Everything means something else

The use of parable to establish customs and convey larger meaning has been around since the dawn of civilization. Telling someone "Things aren't always as they seem" generally has less impact than if you tell them the story of the blind men and the elephant. My guess is that that's where writer/director Goran Stolevski began with You Won't Be Alone. Having dual Australian and Macedonian heritage, he decided to explore some of the roots of the latter by telling a story about witches, societal roles, sex, personal identity, questioning social mores, and half a dozen other things in 19th-century Macedonia, which was still under the rule of the Ottomans, which is also pointed out several times and is often important in understanding modern Balkan societies. Does that sound like a lot to pack in to one story? Because it is and that may be the film's overarching flaw that detracts from something which may have been better delivered with the extraneous parts cut away. Or clawed away, as the case may be, because that happens quite a bit in this film, too.

When we saw the trailer, it was presented as a horror film, which it ostensibly still is. I went in expecting something spooky and largely centered around the isolation that comes with being an apex predator that human society- your prey -will work pretty hard to, well, isolate and destroy. What we got instead sprawled in so many different directions that any sense of the horrific was subsumed by all the other messages being delivered. This is what the term "overwritten" often refers to and this film was a prime example of it. We begin with Nevena, as a baby, being marked by Old Maid Maria; the seeming progenitor of the scourge of witchery. In response, her mother imprisons Nevena in a cave, occasionally bringing food and some grooming, so that Maria won't be able to find her and steal her away when she comes of age. The fact that imprisoning her daughter in a cave without human contact is effectively stealing her away better than Maria might have apparently doesn't occur to mom. But that's one of those messages about the need for community in the human condition. The problem here is that that same community would tear the witchling Nevena "to shreds" as her mother warns. These aphorismal contrasts continue throughout the story; the need for men to provide the literal seed leading to the joy of children, despite their abusive behavior; the need for the weaker members of society to depend on the assistance of that community, despite being scorned or mocked for their weakness; the question of identity and the individual within that larger grouping and how difficult it is to see things from someone else's perspective; and so on.

The largest theme is that which centers around the mistreatment of women, not only in the chauvinistic cultures of the 19th-century Balkans, but in human society in general. It's pointed out that Old Maid Maria becomes bitter and vengeful, and continues to carry out that bitterness against Nevena who refuses to share it, essentially because she didn't get married and serve in the role that women are nominally assigned. Of course, that whole perspective is a form of misogyny. Maria is pointedly the villain, not only towards normal humans, but also Nevena, who is so desperate to be like them that she begins wearing their skins not to prey upon them, but to assimilate. But Maria is the villain because she essentially shrugged off that role that society tried to dictate to her. She preys on those who wanted to treat her as a resource, rather than a human, and tried to burn her alive. It's kind of like suggesting that  revolution is something we should aspire to, but the person who started said revolution is a criminal who shouldn't be tolerated. It ends up becoming something of a mixed message, likely because of the overload of themes that Stolevski attempted to pack in. We don't really spend much time getting to know anyone but Maria, since Nevena is kind of a blank slate attempting to be like others, but when Maria is pointedly the villain, the question of whom we're supposed to sympathize with becomes muddled. Clearly, it's Nevena to a certain degree, but we end up sympathizing with her because she's denied the chance to be the subservient resource that society says she should be...?

Visually, I was somewhat disappointed, as well. The implications of the trailer gave me the idea that we would be seeing something that was much more phantasmagoric in nature and with camera work that involved the scenery in a more arresting fashion. Instead, we got a lot of very basic shots of mundane dwellings and not overly interesting forests and hillsides. Was the visual medium just the framework to hang all of those metaphors upon? Even when attempting that, you'd usually like to include something that was cool to look at while delivering your message. But most of the visual effects, involving a not atypical level of gore, weren't that impressive; not least because most of the transformations took place off-screen and were more audibly interesting than anything that showed up in the lens. It was as if someone had decided they wanted to do a version of The Howling but didn't have the money to pay for the CGI or makeup (which, for all I know, may have been the case.)

It sounds like I'm trashing the film, but I don't think it was bad, per se. I just think it was trying to do and say too many things at once and so didn't say any of them well at all. I'm still glad that I took the time to see it because it's not often we get to see something from that corner of the world. But I can't really recommend it to the horror fans I know, nor to the drama fans, nor to those who just like watching cool things happen on screen. It underdelivered in all of those respects, even though it was reaching higher than most other storytellers try to in the space of two hours.

They (Us) were TTH

[HUGE spoilers below if you haven't seen Us.]

"Therefore, thus saith the Lord: Behold, I am bringing disaster upon them which they will not be able to escape. They will cry out to me, but I will not listen to them." - Jeremiah, 11:11

I wouldn't go quite that far in describing Jordan Peele's Us. After all, there are some solid performances and I think the camera work and the lighting and other technical aspects were really well done. But overall, I can't really say that it's a film that worked for me and there are a variety of reasons for that. The largest one seems to be what, on the famous board, we used to call TTH, or Trying Too Hard.

