mother!

Mother! (2017)

Dir and written by by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer

Whoo, boy. Well, if you needed any further evidence that I’m the worst human being to ever live, I’ll provide it in one sentence: I came perilously close to loving MOTHER! Not quite all the way there, I’ll grant, but far too close for comfort. I can’t even defend my reaction by pleading that I came close loving it in some sort of ironic hipster contrarian way, because as much as I’d like that to be true, I know in my heart it isn’t. Alas, my enjoyment was sincere, and possibly even the reaction director Darren Aronofsky (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) was hoping for. I mean, I certainly don’t think he intended to make a movie which would be so widely and fiercely despised by everyone, everywhere. Or maybe he did, and it’s just me that’s wrong. But I, for one, found it absolutely compulsively entertaining. Exactly what he thought he was doing with it is, to put it mildly, a little unclear. Whatever he was trying to do, MOTHER! Is unquestionably kind of a dumbass movie, but man oh man, is it unmistakably from the outrageous sensibility of the man who brought us NOAH. And I cannot, in good conscience, pretend to resist that kind of manic insanity.

And that’s a long way from the review I thought I’d be writing for this one. Honestly the only reason I was even in the theater was because I was charmed by the vivid intensity of everyone’s hatred, and thought I’d better get in there early and see what all the fuss was about. This deep into pop culture hell, notoriety is vastly more intriguing to me than earnest praise, and I figured this might be my best chance in years to hate-watch something really magnificently misguided with an equally appalled audience (it’s possible the Trump years have not been good for me psychologically). The idea that I’d actually like it never even occurred to me.

After all, let’s just get this out in the open: it’s been increasingly clear for some time now that Aronofsky is a total doofus. A talented doofus, to be sure, but a doofus nonetheless. It wasn’t alway apparent, of course; back when PI came out, it seemed fresh and smart and ambitious, and I adored it. And well I should: it was (and remains) pretty much the perfect starter set for a neophyte cinephile who wants to be into pretentious art cinema but hasn’t quite done the legwork yet to know the ropes. He followed that one with REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, which packed such a powerful, visceral cinematic punch that almost nobody at the time, including me, ever reflected back on how ridiculously silly and overwrought it actually was under all those flashy trappings. With two rapturously received Serious Important Grown Up movies under his belt, Aronofsky seemed like the real deal, a gen-u-ine auteurial master for our times. Then he was attached for years to about a thousand projects which never materialized, and finally when THE FOUNTAIN did come out it wasn’t so hot, but then again we knew it was a compromised mess where the budget disappeared and he couldn’t really make it the way he wanted, and it wasn’t his fault, and hey, it doesn’t quite seem to add up but there are definitely, like, ideas in there, right? And he did marry Rachel Weisz (DREAM HOUSE) so obviously he’s was man of class and distinction.

sick mustache, bro.

My opinion of him really started to change with BLACK SWAN, though. It’s still a technically superb film, but I couldn’t help but notice that, uh, it’s dumb as rocks, just absolutely packed to the gills with over-the-top histrionic silly nonsense treated with almost parodic hyper-seriousness. And that made me kind of reconsider, for all its cinematic potency, how shamelessly melodramatic REQUIEM is. But then again, BLACK SWAN is also a movie from the perspective of a brittle, comically repressed teenage drama queen, and so I thought hey, maybe it just shares its main character’s ridiculously hypersensitive perspective. It’s definitely a lot of trashy fun, after all, so who am I to complain?

And then, NOAH.

Oh man, I fucking love NOAH, but it’s the first film where it became unmistakably obvious that Aronofsky’s ambition had outpaced his intelligence. Not that it outpaced his skill as a filmmaker, mind you, which remained as rock-solid as ever. But NOAH is as pristine an example as ever existed of an artist whose burning need to be thought of as A Serious Artist Who Thinks Big Important Things had superseded his ability to know where high melodrama ended and arch camp began. Which did not make it less enjoyable to me; just possibly enjoyable in a different way than the director intended. The combination of masterful filmmaking, utter grimness, wildly expensive production and total fucking insanity is just so spectacularly perfect. I mean, who could possibly think NOAH was a good idea except Aronofsky? It’s a movie which is 100% earnest about the tragic inner life of giant rock monsters, certain that a simple environmental allegory requires vast intricate battle scenes, and at the end it turns into a slasher flick out of fucking nowhere, like SUNSHINE. Except that the good guy is the slasher!

