Oh! the Horror! – The Girl in the Photographs (2015) and The Other Side of the Door (2016)

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

Tags

Ashes, Claudia Lee, Drama, Horror, India, Jeremy Sisto, Johannes Roberts, Kal Penn, Kenny Wormald, Murders, Nick Simon, Photographs, Review, Sarah Wayne Callies, Serial killer, Spearfish, Supernatural, Temple

The Girl in the Photographs (2015) / D: Nick Simon / 98m

Cast: Kal Penn, Claudia Lee, Kenny Wormald, Toby Hemingway, Luke Baines, Miranda Rae Mayo, Oliver Seitz, Autumn Kendrick, Mitch Pileggi

Colleen (Lee) is young, pretty, stuck in a dead-end job in her home town of Spearfish, and has a jerk of a boyfriend called Ben (Hemingway). Her dull, unexciting existence is eased by the discovery of a photograph that appears to show a murdered woman. She take it to the cops but with no clear evidence that the picture is real, it’s quickly dismissed as some kind of prank. But Colleen starts receiving more photographs, all similar in tone and content, and each one more disturbing than the last. News of the photographs finds its way onto the Internet and is seen by LA photographer Peter Hemmings (Penn). He’s the type of edgy photographer who likes to think his work is “out there”, and he’s affronted by the fact that these photographs have been taken by someone else; he’s also from Spearfish so adopts an even more personal interest.

When Hemmings arrives in Spearfish it isn’t long before he meets Colleen and wants her to be the focus of the photo shoot he’s planning. Colleen, having nothing better to do, agrees to take part, and she recieves an invite to a party where Hemmings is staying. Meanwhile, one of Colleen’s friends goes missing, and the photographs keep coming. As the party gets under way, the guests start ending up dead, and Colleen, along with Hemmings’ put-upon assistant, Chris (Wormald), find themselves trying to stay one step ahead of a killer who now seems content to come out of the shadows and create their own murderous “artistic” showcase.

The last movie that Wes Craven was involved with before his death in August 2015, The Girl in the Photographs is one that he may well have been pleased with, but perhaps with some reservations as well. It starts off with the roadside murder of a young woman, the first of many narrative decisions that stop the movie from being an intriguing murder mystery-cum-horror thriller. Instead this helps the movie nail its colours to the mast as another serial killer movie, albeit with a neat twist. Where it wins points for originality is the inclusion of celebrity photographer Peter Hemmings and his selfish attitude to everyone; he’s so obnoxious you don’t know whether to cheer him or not. Penn is terrific in the role, and the script wisely includes him as much as possible.

However, the movie is on less surer ground when Hemmings isn’t around. The murders lack the kind of visceral intensity that the photographs point to, and the decision to reveal the villain’s identity by the halfway mark (after the movie spends a lot of time and energy hiding his face) allows much of the tension to dissipate, especially as the reason for the murders is none too complex. Director and co-writer (with Osgood Perkins and Robert Morast) Nick Simon shows that he’s learnt a thing or two from watching Craven’s ouevre, but the slow, deliberate, and rewarding pace of the first hour is abandoned in favour of the kind of stalk and slash routine we’ve seen way too many times before. The cast are likeable if not exactly memorable – Penn aside – though Lee is a sympathetic heroine, and the movie is enhanced by the contribution of veteran cinematographer Dean Cundey, who shot Halloween (1978) and all three Back to the Future movies. A little too nihilistic perhaps by the end but still something that Craven could, and probably would, have been proud of.

Rating: 6/10 – narrative muddles and tonal shifts aside, The Girl in the Photographs is a valiant attempt to do something different within the overstuffed serial killer sub-genere of horror movies; worth a watch though for Penn’s performance, and some subtle nods to several other horror movies that both Craven and Cundey have been involved with.

The Other Side of the Door (2016) / D: Johannes Roberts / 96m

Cast: Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto, Sofia Rosinsky, Logan Creran, Suchitra Pillai

Michael (Sisto) is an antiquities dealer who visits India a lot. He and his wife Maria (Callies) decide to make Mumbai their permanent home, and start a family. Six years later, the couple are struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of their young son, Oliver (Creran) in a car accident. They still have their daughter, Lucy (Rosinsky), but for Maria the pain of losing Oliver is too much and she tries to commit suicide. In the hospital, their housekeeper, Piki (Pillai), offers Maria a chance of speaking to Oliver one last time. All she has to do is travel to an abandoned temple in the woods near Piki’s home, spread Oliver’s ashes on the steps outside, and wait inside the temple with the door shut. The only proviso: she mustn’t open the door while Oliver’s spirit is there.

