Leave the world behind, start doing lots of pickling
dir: Alec Tibaldi
2024
So, quite often, because I’ve watched so many films, I often feel like I’ve watched a film before even when I’m seeing it for the first time.
That’s not the same as times when I’ve watched a film and forgotten it, only to watch it again down the track and realise “oh shit, I’ve already seen this.”
Such different circumstances. What I’m actually getting at is that so many screenwriters seem to be starting from exactly the same place.
In premise, and at least initially, this is pretty much the same set up as a Nicolas Cage film I watched a couple of weeks ago, called Arcadian. Except instead of a sweaty, concerned Nicolas Cage bringing up two boys after an apocalypse, we have a decidedly non-sweaty Ashley Judd bringing up two girls after an apocalypse.
Pretty much Ashley Judd is, therefore, playing Nicolas Cage.
In this version of that story, there are no monsters eating people with hyperactive hypermobile mouths, but there is a virus.
A virus, huh? Who could have thought of that?
In voiceover an aunty’s dulcet tones tells her charges of the world that existed before the virus, and of the idyllic place they now live at, one which protects and sustains them, far from the ruins of what looks like Seattle, in a forest.
To a cabin comes a desperate woman, begging for food. A woman in the cabin, shotgun held aloft, with two young ‘uns behind her, takes pity on her and offers something, but then freaks out when she sees the outsider scratching herself uncontrollably.
When she sees a rash on the other woman’s chest, she opens fire. Viruses really do bring out the worst in people.
The film jumps forward ten years later. The two nieces, Maeve and Imogen (Sarah Pidgeon and Katie Douglas) are now in their late and mid-teens, respectively, yet, since society has crumbled, they are dressed like characters from Little House on the Prairie.
Little House on the Prairie? It was a tv show based on the novels of Laura Ingells Wilder about country living in the 1870s? Wow, I just realised how dated that reference is. Next I’ll be talking about stuff we did during the Blitz, how much we enjoyed, as children, smoking our radium cigarettes and how we used to boogie to the absolute bangers dropped by the Glen Miller Orchestra.
Fuck it, I could have just said “they dress like they’re Amish”, and even that would be a bit anachronistic, I think. Whatever. The aunt keeps the girls on a tight leash. Because she’s afraid, for their sake, of infection getting in and killing them all, the way it killed her sister, their mother.
The girls are alike and in significant ways, quite different. The younger Imogen is bolder, and feistier, the elder Maeve, in the inevitable way of eldest firstborns, equates herself with their parent/authority figure, and tries to be all stern and responsible, while also not wanting to be seen as uncool by her younger sibling. When they find a wounded ‘boy’ in the woods, who has terrible wounds and even worse face tattoos, one wants to save him, the other wants to, I dunno, ignore him or kill him or something.
They drag him back to Lazareth, the name they use for their hideaway, and help him, using their various skills. Imogen is fascinated by him, as presumably the first boy she’s ever seen and interacted with. Maeve is horrified and disgusted by him, constantly telling him how much he reeks.
He is the first person from what remains of the world the girls have ever seen. Someone wounded him, and someone is presumably after him. I wonder if that means others will come to the cabin?
When the aunt travels in their truck to somewhere where she gets supplies, she wears a full hazmat suit, and needs to be disinfected each time she comes back with meagre supplies. She tells horrifying stories of the violence she’s just witnessed as other people presumably at these post-apocalyptic enclaves horde their last resources in between violating the weak.
It’s almost like she’s trying to convince the girls like it would be a bad idea to ever leave Lazareth. But now that the outside world has entered their precious oasis, it seems like some kind of conflict is inevitable.
The boy is called Owen (Asher Angel), and he seems like he’s from another planet, but he also seems really confused as to the set up these ladies seem to have. Either there’s something not quite right about him, or there’s something he can’t understand about Lazareth.
Despite all that I might have written thus far, I can tell you now for free that I wasn’t quite sure what kind of story we were watching until very late into the proceedings. Post-apocalyptic stories, despite having a similarity of setting, can tell very different stories. Sometimes it’s about people putting aside their selfishness, retaining their humanity, and helping each other even when it’s not in their direct interest. Other times it’s about surviving the mutant / zombie / monster / human remnants and saving your kids for long enough until you’re satisfied that they’re ready to look after themselves (essentially the premise of that Cage flick I talked about earlier, the A Quiet Place movies and probably, I guess, Cormac McCarthy’s / John Hillcoat’s The Road).
Very late, but then it happens. They explicitly tells us what kind of flick it is, but, yeah, it’s not fair to bring it up now. It’s beyond spoilers to refer to it. I can’t even mention other flicks in which something similar happens, because it’s so fundamental.
Which leaves me at a bit of a loss as to how to talk about the entire film. Overall I think it works, in a lowkey and ultimately depressing way, but it’s a story, and it hews closely to its themes and setting. It’s a (mostly) single location ‘bottle’ flick that, out of confusion / misunderstanding turns into an under siege flick, which probably makes more sense to Americans than it does to anyone else as being a “normal” way to react to outside threats that aren’t really that much of a threat.
There’s the generational aspect as well, because older people reacting to unusual circumstances don’t react the same as the younger ones, but then there are forces that encourage conformity, even in the face of ridiculousness. There are communities, societies, all sorts of self-selecting groups that have a shared set of values, commonly held beliefs, and mythologies. Different people rely on different fictions in order to justify their actions, their fears, their precautions.
Is Lazareth worth the sacrifices required? Only someone who gets to the end of this dreary film would know. Even then, even with what seems like a happy ending, there’s nothing happy about any part of this flick.
It’s competent without being overtly compelling. I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it, and sometimes that’s enough. Ashley Judd is kinda terrifying as a stubborn matriarch, but it’s between the girls that the real story resides.
Lazareth. Hmm. It’s a movie that I watched.
6 times unruly teenagers still maybe don’t deserve being shot even if they have bad face tattoos out of 10
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“You can’t just leave family” – that’s what going overseas is for - Lazareth
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