What’s not to love, unless you have the misfortune of being a normal human being or anyone who has ever experienced even a glimmer of irony? It’s way too blasphemous for the religious, way too religious for the secular, too slow for action fans, but bloated with too much spectacle for serious critics, too dumb for intellectuals, but too talky for the popcorn crowd, and the one thing you might imagine would be the easy selling point of the story of fucking Noah’s Ark (the animals!) are a tiny, minor plot point. And yet, on a technical level it’s absolutely impeccable. It may be one of the best movies ever made that no one alive could possibly be expected to like.

Except me, of course. I am constitutionally incapable of disliking something which is simultaneously so well made and so spectacularly miscalculated.

Jennifer Lawrence at the MOTHER! premier

And it is, without question or equivocation, entirely this Aronofsky who brings us MOTHER!*, another epic-length, possibly environmentally-themed opus which is simultaneously spectacularly well made and spectacularly miscalculated. Though, truth be told, I have to accept the “miscalculated” part based purely on the collective response so unambiguously provided by my fellow cinema-goers. Honest to God, I would never have guessed, based on the movie itself, that it would go over quite as poorly with the public as it did. I mean, I could have told you that turning the two-page Bible story of Noah’s Ark into a fantasy-epic/claustrophobic slasher was misguided folly (it made $362 million worldwide and remains Aronofsky’s highest-grossing film by an enormous margin, haha). I couldn’t have guessed that MOTHER!’s frothy mix of blobby religious allegory and nightmarish awkwardness-porn surreal horror setpieces would be so thoroughly rejected by every other living person on Earth. OK, looking back at that last sentence in stark black and white, I guess I sort of can figure out what the problem might have been, but I swear to you --swear-- that had I just caught this on a lark and not heard anything about it, I would have assumed it would be immediately hailed as cult triumph, a ready-made midnight movie masterpiece.

Which it may yet end up being, I suppose. As it has flitted from the collective consciousness of a furious mainstream into a the subterranean strata of more self-selecting audiences willing to meet it on its own terms, I’ve seen a few flickering of approval. (Which is why it belonged there in the first place, duh; the idea that they released this in mainstream theaters with the fucking MY LITTLE PONY movie is the most bizarre distribution decision since I saw TUSK downtown in a giant empty downtown Washington DC Regal Cinema)

Still, even at that, I honestly don’t understand how people hated it as much as they did. I mean, it’s just so fucking entertaining, like, every single second of the runtime! It’s almost pandering how intent it is on keeping you entertained. Given that magnificent, unfettered “F” cinemascore, I entered the theater expecting some kind of endurance-testing glacial BROWN BUNNY-esque opaque exercise in audience frustration. But it’s not that at all. MOTHER! Is a hoot, and really the only problem it has is that it is, at times, just a little too accommodating and generous in its explanations for its own good. David Lynch would never allow something to explain itself so thoroughly and resolve itself so neatly, and that’s why he’s the king and Darren Aronofsky is just an overcaffeinated kid trying to entertain the ladies at his mother’s book club. But lordy, he’s a really fucking entertaining overcaffeinated kid. He’s annoying, sure, but a hoot is a hoot.

Michelle Pfeiffer is unamused by your antics

Granted, the premise doesn’t exactly scream “whiz-bang entertainment.” Actually it sounds very much like the pretentious bore that everyone seemed to describe watching. Here is how IMDB describes it: “A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.” And here’s the thing: that description is technically accurate. And, absent a few details, it isn’t just a premise, that’s a description of the entire thing. The whole thing takes place in one house, and everything that occurs revolves around the disruption brought on by unexpected visitors (which also describes FUNNY GAMES, for that matter -- a movie which truly does deeply and persistently desire your hatred, unlike poor MOTHER! which just begs you to love it). But describing it that way really sort of misses the point; it’s like describing GODZILLA with: “Scientists observe a large aquatic animal which comes ashore in Tokyo.” Technically accurate, but the details make a big difference.

For one thing, it’s almost instantly obvious that the unnamed husband (Javier Bardem, fun fact, there’s an Alex de la Iglesia movie called DANCE WITH THE DEVIL that features Bardem, Rosie Perez, Demian Bicher James Gandolfini and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins!) represents --or maybe literally is-- God, capital G, and Jennifer Lawrence (THE BEAVER), his wife, is the title character. God’s wife, in other words, which would make her our MOTHER!. The movie is fanatically insistent on driving this point home immediately and unequivocally, and demands that the fact that you’re watching symbols! never leaves your mind for even a second of runtime thereafter (the character don’t even have personal names, just descriptions like “mother,” “man,” “herald,” “zealot,” etc).

For another thing, the “disruption” brought by the “uninvited guests” begins benignly enough (with the arrival of “Man” Ed Harris [KNIGHTRIDERS] and “Woman” Michelle Pfeiffer [GREASE 2], who have just a hint of pushy oddness to them), but, without ever leaving the home, will gradually escalate into some total fucking craziness which is as brutally immersive as any film since CHILDREN OF MEN.

Your ability to balance those two aspects of the film will probably determine your enjoyment of it. Because they are, of course, completely contradictory, right? On one hand, you have a movie whose greatest strength (in my eyes, anyway) is its wild, frenzied intensity, its ability to evoke increasingly stressful situations and drag the viewer right into the thick of it with the characters, to plunge them headfirst into its world and never relent. On the other hand... how can it do that when it’s so flagrantly artificial and insistently allegorical that its characters might as well have what they symbolize printed on them in big letters like a 19th-century political cartoon? I know your hero and mine Mr. Majestyk had this problem, ultimately finding the film’s heavy-handed symbolism too alienating to identify with the characters and their predicament in the way you’d need to to feel any real concern or tension about what happens to them. After all, they’re not characters who happen to symbolize things; they’re just symbols, and the plot is just the literal articulation of how Aronofsky thinks these symbols are related to each other, and is not interested in the slightest in ever letting you forget that you’re supposed to be learning a lesson here. So their fates are completely arbitrary and preordained; it’s more important to try to unravel their meaning than it is to relate to them, which can obviously be utterly antithetical to your ability to get invested in the ostensible story.

But of course, it’s absolutely crucial to the movie that you do get invested in the events unfolding, because they’re the best part, and because whatever valuable life lesson Aronofsky thinks he’s generously providing to us, his real calling is not as a lecturer but a master of the moving image, and he pulls out absolutely all the stops here to craft as evocative a living nightmare as I’ve ever seen put to celluloid. And if you can get past the movie’s admittedly persistent and blatant insistence that it’s about something, you’re in for a truly heady mixture of magnificent, virtuoso filmmaking and brazen, fearless nuttiness the likes of which will surely not come around our way for many a year.

To me, that’s the whole show, and the long and short of why I was able to perform the feat of enjoying MOTHER!. For whatever reason, I was able to safely compartmentalize Aronofsky’s flop-sweating parable and simply accept the experience at face value. And, seen this way, I think MOTHER! Is a real triumph, a horror movie which plays off our fears of social discomfort, personal inadequacy, and powerlessness in a chaotic world in ways which are incisive and brilliantly realized. It has a long, perfectly coiled buildup as things subtly and without clear direction begin to slide out of the control of our main character (from whose perspective the entirety of the move takes place, unless I’m greatly mistaken), and, just as it reaches a fever pitch, the movie suddenly stops, pauses and resets, and then begins the entire process over again (a structure which also mimics a key symbolic arc in the film) except at an even more frantic register. It’s expertly paced (though possibly it pauses just a hair too long in-between its two stretches of frantic escalation, losing momentum rather than simply allowing a respite), patient enough to allow the tension to imperceptibly ratchet up, but not so glacial that it feels uneventful or sparse. It’s quite eventful, actually, even before things really start unravelling.

Hey kids! It's beloved genre favorite Stephen McHattie! [Applause]

As to what it all means, I find that much less of an interesting question, which is where Aronofsky and I probably part ways. Alas, I cannot tell a lie, as much as Aronofsky seems more at home simply providing a wild cinematic thrill ride, this is, after all, a movie which steadfastly refuses to allow its symbols to ever even wander in the direction of being real characters, and so there’s no way to escape the distasteful “what does it all mean?” conversation. In fact, he’s so insistent on the message he’s trying to get across here that even though the movie basically comes right out and screams it at you**, he took the demeaning additional step of actually spelling it out, going on something of a multi-media press junket to get down in print exactly what we’re meant to take from all this. 

And it’s what must inevitably bring us back to the fact that, for all his raw talent, Aronofsky is still ultimately a doofus, a superb craftsman who, like Christopher Nolan (whose MEMENTO came the same year as REQUIEM), was praised too much too early and is now cast into the awkward position of being a celebrated genius communicator without the benefit of anything too interesting to actually communicate. An artist explaining their art, of course, is about as antithetical to enjoying it as explaining a puppy to a child by dissecting it, and that’s a fact so patently obvious that I simply assume that when an artist does it, they don’t understand their own art. MOTHER! Is very much a film which wants to convey a message, but Art, capital A, is not about conveying messages -- it’s about creating an aesthetic and emotional experience. Write an essay if you want to communicate a point. Make art if you want to explore the ephemeral, something more rewarding and elusive than anything as dreary and humdrum as a message could ever be, especially one as sophomoric and dopey as this one, which for all its sound and fury barely rises above the philosophical level of an especially baroque Jewel song.

And yet, for all that, I think Aronofsky has succeeded here in spite of himself. As The New Yorker’s Richard Brody titled his absolutely essential essay on the subject we’re discussing here: “Darren Aronofsky Says “Mother!” Is About Climate Change, But He’s Wrong.” After all, Aronofsky would hardly be the first artist to be wrong about his own work. And you’ll notice that I do call him an artist, despite everything. He may think MOTHER! Is about religion, or climate change, or even (ironically) the other obvious interpretation, the process of creating art. But it’s about those things only superficially and incidentally, and probably even to the movie’s detriment, in that they literalize things which are best left to the murky realm of the subconscious (one of the movie’s worst instincts, and the one which definitively holds it back from true greatness, is to literalize its symbols -- the “heart of the house” is an actual physical CG heart, the destruction and rejuvenation imagery is a special effects mess instead of a simple and elegant montage dissolve which would work infinitely better). At its heart, it’s not a message movie. It is, simply and sincerely, a horror movie, a movie which magnificently captures the rising fury of a panic attack as things spiral out of our control. Everyone has had this experience; everyone can see themselves as “mother!” frantically runs around her overrun house, trying to take back some sliver of control and instead finding things growing obstinately more sinister and goading. Even if we can’t get any sense of her character, the experience itself is so immediately potent that we know it, we feel it, and we can live through it as Aronofsky sadistically unspools it on-screen. That’s real. That isn’t a lecture. That’s Art, capital A. And it’s what makes Aronofsky an artist still worthy of respect and consideration, even if he doesn’t fully understand why, and even if he’s manifestly a total doofus.

Of course, your enjoyment of that bit of art is still probably contingent on how much you’ll enjoy enduring a slow burn 121 minute social-anxiety panic attack pushily masquerading as a lecture on environmentalism. Mr. Majestk dubbed the film “LARRY DAVID’S WAITING FOR GODOT 2: BRIDE OF GODOT,” and described it as a "Godot pastiche thought up by two stoners while playing The Sims,” a designation which I can in no way meaningfully dispute. But what doesn’t sound good about that, again? If you’re willing to look past the film MOTHER! Obviously thinks it is, there’s a masterpiece of absurd horror lounging around, waiting to be discovered. And that’s more than enough to earn the exclamation mark.

*As a general rule of style, I always capitalize movie titles to make them easier to spot and pick out. But the correct written version of MOTHER! Is actually all lower-case with an exclamation mark, as in “mother!”

** In short: Bardem is God, Lawrence is Mother! Earth! Harris and Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve, their beefing kids are Cain and Abel, and the “unexpected guests” who subsequently show up and cause so much chaos and ruin are human who are fucking up the Earth but flattering God enough that he won’t keep them in check. In other words, the point is that global warming is bad, says Aronofsky.

Is it "controversial" if pretty much everyone agrees they hate it?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Too classy to have a tagline
TITLE ACCURACY	Yup, that’s a mother, all right.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope, although honestly it might work better as a book. Do they still do movie novelizations?
SEQUEL?	No, but count me in if they ever get to MOTHERS!
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Surreal horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	The whole cast
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen McHattie! Hey, look at you there buddy, in a real movie.
NUDITY?	Pretty sure there’s at least one shot of boobs, but not in a sexy context.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Definitely an uncomfortable sexual experience where she’s resisting but then gets into it, hello 1950’s
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Doubtful
POSSESSION?	No…?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Yes
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Not as such
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never send an intellectual to do an artist’s job

Regression

Why The World Is Wrong About "Regression" (the movie, not the psychological technique)

Regression (2015/2016)

Dir and written by Alejandro Amenábar

Starring Ethan Hawke, Emma Watson, David Thewlis

I’d like to take a moment to tell you why everyone in the world is wrong about REGRESSION. The world did not take to REGRESSION. This was a movie which was received so badly that it didn’t even generate some quote-worthy vitriol, didn’t inspire hate or condemnation. Just the kind of mild, sustained annoyance that comes from having someone dull waste your time for 106 minutes. And I can completely understand that reaction, first of all. Our buddy Dan P pretty much had that exact reaction, an escalating exasperation for a film so completely empty of anything good that it feels marginally insulting, like the filmmakers must really think you, personally, are an idiot if they thought this was going to be good enough to entertain you.

I understand that reaction, as I said. But I don’t agree. I think I sort of loved it. Which raises the very legitimate question of whether or not I’ve finally just become some sort of Armond White internet movie troll, who has to instinctively size up the collective reaction something is going to get and then puckishly assert, with a certain anarchic brashness, the exact opposite. I do wonder about that sometimes. I loved LOST RIVER, for crissakes, and nobody loves LOST RIVER. I doubt even its creators would be willing to put forward as full-throated a defense as I would. But I swear to you, if this is indeed what has happened to me, it’s not intentional, nor is it conscious. Honest, I really prefer to agree with everyone. I argue because I must. If I have become a troll, it was not by choice.

No, I think the problem is that I just watch too many movies. I’d guess that I average more than a movie a day, and in October significantly more. Watching that many movies is not normal or healthy, clearly, but I'm willing to do it for you, my beloved reader. But aside from being socially and emotionally crippling, it also has the effect of gradually reshaping the very act of watching movies in itself. You can’t watch that many movies and expect most of them will be good. The majority of movies you watch are terrible, and gradually you see so many of those that even when a decent version of the same crap comes along, it’s so utterly rote and predictable that it can be hard to get too jazzed about. Eventually, you notice that the things you enjoy have drifted alarmingly far from anything that anyone you know enjoys, or even understands. You gather friends to watch your new blu-ray of HOLY MOUNTAIN and are genuinely surprised that they find it completely alien and unpleasant. And one day, you finally realize that the problem is not them, it’s you.* You’ve finally seen so many movies that the traditional metrics we use to define successful cinematic “art” have almost no real impact for you anymore. You don’t really care if something is “good” or “bad” anymore, because you’ve seen it all so many times you barely notice it. The only thing that gets a response from you are movies which have even some small little detail which is different. And they may well be terrible in nearly every other way, but you gradually find yourself preferring the incompetent and exotic to normal movies which are technically competent but depressingly generic.

