Youth gone vile: Eden Lake

They set out for the weekend to some remote locale, where the placid water snuggles up against a beach that’s good for camping. The realization, only upon arrival, that this favourite spot from years ago has since been appropriated as stomping grounds for the rowdy teenage offspring of local yokels fails to dissuade them from pursuing their romantic getaway. But Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are handsome middleclass Londoners—dare this horny young couple park their luxury Jeep and set up their tent amidst the unmistakably hostile country trash, marble-mouthed folk who don’t take kindly to outsiders, who above all look out for their own? Such actions are of course rarely advisable in horror flicks.

I rented it for the cover, which was slightly throwback in a good way, suitably gaudy, with the vague promise of atmospherics. The recent weeks haven’t yielded a whole lot of solid options for this column, so I did what I guess most people do, or at least those who still patronize video stores. With so many movies to see for work and a never-ending list of titles I’m hunting down based on my own nerdy obsessions, I don’t browse blind like I used to, but when I do I often wind up in the horror section, wondering to myself who the hell makes all these movies. In theory I love horror movies. I grew up on them. But there are so relatively few good ones, and only one way to find the genuine diamond in the rough. 

I won’t fool you. Eden Lake, the debut of British writer/director James Watkins, is no great shakes. It’s not one of these if-you-don’t-normally-go-for-horror crossover films. But it is quite interesting in its way, especially in the first third or so, and it is impressively creepy, especially in the middle, and though it does get really, really, dumb, it saves most the dumbest parts for the end, where coincidences pile up so high that this basically realistic narrative seems to be striving in vain to become boundless nightmare.

(A notable exception to the way I’ve divvied up the movie is a super-dumb moment that falls right smack-dab in the middle—and consider this a spoiler. It’s perhaps the most ludicrously bathetic scene of marriage proposal in history, with a beat-to-hell Steve sputtering on about honeymoons to India while a wound the size of an egg roll vomits little burps of blood from his side.)

Cinephiles will quickly see some or all of the bold-writ filmic precedents for Eden Lake’s narrative, and I figure they’re meant to. Before they even get into the woods to encounter the brats from hell, Steve begins to suffer a string of slights to his manhood. Jenny’s sweet about the whole thing, but really, shouldn’t he stand up to the rude hicks and impertinent punks and defend the honour of his extremely fetching female? The echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) resound loudly, and pleasingly, too, as it’s a story begging for renovation. I started to wonder if, once she inevitably assumed the role of protagonist—after all, that’s her, nubile and covered in muck, hiding behind a tree like Barbara Steele on the disc’s cover—would Jenny gradually take up the gauntlet of defender of property and bourgeois dignity in a clever gender reversal? The answer: Mmmm, sorta.

The other obvious model for this story is Deliverance (72), emphasized in the unabashedly classist depiction of rural folk as vicious xenophobes. Yet a peak sequence of sexual violation, so central to the hillbilly horror of Deliverance, and so seemingly inevitable in this equally tawdry scenario, is conspicuously absent, even when the teens actually have Jenny tied up and unconscious. Perhaps this is because Watkins sees these kids, whose leader is so completely vile, sadistic and devoid of any psychology as to be a sheer monster, as being so contaminated with violence that their hormones have actually been stunted into submission. Yet, rest assured, juvenile antics nonetheless rise to the fore, with the teens, apt and uncritical pupils of the modus operandi of Abu Ghraib, making videos with a phone of their acts of torture. This abstraction of aberrant behaviour through voyeuristic technology—and that technology’s capabilities for erasing or revising events after the fact—ultimately aligns the film, perhaps surprisingly, with either of the interchangeable versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (97/07), which shares with Eden Lake the peculiar quality of being at once truly terrifying and grotesque and silly, academic and numbing.

It’s worth pointing out that Reilly is pretty fearless. Even when the film demands that she slip at the drop of a hat to being a crazed animal hell-bent on revenge to a trembling griever for the retribution that befalls her tormentors—the film’s first scene lets us know that Jenny’s got a soft spot for kids—Reilly, who you might recognize from Mrs Henderson Presents (05) or Pride and Prejudice (05), dutifully fills out each moment with some sort of emotional logic. It’s really quite something. There should be some sort of Academy Award for valiant efforts toward salvaging the integrity of stuff like this. 

