Dir: David Robert Mitchell. Starring: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Jake Weary, Olivia Luccardi. 94 min.
Wicked.
The terrifying thing that is the teenage mind adjusting to a largely unknown inexperienced world. Born in the USA is a paradise for the horror genre.
Firstly the terrifying Brady Bunch and all the generalities made can be chewed up and spat out with undue repentance to harm and the devil take the hindmost John Carpenter sense of freedom of suspense driven drama.
Spooky and hooky all the teenager vulnerabilities are played upon with a force and vitality which brims with jeopardy.
The horror opens as the child becoming a teenager in an instant, Maika Monroe as Jay , takes on and into her life through the opening terrifying incident at her home, the stricken future promised to her by this it thing.
It is the shape of things to come.
Deliciously and delightfully the standard United States of America suburban landscape is visited once again, not by hurricanes, the industrial implosion, the swathes of reposed houses and the shopping mall culture but by the vicissitudes of the any town pathway between the green blades scorn to a certain height. Even Dallas Buyers Club had this suburban presence.
The landscape is purposely the container of more than.
Landscape
The film club wishing for reality through the morality of recent movies from Twelve Years a Slave, Selma, Boyhood, Still Alice, Her, The Theory of Everything, even Dallas Buyers Club and with relevance here drawn to the studious Under the Skin – identified here! In a previous critique as a certain cult classic is restorative like a new age enlightenment – showing the questions are astute and plentiful.
Oscar my dear
Julianne Moore has secured an deserved Oscar. So many years a custodian of the woman’s voice of filmic portrayal of – remember the Short Cuts legacy as a reality check. We are in a period of perturbed America. Still Alice is persuasively what the title projects and Julianne portrays.
Unexplained It Follows is a Horror movie of studious independence and holds no golden moment of revelation so standing apart from this reality fix found across the Film industry.
This should be a modest box office for its (normal meaning inferred) set of deserving collaborators. The credit list for extras is practically the entire roll call of a school which I didn’t see coming but shows these days everybody counts.
Horror maketh the known
Except it is all a lie over a truth never revealed.
Not when the puerile lapped up diet of Sniper and the passable comedic escapism of sentimental passage of youth films which are every young persons diet of cinematic large screen initiation.
We of later years use cinema for different purposes. Listening to the traffic of themes passing we are underwhelmed often by genre pics.
That said this is a film intelligently drawn and delivered. It is widescreen America as well as the manicured lawns of middle America. The claustrophobic nuanced interior life’s are quickly brought to the filmgoers attention with the preoccupation with the ordinary disrupted.
Director excels
The writer-director, David Robert Mitchell has excelled in adding to the stalker in every guise and at every possible inconvenient moment.
The pass it on theme is quickly up and running.
Is it running in the terrified mind of the teenager, is it a part or deposit of life which must be cast off or erased? The horror requires an entourage to protect the followed Maika Monroe. They come in the form of her friends with a newish older friend whose few years advantage later becomes a more assured voice of the possible reach of the follower.
Nighty Nighty
Firstly there has to be, one third in the sleepover to stay within the home of dreaded encounter. The sleepover follows on from the Educational Campus of State education. The Pavlovian essentials of the locked doors and the experience within and between the walls is extremely well delivered and built around the experience only being felt initially by Maika Monroe.
The Relay of Horror.
And then some. It is on the prowl and becomes the unseen except by the Maika playing visually her literal disturbed self with deft darkness and dark sorrowful eyes often wet with crying. Her mind implants these figures as we see them getting closer and closer in their relationship to herself. They are progressively from her past.
The old woman who appears early I was unsure of, except it being Carpenteresque. The indulgences only heighten Horror movies it (normal use) seems, it is the enhanced carried knowledge. Like a relay of Horror. I love this exhibit of entailing dragging film cross fertilisation. In terms of Under the Skin we are between the lens and film, between the innovation of inverted thought. The prospect of reading in our purview these recollected reflections are very artfully profound occurrences. This is what the Croneburg, chronological contextual shifting verb and adjective. The piece of derision laden depiction of failed and troubled humanity is absolutely spine tingling in places when it gathers on the senses.
DisasterPieces is the music ensemble that delivers a score which is modern tone shifting tension riven rifts and shifts true and plentiful. It requires it’s auditory piercing stabbing, point making double six hit. It carries.
The work becomes a journey between past places revisiting the past and the left behind desolated part of any town another place destroyed and the reverse side of the coin.
The deeper reading of this is the stripped back past place which is in the present time replaced by relative comfort.
It may represent the Troll. After I was musing on the internalised Ibsen like influence of narrative taken along a path. Such as the Wild Duck. The inescapable place within that we reside alongside buffered by the use of conformity as well as the device of useful escape mechanisms.
Ibsen Ipso Facto
Why did the mind attack Maika Monroe so? Why do the appearances occur within one without another. They are alone not shared (often the genre requires bulk packaging so resorts to it it The Damned etc.!) there you have it – one genre deconstructed as I do with the mighty Ibsen once more my compelling lead to this place.
The Lady from the Sea anyone?
Talking of which water and swimming feature. There is a visit to a pool and you can mix music with water.
Local band featured here are Go Swim. They are cool to explore the water environment but the film takes on water in an entirely unmethaphorical way. It provides the close to dangerously good cinema wished for but shocking in its effect.
For Go Swim Go See.
Death of the Pilgrim? Death of the Follower? Death of the Followed?
The irredeemable inexhaustible truth is that before long someone else will be along with an even better version of the stalker as self or unself.
To visit the place first try the widescreen of the world.
Conclusion. ###+ 3+
How is the shape of the film let of the hook by being similar in its (normal use) trace to Horror films familiar and of the recent past?
The famille is everything for the genre. The psychosis a very confrontational deep dish. We eat of the plate from the forest floor and survive the increasing complexities and more conflicting stories the senses take in.
This is a film with plenty of shocks and conveyed terror. It is not a slasher context movie but handled with dexterity and skillful ness by its young cast, the exception being the old lady whose part is all make-up! And a meander through the sets. This is a continuum narrative with no (apparent) flashback. It follows the film is a notable watch. Be watchful.
John Graham
26 February 2015
Belfast
The purview is laid out in the shape of cartoons storybooks, space age science interlocked to the bourgeois system that divides down the line whatever your background the curriculum becomes you unless your mind has opened
What is more terrifying than growing up believing the World is a b