I say all this, because inherent in that method of examining cinema is something fundamentally meta, if not out-and-out postmodernist. To identify works which have something unique and interesting about them implies a deep awareness of what our expectations are as viewers, and a deep awareness of the way cinema, as a narrative medium, is typically constructed. It’s the reason obnoxious people like me sit in a movie theater and immediately tell their viewing companions what the twist is going to be in every movie they see a trailer for, with near-certainty. And it’s the reason that I was able to perform the feat of deeply enjoying REGRESSION. You see, this is a movie with twist. (Maybe). But my entire enjoyment of the film stems from correctly identifying that twist not just from the trailer, not just from the first few minutes, but from the fucking box art. If you too see exactly what the movie is up to, I think you might enjoy it, for reasons I will explain. If you somehow fail to see the twist coming, I can only surmise that you will feel insulted and furious. The question is, then, just exactly how obvious is all this really supposed to be? Does writer-director Alejandro Amenábar (ABRE LOS OJOS, THE OTHERS) know that we know, but still plays along for a very clever thematic reason, or does he think he’s smarter than us and totally pulling the wool over our eyes?

This question of intent is pretty important in trying to evaluate REGRESSION, but there’s no way for me to speak to this issue without talking about the so-called “twist.” So consider yourself warned, I guess, but then again, there’s probably no way to enjoy this without knowing the twist, (which frankly you’re about to figure out anyway from the brief plot description I’m about to give), because you’re an adult human being who has seen a movie before. Here is the plot of the movie, without the spoiler:

This story is inspired by true events. The year is 1990.

Ethan Hawke (SINISTER, BOYHOOD) plays Minnesota Detective John “Reg” Ression, one of those movie cop detectives who can be counted on to go too deep into a case until they’re exhausted and dreaming about the case and have to make one of those big complex charts on a bulletin board with string linking together all the suspects and clues. In this case to change it up they have him do that in notebooks and chalkboards instead of on a bulletin board, which is about as close to shaking up the usual formula as the movie ever dares to get. The particular case he’s about to get Too Deep into revolves around Angela Gray (Emma Watson, a 26-year-old British child star, making about as convincing a 14-year old Minnesotan hayseed as she’d make an MMA champion), who claims she’s been raped by her pathetic, fundamentalist dad John (David Dencik, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY). Dad seems a little unhinged, but he swears his daughter is telling the truth… except that he doesn’t remember anything. Suspecting a repressed memory, the detective enlists the help of psychology professor Ken Raines (David Thewlis, THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU) to try and unlock the memory through a new method called hypnotic regression. Under hypnosis, John does remember the incident… only, he also remembers there was someone else there. Someone wearing a black robe. Uh oh. Soon, other people under hypnosis also start to remember black-robed figures, including some prominent townspeople. Before you know it, our heroes find themselves enmeshed in a sinister Satanic conspiracy which just might go all the way up to Hillary Clinton (they don’t mention her specifically, but it stands to reason).

Except that (spoilers start here) they don’t, obviously. I feel weird using the word “spoiler” for knowledge which it would be insulting to suggest you didn’t infer from that plot setup, and especially weird for using the word “spoiler” for knowledge which can only improve the film, but that’s the odd position I find myself in. See, it’s obvious from frame one of REGRESSION that this is going to be a twist movie, and equally obvious there can be only one twist to come out of this premise: Angela is full of shit, she made up the whole thing and then it spiraled out of control because regression hypnosis is a bogus pseudo-science. Which you would probably have to assume anyway (even if you knew nothing about movies) because you are (hopefully) already familiar with the “real events” the movie is referencing: the Satanic Panic, which gripped the US in the late 80’s and early 90’s, ruining many lives and making heavy metal seem way cooler than it actually is before ending with a whimper when people suddenly realized it was total horseshit. While this year’s #pizzagate debacle taught me that there are, in fact, many people who did not learn a lesson from that national disgrace, I have to believe, for my own sanity, that most Americans do not need to watch a Hollywood thriller to learn that Satanic conspiracies are not real. But even if they did, having a total 180 twist ending would still be a frustrating narrative device.