Savage Grace: the rare occasion where we could use a little less of Moore and a whole lot more of something to truly care about

This long-awaited second feature from director Tom Kalin, who made such an impression way back in 1992 with the Leopold and Loeb retelling Swoon, comfortably nestles up against its predecessor with regards to categorization: it’s a true crime movie, involving sex, horrific murder and characters with deeply pretentious ambitions, and it’s as queer as any movie can hope to be, with its personage mixing in all sorts of combinations untraditional, kinky, or downright deviant.

Besides apparently being exactingly tailored to the thematic interests of prolific producer Christine Vachon (an instrumental force behind Swoon, Boys Don’t Cry, I Shot Andy Warhol, Party Monster, The Notorious Bettie Page and Infamous), it’s the sort of material that also seems to draw in some of our finest actresses of a certain age, especially those who continually crave adventure and edge. Given that Joan Crawford is long gone, I can’t think of a better choice for the star role of Savage Grace than Julianne Moore—yet at the same time I think it might just be the worst, or at least the least enjoyable performance I’ve ever seen Moore give. But then, are we even supposed to enjoy this movie? Even the somber enjoyment of more closely understanding some bleak, troubling aspect of human nature?

Narrated by the real Tony Baekeland, Savage Grace dramatizes the story of his life leading up to his notorious arrest in 1972 at the age of 25. It says a lot about Baekeland’s life that the real star of his story is actually his mom, Barbara (Moore), heiress to the Bakelite fortune, an uncultured, desperately unhappy society woman who, after being abandoned by her understandably demoralized husband (Stephen Dillane) for her son’s girlfriend, focuses all of her overbearing energies on her only child, who she constantly needles, travels all over Europe with, lives with and, as it turns out, has sex with. Tony himself (played by the suitably stunned-looking Eddie Redmayne, once more, as in The Good Shepherd, the psychologically under-developed son) is rather a wisp of a boy next to her, nervous, uncertain, largely unloved and internalizing more rage than most of us will ever know.

For those of us who aren’t survivors of incest but always suspected it made for a pretty miserable home life, Savage Grace, the antithesis of Murmur of the Heart in more ways than one, certainly confirms that and some. But I suppose what’s truly terrifying in this utterly tawdry tale is not the aberrant sex itself but the suffocating mothering from which the sex is but one manifestation, and hardly the most toxic. Savage Grace is really a sort of horror movie about the stifling effects of family and affluence, one beautifully photographed in exquisite locales and filled with beautiful people, where the monster just keeps coming back to embarrass herself and everybody else with her incredibly awkward attempts to seem sophisticated before throwing yet another shrill hissy fit.

I didn’t actually know Baekeland’s story before seeing Savage Grace, which is just as well—at least there were some surprises. But these surprises, like Kalin’s craftsmanship, itself a bit overdone and noodlely, didn’t make Baekeland’s story any more enlightening, just grotesque, sad, jarring, intermittently fascinating and ultimately kind of pointless.

The Proposition: Hillcoat and Cave renovate the western, conjure devils in the outback, get spooky, poetic, violent as all hell

Set in the 1880s Australian outback, The Proposition shakes the dormant Western genre to life from its opening shoot-out, in which the ear-shattering pings of bullets perforating a tin shack echo amongst hysterical cries and bodies shudder below shafts of scalding sun in fear and maybe some kind of demented ecstasy. This is the colonial nightmare unfiltered, moulded by a loose but lean narrative shape and mined for the sort of savage poetry that allows us to recognize it as being very much about our conflicted human souls.

“I will civilize this place,” proclaims local authority Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) once this chaos subsides, revealing no hint of irony as he viciously pistol-whips whimpering young Mike Burns (Richard Wilson) and offers Mike’s older bother Charlie (Guy Pearce) the ultimatum of journeying into the godforsaken hills to assassinate eldest brother Arthur (Danny Huston) or else condemn Mike to death: this is the cruel proposition of the title. The Burns clan are Irish outlaws in a lawless land, murderers and rapists the lot, and a smear on the dream of expanding the British Empire into this country otherwise inhabited solely by men regarded by the enlightened invaders as less than animals.

The Proposition is only the third feature in as many decades from director John Hillcoat, and it fits thematically into his small but distinctive body of work, intelligently dealing as it does with how the mechanics of state violence and control shape communities. As for writer Nick Cave, though he contributed to Hillcoat’s 1988 prison drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, The Proposition marks the proper screenwriting debut of singer-songwriter, and through this fresh collaboration the best in each becomes manifest. The work is both historically and politically sophisticated, and also infused with the Old Testament poetry and fatalistic romanticism that distinguishes Cave as one of the finest, most unapologetically literary lyricists alive (evident not only in Cave’s Joseph Conrad-inspired script but also in the whispery, eerily desolate score supplied by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis).

