Review--The Twin--Taneli Mustonen (2022)

 

           One Creepy kid (Tristan Ruggeri) and Finnish folks with dorky hats are in The Twin (2022)

I was really, really digging The Twin (Taneli Mustonen, 2022) through most of its run time!  Then came the film's ending, and I was so outraged.  Outraged!  

Sometime in the 1980s, Rachel (Teresa Palmer) and Anthony (Steven Cree) are struggling with immeasurable grief, as they lost one of their twin sons, Nathan, in a car accident.  Haunted by this incident, they leave New York City with their son, Elliot, in tow, and travel to Anthony's homeland, a small village in Finland (it was actually shot in Estonia).  The majority of the film takes place here, as the couple and their son hastily move into a giant house in the Finnish countryside in order to start anew.  The house in which the film is set has multiple floors, and seems to be the setting for a former funeral home or mortuary?  It's kind of unclear.  Elliot immediately decides to live at the very top of the house, in the attic, with a super sinister round window at the top, and asks that Mom and Dad put a twin bed in for his dear, departed twin.  Rachel acquiesces to his request, while Anthony immediately pushes back, suggesting that this situation is exactly what "the doctor" warned against.  This set up easily slides into the Haunted Heroine horror film, where a female protagonist struggles with seemingly supernatural events, while everyone else--the local folk, Anthony, and even Elliot--actively question every single move that Rachel makes.  Yet, there's a ton of creepy stuff afoot.

                       Rachel and Elliot cling to each other in the menacing Finnish forest

First, the family visits a local pagan shrine, where if you press your hand against the red handprints on the rock, and make a wish, your wish very well might come true.  Elliot proceeds to "make a wish," and you just know he's wishing for his brother's return.  Then at a welcoming party that the family attends, everyone seems to ignore Rachel, except for the elderly Helen (Barbara Marten), who the villagers believe has a screw loose.  She pulls Rachel aside and tells her that she dreamed of her, and that her son has made a wish, and it was granted.  Ruh-roh.  Not only is Rachel not fitting in, but she and Anthony are compelled to climb onto some giant wooden "wedding" swing as another "pagan" tradition of the town.  As the pagan traditions start to add up, I was getting really excited about a potential Folk Horror title to add to my very long list.  Helen appears to be the only person really willing to talk to Rachel, or take her seriously, especially when Elliot disappears, and then comes back, claiming that he's Nathan.  Sure, Helen equates pagans with Satanists, which is rally sloppy for 2022, but I went with it.

               Rachel, dressed up as some May Queen, is tended to by a bunch of nuns/cultists?  

The strange folk of their new town are rendered stranger at every turn.  At first, they stand around silently, looking disapproving and whispering behind Rachel's back.  Then her visit to the doctor about Elliot's claims (that he's Nathan) just serves to piss her off.  Helen then brings up a cockamamie story about her husband being possessed by some demon, his face twisted into an obscene grimace as he dies a pretty awful death.  There's even one scene that juxtaposes Teresa's weird nightmares/visions with Helen's to suggest that these two women are struggling within a foreign environment (Helen is British) intent on destroying them.  At this point in the film, like Rachel, viewers do not trust anyone, especially Anthony, who comes from this pretty grim place.  Helen also suggests that there are some weird town-related conspiracies involving circles, and we then see numerous rituals on bleak hillsides, where the strange folk are standing in circles, doing who knows what.

                                        Rachel looks pretty awesome in mourning garb

If not for Teresa Palmer's persuasive portrayal of Rachel, this film would be dead from the start, but she's so convincing, that viewers care about the stakes here.  The husband and son are not very well-developed, but after they move to Finland, Anthony comes across as a gaslighting mastermind, who has the whole town convinced that Rachel needs medicating.  In fact, there are numerous shots of Rachel waking up in bed after being dosed with a hypodermic.  What are these people up to, you wonder, as clumps of townsfolk stare, and stare at her.  As I said, the explanation jettisons all the potential Folk Horror/possession/haunting possibilities.  **SPOILERS FOLLOW Turns out, according to that jerk, Anthony, that he and Rachel never had a twin, that Nathan died in a car crash where Rachel was driving, and that she's just crazy, hallucinating another twin when there isn't one.  Oh, and Helen's clearly crazy too, just as the rest of the town thinks she is.  Sure, the Haunted Heroine narrative always oscillates between supernatural happenings and unreliable narrator madness, but something about The Twin felt cheap and dirty in choosing to end the film this way.  Leaving the cemetery one last time, with her family's two gravestones in front of her, Rachel climbs into her car to discover that EVERYONE'S ALIVE, including the imaginary twin she created.  Basically, the ending completely negates all of the spooky stuff happening throughout the earlier portions of the film, rendering any supernatural questions pointless.  The "it was all just a dream/delusion" finale does not feel earned, and I'm still angry at the bait-and-switch.  Perhaps the "she was always just insane" approach has worn thin for me, but The Twin, now streaming on Shudder, disappoints.  NOT recommended.

