‘Elevated horror’ as a sub-genre heading has its elitist undertones and occasionally nebulous usage, but there is still a certain aesthetic that fits that heading. Artsy and unconventional horror films have been a backbone of the genre since its inception, but specifically since the early-mid 2010s, there’s been a noticeable push towards that kind of fare.
In retrospect, the whole movement (if it can even be considered unified enough to count as such) felt like a direct reaction to the waning years of the found footage craze spearheaded by Paranormal Activity, which was reaching its nadir around the time that elevated horror films really started to take off. Instead of the façade of amateur filmmaking provided by the prominent handheld camerawork, and the gratuitous use of jump scares, elevated horror tended to delve more into the formalist side of things, returning to the technical fundamentals to see how far they could be pushed and bent to create new sensations. I may not entirely agree with the naming and framing of this general wave, but as a functional label, it can be quite handy.
This Aussie horror film feels like something of a Greatest Hits compilation of the kind of cinema that falls under the umbrella of elevated horror. The story is about divorced mother Sarah (Sarah Snook) gradually losing her grip on reality as her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) starts claiming, with alarming veracity, to be Sarah’s little sister Alice, who has been missing since they were kids. It deals in familial trauma much like Hereditary did, along with the central depiction of a parent being driven made by their own child that The Babadook essentially kicked off the movement with nearly a decade ago. The use of animal imagery and flirtings with doppelganger storytelling, along with being just a general Alice In Wonderland lift that psychological stories can’t help themselves from referencing, also has shades of Jordan Peele to it. Hell, with the imagery of a woman confronting her family’s past by way of a soul ending up in the wrong body, it even resembles Sarah Snook’s past work in Jessabelle.
Now, it merely being reminiscent of those works isn’t inherently a problem; one of the bigger signifiers with elevated horror stuff is that a lot of it seems terminally fixated on the subject of trauma, and there’s only so many ways to spin that topic into fresh ideas at this point. No, the problem comes in with how direct the lifts are, to the point where the overall story becomes unfortunately predictable fairly early on. There’s definite potential in the main idea of reincarnation(?) as a proxy for the ways that generational trauma keeps recurring, but it’s quite plain in how it’s portrayed.
Which is a shame because, as far as the film craft and performances, this is certainly doing its best to, ahem, ‘elevate’ the material. Sarah Snook may not be on the same level of Essie Davis in her portrayal of a mother going mad from repressed guilt, but she is still giving her all here and manages to be quite unnerving at times. Watching her with scissors, I can actively feel my breath being caught in my chest. LaTorre as Mia is pretty good too, coming across as an authentic(ally annoying) child while also selling the confrontational and karmic moments she’s given opposite Snook. She’s not exactly on the same grating level that Noah Wiseman was in Babadook (which, as much as it turned me away on first viewing, is the point of the character), but she still makes it work. Seeing Damon Herriman in a non-villainous role for a change as Sarah’s ex-husband was a nice touch too.
On its own, this is a decent-enough psycho-horror flick. Director Daina Reid and writer Hannah Kent get the fundamentals for this kind of story, and they bring the right textures to it both visually and thematically. But with how prevalent a lot of these very ideas already are in modern cinema, even outside of horror because the elevated horror craze has grown far beyond the confines of its original genre, even a tertiary exposure to any of the films this is clearly pulling from ends up revealing the rote presentation offered here. It has its moments, and I will never not be happy to see Sarah Snook showcasing why she’s one of the best Aussie actors working today, but the gap between how brilliant its influences are and how so-so this cover is is a little too wide to recommend all that enthusiastically.
No comments:
Post a Comment