SHE WILL (August 2021)

   

SHE WILL

(August 2021)

“We must all keep terribly, terribly calm.”

Imperiously curt and dismissive, Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) is an aging actress who’s recovering from a major medical procedure. Accompanied by her private nurse, Desi (Kota Eberhardt), Veronica is spending some time away from the glaring tabloid scene, at a retreat located in an area in Scotland where “about 3,000” women were once tried for witchcraft (these unfortunates referred to as “the burnt”).

It’s a place where the soil has a “very high proportion of human ashes”, the wind “sounds like whispers”, and it occasionally rains soot, which the locals call “witch feathers”…

“Desi, if you think you’re gonna survive this sh!tstorm called life by doing what’s ‘advisable’, you are seriously mistaken. You have to be all teeth. Claws. Trust me. The bastards will stop at nothing to grind you down.”

As it turns out, Veronica once worked on a film called Navajo Frontier, and was said to have had “a special bond” with the film’s director Eric Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell).

Please note that she was just 13 years old at the time.

“Imagine that. To be able to love without ghosts in your bed. Look in the mirror. Feel hopeful. Clean the bastards out of you.”

Both Veronica and Desi are haunted, each in their own measure, and the dark territories they find themselves in have much to say about what these women should do with their personal ghosts.

Now, I’ve been a fan of Krige going all the way back to John Irvin’s adaptation of Peter Straub’s* Ghost Story, and she does not disappoint here.

Meanwhile, Eberhardt is a revelation as Desi. It’s a quiet and fiercely intelligent performance that serves to complement Krige’s more cutting and acerbic Veronica.

“Foucault wrote of the male gaze, that the act of seeing is neither transparent nor neutral, but an imposition of power.”

“Millennia of patriarchy dictate how we see.”

Directed by Charlotte Colbert (an impressive feature debut), from a script written by Kitty Percy and Colbert, and with Dario Argento as one of its executive producers, She Will is a potent concoction that signals Colbert as a name to watch for.

Please note the score by Clint Mansell, and the cinematographer/editor(s) combo of Jamie Ramsay and Peter Strickland’s frequent editor, Matyas Fekete**, tag-teaming with Yorgos Lanthimos’ frequent editor, Yorgos Mavropsaridis***.

There is also the presence of Rupert Everett as Arturo Tirador! (I honestly did not recognize Everett and had no idea he was in the film till the end credits roll.)

Oh, and props for the end credits song choice, a Nouvelle Vague cover of a song from 1984…

“Just need the famine, the pestilence. We’ll have our very own apocalypse.”

She Will is a darkly evocative portrait of female rage, the kind that simmers just beneath the surface, silent, as if muffled and restrained by a scold’s bridle, often emerging in sublimated form, simply waiting for something to trigger the catastrophic eruption, and the smothering rain of witch feathers in the aftermath…

“It will torture you.”

* RIP. (Just one of many heart-breaking losses on the creative front we suffered last year.)

** Apparently, the only Strickland feature film Fekete did not edit was Berberian Sound Studio.

*** Mavropsaridis was the editor on Kynodontas, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Dennis Iliadis’ +1.

Parting Shot:

If this kind of narrative speaks to you, then might I humbly suggest an interesting double bill with Elle Callahan’s Witch Hunt.

(She Will OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

FLUX GOURMET (February 2022)

   

FLUX GOURMET

(February 2022)

“Cooking and performing is always a hazard.”

Peter Strickland is in the shops, going through the aisles and tossing performers he’s worked with in the past into his shopping trolley--Gwendoline Christie and Richard Bremmer and Leo Bill from In Fabric, Fatma Mohamed from all of his feature films and the “Cobbler’s Lot” segment from The Field Guide to Evil--then adding Ariane Labed, Asa Butterfield, and Makis Papadimitriou to the lot.

He then breezes through the checkout and rushes home so he can whip up yet another luscious Technicolor dish for us with Flux Gourmet, perhaps the oddest effort of his that I’ve seen yet.

Christie plays Jan Stevens, Director of the Sonic Catering Institute, which sponsors “culinary collectives” (otherwise known as Sonic Caterers) on a monthly residency basis, to actively “…encourage the artistic pursuit of alimentary and culinary salvation.”

Described by one of the film’s characters as “feckless faux provocateurs”, Sonic Caterers are basically performance artists working to find the “sonic and performative potential” of foodstuffs.

Or something like that…

Like I said, it’s the oddest film I’ve seen from Strickland yet…

“To taste their shock is to be controlled by it.”

Flux Gourmet follows the residency of the collective led by Elle di Elle (Mohamed), and the tension engendered from the conflicts between Elle and, well, everybody. (Weeks into their residency and Elle still hasn’t decided on the band’s name.)

Not to mention the “escalating threat” from The Mangrove Snacks, another collective that was denied residency…

There’s also a (possibly life-threatening) gastrointestinal illness and some scatological hijinx somewhere in there as well…

“I do wonder sometimes if you’re perpetuating an archetype of epicurean toxicity with all this culinary hysteria. I don’t want to give the public the impression we’re espousing any kind of dysfunctional alimentary ideology.”

Absurdly humorous with some oddly touching moments sprinkled throughout, Flux Gourmet doesn’t really have the horror-tinged streaks found in Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric, but it is, nonetheless, clearly a Strickland piece, with his aesthetic fixations and preoccupations plain to see.

So if all that sounds like something that might agree with your cinematic palette (and stomach), then by all means, dig in…

“When I see joy and abandon, my mind always reverts to this: why can one stomach be so free and another can’t?”

(Flux Gourmet OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

IN FABRIC (September 2018)

   

IN FABRIC

(September 2018)

“A purchase on a horizon, a panoply of temptation. Can a curious soul desist?”

“I’m just looking, thank you.”

“The hesitation in your voice soon to be an echo in the recesses of the spheres of retail.”

I don’t know about you, but if a salesperson walked up to me with that spiel, I would not hang about to hear more…

Particularly if I’ve already seen the creepiest TV advert ever* for the shop’s latest sale…

“You who wear me will know me.”

Peter Strickland’s In Fabric kicks off with Sheila Woolchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a lonely mother just trying to find love and intimacy who happens to visit Dentley & Soper’s, leaving the premises with the singular “Ambassadorial Function Dress”--a chiffon and silk and satin number in, get this, artery red--in stock.

A dress that happens to be, gulp, haunted.

“The very purpose of this seasonal retail occasion is to expunge. Returning what has already left the Ladies’ Fashion Boutique of Dentley & Soper’s Trusted Department Store goes against the nature of things.”

A haunted (or in some cases, cursed) fashion item featuring in a horror film is nothing new, of course.

Some that come quickly to mind: Kim Yong-gyun’s Bunhongshin (The Red Shoes), Won Shin-yeon’s Gabal (The Wig, AKA Scary Hair), the more recent Bad Hair (from Justin Simien, which features a “possessed weave”), and Elza Kephart’s Slaxx (killer jeans, natch).**

And while some of those titles lean more into the comedic side of their horror-comedy combo, there’s still something undeniably unnerving about having something that you’re wearing--that, by its very nature, is something that rests snugly against your body--have a malevolent mind of its own, even if there are some laughs mixed in with all of the chills.

Trust Peter Strickland to toss his hat into this particular horror movie ring…

“But your dismissal of such a prestigious consumerist festivity leaves me bereft.”

If you’ve seen Berberian Sound Studio (and if you haven’t, please, please, please do yourself a favor and seek it out), you’ll know what I mean when I say that Strickland is the kind of director whose work is definitely experiential. Like David Lynch, the way he combines visuals with sound and music is alchemical in nature, disturbingly bewitching.

Just like that artery red dress.

And while there is a ribbon of drily absurd humor that flows through its runtime, In Fabric also drapes us with an unsettling, inescapable tone, almost like that artery red dress settling down all around us, brushing up relentlessly against our bare, viewer’s skin…

The inner, hidden workings of the retail world have never been quite this surreal and creepy on film***…

“Don’t tell me you’re scared of a dress.”

* Courtesy of Julian House, who also worked on Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio.

** For the record, I’ve seen all of these, except for Slaxx.

*** The closest I think we’ve come to something like this is Kim Sung-ho’s Geoul Sokeuro (Into the Mirror), in which bizarre goings-on mar the intended re-opening of the shopping mall, Dreampia. Though to be frank, that film doesn’t even come close to the unsettling strangeness of Strickland’s vision of Dentley & Soper’s…

Comics, though, are another matter entirely…

Eerie retail hijinx may be found in Christopher Cantwell and I.N.J. Culbard’s Everything, from Dark Horse comics, edited by the one and only Mother of Vertigo, Karen Berger…

Parting Shot: If you find yourself enamored with Strickland’s aesthetic, then I implore you to also check out his definitely not horror piece, The Duke of Burgundy, as well as his contribution to The Field Guide to Evil, “Cobblers’ Lot,” loosely based on the Hungarian folktale, “The Princess’s Curse”.

(In Fabric quad and OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

(June 2012)

"It's like putting tracing paper over the horror movie, taking its highs and lows and getting the same response from the audience without actually showing anything horrific.”

-- Peter Strickland

Writer/director Peter Strickland’s second feature, Berberian Sound Studio is one of those titles whose “horror” status some may question, so I’m mentioning it here, outside of the ¡Qué horror!  crush.

In it, we’re transported to Italy, 1976, where Toby Jones plays British sound engineer Gilderoy, who’s been hired to work on Il Vortice Equestre (The Equestrian Vortex), what turns out to be a lurid giallo chockfull of torture and violence, which we quickly discover, is not quite Gilderoy’s cup of tea.

“Horror was the starting point but I would never call it a horror in a million years. I guess the rule was to bounce off that genre – to immediately say, no blood, no murder – but still make it scary. What was exciting about that genre was it has its own history, rules and regulations that you can manipulate and mess around with. There’s something very gratifying in taking a template and turning it into something very personal.”

-- Peter Strickland

Not only does the film, A) send a knowing nod to the heyday of giallo, and B) give a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of old school analogue sound recording (and by extension, display just how vital sound design is to the entire cinematic experience), but also, C) manage to do the job many a full-on contemporary horror movie fails to pull off--build a sense of true disquiet and dread.

And what are some of the weapons Strickland has in his arsenal to achieve said sense? Vegetables, homesickness, difficulties in the work environment, and Jones’ fine performance.

Tellingly, we are never shown a single frame of Il Vortice Equestre, save for its brilliant opening credits (courtesy of Julian House). We’re left to imagine what atrocities Gilderoy is forced to view in order to do his job, the sound of vegetables being shredded and stabbed, and the putrescent texture of their decaying remains exquisitely heightening our fevered imaginings.

Berberian Sound Studio is an enigmatic experience that proves that tone is such a crucial element of the horror genre and can succeed in disturbing an audience far more effectively than gallons of fake blood and gore.

“Genre is a starting point for me, that is my personal taste. I love to screw around with it. Of course, there were many giallo references, but it's more about people making giallo, rather than becoming so itself. We pay lip service now and again in the way we use certain shots, certain zooms, but we wanted to depart from it too. It was the bombastic, rock and roll element that drew me. I mean, I don't see Argento's Suspiria as cinema: it's more like psychedelia to me. I'm not interested in showing horror. But I am interested in the effects of it. Berberian Sound Studio is a meditation on sound as much as it is a meditation on violence.”

-- Peter Strickland

Parting Shot: Berberian Sound Studio took home the following awards from 2012’s BIFAs: Best Director; Best Actor (for Toby Jones); Best Technical Achievement – Sound Design (Joakim Sundström and Stevie Haywood); and Best Achievement in Production.

The film was also nominated for Best Screenplay; Best Technical Achievement – Cinematographer (Nic Knowland); and Best British Independent Film (the award for which was ultimately taken home by Rufus Norris’ Broken).

(Berberian Sound Studio UK quad courtesy of impawards.com.)