The Popcorn Frights Film Festival was canceled this year on account of the pandemic, but fortunately, life finds a way. They and a number of other horror film festivals across the country came together and launched the streaming-only Nightstream Film Festival from now through Sunday, October 11. And I've got a pass that gives me access to ten films of my choosing all weekend long.
So let's get started!
Pelican Blood (Pelikanblut) (2019)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
First film of this online film festival was a German entry called Pelican Blood, a rather conventional supernatural horror film that didn't really do much novel in terms of its story, but which was still effective in terms of atmosphere and mood. It's about fifteen minutes too long, and there were points where I think that it could've gone above and beyond, putting some twists on the supernatural "creepy kid" horror formula instead of more or less playing it straight. However, while the destination was rather predictable, the journey there wasn't, thanks to writer/director Katrin Gebbe showing plenty of finesse behind the camera at crafting a bleak feel to the proceedings. It draws heavily on experiences that countless parents have likely had with out-of-control children, creating a mood where, even though the ending is a happy one on paper, it still feels bittersweet. Overall, I liked it.
Our protagonist Wiebke Landau lives on a farm with her adopted daughter Nikolina, or Niki, training horses for the police. Since single women like herself are not allowed to adopt in Germany, she travels to the Eastern European orphanage where she adopted Niki to bring her home a sister, five-year-old Raya. Raya has few social graces, but she seems to get along well with her new family at first. Before long, however, she turns into an ever-growing handful for Weibke to deal with, getting into fights with Niki, causing trouble at preschool, smashing dishes, and always making a mess. Wiebke finds out that Raya has been taken in by several families in the past, all of whom sent her back to the orphanage. And of course, because it wouldn't be a "creepy kid" horror movie without it, there's some sort of malevolent supernatural force hovering around her. Together with a police officer named Benedikt who she strikes up a relationship with, Wiebke must figure out what is wrong with her new daughter before that something destroys -- and possibly even takes -- her life.
This is a very slow, meandering film, a fact that produces both one of its strongest assets and one of its main flaws. Gebbe takes her time establishing the world in which the main characters live, and uses this fact to flesh them out, most of all the heroine Wiebke. Played by Nina Hoss, Wiebke is a working single mother who takes care of a horse stable, one who longs to find The One and raise a family with him, as evidenced by the fact that she has already adopted one child and seeks another. Much of the film is devoted to Wiebke's inner life as she struggles to raise Raya, her dream slowly coming unraveled and destroying her life as it becomes clear that she signed up for way more than she bargained for. Raya's constant antics slowly wear Wiebke down as she seeks out every solution she can think of to get her in line, from a mother's love to a camera to psychiatric help to a witch doctor, and it is framed for both her and the viewer as an endurance session. The film brings us with her every step of the way, and by the time Wiebke simply faints from the exhaustion of having to manage both Raya and her job with the horses, we feel her pain. This means that the movie takes its time subjecting us to everything that Raya does to Wiebke and Niki, even when it's retreading things that it's shown us before. On one hand, the film does a great job putting us into Wiebke's state of mind. The atmosphere is an oppressive one, the weather slowly transitioning from summer to autumn to winter as things grow ever more dire for Wiebke, and I felt her mounting frustration with and eventually fear of her adopted daughter. Hoss gave an outstanding performance as somebody who starts out joyous at having a new daughter, but who eventually reaches her wit's end with her.
But on the other, this movie is also two hours long, even though it probably could have stood to be about fifteen minutes shorter. Eventually, it's just repeating itself in showing all the ways in which Raya ruins Wiebke's life, all while playing very coy with the actual horror side of the equation, even as it implies early on that there is a supernatural component to Raya's behavior, one with roots in her past and how she became an orphan. I would've liked to see some more scenes, especially in the middle section of the film, played for horror, with the force that is influencing Raya shown to more clearly affect Wiebke, Niki, and the other people in and around the house, instead of just vague intonations telling us that something ominous is lurking in the background. This film falls victim to a common sin, violating the "show, don't tell" rule of storytelling, and while the effects-light approach did work during the climax where it's implied that Wiebke saw something truly terrifying just from the look on her face, it doesn't really work for most of the movie.
