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| Rose McGowan must fight not to be infected by The Sound (Jenna Mattison, 2017) |
Trawling through Amazon looking for "haunted heroines," I came across the quite compelling, women-directed
The Sound (Jenna Mattison, 2017), starring the sadly underutilized Rose McGowan. Rose has recently drawn quite a bit of attention for being a vocal activist against sexual harassment and assault, accusing Harvey "the disgusting pig" Weinstein of rape way before it became a deluge of accounts and spurring a "white, sexual harassment" version of the #MeToo movement. Admittedly, McGowan's current role in this movement garnered much of my initial interest in the film (that, and that she looks remarkably like Angelina Jolie). Yet her performance as ghost debunker Kelly Johanson really won me over, and while there are some loopy plot holes here and there,
The Sound is a chilling ghost story that rather astutely brings another "haunted heroine" into our midst. Damn, there certainly is no shortage of these women in horror. Could there be some link with horror's penchant for unreliable female narrators within cultures where women are rarely trusted or believed? Coincidence?
To remind readers, the figure I term "the haunted heroine" is a frequent female character in the horror film genre. She is a vulnerable, often fragile character suffering from a previous trauma, and the film traces her journey as she interacts with a space that morphs and transforms around her. This interaction with cinematic space is linked explicitly to the character's subjectivity, as her confusion and disorientation mirrors the space she occupies. The line between reality and fantasy is hopelessly blurred in these horror films, and the chief concern here is whether the heroine is actually experiencing supernatural occurrences, or if she's just losing her mind. Often, "science" is used to disprove the existence of ghosts, but the technology used to disprove such things rarely works, and consistently breaks down. In
The Sound, Kelly is a renowned debunker, who analyzes sound waves in order to prove that spirits are just low frequency sound waves affecting the brain, and producing hallucinations, along with headaches, nosebleeds, etc. Her blog is beloved by denizens of the interweb (rather unrealistic, because as a woman, people/guys would troll the crap out of her). She actually makes a decent living, as she's invited to cure various people of "ghosts," and she can just hop on a plane to "ghostbust," whether at some distant farmhouse, or in an abandoned Toronto subway station.
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| Kelly makes a living traveling around convincing people that ghosts do not exist |
After a brief scene with genre stalwart Stephen McHattie, in which Kelly points out that his grandson isn't seeing ghosts, but affected by nighttime crop dusting, she then is summoned to Toronto to check out a ghost that seemingly haunts an abandoned subway station. She expects to be back in Detroit to attend some party with her attentive beau, but things never go according to plan in these films, and she ends up spending the night, riddled with hallucinations as the sound waves take hold. Her most frequent line: "It's not real, it's not real."
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| Christopher Lloyd shows up to offer some wisdom and change some lightbulbs |
The film is full of some great genre actors who do manage to steal Kelly's thunder. International treasure Christopher Lloyd adds another horror film to his roster after his incredible performance in
I Am Not A Serial Killer (Billy O'Brien, 2016), playing a friendly old coot who mysteriously works for the Toronto Dept. of Transportation in some rather dubious capacity changing lightbulbs in abandoned stations. Suspicious?? Then there is the absolutely terrific and menacing Michael Eklund as a Detective with really shady motives. Let's just say that his character reveals the truly tremendous power of low frequency sound waves on the human body! Finally, Richard Gunn plays Ethan, Kelly's beleaguered husband, who gets way too much screen time chasing after her and ultimately saving her ass (I think). Oh, also, there are hordes of moths, and perhaps ghosts.
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| Scary kid ghosts always seem to carry around creepy dolls |
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As Kelly undergoes an underground "ordeal," the film's narrative reveals in bits and pieces that there's a past traumatic event that motivates Kelly's zeal for ghost debunking. In black and white flashbacks, we see a young girl's stumbling walk into a forest, clutching a doll very similar to the one above. Kelly seems to be obsessed with some girl named "Emily," but we only find out who this girl is in the last 10 minutes of the film. Indeed, the film keeps you guessing, and the incipient disorientation and "lostness" common to these types of films is present in every single frame as we are almost entirely focused through Kelly's skewed perspective. Sure, there is some crazy, nonsensical stuff here, especially surrounding Eklund's creepy detective, and the omnipresent moths, but on the whole, spectators are rooting for the intrepid Kelly to make it out alive and sane. Funny, like Nick Murphy's
The Awakening (2011) which follows Rebecca Hall's ghost debunker, all
The Sound's momentum seems to move toward Kelly's inevitable transformation from a doubter to a believer. Like Murphy's film, Kelly experiences her own "awakening," as she tries to come to terms with her past; and the film offers one of the few (relatively) happy endings of the genre. I was pleasantly surprised by
The Sound, and since it's directed by a woman as well, I highly recommend you check it out while it's still available for less than a buck on Amazon.