Of course, Maria opens the door, and soon strange, supernatural events are happening back at home. Lucy tells Maria that Oliver is back, but it soon transpires that Oliver isn’t the happy-go-lucky boy he was when he was alive. And when Piki realises what’s happened, she berates Maria for her foolishness. Oliver is a malicious spirit now, and will stop at nothing to avoid going back to where he came from. But there’s also another entity to contend with: the temple’s gatekeeper, a supernatural guardian who will also stop at nothing to retrieve Oliver’s soul. With Oliver targeting his sister, and Michael away a lot through work, Maria has to find a way of dealing with Oliver’s return, and the gatekeeper’s increasing presence.

A grim variation on The Monkey’s Paw, The Other Side of the Door wastes no time in getting its lead character to behave unbelievably and without even a first thought about what she’s doing, let alone a second one. When Maria has Oliver dug up in the middle of the night so she can burn his body for the ashes, you know that this is a movie that credibility forgot on its way to the multiplex. It’s the kind of horror movie that relies on a few jump scares, a series of strange occurrences (here all the plant and animal life, except for the family dog (for some reason), dies off due to the approach of the gatekeeper – though exactly why is a tough question to answer), and the occasional appearances of a group called the Aghori, Aboriginal-looking guardians of the dead who pop up menacingly from time to time but are there to do the same work as the gatekeeper (for some reason).

By the time the final showdown comes around, the characters have behaved too stupidly for anyone to care, and the final scene is entirely predictable. Roberts, who also co-wrote the movie with Ernest Riera, never quite grasps the idea that evil spirits disguised as children should look normal instead of covered in zombie makeup, and that long close ups of a children’s toy – for sinister effect – are only disturbing when you realise just how often they’ve been done before. As a result of these and other lacklustre decisions, both Callies and Sisto are left stranded, with Callies, whose post- The Walking Dead career is going from bad to worse – this is her third turkey in a row after Into the Storm (2014) and Pay the Ghost (2015) – unable to do anything more with a character who makes so many bad decisions that the audience will be rooting for Oliver or the gatekeeper – it doesn’t matter which – to take her with them to the other side of the door.

Rating: 4/10 – a movie that’s just plain tired in its structure and execution, and with plot developments you can see coming a mile off, The Other Side of the Door tries hard to be different with its Mumbai setting, but lets itself down by being so determinedly prosaic; it also fails to generate any genuine terror, and with the Aghori, creates a mythology that it never fully tries to explain.

The Sisterhood of Night (2014)

02 Saturday May 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Caryn Waechter, Cult, Drama, Georgie Henley, Guidance counsellor, High School, Kal Penn, Kara Hayward, Kingston, Laura Fraser, Literary adaptation, Review, Secret society, Sisterhood, Steven Millhauser

D: Caryn Waechter / 103m

Cast: Georgie Henley, Kara Hayward, Kal Penn, Laura Fraser, Olivia DeJonge, Willa Cuthrell, Jessica Hecht, Gary Wilmes, Louis Changchien, Morgan Turner, Evan Kuzma

Following a feud between teenage classmates Mary Warren (Henley) and Emily Parris (Hayward) that lands both of them in the office of guidance counsellor Gordy Gambhir (Penn), Mary – whose private texts have been published online via Emily’s blog – decides to go offline and take a vow of virtual silence. She also decides to create a sisterhood, a group that girls can join that doesn’t rely on sharing things online but with each other. Her first recruits are Catherine (Cuthrell) and Lavinia (DeJonge). At night, they sneak out to the woods and have their meetings. Above all, they swear to maintain the secrecy of what they’re doing.

As time passes, awareness of the sisterhood grows and membership becomes an ambition for many of Mary’s peers, but only she chooses who to invite into the group. One person left out is Emily, who becomes jealous of Mary’s influence on her friends, and who struggles to fit in at school. One night she follows a new member into the woods and witnesses one of the meetings. Later that night, Emily posts an update on her blog telling everyone that the girls in the sisterhood chanted dirty words, undressed and touched each other, and cut Emily’s hand before doing the same to her. With the sisterhood refusing to reveal the nature of their meetings, Emily’s claims are allowed to go unchallenged, and soon her blog becomes very popular on the Internet, attracting hundreds of followers. It also attracts other schoolmates who claim they have been abused by the sisterhood as well.

