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.

Yet another review of Hereditary--Ari Aster (2018)

This moment precipitates the slide toward non-stop visual and narrative "insanity" in Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018)

Since everyone out there in "horror film" land has eagerly been anticipating this film, has seen it, or has seen a bazillion reviews about Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018), I figure it's time for me to weigh in.  Not only should you see this film if you are into horror, but you should probably screen it more than once, since a great deal happens in little corners of the frame, and certain moments take on much greater significance (and perhaps a shift in meaning) upon film's end.

The film follows one particular family, The Grahams, as they process the death of their mother/grandmother, a difficult woman that her artist daughter, Annie (Toni Collette) tends to immortalize in these miniature dioramas of her house, and the experiences she has there.  Rounding out the rest of the Grahams are psychiatrist/father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), with eldest son, Peter (Alex Wolff), and younger, ambiguously disabled daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro).  Unsurprisingly, this family is really pretty bad at expressing their emotions and supporting each other in times of crisis, so the death of Annie's Mom sends them on a slippery slope, and then over a precipice into a nightmare abyss from which there is no return.  The film is a pretty slow burn, punctuated by the death of a main character a la Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.  Once that death occurs, things start to escalate, but the film really gets into gear in the last 15 minutes of the film, and then things just get nuts.  While one has to be careful how one uses words like "insanity," "crazy," or "nuts," the ending of Hereditary is so intense, over the top, and out there, that these terms seem quite appropriate--especially for a film that in some ways at least calls out, if still not really exploring, the pain of mental illness.  I haven't seen an ending in a contemporary horror film that left my mouth hanging open quite so much as Hereditary's, not since Liam Gavin's  A Dark Song (2016)--a film I really need to rewatch and review.

Annie (Toni Collette) channels her turbulent inner life by creating bespoke interiors

One of my favorite things about Hereditary is its portrait of its protagonist/artist, Annie.  She makes these finely detailed dioramas of her personal space, and many clues to the film's world are lurking in these miniature realms.  Indeed, the film begins through a clever device thrusting us into its world, as one of Annie's miniature rooms is suddenly charged into animation by Steve walking into his Peter's room in order to wake him for Grandma's funeral.

Making living in "little boxes" all too real

This liminal, psychological space, formed and perfected through Annie's artistry, constantly shifts as Annie's perspective changes.  No one really talks about their feelings in the Graham household, compelling Annie to visit grief counseling groups, rather than turning to her psychiatrist/husband, Steve.  On the whole, Steve is one of the most useless characters ever committed to celluloid, and sure, Gabriel Byrne is underplaying his role, but Hereditary really does some harm to representations of the psychiatric and therapeutic communities.  In fact, it's in grief counseling where Annie meets Joan (the always marvelous Ann Dowd), who sends her on a journey that "ignites" a spark that rapidly explodes the family's already tenuous connections to each other.  What I'm suggesting, in perhaps a roundabout way, is that the film does a wonderful job of allowing Annie an outlet for some of her pain at the same time implying that her safe, miniaturized universe will not save her from the sh**storm to come.  One particularly powerful moment has Annie regaling her grief group with an anecdote regarding her mother's overbearing presence in raising her daughter, Charlie, which the film chooses to illustrate by returning spectators to the world of her dioramas.  These chilling illustrations punctuate the film's past and present with reminders about the unsettling contents of Annie's psyche.

Annie illustrates a not-very-touching scene where her mother's domineering presence hinders her connection to Charlie

Also, Toni Collette has given one of the best performances of her acting career.  During the film, you cannot take your eyes off her.  She combines sympathy with charisma and the kind of blithe cluelessness that seems essential in order for horror film protagonists to fall into the hot messes required.  She performs grief, rage, stoicism, confusion, and mania with equal expertise, and like Amelia in The Babadook, spectators are both identifying with and afraid of Annie--quite a trick that only the most talented actors can pull off. While horror films rarely get enough accolades, one hopes that someone in these various awarding institutions realizes the tremendous performance Collette gives in Hereditary.

