Cross-posted from my blog.

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✦ ✦  of five

What a mess.

The trailer for Goodnight Mommy had me fairly excited. Here is a situation that, while not the most original horror setup in the book, could very easily deliver a genuinely unnerving experience, a mix of the family tensions of The Babadook or The Shining, the child-driven horror of Let the Right One In, and the in-broad-daylight isolation of The Witch. It’s calculated to hit those primal fears any child has experienced: being all alone and chased by a monster without a parent to help, or worse yet being chased by a parent who has become monstrous. And for the first act, the movie looks like it’s going to hit all those notes. And then, things begin to degenerate at a fairly incredible rate.

Spoilers ahead.

In terms of initial setup, the trailer is fairly accurate. Two boys, living in an isolated house in the middle of Austrian farmland, are greeted by a woman whose face is covered in bandages. She’s apparently their mother, returned from a cosmetic surgery of unknown purpose. But her behavior is different—where their mother was warm and loving, this woman is cold and harsh, and often mentally and physically abusive. As time goes by, the paranoia of isolation sets in more and more, and the boys are increasingly convinced that whoever this masked creature is, it’s not their mother.

The movie is completely unsubtle in its hints as to the mother-creature’s nature right off the bat. There’s a crucifix affixed to the boys’ wall that’s conveniently framed in numerous shots, and in a moment about halfway through the film, when the boys flee to town in an attempt to find help, they visit the local priest, the Catholic imagery growing even more obvious. The clumsy nature of this setup has either two outcomes: the movie thinks it is being clever in its foreshadowing rather than blindingly straightforward, or it doth protest too much. It turns out to be the latter—the horror at the heart of Goodnight Mommy is gradually turned on its head, the viewer’s fear for the twins Lukas and Elias slowly morphing into a fear of them and empathy for their antagonist/victim. The first of the movie’s two twists to be revealed—Mommy is indeed who she says she is, the torture the boys have inflicted on her in an attempt to get their real mother back all for nothing—while it takes the wind out of the horror sails, is built to with a fairly effective amount of viewer dread. One scene in particular, in which the twins strap the mother down to her bed and torment her in increasingly shocking ways, is masterfully played, our fear that the mother will reach out and seize the boys bit by bit supplanted by a stunned sort of revulsion at what they’re doing to her.

Unfortunately, the movie can’t support this well-drawn scene, nor can it support the entire twist that it’s built around. The reason for this could have been completely avoided, and it’s almost mind-boggling to me that writer/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala left it in the film. But they did—it even shows up in the trailer. And because of these thirty seconds or so of footage, Goodnight Mommy completely collapses.

It’s near nightfall. The mother, having recently thrown a tantrum in front of her children, wanders into the woods outside the house, shedding her clothes and walking naked through the trees. Odd, but not inexplicable—until her head begins to vibrate, whipping itself back and forth at a CGI-assisted speed clearly impossible for a mundane human being to achieve. This, coupled with the crucifix imagery, would seem to suggest that, if not a demon, something supernatural must be at work here.

Except…there isn’t. And the movie doesn’t even attempt to offer an explanation as to what the hell the forest scene is supposed to mean as a result.

One of the things that pleases (and frightens) me the most about The Witch, which has a similar and far more disturbing scene of a naked woman wandering alone through the woods, is that it doesn’t even think of pulling the all-too-easy trick so many horror movies do of trying to have their cake and eat it too in regards to the supernatural. The early sequence of the titular witch carrying baby Samuel back to her den, startling in its flouting of the generally accepted tenet that showing one’s monster should be reserved for the third act, firmly shuts down the internet-popular mode of interpretation that relegates every horror movie to the protagonist’s delusions whether that approach is warranted by the film or not. By contrast, The Babadook is an excellent example of taking that tired critical approach and making it work thematically. The monster can be either real or the product of the grief-driven psychosis of the film’s characters; the film’s central metaphor remains the same regardless of which approach is taken, and neither reading diminishes the horror at its core.

Goodnight Mommy tries to make use of both these approaches, which results in a completely incoherent piece of work. Even if it had committed to The Witch‘s brand of horror and rendered the mother an actual supernatural entity, the scene in the woods doesn’t particularly add anything to the film; indeed, it rather scuppers the dread of not knowing, of questioning what exactly this thing that wears a human shape is before it finally reveals itself—the boys’ mother somehow changed? a human impostor? something altogether more unnatural? As it is, a scene that in that scenario would have been tension-draining is utterly crippling. The film wishes us to believe that the boys’ mother always was just that, no alterations whatsoever. However, in having us do so it has to hope we’ve forgotten entirely about her supernatural jaunt. If the directors had rendered it as a dream sequence, something that the boys in their paranoia experience as a nightmare, it could have worked. No such trappings are wrapped around it, however. The movie is broken, and no attempt is made to fix it.

