Dementer

Dementer (2019)

Dir and Written by Chad Crawford Kinkle

Starring Katie Groshong, Larry Fessenden

DEMENTER is a distinct subspecies of film I haven’t seen in a while: a genuine horror micro-budget. For awhile in the late naughts and early 2010s, there was something of a renaissance of micro-budgets, and quite a number of today’s hip horror auteurs got their start in that stratum. With the recent boom of indie horror (starting, I’d say, with the 2009’s HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and really taking off in earnest with 2014’s THE BABADOOK) and with the vastly cheaper cost of high-quality digital cameras, though, it seems like almost anyone today can scrape together at least the couple hundred thousand dollars you would need to make a film, even a cheap one, that looks at least technically on par with most theatrically-released indies. Hell, Stephen Soderbergh shot a film on a fucking iphone last year. So DEMENTER, with its underlit, digital camcorder-quality photography, mostly non-actor cast, and near-complete lack of production value, seems almost quaint and refreshing.

Of course, while time has made me a little nostalgic for the ambitious micro-budgets of my youth, I’m not so naïve as to think many of them were very good, or, indeed, even watchable at all. For every ABSENTIA we got, it seems like there were at least ten POP SKULLs or HEAD TRAUMAs. Still, I always sort of liked and admired this sort of film, and am perhaps uniquely predisposed to see the good in them and ignore a certain level of inevitable sloppiness and lack of whammy. Part of that is that I simply respect the spirit in which they’re made; they’re usually the province of young, ambitious artists, engaged in that most noble of all artistic alchemical pursuits, which is, simply, to make something out of nothing. But I also like something else, something more likely borne out of necessity than aesthetics: I like that these micro-budgets show us images of life which you’d simply never get in a Hollywood movie.

I remember being genuinely shocked, maybe even a little emotional, at seeing the protagonists of ABSENTIA living in a basement apartment with those vertical slat blinds covering a sliding glass porch door. We’ve all lived in one of those at some point, but how often do you actually see that in a movie? Depicting places and people who actually inhabit the poorer, unflashy side of real life –which is almost entirely ignored and unrepresented in studio movies; even their occasional portrayal of poverty usually feels phony and constructed-- tends to give these micro-budgets a shot of legitimacy that adds genuine punch to genre stories which are, by necessity, sometimes a bit thin on real action. It also has the effect of tying their narratives, in a very tangible, visceral way, to the real world, which means we usually at least glimpse the basic day-to-day stress of living which is so much a part of everyday life for virtually everybody in this crummy country, as oppose to the sleek, idle comfort of most screen character. Just a few years out from his gritty, harrowing micro-budget THE PACT, Nicholas McCarthy’s studio debut THE BOY features characters that live in an immaculate, palatial, three-story house which we’re told is in “the suburbs” (though it doesn’t look the like kind of suburbs that would allow me past the gate) and it’s not clear that they even work at all. Meanwhile, the title character from Eduardo Sanchez’s micro-budget LOVELY MOLLY can’t afford to take off work even in the event of demonic possession. Micro-budgets tend to be like that; the studio pics, even the smaller-scale indie ones, tend to forget that most of us just plain don’t have time to be haunted.

DEMENTER almost immediately gets down to the business of doing both things I want an real, salt-of-the-Earth microbudget to do. First, it presents us with an impressionistic series of images, sounds and atonal music, things which are not in themselves very revealing or even macabre, but which combine into something suggestive and unsettling. This is the bread and butter of a micro-budget; they are the inheritors of the Val Lewton model. Since they cannot afford to show, they must instead imply, evoke, and insinuate, trusting our imagination to conjure its own horrors carefully tailored to the imaginer. Thus it is that we learn, obliquely, that our heroine, Katie (Katie Groshong, also in director Chad Crawford Kinkle’s previous film JUG FACE) has clearly recently been part of some decidedly unorthodox religious doings, which involve nudity, branding, fire, and the droning, echoing voice of Larry Fessenden (ubiquitous horror impresario and actor from WE ARE STILL HERE, JUG FACE, and about a million other things). It’s esoteric and hallucinogenic and definitely not the kind of thing likely to result in an overwhelming degree of psychological stability, so it’s a bit of a surprise when the film suddenly cuts to her applying for a job at a very responsible-seeming home for adults with special needs. Which brings us to my second requirement for a micro-budget, because this home and the people in it (including both the other employees and the residents) are almost certainly non-actors essentially portraying themselves, and this is most certainly a location and a demographic which is under-represented (to say the least) on celluloid. Here, the film turns into something like a quasi-documentary, with the camera meticulously documenting Katie's introduction the very mundane details of this unflashy job in this squat, unflashy building, courtesy of people who are obviously really living here. It makes for an interesting and initially effective contrast with her chaotic inner life, and for a while the movie’s observational interest –fixation, almost!—on the specific details of the job and the lives of the special-needs adults Katie is serving is kind of interesting, even zen-like in its daring attentiveness to the banal minutia.

