Insidious: sneaky demons lead family "Further"

If “it’s not the house that’s haunted,” as the tagline promises, then why does director James Wan spend the listless opening credit sequence for Insidious doling out one conventionally creepy haunted house image after another (and solemnly fading to black after each and every one)? Perhaps under the persuasion of co-producer Oren Peli (creator of the mega-smash new-old school chiller Paranormal Activity), Wan’s affectionate deployment of tried-and-true creaky horror tropes is, in theory at least, more than welcome in the era of torture and mutilation as entertainment (an era Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell helped cultivate with their Saw franchise). The problem is that these tropes feel almost arbitrary in their placement. But then so many items in Insidious feel arbitrary.

The first member of the Lambert family we meet is Renai (Rose Byrne), the second Dalton (Ty Simpkins). Mother and son both rise early and wear matching pajamas. They seem to share a quiet curiosity and a connection distinct from those shared by the other members of the family. Renai, a struggling songwriter, is diminutive in figure and seems especially vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be the character most tormented by apparitions and inexplicable sounds (the haunted baby monitor makes its token entrance early on) that accumulate in the film’s slow burning first act. But it’s her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson, as always, looking like he’s hiding something) that intrigues. Hints are dropped rather heavily that there’s something untrustworthy about him. He doesn’t like to be photographed. He’s a schoolteacher but seems awkward with kids. He stays late at work when he knows Renai is stuck at home, deeply upset by the weird disturbances, minding three kids, and single-handedly nesting. Josh also snores loudly, and rubs some dandyish cream under his eyes before bed.

Soon Dalton has an accident in the attic and winds up in a coma that the doctors can’t make sense of. That his coma seems directly connected to the by now unambiguously paranormal activity (a premise that could almost resemble something out of a Haruki Murakami novel) is the thing that got me especially interested in Insidious. But a major switch in tone and tack occurs at the film’s mid-point. The Lamberts move house but the shadowy figures keep a-comin’. What was previously only suggested, sometimes rather effectively so, suddenly becomes all too visible and really, really dumb looking. Steam punk heavies, a red-faced boogeyman and many kooky, pancake make-up wearing, formally dressed phantoms turn up, looking like rejects from Carnival of Souls. A spiritualist is consulted, accompanied by a pair of bumbling ghost busters (one of whom is played by Whannell), and a whole over-complicated mythology begins to establish itself surrounding a normally invisible parallel realm called “the Further.” The aforementioned connection between Renai and Dalton turns out to have no consequence. Barbara Hershey arrives on the scene, conjuring horrorphile memories of The Entity, but ultimately for no special reason. Much of what’s set up during the first act gets shelved. Josh eventually is induced into an out-of-body experience and travels to the Further where he gets into an astral fistfight with a demon and wins, whatever that means. Insidious can’t quite decide what it wants to be, though the real problem is that what it promised to be might have been so much more satisfying.

Variations on life's first-times: Au revoir les enfants and Yi Yi turn blu

As rendered in Louis Malle’s autobiographical Au revoir les enfants (1987), the Petite-Collège d’Avon, which rested on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery and neighboured Fontainebleau, and which Malle attended during the Nazi occupation of France, seems austere and bone chilling, especially if you’re permanently garbed in short pants. Yet it’s also an oddly wondrous, comforting place, nestled in fecundity, where boys could get away with a little horseplay and develop a scrappy camaraderie. Under Malle and cinematographer Renato Berta’s earth-toned, always fluid gaze, the Petite-Collège feels like home, even its sleeping quarters, where too many bunks cram a single room and a it’s only a matter of time before a serial bed-wetter like Malle’s surrogate Julien (Gaspard Manesse) gets outed by his merciless peers.

The masterstroke in Au revoir, now available on gorgeous blu-ray from Criterion, lies in Malle’s respect for the past, his resistance to burdening it with the gravity of hindsight. In keeping with the experience as lived by Malle’s adolescent characters, much of what passes feels essentially ordinary, even if historical circumstances are extraordinary: reading by flashlight, playing on stilts in the courtyard, dodging the air raid drill to rattle off some boogie-woogie on the school piano, getting treated to a screening of Chaplin’s The Immigrant with live accompaniment. The film traces Julien’s friendship with Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), a story which stumbles along playfully and awkwardly the way childhood friendships do, until that day that forever changed Malle’s life, the day the Gestapo arrive to take Bonnet and three other boys away to their deaths, along with the school’s headmaster Père Jacques, who took them in and attempted to conceal their Jewishness. Before this final sequence Nazis remain in the background, spied outside the classroom window asking to confess, or, ironically, shooing away collaborators attempting to throw Jews out of a local restaurant. By largely eschewing overt, artificial portent, Malle’s finale becomes infinitely more moving, and every scene leading to it, however mirthful its tone, becomes pierced with unbearable loss.


The fleetingness of childhood (and adulthood) and ordinariness punctuated by sudden violence (which is ordinary enough) also dominate Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), also new to blu-ray from Criterion. It follows a middle-class Taipei family through a rough patch: grandmother slips into a coma, mother into a spiritual crisis, father into two parallel ethical crises. Sister undertakes her first brush with romance while little brother quietly absorbs everything, translating it into images. Eight year-old Yang-Yang’s nascent experiments with his father’s instamatic, collecting evidence of those aspects of ourselves that remain invisible to us (he takes pictures of the backs of people’s heads), arguably make him the world’s youngest conceptual artist. Not that he knows it.

Yang’s group portrait is also a portrait of urban life and its inherent merging of disparate experiences. Public scenes are observed entirely through windows, neighbours are heard fighting through walls, surveillance cameras track movements. Sounds, music or dialogue from one scene bleed into the next. Yang-Yang, whose name invokes the film’s writer/director, is Yi Yi’s richest source of discovery and amusement. He’s cute, of course, but also vividly alert to the world and all its contents he can’t understand. A scene where Yang-Yang beholds a pretty schoolmate standing before the projected image of a documentary on thunder is elegantly echoed in a later scene where he dives into a swimming pool during a thunderstorm.

Yet I find myself most drawn to scenes involving NJ, Yang-Yang’s father, who, like Yang-Yang, is unassuming and wears clothes three sizes too big for him. The scenes where NJ dines and hits a karaoke bar with a Japanese colleague, their exchanges limited by their broken English (the only language they share), constitute marvelous moments of adults connecting. “Why are we always afraid of the first time?” the Japanese asks. Yi Yi brims with so many resonate variations on life’s first-times, and even if Yang allows them to be harrowing, he nonetheless consoles us with the fact that we can at least share them, though conversation, physical contact, or the compressing force of art.

Marwencol: a backyard theatre of war

Mark Hogancamp went into a coma for nine days after being beaten by four guys outside a bar. The movies have told us that something strange and possibly sinister transpires in that fathomless non-place where victims of accidents, crimes and war plunge for a time, but for Hogancamp, what was lost while comatose seems to have been a blessing. He awoke with severe amnesia, which meant he forgot he was a ruinous alcoholic. Bottles of booze stir nothing in him now. Their faded allure has freed him to make a new life, but of what sort? He had to learn to walk and talk all over, but couldn’t quite shake off a tremor. He can only handle working one shift a week making meatballs at a diner. In his abundant spare time he discovered he wasn’t just brain injured but deeply lonely. Medicare bought him little in the way of therapy, so he had to invent his own. In his Kingston, NY backyard he constructed a Belgian village in miniature, populating it with dolls refurbished as soldiers and women seeking refuge from the Second World War. Jeff Malmberg’s documentary about Hogancamp is named after Hogancamp’s creation: Marwencol.

It isn’t to dissuade you from seeing Marwencol when I say that everything great about it is derived from Hogancamp’s own charisma, vulnerability, and creativity. I don’t think Malmberg went as deep as he could have. There’s so often the feeling that Malmberg stopped digging as soon as he uncovered a sentimental sweet spot—which is easy enough since Hogancamp wears his heart on his sleeve, and his heart is so directly connected to his endearingly desperate horniness. All of Marwencol’s most striking images come directly from Hogancamp’s own lens, his painstakingly made photographs of tableaus depicting the elaborate dramas unfolding in Marwencol, tales of bravery, sadism, romance and betrayal. These inspired pseudo-film stills are what brought Hogancamp’s project to public attention, first in the pages of Esopus Magazine and later via his solo exhibition in a Manhattan gallery. But it’s enough that Malmberg invested such time in allowing his subject to reveal himself, fears, obsessions, and fetishes included. I don’t like to let documentary filmmakers off the hook just because they chose a great subject, especially from the veritable gold mine of the outsider art world, but I have to commend Malmberg for recognizing that Hogancamp had a lot to say and mostly staying out of his way as he tried to speak.

You might say that what Hogancamp’s inadvertently achieved is a modest version of what Philip Seymour Hoffman undertakes in Synecdoche, New York, but all on his own, and without a MacArthur Fellowship. Hogancamp’s dolls are surrogates for people he knows, neighbours, friends and workmates, and he uses these figures to negotiate between fantasy and reality, desire and disappointment. Unlike Charlie Kaufman’s epic of proliferate simulacra, Marwencol ends not with death but the possibility of rebirth. Hogancamp had the need for alcoholic oblivion beaten out of him. He constructed a place where his inner demons could wage war without hurting his loved ones, and he may have become an artist while mostly just trying to heal himself. Some day Hogancamp’s World War II will probably have to end, but his postwar universe will be glowing with nothing but potential.