Day 3 of the Nightstream Film Festival started with an occult horror film from New Zealand that felt like it had more ideas than it knew how to tell in ninety minutes, plus a return trip to Indonesia for a gory mess full of bugs and self-mutilation.
Reunion (2020)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
Reunion was an incredibly frustrating film. I can't call it entirely bad, let alone irredeemable, as it was certainly visually striking, well-shot, and well-acted, with a lot of interesting ideas within its story and themes. It was reminiscent of Hereditary in a lot of ways, particularly with how its plot concerns a fraught relationship between a mother and her daughter that winds up dipping into the occult. At the very least, it was certainly trying. Unfortunately, whereas Hereditary was a very tightly-written film that expressed its themes clearly, Reunion left me scratching my head as to what precisely happened, even after rewatching it. It felt like a grab-bag of concepts that bit off a lot more than it could chew, overstuffed with ideas about family, motherhood, the relationship between science and the occult, and more that it wasn't able to tie together convincingly, leaving just a bunch of concepts floating around in the ether that left little impact on me. I don't doubt that others may get more out of it than I did, but for me, it fell flat.
The plot, such as it is, concerns a young, pregnant woman named Ellie returning home to her mother Ivy and her ailing father Jack. Ellie and Ivy have been estranged for years, ever since an incident in which Ellie's adopted sister Cara died tragically, and neither of them are exactly ready to put it in the past. The film is at its best when it's exploring Ellie and Ivy's relationship, which has a lot of bad blood on both sides as we slowly learn over the course of the film. With Julia Ormond as Ivy and Emma Draper as Ellie, we get two very talented actors showcasing their craft, Draper's Ellie clearly under serious strain in her relationship with her mother and Ormond's Ivy clearly having a lot to hide, even discounting the things that drove them apart in the first place. In flashbacks that are woven throughout the story, we learn about the circumstances that led to Cara's death, and they do not paint a pleasant portrait of either of them; Ellie was a brat who was jealous of the affection that Cara was getting, and Ivy was a distant and at times even cruel figure who did not seem to understand how to raise a child.
It's when we start getting into specifics that the film falters. This movie has a lot on its mind, much of it seemingly thrown together without a whole lot of care. (According to the Q&A session afterwards, writer/director Jake Mahaffy originally conceived the film as a comedy without any supernatural elements.) Cara's ghost is lingering around the house and makes herself visible to Ellie on multiple occasions, and Ellie is doing research on the history of medieval occultism that infuriates Ivy; given the prominent role it plays woven throughout the subtext of the story, it's not that hard to figure out that Ivy is herself into that kind of stuff. Where the film falls on its face is when it tries to tie all of this into a coherent narrative. It is filled with all manner of bizarre imagery, from a deformed baby who Ellie tries to breastfeed to recordings of her speaking about how modern science is descended from the occultists of old to a whole bunch of stylistic tricks and flourishes, and to be sure, it all did its part in building a very strange and unsettling atmosphere. But aesthetics alone can only take a film so far, especially when your film's isn't a mood piece where plot is secondary to the emotions drawn out of the viewers, but a film where the plot and characters are central. The emotion this film got out of me was confusion, as its split timeline, flashbacks, and shrouded backstories and motivations for its characters left me with several new questions for every answer that it provided. At times, I tried to just shut off my brain and enjoy it on a visual and aural level, but the film was never able to let me do that, always pulling me back to the story that served as its Achilles' heel. This movie needed a very tight plot structure in order to keep from falling apart, and it had the opposite of that.
The Bottom Line
Reunion had a lot going for it in terms of its visual style and its two lead performances, but they aren't enough to hold up a thoroughly jumbled mess of a story that felt like it was convoluted for its own sake.
----------
Next up, back to Indonesia for the newest film from the writer of Satan's Slaves, one that, if the trailer is any indication, promises to be extremely fucked-up.
The Queen of Black Magic (Ratu Ilmu Hitam) (2019)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
You see those bugs on the poster? That alone should be a warning to any entomophobes that they should steer well clear of this movie. It doesn't have much plot or particularly memorable characters, but what The Queen of Black Magic, a loose remake of a 1981 Indonesian horror film, does boast in spades are plenty of extreme, creative violence and terrifying scenarios to drop its characters into. The gore will make your skin crawl, the rest of the film is gutsy in both its backstory and what it subjects its characters to, the villain is scary, and overall, it delivered the goods.
Set at an orphanage (which seems to be a trend in Indonesian horror right now; see yesterday's May the Devil Take You Too) where some of the now-adult former residents are holding a reunion, our main characters are a family comprised of the parents Hanif and Nadya who met at the orphanage, their teenage son Sandi, their teenage daughter Dina, and their younger son Haqi. It won't come as a surprise to learn that there are dark secrets in the history of this orphanage, namely concerning a former caretaker named Mirah who was into black magic and killed three young girls, and the fact that the orphanage's aging headmaster Bandi seems to know a bit more about what actually happened that doesn't exactly paint him in a good light. I'll say it now, without spoiling anything, that this story does not handle the themes it explores with a lot of elegance or grace. Almost nobody in this film comes off as a good person in light of the big reveal as to what was actually going on at the orphanage, not the headmaster Bandi who was responsible for everything, not the orphans who knew what was going on, and not the witch Mirah who has sympathetic motivations but decides to unleash her rage on everyone, even those who had nothing to do with it. Only the kids Sandi, Dina, and Haqi, all supporting characters, come out of this not looking like assholes. It's a film where it's difficult to find people I don't wish to see get brutally murdered, such that, by the end, I was just rooting for the witch by default as she plunged everybody into her own personal hell. I'd like to see the original film, where the witch was apparently more of an anti-hero and played by the famed Indonesian scream queen Suzzanna, and which they show screenshots of during the end credits.
That being said, this film does get quite hellish. Once we're past the requisite first-act character development, this movie gets right to the action, and from the moment we see a centipede crawling into a dude's mouth and then pushing one of his eyes out of its socket as it crawls out, it is made abundantly clear that this film has come to play. Bugs are among its favorite toys -- we get the aforementioned scene, people vomiting up bugs, bugs crawling around beneath someone's skin and eventually bursting out, poisonous hairy caterpillars leaving a nasty rash on someone's face, and the highlight towards the end, one scene that is bound to trigger anybody with trypophobia. It's not the film's only trick, either; there's a woman slitting her own throat and disemboweling herself as Mirah possesses her, a man stapling his mouth shut, skin getting torn off, and more, all of it creating an atmosphere that felt, as Mirah so chillingly describes during the climax, like she's creating the hell that she wishes existed for these awful people. And when she's not brutally torturing people, she's stalking the orphanage and generally being creepy in scenes that are themselves pretty damn effective, especially a scare involving a TV and an old videotape. It's a movie where nobody felt safe, not least of all myself watching it. Director Kimo Stamboel went all-out in crafting a vicious atmosphere, one that was not subtle at all and served to showcase all the nasty tricks he could come up with.
The Bottom Line
The Queen of Black Magic may be a pretty shallow and dumb movie, but it's one that's told with a lot of panache and great gross-out gore gags. If you're into body horror especially, keep your eye on this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment