This film should’ve been an easy lay-up for someone like me. A Guillermo Del Toro produced creature feature about Indigenous mythology and the purpose of cultural storytelling. I know I can end up digging myself into my own navel with these kinds of topics, but I genuinely find them to be fascinating, so I was definitely curious to see how this film would turn out. Well, while it definitely has its points of interest, it also suffers from a real lack of focus that ends up hindering its juicier aspects.
It’s a fantastical horror film in the same vein as A Monster Calls or Before I Wake, where the horror elements are specifically tied to the perspective of a child trying to make sense of the darkness in the world. Here, that takes the form of young Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), an isolated and disturbed child who takes care of his father and younger brother… who are both locked up in the attic because the dad is becoming a wendigo. The design for the wendigo itself is very cool and very unsettling, like a dark mutation of mundane wildlife, and the way director/co-writer Scott Cooper of Black Mass plays around with the gorier moments of the narrative show a solid understanding of the assignment at hand.
However, it’s also like A Monster Calls and Before I Wake in that it focuses far more on the emotional and family-oriented aspects of the story than the horror elements, to the point where it can feel like a domestic thriller wearing the appearance of a horror flick like a Leatherface mask. Except, where those other two films were able to make that disconnect work to their advantage and still be effective with the dramatic side of things, this film fumbles with the ball a few too many times.
The main allegory at work, of monsterifying an abusive parent as a coping mechanism to deal with their actions (‘He’s not a bad person, he’s just sick’; that kind of thing), is a compelling one, and Jeremy T. Thomas is scarily effective at depicting the kind of trauma and abused attachment he has to his father, but the writing around him is pretty scattershot. That core idea ends up getting lost in the mix of trying to comment on First Nations spirituality, the purpose of human folklore, not to mention juggling Lucas’ parental trauma with that of Julia (Keri Russell) and Paul (Jesse Plemons), which occasionally ventures into even darker territory than what we see from Lucas, but the script ends up being far more hesitant to really address what it brings up.
That’s not to say that this film doesn’t work at all. Lucas’ character arc and performance are that strong that they are able to hold up the rest of the production’s sag points, and its take on familial abuse is certainly one of the most heartbreaking I can recall in recent years. But in the face of everything else it’s attempting here, up to and including that Del Toro style of supernatural horror feature, its best qualities feel like they’re struggling to their heads above the rest of the pile.
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