There’s a million movies that end with this kind of infuriating movie-negating twist, going most directly back to PRIMAL FEAR (which seems to have lit the fuse on the modern mindfuck thriller, which was then thoroughly and irreversibly exploded by THE SIXTH SENSE) but originating at least as far back as THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI in 1920. In fact, it seems like every fucking thriller these days feels the need for some kind of mindfuck twist, regardless of how nonsensical or pointless it makes the entire movie which came before it. But as twists go, this one is particularly insipid, because of course it completely repudiates almost the entire movie which came before it. All those scary moments where we think we glimpse hooded figures, all those nightmares about satanic baby sacrifice… none of that happened. We just watched a film in which nothing happened, in which the main characters got really scared about nothing, and no forward progress whatsoever was made. I think you can begin, now, to see why this was such a frustrating and irritating viewing experience to most people. And nothing about the way it approaches this material seems to indicate any hint of awareness of how obnoxious it is to shoot a completely conventional horror-thriller and then rescind the entire thing in the last ten minutes. Particularly when the actual horror-thriller part is very much in the standard paranoid hint-don’t-show mold, and consequently almost completely lacking in money shots or genre payoffs. If you’ve already figured out that there’s nothing real going on here, there is desperately little in the movie that hasn’t been repeated so often in this genre that it barely even has any meaning anymore.

But ah, therein lies the possible brilliance of the film. Everything about its premise and execution is so completely conventional that it seems almost archetypal. You have your over-the-line cop, you have your shadowy conspiracy, you have your tough-but-caring sergeant, you have your uncaring system which doesn’t believe our heroic detective’s intuition, you have your damsel in distress. And everything plays out exactly the way you’d expect it to… except that you already know that this is going exactly the opposite way the characters think it is. That forces you to experience the story from a critical perspective instead of a narrative one.

Regardless of whether it was intended or not, this has the clever effect of completely undermining all the expected conventions of this sort of film. You’ve seen a million cop flicks where the over-the-line detective shakes down an uncooperative suspect in custody and gets too aggressive with him and the other officers have to step in and drag him away. But we accept that it’s just because he cares too much, that he’s frustrated because he knows he’s right, but the evildoers are trying to slip their way out of justice. We know that, because we understand the conventions of this genre. Such films use our expectations about cinema to assure us that it’s OK, he’s the good guy. Here, though, we can’t hide behind that comfortable assurance -- this particular suspect in police custody is almost certainly completely innocent, and we’re watching the “hero” of the movie violently abuse someone who can’t possibly give him the information he wants.

This ingeniously turns the entire framework of the movie on its head, forcing us to re-experience every expected beat of this familiar cinematic contrivance, except with the knowledge that our heroes are wrong and they’re actively making the world worse the harder they try to get to the bottom of this non-existent mystery. It’s a meta horror movie superimposed on a conventional horror movie, and that creates a particularly unsettling dissonance which I’ve never quite experienced before. Poor Detective Ethan Hawke knows he’s in a horror movie; he just doesn’t realize that it’s not the one he thinks he’s in. He thinks he’s the hero, and everything about the way his story is presented backs that up, makes us understand exactly why he would think that. He has absolutely no idea that he’s actually the villain, which is what makes him so much more dangerous and tragic. He’s crossing the line in his desperate effort to do the right thing, and we can only watch in horror as every step he takes ruins more lives and brings him further away from the truth (Hawke’s near-mega intensity just makes his folly all the more believable).**  

It’s a terrifying cautionary tale of how easy it is to get stuck on the wrong track and still convince yourself that you’re right. And, crucially, it makes sense to us, because it’s entirely presented in a context with which we’re already powerfully familiar. In a normal version of this movie, the detective would be completely right, and that’s how he experiences these events. We’re watching the movie he thinks he’s living through, except with the knowledge that it’s all wrong. We can understand why he does what he does, because he does exactly what you’d expect him to in a movie like this. It’s just that this time, he’s eventually going to have the legs completely cut out from under him. That’s the genius here: it’s a subversion of a modern mythic narrative which forces us to suffer through the entire story, watching as each new convention backfires more spectacularly -- but without the relief of allowing us to condemn the characters, since by the very act of acknowledging the mythic nature of the story arc, we acknowledge that we fully expect and condone the characters going through exactly this arc. We’re just as complicit as they are in being misled by our expectations.

