I Would Like to See It: Hellbender (Patreon)

Too often in fiction about the arcane and occult, artists treat these forces as a sort of Mortal Kombat-esque move set. Reproducible gestures and words conjure reliable effects. That there are rules governing the magic in John and Zelda Adams’ and Toby Poser’s Hellbender is certain, but those rules are cruel, primal, and simple in the extreme: no power without blood, no blood without violence. Kept in isolation by her mother (Toby Poser), sixteen-year-old Izzy (Zelda Adams) longs to meet others and get her first taste of the outside world, but in pushing against her mother’s boundaries she discovers not just the adolescent pitfalls of crushes and petty trespassing, but the dark secret of her matrilineal ascent. She and her mother are witches, hellbenders more precisely, who draw power from murder, cannibalism, and bloodletting.

The film sublimates foundational familial anxieties — the fear of losing control of a child, the fear of that child supplanting and replacing you, and perhaps most elementally the fear of one’s child’s morals diverging from one’s own — into a brutal generational struggle between mothers and daughters. All hellbenders inevitably kill their mothers, and in so doing become impregnated with their own doom. When Izzy at last gets her first taste of blood after living in carefully enforced isolation for her entire youth and much of her adolescence, the latest iteration of that eternal struggle kicks off at once. “My mother,” Poser breathes in one scene, her expression faraway, “was a monster.” It’s hard not to see parallels between such grandiose supernatural matricide and the Thanksgiving table screaming matches of the modern American family. How do we cope with loved ones experimenting with or delving deep into ways of thinking and being diametrically opposed to our own? Hellbender has no easy answers, only a grim reminder that bonds of blood can be as cruelly arbitrary as any other sort.

In pursuit of the film’s elliptical interrogation of connection, violence, and family strife, John and Zelda Adams deploy a keen minimalist knack for framing in their cinematography. Zoe and her mother are frequently glimpsed against dramatic monochrome backdrops, sometimes splattered in dark fluids to heighten contrast, sometimes left milk-pale to seep into the gray pallor of their forest home. With the exception of a single fumbled scary-face shot in its final moments, the film’s effects are stunningly convincing. A moment in which a key emerges through the back of a woman’s hand, parting flesh as easily as parchment paper, is particularly unforgettable. Likewise the glimpses of hellbender magic we’re afforded are both grisly and mysterious, intuitive on a visual level but obscure in their mechanics and application. Hellbender is meaty and complex, unafraid to delve into dark places without a light to hand.