The Bottom Line
It could've stood to be tighter and more focused, but as a mood piece, Pelican Blood shines, offering a unique aesthetic twist on the supernatural family horror formula even if it's still playing the hits.
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Next up, an American horror-rom-com...
It Cuts Deep (2020)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
It Cuts Deep was my first disappointment of Nightstream so far, and a big part of why comes down to the cast and the tone. It had a lot going for it initially, with a tone that felt reminiscent of a mix of an indie romantic comedy and a serial killer movie that offered a satirical portrait of a man's feelings of inadequacy and fear of commitment in his relationship. The jokes seemed to land, and I liked where the film seemed to be headed. The tone just falls apart, however, about halfway in, as the jokes stop coming yet the lead actors are still playing the film as though it were a comedy, even though the stakes are rising and they should be lending a darker edge to their performances. The result isn't an effective horror-comedy, but a straight horror movie that thinks it's a comedy and doesn't realize it's not. There were some good ideas buried here, but it just didn't really work.
We start with a young couple, Sam and Ashley, traveling to a vacation home where Ashley plans to ask Sam to marry him and think about having kids, a thought that terrifies Sam. It's clear that their relationship is not in the most optimal spot, and it only gets worse once Nolan, an old friend of Sam's, shows up. Nolan is the kind of man that Sam wants to be, a man's man with a loving family who Sam sees as an existential threat to his relationship, as he seems to just give off the vibe that he wants to have an affair with Ashley. A rivalry soon erupts, reminding the both of them why they haven't spoken in years, with Sam growing ever more obsessed with Nolan.
For the first act, I liked where this film seemed to be headed. The jokes were hitting their mark, especially an early exchange where Sam encounters the father of an obnoxious young boy who underlines what he's afraid might happen to him if he becomes a father. He clearly adores Ashley, but this cuts against his hesitancy to get into a long-term relationship with her, a contradiction that is merely heightened when Nolan enters the picture and Sam immediately gets jealous. There were a lot of interesting directions that this film could've gone, from Nolan's rugged family man image being the mask of a serial killer (something that Bloodline pulled off to great effect) to Sam growing increasingly anxious about Nolan and jumping off the slippery slope in his efforts to match up with him.
It felt as though the film tried to take the latter path, but unfortunately, it absolutely botched the landing. The two lead actors, Charles Gould as Sam and John Anderson as Nolan, both seem to be performing their parts as though they were in a straightforward comedy, going broad and over-the-top as if they're slinging out jokes and punchlines. The problem was, this was only really true of the first act of the movie, so when the film got a lot more serious, these same performances came off as ridiculous overacting, which made it far more difficult to buy the increasingly dark beats of the story as it progressed. Gould and Anderson seemed to be in a contest where they were trying to out-ham the other, and it just didn't work at all for either of their characters, Gould as someone who's clearly losing his mind and Anderson as someone who acts like a dick but isn't actively malicious. As I watched this movie unfold, I tried to picture the more comedic version of the story that they were trying to go for, one in which the music and atmosphere weren't so overbearingly ominous and in which the main characters actually did humorous things, or alternatively, the version in which the attempts at humor were given a darker twist once shit got real. Quinn Jackson as Ashley was the only one who seemed to really get the shift in the film's tone, which meant that she acted circles around Gould and Anderson more or less by default once she had to survive the mayhem around her. It felt like a comedy sketch that went on for way too long and eventually stopped being funny yet still thought it was. I was unable to take either Sam or Nolan seriously as characters, but at the same time, I couldn't laugh at the humor because of how bleak the film was getting.
The Bottom Line
It Cuts Deep was a misfire that had some good ideas early on, but fell apart as it couldn't seem to decide whether it was a horror movie or a comedy.
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Third, we come to what is quite possibly the biggest movie of the festival, one that comes from the makers of Searching, stars Sarah Paulson, and will be premiering on Hulu next month.
