Escalated Horror (Patreon)

or, Notes on Two Prominent Art-Horror Flicks from 2022

Resurrection (Andrew Semans, 2022)

First of all, I was surprised to learn that Andrew Semans' first film was Nancy, Please, a film I have not seen but remember hearing about. It stuck with me because of the bizarre narrowcasting of its central conceit. A grad student's dissertation is held hostage by an angry roommate who won't return an obscure book about Dickens. Again, haven't seen it, but Resurrection has a similar "commitment to the bit," which is impressive and bothersome in equal measure. I'm sure I'm forgetting several classic examples, but I always think of Breaking the Waves in scenarios like this. That is, every diegetic cue is telling us that the protagonist's insane belief is just that: insane. Then, in the 11th hour, surprise! God really did reward you for making a sexual martyr of yourself, or whatever.

It often smacks of desperation, a filmmaker having painted themselves into a corner and having no other choice but to jump. And although I admire quite a bit about Resurrection, I just can't get over that hump of skepticism. Because what we have here is psychological violence, a man (Tim Roth) who has been grooming and gaslighting a woman (Rebecca Hall) since she was a teenager. And he reappears in her new life, manipulating her with memories of the infant son that he himself killed. "He's still alive," David insists, and even though Margaret is a sane, rational woman, of course there is some wounded part of her psyche that wants to believe it's true.

If that had been the extent of Resurrection, the reopening of a traumatic wound and the increasingly dangerous lengths Margaret goes to to suture it up again, that would have been sufficient, narratively as well as intellectually. But Semans casts his lot with the supernatural and the frankly absurd. (More than one writer has compared Resurrection's conclusion to Fat Bastard's injunction to get in mah belly!) Nevertheless, Hall delivers a true tour de force performance, at times achieving almost Jeanne Dielman levels of prim repression and its inevitably cracking dam. 

If folks are insisting that the last act of TÁR is a dream sequence, what are they saying about Resurrection? The fact that Margaret squares off against her abuser, like one would see in any number of faux-feminist revenge flicks, is practically demanded by the genre. But she doesn't just dispatch the villain. She regains everything, repairing her damaged relationship with her daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) before she heads off to college, and effectively unwriting her troubled past. But real people who have been victimized must find ways to reconnect with the human race despite their histories. There's no Mulligan when it comes to life and death. And yes, I know Resurrection is not a work of social realism, but it does touch upon actual violent misogyny and waves it all away for some sort of whoa, dude! twist. It just feels cynical to me.

Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022)

There's quite a bit that feels half-assed about Barbarian, but it's successful enough in other respects that I almost want to give it the benefit of the doubt. I mean, is Cregger making fun of the fact that all contemporary horror films have some kind of political subtext? At first it seems as if the Big Bad, whatever it might prove to be, is intimately connected to white flight and the systematic abandonment of Detroit's minority neighborhoods. After all, we know fairly early that there is something lurking quite literally beneath all the burned-out houses and urban rot.

While Barbarian is not exactly uninterested in this idea, he sure doesn't feel much need to see it through, suggesting that it might have all been part of a wishy-washy liberal pitch to get the money he needed, the way contemporary artists learn to sling the appropriate buzzwords in their grant applications. And while sure, the outwardly evil celebrity home-flipper (Justin Long) also proves to be a rapist and throws the woman who tried to save him (Georgina Campbell) under the bus, Force Majeure-style, there's nothing here that means to specifically indict real estate speculators or Airbnb profiteers. 

After all, the film's somewhat unnecessary flashback informs us quite directly that the Original Evil that begat all subsequent violence was at the hands of a working class serial killer (Richard Brake) who spent enough time building an underground murder dungeon that he's never moving out of Brightmoor, come what may. And again, I don't know to what extent Cregger intended this as irony. But it does provide an amusing antidote to all the Saw-like movies that feature inexplicably wealthy murderer of total leisure, who can spend all their time and money constructing deadly contraptions like they were the love-children of Jean Tinguely and Ed Gein.

Anyway, Barbarian spends its first half-hour or so carefully delineating the very real anxieties of young women when they are forced to interact with strange men. In this case, the set-up is that Tess (Campbell) has been double-booked for the Detroit rental, with Keith (Bill Skarsgård). Tess is in town to interview for a research job with an obscure documentary filmmaker. But to Tess's surprise, Keith knows her work, because he is part of an activist arts collective. A random meet-cute in the urban jungle. Small world!

The twist, if you want to call it that, is that Keith is exactly what he appears to be, and is the first poor sap to die. Again, don't mean to assume to much intention here, but Cregger does a fine job of showing both Tess and Keith to be part of the young hipster art crowd who so often comprise the first wave of gentrification in places like Brightmoor. And while, following the Candyman template, we might reasonably expect that it's the displaced Black folks who have turned this refurbished cottage into a deathtrap for Millennial creatives, the roots of evil go back further. It's the old white working class with its well-documented propensity for rape and incest.

Is Cregger even remotely committed to any of this? Even near the denouement of Barbarian, when it seems as if Tess may discover some affinity for the "monster" -- herself a victim of inbreeding, deprivation, and genuine (if misguided) maternal yearnings -- she shoots the fanged woman-thing in the head and trudges back to civilization. And indeed, Barbarian does seem quite defiant in the way it provides us with a Black "final girl," as sincere a gesture as its depiction of the police as utterly feckless at best.

In fact, if there's one thing Resurrection and Barbarian both share, it's their firm belief that 911 is a joke.