Of course, I wouldn't be a horror film critic if I didn't s**t a little bit on the effusive love of Hereditary by calling out some of its most egregious problems.  Be warned, from here onward there are lots of ***spoilers.

Herditary's representations of disability, and their alignment with evil, really suck

The film's pat representations of both mental illness and disability, and their ultimate link to demonic evil are a really BIG problem, and I have seen some, but not a ton, of discussion about these issues in reviews.  First, audiences learn from a monologue Annie gives to the camera/her grief support group, that she comes from a long line of mentally ill family members, including her mother and brother.  This revelation, combined with the tragic ways in which the Grahams communicate/do not communicate with each other, points a finger throughout the rest of the film right at "bad MOM" Annie, who perhaps has inherited these unfortunate traits, and has indeed passed them onto her disabled daughter, Charlie. 

Then there's Charlie's unnamed, undiagnosed, and unclear disability.  Ominously pegged as Grandma's favorite, she barely speaks, and needs to be monitored at all times since she cannot seem to control her own vicious nut allergy.  Is she on the autism spectrum, developmentally disabled?  Hereditary is happy to use her disability to make Charlie creepy and unlikable, but cannot spare the time to either explain what's wrong, nor flesh out her interior world.  Like Annie, Charlie also appears to be an artist, constructing her own little effigies out of various parts, but she happens to cut the heads off of dead birds to use in her contraptions.  Such details become important when spectators find out at film's end that Charlie houses a demon who's trapped inside her inferior female body until "he" can find a preferable male vessel in Peter.  Here is the film's great conceit: Charlie isn't actually disabled, but rather possessed by a demon, seemingly compelling her to decapitate herself in order for the demon, Paimon, to sneak into her now devastated brother, Peter.  This great demon uprising has been in play since before Charlie's birth, as Annie's mom had pressured her to have children in order to create this vessel.  Which brings me to the most tired and cliched part of Hereditary:

Moms are evil and will destroy everything and everyone--including themselves--for the greater demon good

Women, especially mothers, are evil, self-absorbed, and not protective, and will do anything to reestablish patriarchal dominance through the worshiping of male demons, and once that's handled, they might as well off themselves in one of the most incredible, indelible images ever to be committed to horror film.  Seriously, the image of Toni Collette's Annie, levitating up into the upper corner of the house, manically sawing her own head off in front of Peter's horrified gaze is going to stay with me for a really long time.  That image, followed by a perverse tableau of demon worship (visited by a trio of headless female corpses) enacted in the family tree house, leaves Peter the last guy/demon standing, compelled into place by the machinations of some demon-worshiping cult (led by Anne Dowd, of course). 

So Hereditary isn't a film about mental illness, or a family's inability to cope with grief.  Nope.  The long con is a plan to resurrect a demon, and it works.  Women are only pawns or tools in achieving this dream, and their bodies are easily violated as they are mere supplicants to this patriarchal fantasy run amok.  Now you might think, "Hereditary is obviously a critique of these ideas because it's representing them in such a blatant manner."  I would then sigh, heavily, and once again remind readers that "representing" racism, sexism, and homophobia doesn't necessarily mean that those problems are critiqued, and very well might be reinforced by said representations.

Come for the occult rituals and weirdness, but don't be fooled by talk of "cultural critique"

Should you see Hereditary?  Definitely.  The film is visually provocative, marked by a riveting performance by Toni Collette, revels in various uncanny settings, and is laden with enough creepy occult stuff to pretty much demand repeat viewing.  What are those words written sporadically on the walls of the house?  What are some clues that Joan's really evil, and how does Charlie manifest this evil while she still has her "girl" body?  How many shallow shout-outs to mental illness are there?  Why is Steve clearly the worst mental illness professional ever?  These questions are sure to haunt viewers after their first screening, but nothing, NOTHING haunts as much as that image of Annie frantically sawing off her own head.  Still haunted.