Fantasia 2018--Aragne: Sign of Vermillion--Saku Sakamoto (2018)

Rin's apartment building is a pretty grim place in Saku Sakamoto's Aragne: Sign of Vermillion (2018)

Full disclosure: I know very little about Japanese anime beyond Hideo Nakata, Osamu Tezuka, and The Ghost in the Shell films.  So to my delight, I discovered that Saku Sakamoto did the digital effects for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) and he was presenting the world premiere of his debut feature Aragne: Sign of Vermillion at Fantasia 2018.  The director and producer of the film were there for a Q &A and there even was a translator--who translated Japanese into French.  Heh.  My French is mal, tres mauvais, so I pretty much gleaned little from the film's introduction, other than how happy Sakamoto was to be there.  I was enthusiastic and swayed by the cool trailer.  Giant bugs crawling all over a city!

Rin runs away from a lot of creepy crawly scary s***

My grasp of the narrative is...limited, but I don't think that really matters all that much.  The film is a dread-filled atmospheric fever dream, and its ambiguities are part of its appeal.  Rin, a University student, has moved into a new apartment that is not at all like its been advertised.  Instead of a sunny, well-lit space, the rooms are more like bunker dorms, lined up on dank hallways, the building decrepit and looming.  It's basically a dump, and little wonder it's haunted.  Or is it?  Rin is not sleeping well in her new digs, passing out exhausted in her college classroom, and riddled with very disturbing dreams.  The imagery of the film is infused with a blood red ambiance, and one can never tell whether Rin is actually seeing things, or just hallucinating.  Important, but confusing backstory: medical experimentation was performed on people some 40-odd years ago, where they became delusional, hallucinating wrecks, victims of some weird plague, and this widespread disease, spread by spirit bugs, is consuming the city in present day.  Yeah, I know.  I told you I didn't have a great grasp of the narrative.  Meanwhile, Rin seems to be enamored of this brunette who's always dancing, and she's being chased by some masked serial killer with a portable circular hand saw or some such weapon.  Also, there are "dead soul soldiers" possessed by "spirit bugs" that she must run from over and over again.  Still following?

Scary people/creatures are constantly after Rin

The film deliberately blurs the lines between Rin's dreams and waking life, and the hi-jinks in her building indicate that Rin is what I like to call a "haunted heroine."  Something from her past is causing all these horrific manifestations, and every time she seems to grasp what that might be, it slips away from her (and the audience).  She encounters plenty of people who appear to verify that all this stuff is happening IRL, but is it??  This context is really confusing/fun, and adds something special to the truly marvelous and weird imagery.  Brains with insect legs crawling on top of Rin.  EWWW!  Because she seems to be hallucinating constantly, one wonders if she's contracted this disease people seem to have.  At other moments, nonsensical things happen, and I don't know why.  At one point, I wrote in my notes, "Why is she dragging a dead body?  To prove it's real?"  Yeah, this film isn't about easy, clear answers.  Also, the dancing brunette pops up on occasion to opine, "I wish you'd just die" to poor Rin.  At one point, she's strapped to a giant machine while bugs chew on her.  It's nuts!!

Spirits from Rin's past haunt her in the present

Despite my somewhat incoherent recitation of an incoherent plot, things actually make a lot of sense at the end; indeed, the ending tempts viewers to rewatch the film to see what subtle indicators might have been supplied along the way.  The film actually reminded me a great deal of Eyetan Rockaway's The Abandoned (2015), but I'm not going to say how exactly, so you can experience this twisted little gem all on your own.  The film clocks in at just over an hour, so it never drags, even in its most confusing moments.  Give it a shot!

Zombies as livestock, factory farmed for food, turn on their corporate "farmers" in Shinya Sugai's Walking Meat (2018)

The great thing about Fantasia, is viewers often get to see really fun and innovative short films that are cool, and hard to screen elsewhere.  That's why I highly recommend Shinya Sugai's debut Walking Meat (2018).  The short starts with a commercial for zombie food--that's zombies that humans eat as food, not food for zombies.  It seems that zombies are now considered livestock, kind of like cows, but angrier and far more deadly.  Also, these zombies are not zombie cows, but zombie people.  I'm surprised that someone hasn't thought about this idea already (have they??)  Why waste a good zombie, right?

