As Above So Below

As Above So Below (2014)

Dir John Erick Dowdle

Written by John Erick Dowdle, Drew Dowdle

Starring Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge, François Civil, Marion Lambert, Ali Marhyar

  

            Well, it’s Chainsawnukah, so tradition dictates that you gotta get some found-footage shit in there. For years this was merely a matter of statistical probability; if two out of every three new horror movies was found footage, you just had to accept that you'd end up with at least one by sheer chance, even if you were actively trying to avoid it. This year, though, I notice that they’re not nearly as pervasive; a new trend of mopey, uneventful indie “horror” movies about sad people seems to have emerged as the fashionable way for lazy hucksters to crank out content with minimal effort. But a tradition is a tradition, so a-hunting for found-footage clusterfucks of yesteryear I went. This fit the bill nicely in that it was A) found footage and B) that’s it. I did not have high hopes for AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, even going in with the interesting trivia that it was actually shot in the real Catacombs of Paris. Great, what better way to experience a jaw-dropping real-world marvel than through an indecipherable visual jumble of shaky cam with ad-libbed shouting over top? But I watched it anyway, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

            And it turned out that was a good idea, because right off the bat, it's way nuttier than I anticipated. We begin with the introduction of our hero, the excellently-named Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks, minor roles in both HAMLET and SPICE WORLD! Now that’s a resume!) who we encounter in medias res, already on an adventure considerably more epic than you would usually find in some found-footage debacle: she’s tomb-raiding a forgotten, sinister underground shrine in Iran as part of her quest to discover the secret of famed 14th-century alchemist Nicolas Flamel. And what she discovers in Iran (after effecting an exciting escape while the cavern collapses behind her!) sends her to Paris, to uncover a secret message transcribed on the back of Flamel’s tombstone! Woah, was not expecting this crazy ass Da Vinci Code shit.

In Paris, she meets up with her dishwater-dull ex-boyfriend, George (Ben Feldman, one of the guys who gets killed in opening 15-minute mini-movie in the FRIDAY THE 13th REMAKE) and cameraman Benji (Edwin Hodge, two PURGEs), and then get right down to the business of finding the treasure map hidden on the back of Nicolas Flamel’s tombstone or whatever. You might think this in itself would require, like, a heist or something, but nope; the tombstone is just hanging there in a museum, not guarded or even behind glass or anything. I thought this whole thing was delightfully silly until I looked it up and discovered that no, this is actually a real place (the Musée de Cluny, a Paris museum devoted to the Middle Ages), and that’s probably Flamel’s real tombstone being used as a prop. Take this movie out of the “horror” section, folks, it’s a documentary! Needless to say, they waste no time in translating the Aramaic writing of a 14th-century Frenchman’s tombstone poem, and holy shit, it rhymes in English! That’s thinkin’ ahead, Nicolas Flamel, you old dog! He also apparently calculated his conspiracy numbers in feet, which seems surprising. But I guess I can't argue with them, since they're looking at the real tombstone of a legendary magical weirdo. 

This turns out to be the movie’s secret weapon. Something about the mix of fantastical bullshit with actual reality that’s even crazier really does it for me. I guess it’s why I’m so embarrassingly helpless to resist the appeal of Ancient Aliens or a good conspiracy theory or whatever. Reality is nearly always going to be weirder and more interesting than whatever bullshit some goofball found-footage director is going to be able to imagine, and so the smartest thing a fiction writer can do, sometimes, is find some little nugget of real-world insanity and piggyback on top of that, drawing tenuous but irresistible links between the stranger corners of actual reality rather than inventing new, and almost certainly less outlandish, fiction from whole cloth. The good create; the best steal. I’m sorry, but it’s fucking awesome that Nicolas Flamel really did design his own mysterious, cryptic tombstone, and that you can actually go to some museum in Paris and see it! Throw some circuitous plot and outlandish theory over top of that, and I’m a happy man.

Here’s the problem, though: I’m way into this dumbass story, but the found footage makes it 1,000 times harder to buy, because all I can think is how unnatural and phony all the acting and photography and everything about this is. I can and will happily accept that there’s a 600-year old alchemical conspiracy to solve, but I cannot accept that human beings talk or act like this, and the found-footage conceit forces me to compare this behavior to mundane reality in a way that traditional cinematic staging doesn’t. If you’re going to start throwing around the name “Nicolas Flamel” why on Earth would you ever intentionally do anything to remind the audience of what normal reality is like?

Still, as luck would have it, the tombstone sends our Da Vinci Treasure-hunters down into the endless, ancient catacombs below Paris, and of course, they actually shot there for real! Apparently this is the first film production ever to do so! And once there, the obvious objective reality of the catacombs themselves takes you a long way. Plus, our party is joined by irreverent, punk rock Parisians Papillion (François Civil, FRANK), Souxie (Marion Lambert, MONGEVILLE) and Zed (Ali Marhyar, ZERO DARK THIRTY), who agree to guide them through the dangerous maze, and have an easy, practical naturalism to them that the Americans do not. In fact, I wondered if they too were “real” – actual catacomb guides essentially playing themselves on screen. Doesn’t seem like it, but at least they inhabit their roles much more naturally than the Americans do, and contribute a real lived-in feel which grounds the film immensely. Papillion’s straightforward, pragmatic guide to how to crawl across ancient human bones without hurting your arms smacks of lived experience, and the actor delivers it with the right mix of very sensible advice and very slight smugness about his greater experience. He seems confident and reasonable and in control, in a very grounded way.