Run (2020)
Not rated
Score: 5 out of 5
I was interested in seeing Run from the moment I saw that it came from Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian, the writers and directors of Searching, one of the best films of 2018. A thriller that took the "set on a computer screen" stylistic conceit of Unfriended out of the teen horror arena and into the realm of an adult thriller that commented on our relationship with technology and social media, it established the two of them as filmmakers to watch. This film, their more conventionally-filmed follow-up, got punted to Hulu because of the pandemic, which sucks, because I would've really loved to see this in a packed theater. Run is a fast-paced thriller seemingly inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case that gets off on the right foot immediately, is on a roll from there, and keeps topping itself as it builds up to a wild ending, all of it tied together by a frightening villain performance from Sarah Paulson and a standout debut from newcomer Kiera Allen.
Chloe Sherman is a teenage girl living with her teacher mother Diane who is beset by a litany of ailments that have left her paralyzed and in poor health. Unable to go to a normal school, she is homeschooled by her mother, and has become a gifted engineer who dreams of going to college. One day, while helping Diane with the groceries, Chloe notices a strange medication in the grocery bag, one for Diane rather than her, which turns out to be the first thread she pulls at revealing that her mother has not been entirely forthcoming with her about her disability. Using every means at her disposal -- harder than it seems given that she lacks the use of her legs -- Chloe slowly discovers that her medications are in fact hurting her and keeping her sick, and that her mother's treatment of her is hardly altruistic even if, in her own sick head, she may think it is.
This is mostly a two-person show for Sarah Paulson and Kiera Allen as Diane and Chloe, and the both of them are outstanding. Paulson's part is the showier of the two, and she plays it with all the theatricality you'd expect from someone who frequently works with Ryan Murphy, all without sliding into the realm of pure camp where you can't take her seriously anymore. Diane is, for lack of a better word, crazy, somebody who seems obsessed with the idea of having a sick daughter in ways that grow ever more disturbing as the film progresses and the layers of her madness are peeled back. She has ruined Chloe's life, all to feed her own sick sense of self-worth; while the film doesn't linger too much on exactly what is driving her to do what she does, anybody who understands what Munchausen by proxy syndrome is can probably fill in the gaps themselves. Paulson is electrifying and terrifying, an authority figure who, from the moment Chloe realizes something's not right, represents a threat in almost every scene she's in. Allen's part as Chloe isn't as in-your-face as Paulson's, but she too holds her own as a crafty young woman who is understandably angry and scared about what she learns. Without the use of her legs, she's learned how to make various engineering solutions around her handicap to manage her daily life, and she proves extremely adept at staying one step ahead of her mother through a series of increasingly outrageous schemes. (Also, props for casting an actual wheelchair-using actress in the part, somebody who knew what her character's physical limitations would logically be.) Between the two of them, there was never a dull moment in this film.
It helped that this is a movie that wastes no time. It is not a slow burn; by the twenty-minute mark, Chloe has not only learned that her mother is lying to her, she's already scheming to figure out what's really going on. Twists flow from there, all of them feeling logical and building on what had been shown or at least alluded to before. The only minor plot hole concerns dog medication, considering that we never see a dog in the Sherman household, but even here, given how many lies Diane tells Chloe (and the fact that she has a dog-lover bumper sticker on her car), I was able to infer that the dog had died at some point in the recent past and that Diane simply used it as an excuse to get her hands on that medicine. It's exceptionally well-shot in terms of thrills, as well, being built as it is heavily around not just Chloe's handicap limiting her options in getting around but also the fact that Diane has limited her communication options. Not only do we get to see Chloe's craftiness put on full display, we get a slew of inventive sequences where she constantly has to improvise, most notably one set on the roof of her house in which a simple ten-foot drop suddenly made me afraid of heights. This movie proves that Chaganty wasn't just a one-trick pony with Searching and its screen gimmick, but that he more than has the chops to tackle a more straightforward movie.
The Bottom Line
The movie that made my night, Run was a standout by any measure, between its two excellent lead actors and its parade of thrilling twists, turns, and set pieces. When it hits Hulu, check it out.
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