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Kill List

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Paul

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Kill List. A man, a dog, and his will to yield a lump hammer. In this moribund world of northern contract killings, director Ben Wheatley plays a cruel game on his audience. He allows us a glimpse into the lives his characters have grown accustomed to – an awkward marriage of domestic normalcy and deranged brutality – only to upend it with a finale that pays little mind to what has gone before. The film is less an example of misdirection than it is an elaborate con. Wheatley does not seem to understand the difference.

If money can turn a good man bad, then lesser men can surely be driven to ugly cruelty. Jay once made a fated pilgrimage to Kiev. What happened there, no one will say. All we know is that he returned with a thousand yard stare that colours everything he does. Together with his wife and young son, he tries to paint a happy picture of friends and polite dinner parties, only for the mask to slip almost immediately. Snide comments about the dry meat presage a tablecloth torn asunder, guests and onlookers be damned. It is not a pretty sight. And yet, compared to a garage stocked with military-issue carbine rifles, such arguments seem almost like the warm embrace of possibility.

I do not believe there is anyone who has owned a gun that didn’t pray at least once for the opportunity to use it. It is our nature. Jay’s friend – perhaps his only one – allows him such a chance. A shadowy faction present the two friends with a Kill List and the kind of money you don’t easily turn down. Jay and Gal are men who know little else. Their domestic disharmony is a reflection of the nihilism shared by so many of those returning from war. The most fascinating moment of 2008′s The Hurt Locker was its juxtaposing the rush of front-line bomb disposal with the deadening task of having to choose from a hundred interchangeable breakfast cereals. When at first Kill List succeeds in that image, it threatens to continue a quite masterful year in British cinema.

Where the film comes unstuck is in setting its two leads on their bloody quest. There remains promise in the details: the way Jay’s wife books their hotels, or in the clothes neatly stacked and folded, the latest Andy McNab by their side. Bold title cards announce the targets: the Priest, the Librarian, the Minister. As they swing their sythe, an industrial soundtrack strikes dissonant chords that compliment violence surpassing even the film’s most tortured competition. Gal barks questions at delirious stooges while Jay readies his hammer. Skulls are clubbed in. Hands, broken and deformed. The first of their victims dies in an immaculate kill room to make Dexter proud; the last, in the knee-deep killing fields of the damned.

No explanation is given for their descent. To do so would only interrupt the horror; the unspeakable crimes, relayed one frame after another. It becomes tiresome not because the individual scenes are lacking in impact, but because they are almost indistinguishable. You remember a man beaten to death in his kitchen, and you remember the shotgun tour of a construction yard under cover of darkness. What you don’t remember is the rhyme or reason. They are just these individual snatches of brutality, offered for your viewing displeasure. When Jay and Gal arrive at their final target, the title card ominously reads ‘The Hunchback’. It is not altogether inaccurate.

For the longest time, the film seems to be building towards an ending, but not the one it delivers. For viewers with the will to do so, I wish them luck in clinging to a handful of enigmatic clues as evidence of some greater truth. Others will soberly conclude that an audience’s inability to draw anything but the broadest of connections represents not artistic flourish, but a fundamental failure to narrate. Of the film’s possible themes – morality, war, society – none stand up to scrutiny. There is nothing but hot air behind these puzzles. It is part survival horror, part impressionistic mood music. There are dead rabbits on the lawn, and a cat strung up by its tail. Any coherence it once had gives way to an ending reminiscent of ‘A Serbian Film’, which paired similar goals with grander achievements. Viewers will find much to alternately laugh at and be disappointed by. All will leave confused. Do not mistake such a feeling for profundity.

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Insidious

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Paul

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Insidious is so sure of its intrinsic thrill that it allows the audience in on its every machination. Ringing, dissonant piano notes not only accompany every scare, but foreshadow them long before Character A finds himself alone at Location B to await Grizzly Fate C. Director James Wan, of Saw and Doggie Heaven fame, dolls out the suspense with all the subtlety of an ACME sledgehammer to the face, so satisfied to bask in his macabre, B-movie prowess that he forgets to offer anything more.

If the audience wants to know what’s coming, they don’t have to wait for the sound cues. It begins with Renai and Josh (Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson) moving their family into a new home, only to find previously-shelved books mysteriously thrown to the floor. Renai is too frazzled to think much of it; perhaps she hasn’t seen the horror films we have, in which evil spirits signal their intentions by throwing books and banging around as a matter of course. There are more overt signs to come: Dalton, her inquisitive son, explores their attic by a lantern that shadows his worst nightmares on those suburban cave walls. A piano chord strikes, and he falls into a coma for which medical science has no answer. Mightn’t they ask the attic furnace, you wonder, its hinged door growling like a demonic mouthpiece?

Months pass with little apparent progress, but their other son, Foster, knows the truth: “I’m scared of Dalton” he tells his parents, “I don’t like when he walks around at night”. Unburdened of petty exposition, the film concentrates on mining its rudimentary scares. Ghostly figures appear in windows, only to disappear upon second glance. Josh investigates a loud banging at the front door, finding nothing but bad omens. At the other end of the house, an alarm sounds while an unattended door swings open in the howling wind outside. The modulation of outdoor noises and transient sightings indoors mimics The Strangers, an overlooked Liv Tyler vehicle that evoked similar horror with a far clearer sense of dread. Here, I mostly just felt like they needed a handyman.

Horror movies live and die by their patience for keeping the menace off-screen: think of Jaws’ infamous reticence, or that James Cameron’s Aliens allowed an hour or more to pass before our first sighting of Giger’s Xenomorphs. For a while at least, Insidious follows their path to a passable sense of foreboding, but even the shrewdest purveyor of horror would struggle to ring any real tension from this tired plot: a young boy’s soul acting as the prize for ghouls from beyond is a plot point as creaky as the house it takes place in, and Insidious makes no attempts to re-imagine the scenario. It even conspires to bring a lively Jessica Fletcher-type to the door as the bearer of bad news and dramatic pauses. “It’s not the house that’s haunted” Elise (Lin Shaye) remarks, heralding the films one moment of nostalgic thrill, “it’s your [PIANO CHORD] son”.

Josh is unconvinced by her sorcery, which is odd when you consider that five minutes earlier he was standing in a bedroom torn asunder by rampaging sprits. How does he suppose that happened? The answer comes in a vaguely intimidating séance enabled by an unlikely World War-era gas mask. Elise dictates from the spirit world to furiously scribbling Ghostbuster sidekicks – a screwball flourish all on their own – but the film’s predictable escalation to full-on possessed allows any accidental tension to dissipate into pantomime scares recalling nothing more terrifying than Rentaghost.

Consumed by its fascination with all things that go bump in the night, this is the progression from a familiar story of possession to the kind of amateur dramatics one might encounter on a ghost train at the fair. Insidious isn’t sad because its story is dull – though it is – but because Byrne, Wilson and Shaye deserve so much more. Granted, Shaye need only show up for our own recognition of her role and purpose to do most of the work for her, but Bryne and Wilson do wonders with limited material to give their marriage heartache in a few tender scenes. They sit on the porch to their house, and Renai pleads with her husband to share the burden. “I need you, but you’re never here. Where are you? You’ve avoiding this, like everything else”. Hints to past heartbreak are scenes that belong in a different, better, movie, but which instead find themselves sharing the screen with ridiculous, unearthly contrivances, and the single piano note that follows them everywhere.