Mate, I never started looking
dirs: Indianna Bell & Josiah Clark
2024
Thank you, yet again, Shudder. Without you, I’d have to watch, uh, something else on some other streaming service.
This Australian horror flick has appeared, indistinct, barely visible, just out of sight, gradually coming out of the gloom, on this most excellent of streaming services, and as such I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about it, other than that it was a newish flick with sterling reviews (overseas).
It’s not for everyone. It’s mostly set in one location. Scratch that, it’s only shot in one location, and only has two actors in it who speak. One of them is Patrick (Brendan Rock), who lives in a trailer home somewhere near the coast, and the other is the visitor who knocks on his door during a storm (Jordan Cowan).
It is really pouring down outside, at least that’s what it sounds like to Patrick. Before there’s even a knock at the door he seems distraught, or drunk, or both.
Things you can tell just by looking at him: he’s on his own, and probably has been for a long time. Isolation, we might think, has brought him to a place of paranoia and fear of the world outside his trailer. However long it’s been since he’s had a visitor, he does not seem to be that welcoming, telling the woman knocking to fuck off.
Nevertheless, she persists, and he eventually lets her in, dripping wet and muddy footed. She’s very grateful, and seems a bit confused about where she came from, how she got to his trailer, and where she should be going.
He’s mistrustful and less than cordial at first, but then apologises, and warms to her presence, and tries to be a better host, offering to dry her shirt on a heater, heating up some food, and suggesting she take a shower to get warm.
This trailer is a claustrophobic space even without two people in it. It enhances the tension. We don’t know what either of them is capable, or why they both start philosophising in dire ways about the human condition or the need to escape from one’s actions or past.
Patrick is particularly prone to pontificating. When he talks about the general shittiness of the other people in the caravan park where he lives, highlighting their paranoia, their inability to relate to people or act like decent human beings, well, we suspect he’s talking about himself, and the myriad ways why someone like him needs to be in a place like this.
He also, more worryingly, keeps hinting at stuff, at a mentality that perhaps is not the safest to be around. When he dismisses the majority of humanity as a “population of moths”, we suspect that either he is damaged in some ways, or that years of isolation has warped him in unhealthy, but not necessarily dangerous ways.
It’s easy to be dismissive about these kinds of characters, about these kinds of men. I think, as film watchers, or horror fans, we make automatic assumptions about characters like this. Rarely does giving them the benefit of the doubt bear much fruit for us, when they inevitably reveal themselves. I would like to think that, if the filmmakers go to the effort of carefully crafting such an elevated horror film, and focus on giving the actor the chance to enlarge the character, I too should at the very least try to override my prejudices and give him the benefit of the doubt.
I know men like this. Some are sad, and sweet, and smart, lonely in a life that didn’t go as they’d hoped, but not embittered, not hateful. Whatever lack we might superimpose, they find interests, master skills, find other ways of being other than the ones society tells us are the only ones that matter. Others are full of too much anger, aimed mostly at a world that failed to give them the due they feel they were entitled to. They aim that rage at neighbours, governments, celebrities, but sadly, more often at women.
We don’t know Patrick’s deal, but he does tell us that he used to work as an electrician, but then couldn’t keep working after accidentally sticking a screwdriver in a socket, and getting a shock. He couldn’t go back, I guess, to a non-electrocuted life?
And after isolating himself, and presumably getting by on the dole or a disability pension, he just counts the minutes as they roll by, losing a sense of time or place, sleepwalking through his own life, rarely sleeping, and unsure as to what’s really going on, both inside and outside of his trailer. As all this is going on, this to-and-fro, this dance between them, of mistrust and a fear of offending, the storm continues, but it sounds even more like a giant hand is squeezing the trailer from above, contributing to the tense atmosphere.
And the flick has atmosphere, dread atmosphere, by the tonne. The visitor sees little things, everywhere, and in themselves they don’t add up to anything, but maybe they do mean something? Patrick seems to be exactly who he says he is, but what’s with these scraps of jewelry? This trailer has clearly never seen a woman’s touch, but was there a woman there at some stage?
He offers her a green jumper, and mentions that it belonged to his wife. I’m sure there’s a sad story behind that. There is always a sad story behind it. They ask so many questions of each other, and it’s either to bring themselves relief, or confirm their worst fears.
What is his fear? I’m not sure. Maybe he’s afraid that she’ll leave, and that the crushing loneliness will flow back in with her gone. Her fear is a bit more obvious, but he doesn’t seem like that which one naturally fears in films like this. And yet, what does it mean when she starts to monologue, and mentions that people are pretty much disposable and just a population of moths, huh?
If you’re not a patient person, the agony of this long tense section, which is the majority of the flick, will be unpleasant, I suspect. This film is in no hurry to get to its resolution, or its destination, and that’s the thing, really. There’s an argument to be made that the flick works best before a certain revelation, before it seems like an action has been taken, before it seems like the worst case scenario that we feared will come to pass, has come to pass.
The thing is, the crux of it is, I am not sure that it resolves in the way that it seems to resolve. There are elements that we saw, images we saw, that we, specifically, couldn’t really have seen. And there is an ending which implies a supernatural reality, where just deserts are being served, or comeuppance is comeupping, but I don’t know that that’s certain, either. A death is foreshadowed, or represented, but is also seems to follow perfectly from something that Patrick said about being in his youth when his father, being on a ventilator, way back in the day, slowly suffocated.
And then we also have the visitor herself, who cannot be who she says she is, and seems like she’s is from the past or the present, but probably not the future, because I’m not sure there is a future for anyone in this flick, inside or outside of that trailer.
Or, worst of all possible fates, the hell that is living in this trailer, alone, will never end, surrounded by shades and fears, dreading the coming knock, and the staccato flash of the red and blue lights.
I found this flick incredibly compelling. The performances are pitch perfect, but the real best performance is from the cinematographer Maxx Corkindale, and the aggressive sound design, which makes the flick at least 33 times more harrowing than it otherwise would have been.
It’s not a gory or violent flick, per se, but it really feels like violence is perpetrated upon us in the audience, and maybe we deserved it? I don’t know, but I also don’t want to start questioning the line between sanity and insanity, because… really, none of us come out of such an evaluation okay. We all look crazy to someone, sometimes.
8 times we are all trapped by ourselves in our own constructions out of 10
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“Sometimes it’s like we’re drawn to unhappy endings, like a population of fucking moths.” - You’ll Never Find Me
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