Y’know, after bringing up niche examples of abstract psycho-horror in my last review, I find myself wanting to dip into the real thing. So let’s dive once again into the freshly-opened catalogue of Shudder and take a look at this little number: A horror flick about a couple who go to the titular beach house and weird shit starts happening.
Man, these filmmakers sure know how to make the ocean look like the single most terrifying thing on this planet. Owen Levelle’s cinematography combined with the incredibly surreal, Spectrevision-esque effects work bring out a lot of surface tension by showing what lays under the surface of all that water: All those micro-organisms, all that uncharted territory, not to mention just how bloody much of it there is; it makes staying at a house right by the beach seem like the worst idea possible, and it certainly delivers on that notion.
I don’t know how a film under 90 minutes long can get away with being this much of a slow burn, but credit to writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown for pulling it off. Starting out with a light-hearted experience with edibles, he slowly ramps up the weirdness, aided by some ample use of physical effects. It can get pretty wince-inducing when it gets to the worm scene, and with the transformative quality of the mysterious microbes causing all this crazy, there’s a lot of body horror to go around.
As well as some nudges into cosmic horror, with the female lead Emily (Liana Liberato in a film that’s supposed to be unsettling for a change)’s monologue about organic chemistry bringing out the psychedelic qualities of the natural world, something at the heart of the main source of terror in this story. It’s essentially an enviro-horror flick where man’s mistreatment of the environment comes back to them on the arse, but in the process, it taps into a side door into some Lovecraftian shit. While the exposition can be easily missed (honestly, I wound up blanking past of it myself), a lot of it points to how unique Earth is within our solar system in terms of sustaining life, how much of an anomaly humanity is as a result, and that maybe desolation, entropy, is the natural state of things. Doesn’t get any more existential than suggesting that merely existing is going against the ways of nature.
It’s a lean and mean serving of horror, unfolding like a mutant flower from an isolated sickness into a likely extinction event. I can make some educated guesses as to why Shudder decided to pick this up earlier in 2020, and I have to admit, some of the visuals gave me flashbacks to our own little eco-disaster with the bushfires, but beyond any potential timeliness, it’s just a solid effort and an intriguing debut for Jeffrey A. Brown.
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