The studious girl, the social media maven, and the incompetent geek boy all show up for their first day at work

The set-up is three obvious millennials show up for a corporate training session their first day on the job.  Of course, things get pretty hairy when the system malfunctions, and the zombies get loose.  Mayhem ensues!  Plenty of jokes litter what feels like a web series, with little pauses inserted and held occasionally, before the film moves on to the next zombie set piece.  The pace is frenetic and fun, and the film is really quite accomplished, with a great deal of tension, and a lot of slash 'em action too.  Really terrific and worth looking for once it emerges online.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black--Francesco Barilli (1974)

A haunted Sylvia (Mimsy Farber) graces the elegant and very weird The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)

Italian giallos are some of my favorite types of horror films, especially if they are centered on a female protagonist lurking around an incredibly stylish set.  They've often been accused of being more style than substance, and frequently seen as an incoherent mess of red herrings, but there's something so intangibly cool about these (mostly) 1970's thrillers, that none of those complaints make any difference to me--especially in regards to the gorgeous, and undeniably wacky, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974).  Even though director Francesco Barilli wrote Who Saw Her Die (1972) and later directed Hotel Fear (1977), he's not really that known for his giallo offerings.  I wish he would have had a chance to dabble in the subgenre some more, because this 1974 film is completely, and utterly, unique.

Perfume introduces us to Sylvia Hacherman (Mimsy Farber), a career woman working at a perfume factory, with a smooth boyfriend, Roberto (Maurizio Bonuglia), and an elegant neighbor, Francesca (Donna Jordan).  She lives in an apartment complex with some very nosy neighbors, such as hippo-obsessed Signor Rosetti (Mario Scaccia), and a mysterious black cat named Chopin.  Sylvia seems successful and assured, albeit a little quiet, but this facade hides a roiling mind, troubled by her absent father and a trauma connected to her dead mother.  In typical giallo style, the film provides clues to Sylvia's puzzling past, but also throws in enough ominous little moments to make viewers suspicious of everyone--especially Andy (Jho Jenkins), a black man who talks about occult practices and ritual sacrifice at dinner parties.  While playing tennis with Andy, she cuts her hand on a nail that happens to be jutting out of her racket, and Andy seductively sucks on the wound in a truly unsettling manner.  He and Roberto are pals, but they seem to exchange frequent odd gazes when Sylvia's back is turned.  I give some credit to Roberto in a love scene which is exclusively about her pleasure--nice.  Yet, for the most part, you can't trust this guy.  He's shifty and far too smooth.  Unsurprisingly, the narrative hinges on whether Sylvia is mentally disturbed, or whether her friends and neighbors are deliberately trying to drive her there.

Sylvia is haunted by visions of her mother, handling perfume while wearing black

In many ways, Sylvia is a classic haunted heroine, jumping at shadows and seeing people only she can see.  As the film unfolds, she becomes increasingly unstable: she flashes back to her mother having sex with someone other than her father, and sees Mom in all sorts of places.  In one version of events, Sylvia stabs her mother's lover, indicating an early penchant for violence.  She repeatedly visits her mother's grave, until she violently smashes her mother's image on her gravestone with a hammer.  In another scene, she's using scissors to cut all the men out of her mother's photographs.  She becomes enamored with a vase she sees in a store, but when she goes to purchase it, it's no longer there.  Shortly thereafter, it shows up as a gift at her door, as if someone is watching her, or can see inside her mind.  She starts to see a younger, child version of herself hanging around her apartment, until the girl declares "I've come to live with you."  Little Sylvia gives "the bad seed" a run for her money.  Things escalate, and soon Sylvia's getting really handsy with a cleaver, and setting up her own macabre tea party after obviously reading Alice in Wonderland.

Grown Sylvia and Little Sylvia bound together over a mysterious shared trauma

Still, there's more going on in this film than Sylvia merely losing her mind because she's haunted by a trauma from her past, and viewers are given glimpses in order to suggest some gaslighting is underway.  Sylvia is blown off by Roberto for one evening, but as she hangs up, the camera cuts to Roberto climbing into his car with both Andy and Francesca by his side (Andy's supposed to be on a date with Francesca that evening too).  Soon, the gang are joining a whole bunch of other people, dressed in black trenchcoats, and hanging around an ominous warehouse space.  The next day, the neighbors are whispering over the tragic death of Francesca, who somehow fell to her death the previous night.  How???  After the memorial service/cremation, the camera cuts to Signor Rosetti, painting some hippos (yes, I'm not kidding) and feeding his cats some bloody looking meat.  A close-up reveals there's a finger in that mess!  What???  They even have a seance with a blind psychic, because...creepy.  The film isn't remotely as entertaining if you insist on these random things making any sense.