The supremely frustrating thing about all this is that the sixty seconds of screentime that the movie-breaking scene consists of could have been cut entirely without affecting anything. No information of any importance is conveyed, and the film would arguably be scarier without it, the ambiguity of the mother walking off into the dark woods alone far more unsettling than our seeing what she does there. Plenty of Christian imagery is littered throughout the next forty minutes, meaning the demonic red herring is viable without firsthand “proof.” And if the scene was shot for a misleading trailer, which is entirely possible—well, that’s exactly the sort of thing one leaves on the cutting room floor, isn’t it?

And so, the movie collapses in on itself. And while this complete lack of sense-making is its biggest flaw, it’s far from the only one. The third act increasingly relies on silliness in order to move the plot along. A pair of bumbling Red Cross workers take it upon themselves to enter into the family’s seemingly abandoned house and venture upstairs to look for inhabitants simply because the door was unlocked, resulting in a three-minute scene that accomplishes nothing and whose nonsense takes the viewer out of the film. More egregious is the film’s second twist—one of the twins has actually died, and the other in his madness has been hallucinating his presence. A comparison to Fight Club isn’t flattering—that film’s twist is integral to the plot, and the viewer is given a solid twenty minutes to acclimate to the Durden/narrator connection as part of the story they’re being told. Goodnight Mommy, on the other hand, shoves the twist in at almost the last possible moment, its rushed reveal a testament to the fact that the movie really doesn’t need it there. The viewer’s reaction at this point is not one of wonder or appreciation but of tired contempt.

Paradoxically, this flaw of silliness is balanced by a flaw of grimness. The film’s third act largely descends into torture porn, as the boys perform a series of indecencies on the intruder-mother to try to break her spirit. There are some shocking bits and pieces here—one moment in particular, in which the boys crazy-glue the mother’s lips shut and proceed to slice them open again, had me looking through my fingers—but beyond that shock their intent is unclear. Seeing such acts committed by little boys inspires visceral discomfort, to be sure, but to what purpose? The film begins to feel like nothing more than exploitation, and as the credits finally roll the viewer’s primary emotion is deep disappointment mingled with frustration and disgust.

Oddly enough, The Descent, which as of this writing I’ve just watched for the third time (for my family it was the first, and their reactions will certainly feature into my planned analysis of the film), contains far more violence per minute of screentime than Goodnight Mommy, violence far more extravagant in terms of blood spilled and lives ended. And yet it doesn’t feel nearly as exploitative. Perhaps it’s because that film is so perfectly constructed, whereas the flaws in this one are so egregious they encourage the viewer to poke and prod for more. Perhaps it’s because that movie has a lot to say (in a comparatively subtle way) about grief and the titular descent into despair that follows, where this one could say a lot about the mutual fears of parent-child relationships but chooses instead to descend into melodrama and ridiculousness. Either way, a comparison between the two proves that an over-the-top level of gore is not inherently in bad taste; it’s all in how you use it, and Goodnight Mommy doesn’t seem to be interested in using it as much more than a way to keep the audience involved with a shoddily constructed descent into not madness but absurdity.

There are glimmers of greatness in Goodnight Mommy, which makes it worse than if it were simply a consistent display of hackdom. It’s tastefully shot, and its three-person cast of Susanne Wuest and Elias and Lukas Schwarz does an admirable job, the boys in particular easily joining the ranks of excellently-rendered creepy children in the annals of horror film history. And individual moments—Elias’ nightmare of slicing his mother open only for cockroaches to pour out, the aforementioned transferring of sympathies from children to adult—are incredibly effective. It’s all the more a shame, then, that the film’s writer/directors couldn’t elevate the rest of its length to meet these moments in quality. Goodnight Mommy has gotten a fair amount of critical praise, with some going so far as to place it among fellow candidates The Babadook, It Follows and The Witch as one of the best horror films of recent memory. I’ve a feeling that, while those latter three will endure, this one’s reputation will fade away ere long. Not only is it not really horror, inexplicable moment of supernatural antics notwithstanding, it simply isn’t built to last in terms of meaning, story, or sense-making.

Cross-posted from my blog. I began this piece intending to generally review Blatty's novel and by extension its film adaptation, but I'm intrigued enough by the philosophical quagmire that is a Christian framework of demonic possession within a genre that is essentially atheistic that I decided to focus solely on that issue. The theology of horror is something I want to write about further in future, so this was a good test run for seeing if my ideas have any merit.

