Horror

dir: Travis Stevens

2022

A Wounded Fawn is not a predictable film, and that’s one of the things I liked about it the most. It is horror, definitely, but depending on how you look at it, it is less of the supernatural revenge thriller that it may look like, and a more straight-forward look at an awful man, and one of the women that he tries to prey upon.

Meredith (Sarah Lind) is recently out of an awful marriage, and is looking forward to her date with Bruce (Josh Ruben). They’re going away for the weekend, to a cabin in the woods.

The problem is, in the film’s intro, which follows a snooty auction for a piece of ancient Greek sculpture, we watched Bruce murder the successful bidder for the statue, as a weird red owl looking chap looks on.

So, okay, Meredith may be dating a serial killer.

Well, maybe “dating” is assuming a bit much. It doesn’t seem like he’s planning on a long term relationship with Meredith.

The opening speech from the auctioneer explains that the sculpture is of certain avengers from Greek mythology, the Erinyes, or Furies, as they are otherwise known; avengers of wronged women, scourges of those who murder or harm women. Hopefully they go after the manipulators and the gaslighters too. Regardless, right out of the gate, they’re saying that tied to the sculpture is the idea that some force exists in the universe, hinted at in mythology, of divine retribution that apportions cosmic justice.

If only it were true. I so wish it were true.

The reality is, there’s nothing there. Nothing punishes the worst of the worst unless the cops are lucky, and it’s arguable as to how you can get justice on serial killers. Capital punishment seems almost like a favour, and decades in jail seems like a joke.

All we can do as viewers is hope that the piece of shit fucks up, slips up in some way, and gets his just deserts.

Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, though. Maybe Bruce, too, is powered by the supernatural? I mean, whenever he’s about to kill a woman, a weird humanoid owl turns up, telling him to do it. Then he does it, horribly, jerks off, and then everything’s better in his world as he sets about dealing with the body.

Eww, no thanks, don’t drag us into your sexual dysfunction bullshit.

dir: Daina Reid

2023

Horror. Purest horror.

That’s what parenting is like, apparently.

Of course people watching this flick will be muttering “Babadook, Babadook” under their breath, but no-one said The Babadook was either the most original horror flick ever nor that it had the monopoly on mad mothers wanting to strangle their kids for reasons in movies.

This flick, mostly filmed in Victoria and South Australia, is ominous and filled with dread right from the start. It’s not just the exquisite cinematography, or the choice of what’s filmed, but the discomforting soundtrack does a lot of the work too. Those cello / double bass slowly bowed strings…

And then there’s all the awful things happening on screen.

It’s mostly a two-hander, with Sarah Snook playing a character called Sarah, and Lily LaTorre playing her daughter. I won’t say the name of the daughter character, because apparently no one is quite sure what it should be.

We already know terrible things are going to happen, because the daughter, while being driven in the car, asks about where someone is who she’s never met, and the mere mention of her name is enough to make Sarah somehow look even paler.

At first the name being said is “Joan, where’s Joan, is Joan going to be there?” referring to the guest list for the daughter’s birthday party. The answer is an emphatic no, because the Joan in question is Sarah’s mum, and Sarah can’t stand her mum, plus her mum is in an old folk’s home. For old folks. Speaking of which, Sarah’s dad, mostly referred to as grandpa, has recently died, and both Sarah and her daughter miss him terribly.

Sarah especially seems wounded by grief at the loss. But there is something far more seriously wrong with Sarah, and wrong with the daughter, especially when she starts insisting that her name isn’t Mia, but is in fact Alice.

Alice. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice? That’s a name to conjure with. Plus there’s a white rabbit that seems to have appeared out of nowhere, who just hangs around ominously in the house, only earns its keep once when it takes a chunk out of Sarah’s hand.

Alice…white rabbit… I can’t tell if we’re through the looking glass or in a wonderland, but this flick is short on wonder, and long on dread. Mia keeps getting injuries, and Mummy Dearest keeps asking her if someone is hurting her, bullying her. Mia keeps shaking her head, but at random times seems to insist she’s not Mia anyway, she’s this other girl.

And Sarah doesn’t want to talk about Alice, because clearly she’s still traumatised by something that happened 30 years ago.

Like always in these flicks, the mum is either a widow or divorced. The ex-husband / still dad (Damon Herriman) is nice enough, but he’s got a new wife, and they’re trying for another kid, and for some reason this really brings out the Shiv Roy in Sarah, who is always either terrified and confused, or profoundly irritated by people trying to bring up the past all the time.

dir: Kurtis Davis Harder

2023

With a title like Influencer, it’s not unreasonable having some expectations going in to this experience.

All I initially heard was, there’s a film coming out soon called Influencer, and it’s a horror flick. And I was like “Great! Fucking love the idea”, and I made sure that the second it was available on streaming service Shudder, that I would watch the fuck out of it and review it.

And now I have done so. Perhaps I was a little bit over-amped for it.

Perhaps, like with a lot of horror flicks, the mere thought I had that this would be a hard take on the newly discovered species known as the “influencer”, Latin name narcissus maximus, which would, I dunno, get revenge on them by either showing how awful they are and then maybe torturing them? It’s a horrible place to be coming from, I have to admit.

I don’t think (I hope) that I actually wish harm on anyone, no matter how awful they are, because that goes against my beliefs as a Buddhist, but the whole glory of fiction and movies is that maybe there’s some transgression, some schadenfreude that we can be allowed to experience without anyone actually getting hurt.

The film opens with an Insta influencer called, of course, Madison (Emily Tennant), going through the motions at a Thai resort. She’s American, and takes the right photos, uses the right products, says all the right things, but whenever she’s not taking a tortured selfie or taking snaps of food she doesn’t want to eat, she looks sad.

Fuck you for trying to make me feel sorry for some vacuous influencer. Madison is alone, and sad. The resort looks pretty much abandoned. They don’t make a big deal out of it, but I’m pretty sure this was probably filmed in the covid / shutdown era, hence the many scenes of the vacant resort.

dir: Brandon Cronenberg

2023

Few people could start a career with a mission statement that reads something like “I will make my father’s movies look like children’s television”, but here we are.

The son of David Cronenberg, in at least the last two flicks of his that I’ve watched, is making films so visually and viscerally disturbing that the flicks of his horror auteur father now look quaint in comparison.

Infinity Pool is his latest outing / atrocity, and unlike his last flick Possessor, seems like it has more of a social commentary component. It deals, after all, with a bunch of rich fucks who think they can get away with anything.

But those aspects aside, which are pretty gruesome and galling, the real horrors visited upon our eyeballs are aimed at, really, someone who’s just a chancer, like one of us.

Chancers are great for fiction in general and movies specifically. I think chancers are great audience surrogates generally. They are not an overused trope in movies. It’s the rare chancer that’s not relatable. Chancers usually are trying to “get” something, whether they’re entitled to it or owed it or not. In a comedy, they don’t get it until the very end, if at all. In a drama or a tragedy, they might get it, but at the cost of everything, if not their lives.

The chancer here, being James (Alexander Skarsgård), is aspiring to something else, something he doesn’t recognise yet, but he’s really yearning for it, in the way that only rich people with no cost of living pressures can.

He and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are not having a great time on their holiday, in some fictional Mediterranean coastal country (it’s really Croatia). They are in some high security resort that tries to keep the locals well away from the tourists. They are absolutely not allowed to leave the compound.

Unless they really, really want to.