That makes it all the more potent when he suddenly doesn’t seem to be in control any more, when the skills he’s mastered betray him. Because wouldn’t you know it, before long our heroes end up hopelessly lost, and begin to suspect that something supernatural and sinister may be going down. Here, again, I appreciate François Civil's convincing mix of bafflement and panic. He should be in complete control down here –this is what he’s spent his life mastering—and yet reality refuses to cooperate. This is so fundamentally unbalancing that he doesn’t even think to conceal his shock and panic, which consequently makes it so internal that it doesn’t read to his companions as quite as devastating and potentially dangerous as it is. That kind of upending of reality is a much richer source of horror than simple fear of the unknown, and helps build an escalating unease which is surprisingly effective. Sadly, the French cast gradually gets lost in the shuffle, supplanted by Feldman and Weeks, neither of whom has even the vaguest echo of human authenticity to them. Feldman, in particular, is a total non-entity, which is especially disappointing since apparently the actor suffered from claustrophobia and must have been disturbed beyond words by the work he was doing. It doesn’t end up on the screen, though. There's a time and place for method acting, but the only important thing is what the audience actually sees. Sometimes it's better to just follow Peter Lorre's advice and 'just makes faces.' Whatever Feldman is feeling, he’s not making the appropriate face.

The found-footage approach is never believable, and almost always ugly and unnecessary, but it does get at the essential point here: this is an experiential movie. Found-footage is a miserable medium, generally speaking, for telling a story, because of its constricting focus on specific visual perspectives. But it’s a much better medium for documenting an experience, one long incident which doesn’t call for narrative finesse so much as focused intensity. At its best, the conceit traps the viewer within some kind of ordeal, refusing to grant them the omniscient safety of unmotivated editing and forcing a grueling, intimate sense of being in the thick of it. The camerawork here doesn’t do that more than thoughtful standard photography could, and in many ways it highlights the phoniness of the whole scenario and potentially lessens the impact. But it does generally get the job done sufficiently, if not optimally. It’s at least the sort of found-footage movie which understands that it’s shooting for immediacy, not realism. It doesn’t capture the strange, alien feeling of being underground better than the immensely shitty TEMPLE, though, and that ain't a high bar to clear. But it does have better ideas: it establishes a baseline of reality strong enough that small disruptions in that reality, be they phony acting or deliberate continuity breaks, have real impact. And of all the real things, there is nothing more real than the stomach-churning power of those catacombs.

The catacombs themselves are, of course, the real star –as well they should be. The feeling of all those years and all that weight above as we descend lower and lower into a claustrophobic netherworld has some genuine, undeniable power, at least to someone with my particular constellation of weaknesses (claustrophobia, antiquarianism, and Catholicism). And the idea of being trapped, forced down, down, beyond the point of no return, beyond the point where anything makes sense, perhaps into Hell itself, evokes something one encounters only very rare in a horror movie: actual horror. Philosophical horror, horror that troubles the very waters of the soul. If the movie had trusted this instinct, it might have strayed dangerously close to genuinely great territory, and damn the ugly and unnecessary shaky-cam.

Unfortunately, the movie’s actual idea of horror pales in comparison to the basic factual horror of its premise, and so much of the end is concerned with scary silent people sitting in chairs facing away from you, monsters that suddenly pop out from behind walls, and various assorted haunted house detritus. Even if the movie’s very end is suitable mind-bending, the 20 minutes of wasted goodwill leading up to it drain much of its impact.

Still, it lingered in my mind. There's something visceral and potent here, and no amount of phony acting or tired jump scares can quite dissipate the oppressive, amorphous feel of gut-deep horror that comes with the endless, maddening descent into that alien subterranean hell where the living hold no power. They can weaken that feeling, but a few days later any irritation has passed, and the troubled dreams remain. It's a feeling bigger and more powerful than AS ABOVE SO BELOW is capable of handling or channeling effectively, but at least for a little while, it at least manages to unambiguously conjure it. I wish it were great, and I think greatness was, at least at some point in the conceptual stage, within its reach. But I’ll settle for good, and it is intermittently pretty good.

Also want to point out that it introduced me to the French punk/psychaedellic band La Femme, and I think this is love.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	The Only Way Out Is Down.
TITLE ACCURACY	Pretty good, since it’s a phrase which literally suggests that our crew is going underground, and also has both religious and mystic connotations.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA, though shot on-location in Paris, France
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Found-footage, haunted house, Religious horror,
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, ghosts
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	No. But there is a creepy piano!
EVIL CULT?	Yes, though we never learn much about it
MADNESS?	Certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None beyond the basic found-footage conceit.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Da Vinci Coding is more common than you might think, yet another possible career option I unwisely never considered.

Admittedly a weak 4-thumb effort, but it definitely managed to get to me at times, just enough to push it into distinctly positive territory.