Review: Spiral (2019)

Spiral (2019)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

Spiral is a movie that really, really wants to be Get Out. A horror film about a couple that moves into a new community where their lifestyle seems to rub the locals the wrong way even if they won't come out and insult them to their faces, and it turns out their new home has some dark secrets lurking underneath, it roots its horror in real-world issues of prejudice and violence faced by marginalized communities, in this case gay people instead of black people. It's a film where the subtext is always there but the text is saved for the end, the rest of the film being a slow burn psychological thriller as the protagonist's suspicion of the people around him starts to mount. Once you spot the similarities, it's easy to figure out that things are not as they seem, that certain characters are up to no good, and precisely how the main characters are in trouble. Of course, merely being heavily inspired by another movie doesn't make your film bad. While Spiral may be heavily lifting and remixing elements of other, better films, it does so pretty well, anchored by an outstanding lead performance by Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman and a dark ending that hits just the right grim tone, especially once you realize what it's saying.

Our protagonists Malik and Aaron are a gay couple living in the '90s who have just moved to a small town in Illinois. Aaron has a teenage daughter, Kayla, from a previous marriage to a woman, while Malik works as a ghostwriter, in this case writing the "autobiography" of a right-wing activist who supported ex-gay conversion therapy. Obviously, they don't fit in with the lifestyle of the conservative town they just moved to, though their neighbors Marshal and Tiffany seem to be rather accepting of them and think their community's homophobia is dumb, and Kayla starts to hit it off with their son. All is not well, however. Malik arrives at the house one day to find the place vandalized with an anti-gay slur, and an encounter one night with a strange old man seemingly trying to warn him that he's in danger leads him to start doing some digging on the town, particularly the lesbian couple who last lived in their home in the '80s and seemingly disintegrated in a murder/suicide. It soon becomes apparent that whatever happened to them was a) not as simple as the news reports stated, and b) is about to repeat itself in dramatic fashion, because his and Aaron's new home is not what it seems.

Malik is the focus of this film's plot and drama, and a lot of it would not have worked without a very good actor in the role. For the first two acts, the film is slow and meandering, taking its time as Malik witnesses various strange things going on around him while Aaron discounts them and assumes his partner is going crazy, and if I weren't able to attach myself to Malik and put myself in his shoes, it would have felt terminally dull and insufferable. Fortunately, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman was outstanding in the part. As the film progresses, it's really a one-man show with a lot of supporting characters, and Bowyer-Chapman does a great job selling him as somebody who increasingly feels that he cannot trust anybody around him -- his neighbors, his partner, not even himself -- while everybody else tells him that he's losing his mind. He's a man trapped in a (pardon the pun) downward spiral that some force or another is secretly fueling, all of it building up to a vicious climax that takes the film to some dark places, in a manner not unlike the famed alternate ending of the film that this one is clearly drawing from. After an hour where Bowyer-Chapman kept the film afloat even as it plodded, it's in the third act where it truly comes into its own, particularly in its message about the toxic nature of prejudice allowing the concerns of marginalized groups, whoever they may be, to go ignored. The film may be set in the '90s, but it's not interested in the decade for its aesthetic so much as it uses it to underline its point: the targets of bigotry may change over the years, but at its core, it's always the same story.

The manner in which the film's plot and message came together at the end made me wish that much more that it had been more focused before then. Like I said, it's really Bowyer-Chapman's performance that held my interest for most of the film, as it is otherwise filled with subplots and diversions that ultimately go nowhere. Kayla's story especially felt entirely disconnected from the main story, her relationship with the neighbors' son accomplishing little except to establish that she's developing a social life in the new town, something that could've been conveyed with a few lines of dialogue between her and her fathers. We get moments of anti-gay prejudice against the main characters, and a snippet of Pat Buchanan's "culture war" speech to underline just how mainstream it was in the '90s, but it never truly connects to the ending except to set the mood beforehand. Most importantly, however, the lack of development for the townsfolk seriously hurt them as villains. To go back to Get Out, that film spent a lot of time establishing who the Armitages were and crafting an aura of mystery and shadiness around them behind their agreeable liberal exterior. We knew from the start from they were up to something, and while we didn't know what until the big reveal, they still dominated the film, every action of theirs serving to remind us that Chris was in trouble. Here, however, Marshal and Tiffany, the main human villains here, are background characters who only show up in a few scenes and have little presence over Malik's life in the town, and much of his realization of the pickle he's in concerns digging through the local archives, a move that worked to develop him as somebody slipping into paranoia but didn't do much to build the rest of the town as characters. It's only towards the end when the stakes seriously start to rise, and while the payoff did redeem the film, for too long it felt as though it wasn't really going anywhere.

The Bottom Line

While it was a bit too slow for its first hour or so, and the plot isn't particularly original, a great lead performance and a killer ending make this one worth checking out, especially within the otherwise sparse pantheon of LGBT+ horror.