A blind psychic creeps out Sylvia in a random seance they happen to have

Often a film's ending is what really solidifies the narrative's drive, or may give the audience a false impression, only to perform a killer twist in the end.  For instance, in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), we ostensibly believe that Nancy has successfully banished Freddy just by virtue of turning her back on him, even after a rather violent climactic battle.  Yet, that film's actual ending turns everything upside down in a "what just happened??" way.  The Perfume of the Lady in Black performs a similar feint.  By film's end, we're pretty convinced that Sylvia has lost her mind, and turned to violence once again.  But then...the gory ending makes you feel like you're watching some other film, even though most of the cast of characters left standing are from earlier moments--at her apartment building, at the perfume plant, and even from the local antique store. 

Francesca's pad just gives you a sense of the outre style and visual flair of the film

I'm very deliberately NOT giving away the ending of the film, so I recommend checking the film out--it's available on Amazon Prime for as little as a couple of bucks, and well worth your time.  The film is bold, visually rich, and gloriously demented.

The Abandoned--Eytan Rockaway (2015)

Julia/Streak's journey is rather harrowing in The Abandoned (Eytan Rockaway, 2015)

Why is it that so many creepy haunted spaces were formerly the home/burial ground for an insane asylum?  Julia (Louisa Krause) stumbles upon one in the majestically set "haunted heroine" film The Abandoned (Eytan Rockaway, 2015), encountering the gamut of well-preserved children's drawings, rickety beds covered in mysterious stains, and voices calling to her from every corridor and dank, dark hallway--all the ingredients for some derivative, but unsettling scares.  The film opens with Julia taking a cab to her new job as a night security guard at some gigantic, ornate, and sinister abandoned apartment building.  Spectators learn that she's a "haunted heroine" almost immediately, as she chats with her Mom on her phone; we find out that 1) she has a kid, and 2) she's gotten into some trouble, and this job is her "last chance," and 3) that she has to take her "medication."  Of course.  So, from the film's first moments we should not trust Julia's potentially crazy POV, as we go on this subjective journey with her.

Jason Patric is her curmudgeonly paraplegic co-worker Cooper

The first horror that Julia encounters is the grumpy as f*** Cooper (Jason Patric), who has been working as a security guard for quite some time, ruling over a set of surveillance cameras and chasing his coworkers away with rampant hostility.  Yes, he cannot use his legs, which makes him a curious candidate for guard duty, but hey, the film has to make him unhelpful in order to put Julia in serious peril.  The use of a head-cam as Julia walks around gives the film some really unnecessary surveillance footage--making the film even more derivative than it needs to be.  At least Julia isn't a secret ghost hunter, although that fact doesn't make the narrative any less ridiculous.

This mysterious abandoned apartment building looks suspiciously similar to Grand Central Station

The opulent setting of the film's abandoned apartment complex is what makes The Abandoned worth the watch--supposedly it was shot at the Prince George Ballroom in NYC, and some of the sets are pretty breathtaking.  Still, most of the film is shot in dank hallways and boiler rooms barely lit by a flashlight.  Now I love a good, scary hallway, but one really wonders why Julia, on her first night on the job, would decide to break the lock in a forbidden area of the building and go exploring.  Ah, to forward the plot, obviously.

A Heroine isn't truly "Haunted" without malevolent kid ghosts in the mix

As I mentioned earlier, seems that the apartment complex was actually an asylum housing the strangest menagerie of kids with issues, and they really don't like adults.  Mix in some weird poisoned water, neglectful caretakers, and angry ghosts abound.  One silly, but kind of fun scene has Cooper losing control of his wheelchair, as it speeds down the hallway by some kind of "force."  Just when you are truly wondering how Julia and Cooper will get out of this mess, the film switches gears and the ending MAKES NO SENSE.  It garnered a "wait...what?"  As per many desperate horror films, the twist makes you question everything that came before, and then the film SWITCHES BACK, making viewers question the previous ending.  While I can usually posit some type of interpretation (as an expert, natch), this film left me utterly puzzled--as if the filmmakers couldn't decide on an ending either, so let's have two contradictory ones!  The Abandoned is currently streaming on Netflix, and I'm on the fence whether to recommend it or not.  Like The Forest, I would say that there are some really great moments, but they don't make up for a film that really takes a header rather than nailing the landing.  Ooof.

The Sound--Jenna Mattison (2017)

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.

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."

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.

Scary kid ghosts always seem to carry around creepy dolls

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.