TTH first came up in a discussion about one cultural phenomenon or another. One of the regulars was complaining about something that struck him as being more image than reality; an event that was trying to show how "real" it was, only to make everyone understand that it was more show than substance by trying too hard. He asked for examples from the rest of the board and I remember mine distinctly: "Every Woody Allen film, post-Annie Hall." All of them have struck me as Allen trying too hard to be "Woody Allen"; to present a story and a style that most would identify as his work but without really carrying the weight and depth and whimsy that originally defined it. I think Peele's latest effort suffers from that same phenomenon but, on top of that overreach, I'm not really sure who he's trying too hard to emulate. Is it himself, following on the heels of his excellent debut, Get Out? Is it a pivot toward the Hitchcockian label that many are so eager to hang around his neck? Is it something more Serling-esque? All three and, thus, none of them? I really can't say.

What I can say is that it feels like he was attempting to set up a giant metaphor and wrapped it into a story that had a Twilight Zone-ish premise, but also wanted to keep the pace of more modern thrillers. That's a big ask for any writer or director, since any two of those are not going to cooperate with the third. (e.g. Pick any two: Fast/Good/Cheap.) Apparently, he was directly inspired by the Twilight Zone episode, Mirror Image, and that can be seen in the basic premise of the film: the vengeful doppelgangers, the Tethered, emerging to slaughter their other selves. It's also not difficult to see a lot of the metaphors that he was building into the story, like the references to Jeremiah 11:11, which was the doomsayer's warning against worshiping the wrong things; in this case, rampant consumerism demonstrated by Gabe's desire to keep up with the Tylers. Or the dichotomy of the world's wealthiest nation propped up by the existence of so many who have no chance to take part in that exercise of wealth, whether because of skin color or circumstance. The Tethered are "the other" that so many Americans are whipped into a frenzy about by our xenophobic president, even though many of those "others" are Americans themselves; thus, inciting the quote from Red early in the first confrontation: "We're Americans." That statement is equally one of defiance and condemnation, depending on one's perspective both inside and outside the film.

But I have to say that all of that kind of gets lost under the blood spray and screams of the routine chase sequence that takes up the latter 2/3 of the film. There's nothing particularly innovative or exciting about any of the action. I am most certainly not the audience for this kind of thing, since I find it to be a pretty pedestrian storytelling technique, most of the time. But it's especially so when the antagonists happen to be led by someone who shows regular emotion and stops to disgorge significant segments of the plot not once, but twice, when Peele could have been building tension and/or trying to relay that exposition visually, rather than make the audience sit there and wonder why both we and our protagonists are (also) sitting there listening to someone almost literally tell their life story. In the end, there is some basis for that, given that Red is not like the other Tethered, but that doesn't help me when I drop out of the story like a body hitting the floor because the tension balloon has just been punctured. The reasons the original Halloween spawned an entire genre are because Michael Myers was implacable and John Carpenter, working with a tiny budget, had to perform a lot of low-grade tricks to show things that special effects would have done for him. But that low-grade approach was storytelling and I'm not sure that modern horror films really carry that kind of atmosphere, especially if you've seen more than, say, three of them (which I have.)

Plus, I'm not entirely sure about a lot of the small touches. Why the focus on Hands Across America? Was it because it was more publicity stunt than obvious act of philanthropy; a moment for celebrities to show up on camera while great swathes of the country were excluded? Is that a statement about the artificiality of the 80s where the current consumerist culture really took hold and continues today? Were the references to Black Flag, a band of rebellion in the 80s where the film starts and a note of kitsch today, a further example of that culture? Were the rabbits a statement about the testing that still goes into the products that fuel that culture? Did we need the reference to the actual tunnel networks at the start of the film because Peele thought it would make the existence of the Tethered easier to believe? (It had zero effect.) Was I easily distracted by this stuff because the main story failed to hold my interest?

The key element to Get Out was that you weren't clobbered by those metaphors. Peele made a number of statements within that film about race and racism, culture and style, personal relationships and public ones, and they all flowed together. There were obvious statements and far more subtle ones about the social and sociopathic tendencies of modern America. In the midst of that, there was an intriguing mystery and a gradual level of horror. Us was nowhere near that progressive. We started with a scene of mystery and some tension... and then skipped right to the main event where Adelaide (Luptita Nyong'o) was already worked into a pretty good frenzy by returning to the scene of the crime. That level of discord on her part made the casual attitude by Gabe (Winston Duke) that much more unnatural. She was instantly panicked and he was instantly an idiot. The most natural character (and actor) of the whole film was Shahadi Wright Joseph as Zora, who went from bored teenager to terrified kid to practical actor in what seemed like a normal progression in a crisis (allowing for the usual Joseph Campbell journey in a fictional story.)

I think the only conclusion I can come to is that Us isn't a bad film. It's just not a very good one. Maybe if Peele tried to focus a bit more on what he was trying to say or, for that matter, simply dump the message and go with a good story. Even doomsayers have to be able to sell what they're saying or they just get ignored.