Unfortunately, while this approach is initially rather refreshing and effective, it becomes evident after about 25 minutes that this is literally all the movie is interested in providing. We see the humdrum routine of Katie’s job for a bit, and then we get a flash of impressionistic spooky images with menacing voiceover (often nearly the same images and voiceover*), and that’s pretty much all you get here for 80 minutes. Day job, spooky montage, day job, spooky montage, again and again and again. Gradually, the vaguest skeleton of a plot starts to emerge –Katie is convinced that one of her wards is being sickened by devilry, and has to subtly use her own black magic to aide her—but it moves at a glacial pace and never develops a whiff of momentum or even recognizable conflict. Something does kind of happen at the end, but not nearly enough to justify the punishing repetition of the bulk of the film, and even at that it’s far too elliptical and pedestrian to amount to much. It’s not exactly ambiguous, but anything interesting has to happen off-screen, and the only thing the movie can think to fall back on for a climax is yet another spooky flashback montage, slightly longer this time but still maybe 50% composed of images we’ve now seen five or more times by this point. It reveals enough to count as a satisfactory conclusion of the wisp of a story, but the whole thing still feels anemic and underfed.

Which is, alas, the movie’s biggest problem: it wastes too much of its runtime deliberately avoiding things which would be interesting. While Katie is on-screen for virtually the entire movie, she remains a frustratingly opaque character. We learn nothing whatsoever about her life or her personality except that she was once in a cult (recently? Years ago? When did she leave? Why did she join?) and that the experience has left her paranoid and given to worrying about devils. I understand that micro-budgets rely on ambiguity to conjure the dark terrors that only our imagination can supply, but there’s a difference between productive ambiguity and outright vagueness. Even worse, considering the huge amount of screentime that is devoted to the daily work of assisting the special needs adults, the movie is disappointingly lacking in meaningful insights. It’s obviously well-intentioned and generous to these people, and genuinely desirous of depicting a too-rarely-seen demographic in an honest and un-stigmatizing way (one of the residents is, I believe, the director’s sister), but there’s just nothing very revealing in this portrayal. We see them sitting around a lot, being shuffled from place to place, doing more sitting. But we never get any sense of their inner lives, of their relationships, or even the relationship their caretakers have with them. How do Katie and her co-workers relate to their clientele? Do they connect, emotionally, or intellectually on any level, or are their mutual perceptions of the world too far apart for that to be possible? Does Katie view this job as rewarding, or is it simply a job, with her attention to her charges a matter of professionalism and perhaps a certain sympathy, though distinctly not empathy? I know nothing whatsoever about this topic, and this seems like it would have been a good opportunity to learn something, but the movie is frustratingly superficial, focusing obsessively on the procedural elements of this kind of care without any kind of deeper examination. Which is a real shame given the amount of time and attention it expends on the subject; for long stretches, it seems to be at least partially a straight-up documentary, but alas, not a very interesting or elucidating one. Representation is great, but mere depiction isn’t quite the same thing.

Anyway, I hate to rag on a movie like this, which was obviously a labor of love, earnestly made under what were surely punishing financial limitations. I appreciate some of the things it tries, but there’s no getting around the fact that it feels awfully empty for a feature-length film, a particular shame since I thought director Chad Crawford Kinkle’s first film, 2013’s JUG FACE, was worthwhile, in spite of some problems (including a very similar lack of urgency and escalation), precisely because it felt densely imagined and ambitiously provocative. DEMENTER is not wholly without ambition, but it feels comparably underimagined, limited to just a few scant ideas that can’t satisfyingly fill even a perfectly reasonable 80-minute runtime. As a 20-minute short film, this might feel genuinely impactful, but at feature length, it plays its limited handful of tricks a few too many times. Oh well, such is the risk of daring to try and make something meaningful out of so few resources. Here’s hoping that Crawford Kinkle maintains the passion it takes to make a film like this, and is able to expand his palette a little next time.

PS: I genuinely have no idea what a “Dementer” is. Taken at face value, it’s a thing that dements, but I don’t think we’re supposed to believe the protagonist is demented, and I don’t know who else that could apply to.

*”The blood shows the devils the way,” –which is also the tagline on the poster—is repeated so often you could make it a drinking game.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	The Blood Shows The Devils The Way. Crawford Kinkle must have really been taken with this phrase, because it’s repeated approximately 150,000 times during the course of the movie.
TITLE ACCURACY	No idea, don’t even have a guess as to what that could mean.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Psychological horror/occult horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Larry Fessenden!
NUDITY?	There is quite a lot of repeated footage (from behind) of someone (Katie Groshong?) running naked from a truck, although I have no idea what the deal is with that.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Quite the opposite
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Unclear
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Oh yeah.
MADNESS?	Iffy
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re absolutely bound an determined to join some sort of Satanic cult, I know you could do better than Larry Fessenden as an anti-messiah. Come on, girl, have a little self-respect. I love ol’ Fessywig too, but if you’re going to give some devil-preaching creep complete control over your life, at least get you a John Hamm, or at the very least a Steve Railsback. You’re worth it.