagey motherfuckers are giving him nothing.  So he goes out in search of another familiar face he saw running along the road on their way in, and is horrified by both what he sees and is told.

Just like Resolution which found its main character focused on the betterment of his drug addled best friend (thinking it couldn't get too much worse than that), so too is Justin distracted by his brother's infatuation with the camp, knowing that it's an unhealthy place for him to be, but unable to deny him his happiness.

The journey this film takes is incredible, the giant strides it manages to adeptly take in covering a lot of ground efficiently is utterly impressive.  How it continually dovetails back into things hinted at in Resolution do not necessitate watching the earlier film, and vice versa, but certainly improves the experience of both.

I just utterly love these movies.  Are they horror?  A little bit, yeah.  A little bit.  It comes in from the edges because it's always there looming.  But they're brilliant little puzzles that form their own smaller segments of a larger picture.  There's so many threads left for Moorhead and Benson to pull that the next feature in this world (which is in the works) could be almost anything. That old prospector guy in the tent.  The French students.  The wellness center mentioned in both films but yet to be seen (that's my guess for the next one actually...).  Whatever it is, I'm eagerly waiting for it, and I'll be definitely revisiting these.  This duo is now on my watchlist for everything they do (a movie called Synchronic starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan was shown at TIFF in 2019 but has yet to receive larger or digital distribution).

But, there's still a third Moorehead and Benson film out there, also on Amazon Prime (thanks to Toast's Resolution review for the tip), called Spring, a very different film from these other two, but just as creative, and much more visually stunning.

The bulk of the film takes place in a coastal tourist town (in the late winter off-season) in Italy and the directing duo seem to just love the place... it's captured gloriously, almost like actually taking a vacation.  The water is a gorgeous blue, everything looks bright and fresh... there's a definite tranquility to it, a pace acknowledged as something much different than California where our lead, Evan, is originally from.

But before we get these gorgeous vistas we spend time with Evan back home, immediaetly following the death of his mom, running into trouble with a potential gang member, and getting fired from his crappy cooking job at a bar.  His dad died a few years earlier and they had planned to go to Italy, so it seems apt that that's where Evan winds up.  But the film still puts us through a few more paces as he connects with a couple of loud Brits who serve zero purpose to the film or character, or his journey really.  Honestly this whole opening 25 minutes could probably have been cut and just stripped down to exposition. 

Winding up in this small, scenic, coastal town, Evan immediately takes notice of Louise, a beautiful young woman with an indeterminate accent. They flirt but their connection doesn't take immediately.  A chance run-in the next day fares better, and Evan finds work at a farm under the tutelage of an older Italian man (not just tutelage in farming mind you, but life and love as well).  The romance between Evan and Louise is immediate (as Toasty noted, there's a real Before Sunrise vibe to how they connect).  And that's basically the movie.  Beautiful Italian scenery and a legitimately charming and romantic tale.  Oh, and she's some kind of monster who can't keep herself fully in check.

Right.

The monster thing.  Oh, man, Benson and Moorhead make it work, and make it work so well.  The monster thing is so baked into the DNA of the film, it's not really a twist, just more of the discovery these two have in the "getting to know you" process, and perhaps the big hurdle they will need to overcome.

This "creature" that Louise actually is is something wonderfully new, a brand new mythos for the screen that doesn't have nearly enough variety.  She's not a zombie, vampire, nor warewolf, not even close.  And the exploration of who she is, who she was, and who she becomes is really just more of a continuation of that wonderful romantic "getting-to-know-you" dialogue.  That may be a spoiler, but I want you to know what you're in for... an absolutely darling little film that wears its heart on its sleeve.  Is it horror? Only in the slightest... there is a threat from Louise, but that's not what this film is about, and it's not what its interested in.  Just marvelous, and a great double feature to go with The Shape of Water (also check out the graphic novel Dear Creature).

[Oh, and just to note, this film may actually be in the same universe as Resolution and The Endless as the character of "Shitty Carl", who is mentioned in the former and appears in the latter is referenced here as well in the opening sequence.]