Gugino has to carry pretty much the entire film
off of the back of her performance, and whether she’s showing self-doubt,
self-arguing or self-regret, she is spellbinding as the captive with an
incredibly complex psychology behind her. Doubly so for the version of her
inside her head, embodying all of her strength and ability to reflect on the
past. Greenwood starts out well enough as the over-enthusiastic role-player,
but then really comes into his own as
a counterpoint to the above in Jessie’s head, acting as a constant instiller of
worry and paranoia. Henry Thomas as Jessie’s father is unnerving in how he
plays a quiet abuser, Chiara Aurelia as the younger Jessie really drives home
just what led her to her current predicament, and Carel Struycken as the
Moonlight Man… works but ends up serving as the film’s biggest drawback by the
end.
One of the trickiest hurdles when it comes to
writing any story involving elements of psychology is being able to maintain
its own existence within the mind. Even with the presence of the supernatural,
psycho-horror relies on not only the potential darkness within the human mind
but also enough clarity to keep that darkness in the mind. Plot holes concerning outside influence can be hand-waved away through the usual
sense that reality is always being brought into question, but that ends up
making the whole thing more of an uphill struggle. After seeing what Flanagan
and Howard are capable of in this arena, their approach to this extremely
high-concept idea is precisely what it called for.
Once the visions start and
the inner monologue evolves into inner dialogue,
the script keeps bringing up the specific reasons why certain thoughts and
memories are sticking out at the moments they do, similar to the
stream-of-consciousness flashbacks in Wild. Where this gets better is that, in
terms of the characters existing in Jessie’s head, there is a remarkable amount
of consistency to why they know what they know. Not delving into character
history that would be unknown to the person imagining the conversation, but
instead using already-existent memories to create not real people but an
individual’s interpretation of real people. That is a hell of a tightrope to
walk, but because of all this internal continuity, it makes the hellfire-red
core of the story shine through even brighter.
On the surface, the decision to adapt this
particular Stephen King story at this moment feels reactionary to the current presence of
Fifty Shades in the box office. Hell, the very story concept of an adventurous
night of love-making going horribly wrong feels like a darkly comedic answer to
that same brand of dangerous sex that is actually a lot more vanilla than it keeps insisting to be. But this film is a lot more
emotional than strictly sexual, focusing as much on Jessie’s mental breakdown
as it does on ideas of restraint and domination. As we see Jessie talk to her
own mind in its many forms, we see how years of trauma and fear made her into the
woman we see in an impossibly helpless situation.
More so than BDSM depictions
of domination in relationships, this film shows it in more of a power dynamic
sense, showing how alpha-male arrogance can bend people into these sorts of
positions, not just physically but mentally as well. It gets incredibly
uncomfortable at times, particularly when looking at Jessie’s relationship with
her father, and after sitting through this film, describing her connection with
her father as a ‘relationship’ makes me feel like throwing up. I never thought
I’d have to explain this, but I mean that in a good way. Same thing with the
insanely visceral imagery making a pleasant return from Oculus, with injuries
and the lingering stray dog bringing out a lot of wincing throughout. No joke,
once it got to the cutting scene… I actually had to look away. Very few films
nowadays get me to that point.
However, there is something that ends up
digging into what this film has to offer, a seemingly minor thing that ends up
creating massive dissonance by the finale. And it all has to do with how the
world inside Jessie’s head and the real world overlap. Now, Flanagan and Howard
are probably one of the few writing teams working today that I would trust to
deliver exposition in a horror film; hell, it’s their work on Ouija: Origin Of Evil that made me realize that exposition and characters explaining the plot
doesn’t have to be a bad or even boring thing in films. Stephen King, on the
other hand? Rationalizing the weirdness in his stories has always been a problem. The man is really damn good at coming up
with high-concept ideas, from the extra-dimensional
conflicts of The Dark Tower to the demonic clown that feeds on fear from It.
However, he also has a
problem with trying to explain the fantastical elements in real-world terms,
resulting in more than a few stories where things would have been better left
unsaid. The Langoliers turned a childhood story meant to create compliance into
a species of creatures that literally eat time, The Tommyknockers went from a
look at how the creative process can affect people into a yarn about a crashed
UFO driving people crazy, and The Dark Half evolved from a look at the use of psuedonyms in writing into a story about a man with a literal malformed fetus stuck to his brain. That last one isn't that bad in execution, considering King’s own writing
sensibilities as a whole, but in a story that is this textually and visually
grounded in reality, such explanations don’t work out. Without getting into
spoilers, the film takes a rather steep dive right at the end, personified in
one last attempt to explain why Jessie saw the things that she did in a way
that is less creepy and more awkwardly funny. After how good the rest of the
film was, this is more than a little disappointing.
All in all, even with that last issue that I took with the
overall film, this is still quite a tense thriller. The acting is top-notch,
the visuals range from the claustrophobic to the vulgar to the graphic without
missing a beat in the transitions, and the writing uses its seeming
short-story-length idea to highlight power dynamics in relationships, both
personal and sexual, and how they can torment those that can’t come to terms
with them. Knowing King’s understanding of fear and Flanagan’s understanding of
how fear changes people, this is precisely the kind of film you would get from
such a cross-section… even with the slightly jarring conclusion.
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