There is a brutally clear beginning and end to The Proposition, bridged by a stream of evocative middle. With context and complexity of character supplying our sense of penetrating deeper into the film’s heart of darkness, atmosphere equals story here—what’s so memorable are often moments of reverie that linger between bursts of violence, details like the branches twisted into arthritic claws by sun and thirst, flies blanketing the backs of witnesses to an almost bleakly comical, seemingly endless public lashing, or the delicate surfaces of the fine china and English rose garden treasured by Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson), the film’s lone woman and one source of its scattered moments of genuine tenderness.

No one’s left uncompromised yet neither is even the most aberrant character drawn without some trace of humanity, the marvellous cast deserving much credit. Winstone’s Stanley, red face and black eyes pinned down into glistening watermelon seeds, seems hopelessly numbed to human suffering but is consoled by Martha’s pride and the innocence he tries to maintain in her through keeping her isolated from the wretched town he oversees. Huston’s devil crouched in the wilderness seems to have no difficulty reconciling his acts of malice with his love of poetry, nature and the family that drives him literally to tears. And Pearce’s soul-drained searcher, tortured, resurrected, betrayed by his master and abandoned to an even deeper loneliness than is suffered by the others, is the actor at his finest, bringing a ragged humanity to an archetype rendered far more obliquely in the spaghetti westerns of the ’60s.

I can’t think of anything like The Proposition out there these days—but then I’m not sure anyone ever made movies quite like this. It’s funny—and inspiring—how a dead genre can still bring out the best in some of our best filmmakers, Hillcoat, Jarmusch, Eastwood, et al.

Joshua: The kid slays in the picture

When Joshua received its lamentably minor theatrical release last summer, the artwork for the film showed a giant framed portrait of the film’s 9-year-old bad seed with his anchorman hair and eerily innocuous expression hanging before the actual Joshua, looking diminutive against it, his back facing us. I found the image intriguing and looked forward to the film. I seemed to have been in the minority.

The revised artwork gracing the cover of Maple’s Joshua DVD, bathed in deep red and featuring the shadowy figure of Joshua’s mother looking vulnerable below a looming, more obviously sinister Joshua, is far less ambiguous in conveying the film’s place within the horror genre. I’m sympathetic to the marketing division –this cover will probably generate more pick-ups– yet this sort of Omen fan baiting hardly represents the true merits of this terrifically unnerving, subtle and complex chiller, which works not through violent imagery or apocalyptic prophesies but through banal family dynamics.

Directed by George Ratliff and written by Ratliff and David Gilbert, Joshua opens with the birth of the second child of Brad (Sam Rockwell) and Abby (Vera Farmiga), parents to the titular piano prodigy (Jacob Kogan). One suspects that, like most kids, the emotionally repressed Joshua feels threatened by the bald, wiggling, wailing intruder. One also suspects that Brad and Abby, perfectly likable yuppies eager to uphold an air of normalcy, are basically content to be distracted from their stuffy, introspective first-born, who occupies himself playing Bartók and reading about Egyptian funerary practices.

What gradually develops through the tightly constructed script, bold editing, creeping camerawork and superlative ensemble cast, is a series of blows to the family order, fed by forces every parent understands: postpartum depression, issues of identity linked to birth order, occupational instability, meddlesome grandparents, hormonal havoc, parental duty sharing. Strategically exploiting these forces is Joshua, whose increasingly apparent malice is, right up into the third act, consistently undercut by his sympathetic position as the neglected weird one vying for attention and favour. Whether the kid’s an evil little bastard or his elders had it coming should make for interesting debate afterwards.

In the disc’s supplementary interviews Ratliff expresses frustration over comparisons between Joshua and Rosemary’s Baby. The crucial difference between the films, Ratliff explains, is that Polanski’s classic depends on supernatural elements to invoke chills. These protests are both inaccurate and unneeded. Joshua stands on its own just fine, and aligning it with Rosemary’s Baby only enhances the viewer’s pleasure is tracing its rich lineage. However you read the Satanic elements in Rosemary’s Baby, its deeper resonance comes from precisely the same place as Joshua’s: recognizable bourgeois familial anxieties enveloped by the hothouse of Manhattan’s upper east side. And like Rosemary’s Baby, Joshua has the distinction of being a movie that no new parents want to see –but they probably should.