As more and more claims are made about the sisterhood, the girls’ parents become more and more aware of what’s going on, and so too does the media. The press has a field day speculating on whether or not the sisterhood is a cult, or if it brainwashes its members, or if it worships the devil, but Mary and the rest hold fast and keep to their vow of silence. Emily’s blog continues to grow in stature, and becomes a place where people who have been abused can talk about what’s happened to them. At the same time, Emily and two of her friends decide to target Lavinia, believing that put under enough pressure she will reveal the secrets of the sisterhood. Meanwhile, Mary’s budding relationship with Jeff (Kuzma) founders over her silence, and upset by this she ends up one night at Gambhir’s; matters are made worse by their being seen by Emily’s mother (Hecht). As tensions mount in the community, Mary comes under pressure from Catherine and Lavinia to come clean, while Emily has second thoughts about the plan to make Lavinia reveal the sisterhood’s secrets.

There’s a moment in The Sisterhood of Night where approachable guidance counsellor Gordy, tasked with trying to find out what the sisterhood is all about, attempts to talk to Mary in his office. She’s unresponsive, so he gets up and goes to talk to the school principal (Gilmes), who just happens to be outside. Also outside – conveniently – is Emily. Mary remarks that Emily’s hand must hurt where she slipped on some rocks; Emily responds by recounting what she saw up until the point where a) the script doesn’t want to go because it wants to retain the mystery of what did happen, or b) the point at which Emily will have to make things up to appear credible. It’s a fine line that the script – by Marilyn Fu, and adapted from a short story by Steven Millhauser – comes close to crossing time and again, but the audience knows that Emily is lying about what she saw, despite all this prevarication. In the same way that we know (without being told explicitly) that the sisterhood aren’t devil worshippers or cult members, we know that there is a solid reason for Mary’s starting the group (though what that is remains a secret until the end).

In making a movie about secrets that prompt lies and deception, Fu and first-time feature director Waechter have fashioned a modern-day version of the Salem witch trials, with accusations flying thick and fast and hysteria gripping hold of the Kingston community. But there’s a fly in the ointment, and it’s a big one: the paucity of adult involvement. While Mary and Emily and their mutual supporters are given much of the screen time, the adults fare so badly it’s almost as if they and their motivations were an after thought. Lavinia’s mother, Rose (Fraser), acts distraught and unable to cope from the moment she learns of her daughter’s involvement in the sisterhood. Gordy allows himself to be put in an inappropriate situation when Mary stays the night, but makes only one phone call to let anyone know (and thus cover himself). Emily’s mother is the small-town Christian busybody who accuses first and doesn’t even bother to ask questions later, and who behaves like a less shrill version of Veronica Cartwright’s character in The Witches of Eastwick (1987). And the police barely get a look in, despite the nature of the accusations being made by the press and everyone else. This approach makes the movie appear lopsided in its focus, and it never manages it right itself.

This is also a movie where the kids run rings round everyone else, and while this might make for an intriguing reflection on modern society and the nuclear family, and the teenagers who believe they can reject any notion of personal responsibility, it makes for an awkward, uncomfortable movie that is rescued by a clutch of intuitive, resonant performances. Leaving behind – way behind – her best-known role as Lucy Pevensie in the Narnia movies, Henley is authoritative and deceptively alluring. She makes Mary the provocative, intimidating centre of the movie, beguiling and caustic, and never lets the character become too affected or pretentious. It’s a strong, effortless portrayal, and she holds the audience’s attention throughout. As her primary adversary, Hayward makes Emily a more three-dimensional character than expected, fleshing out the awkward adolescent feelings Emily is trying to deal with, and making her more sympathetic than she appears at the movie’s start. With equally strong support from Cuthrell and DeJonge, the movie benefits from all four young actresses’ approach to the material, and they help guide the movie through some of its more overly melodramatic moments.

While the movie is largely uneven, and strains credibility at times, it does have a sense of small-town paranoia that is effectively rendered, and the casually cruel behaviour of teenage girls is adequately presented (if not delved into too deeply). Waechter displays a knack for making the meetings in the woods as creepy as rumour and gossip would have them, and she’s equally adept at teasing odd nuances out of the characters’ behaviour, especially when Emily attends a radio station and comes face to face with some of the victims of real abuse who’ve responded to her blog. Zak Mulligan’s photography unfortunately paints a drab portrait of Kingston and its surroundings, while some scenes feel truncated thanks to Aaron Yanes’ assembly of the material. There’s also a voice over provided by a minor character that comes and goes without any consistency.

Rating: 6/10 – without sufficient depth or clarity applied to the story and characters, The Sisterhood of Night comes across as being a mystery about something the audience won’t ultimately care about; when the reason comes though, it’s beautifully told, and more than makes up for some of the vicissitudes that have gone before.