Sadistically, the movie constantly teases our characters’ ruinous lack of awareness, giving them ample opportunity to figure out that they’re on the wrong track, but then dragging them right back into it. And it plays pretty fair with them, considering how mercilessly it sets them up to fail. They’re not idiots, and they’re not bad people. They really think they’re being logical and practical about all this, but they’re starting from a false premise, so every subsequent assumption they make is wrong. The movie is fraught with moments where one of them notices something off, and almost figures it out. But the psychologist doesn’t know much about detective work, and the detective doesn’t know much about psychology, so no one can see the big picture. They reassure each other whenever one of them is having doubts, and the whole thing becomes a downward cycle of confirmation bias. And of course, it’s personal, too; when confronted with the idea that maybe, just maybe, regression hypnosis doesn’t reveal hidden memories, but instead a highly suggestible unconscious state, the scientist in Raines suddenly sees the truth. But then the ego kicks in as he realizes that would undermine his whole career. And he forces himself to unsee it.

By the way, that guy over Hermione's shoulder is Lothaire Bluteau, fuckin' JESUS OF MONTREAL himself! Nice to see him still getting some work. Actually this movie is full of interesting character actors in small roles (Bluteau, Dale Dickey, David Dencik, Peter MacNeill, Julian Richings) who make their standard-issue roles a lot better than they deserve to be.

I guess I have to admit that maybe this got to me a little more than it otherwise might have because of the unique way it juxtaposes narratives with objective reality. I’m obviously looking at the world right now with some mix of horror and despair, as I watch my beloved country (America) start down what could be a very, very scary path. I’m looking at these Trump voters, and I just simply can't imagine what they could possibly be thinking that would make this seem like a good idea. This is pretty extreme stuff we’re playing with here. This isn’t stuff which I don't think it’s possible to have a simple political disagreement about -- either I’m right about how dangerous this approach is, or I’m completely crazy and everything I think I understand about government and reality is wrong.

And I can’t discount that possibility. We all have an idea about what kind of movie we’re living in, and I think we probably all imagine ourselves as the hero on some level. But it’s easy to imagine someone watching the movie of our lives slapping their foreheads over how frustratingly shortsighted we’re being, how we can’t see the obvious no matter how many times it throws itself at us. Hell, I can look back at my own life and see times where I can hardly believe how caught up I got in a narrative which turned out to be totally bogus. It didn’t just feel right at the time, it felt inevitable. I’ve seen this movie, you think, I know what happens. But of course, the whole reason we need narratives is to try and make sense out of the chaos of reality. They’re a comfort, not a truth. REGRESSION, whether it means to be or not (and, truthfully, I think the case for “not” is probably the stronger one)*** is a sobering reminder of that fact, and its potential to turn well-meaning people into an instrument of great harm. As a straight horror movie, it’s completely played-out, predictable, and dull, with a flourish of intelligence-insulting in its finale. But as a parable about the danger of believing your own story, it’s genuinely horrifying.

*Although in that particular example it’s actually them, because fuck you all, HOLY MOUNTAIN is a delightful movie that deserves and demands be loved by all who gaze upon its glory.

**Man, is that guy great or what? This is a total nothing of a character, but you wouldn’t know that from how hard Hawke works to make him come to life.

***It is, however, obviously designed as a movie which will read very differently once you know the twist. So whether you think we’re supposed to know the first time around, or it’s just designed to be re-watched with that knowledge, the intention is certainly there.  

Also, this is in the movie. I'll let you decide if that was a good or bad choice.