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An infernal nuisance: The Exorcist and the problem of demonic possession

Next to Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is probably the most important horror novel ever written. It and its more famous film adaptation near-singlehandedly ushered in the Horror Boom of the 1970s-80s, a period that permanently raised the horror genre’s place in public consciousness and gave us authors such as Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Clive Barker. The entire subgenre of demonic-possession story was also brought to popularity by the book and the film, and has never since gone away (even The Babadook, an otherwise classically monster-in-the-closet tale, can’t quite escape its influence). It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the story’s two versions to the genre of horror and to popular culture in general. Which is why it’s a shame that both are deeply flawed, and the novel in particular simply isn’t that good.

Let me qualify the above by saying that the novel still merited three stars out of five as my Goodreads rating. Fun is a large factor in how I rate certain books, and it’s undeniable that Blatty’s novel is indeed quite a bit of fun. Even given all its flaws, it moves at a tremendous clip, and while it never scared me it did have me turning pages at a pretty tight rate. It, like books by Michael Crichton and Jack McDevitt and others like them, is a great stress-reliever; one goes into it knowing exactly what they’re getting and leaves feeling solidly entertained. But where Crichton’s Jurassic Park or McDevitt’s Polaris are also successfully told stories, The Exorcist is merely fun. It lacks a coherence and an internal logic, and this paucity of sense draws attention to itself at all the worst moments.

I can’t place the blame for this solely on Blatty, because these problems are not, by and large, with The Exorcist in particular but with the concept of demonic possession as a whole. It simply can’t be made to work in a piece of horror art, at least not the specifically Christian conception of possession that pervades nearly every such story. Below, I lay out a brief critique of the numerous problems for demons in horror literature, beginning with problems specific to The Exorcist before broadening my approach to the Christian framework of demonic possession in general.

Problems Inherent to The Exorcist‘s Depiction of Possession

The largest problem in The Exorcist that is created specifically by Blatty is involved in the incredible coincidence required for the plot to come about in the first place. Both the novel and the film open in the midst of an archaeological dig in Iraq, with the titular exorcist, Father Lankester Merrin, as our viewpoint character. Merrin is disturbed to discover that one of the artifacts that has been unearthed is an amulet bearing the likeness of Pazuzu, an Assyro-Babylonian wind demon. The priest, who has apparently beaten Pazuzu once before, senses that another showdown is imminent, and promptly vanishes before indeed reappearing in the final act to assist Father Damien Karras in driving the demon from the body of horrifically possessed little girl Regan MacNeil. Ignoring the straining of credulity required to believe that Pazuzu would have fled across hemispheres to possess a little girl who just so happens to live in the same location as Merrin’s Catholic cohorts, his ties to the old priest introduce huge internal problems to The Exorcist.

First of these is the damage that the desert opening does to the story’s atmosphere. One of the elements present in The Exorcist that became integral to the horror boom is the familiarity of its setting. Stephen King especially would learn from this, setting nearly all of his novels in a set of small towns in the state of Maine and never departing from the city limits; the same can be said for Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (which itself borrows heavily from King’s ‘Salem’s Lot) and countless other novels and films of the Horror Boom. Even today, the tactic hasn’t grown stale—placing an alien horror in the midst of an otherwise completely “normal” and familiar environment is a tremendously effective device for making a story’s central evil a much more invasive and paranoia-inducing threat than it otherwise would be. Unfortunately, Blatty undermines his own stroke of genius in this regard by deliberately opening his novel in a conspicuously exotic setting. The sense of scope this lends the narrative, though it leads to some very pretty shots in the film adaptation, is precisely what is not needed—it collapses the otherwise claustrophobic invasion of the mundane by the supernatural in a manner that cannot conceptually be recovered from.

The second problem caused by Blatty’s introduction of Merrin and his foe is the confusion it adds to the story’s internal mythology. The spirit that possesses Regan is very clearly one that fits the Christian conception of a demon (which, as is discussed below, brings with it a whole host of its own problems), answers to such biblical labels as the devil and Legion, and has a particular dislike for crucifixes and holy water. Identifying it as the Assyro-Babylonian Pazuzu, however, takes what is otherwise a purely Christian enemy and hopelessly muddles it. Are we to assume Pazuzu is lying, adapting itself to a Christian culture’s fears in order to better exploit it? Did the Assyrians and Babylonians identify as a god an entity that is in fact nothing more than one of Satan’s host (we’ll ignore all the problems of cultural disrespect this entails)? If we were given one of these answers it would at least partially repair the damage, but Blatty never attempts to offer an explanation for the cultural cross-pollination. Pazuzu simply transforms into a Christian demon, and in doing so renders The Exorcist a mythological scrap-heap.

The final problem caused by the story’s opening is one of effective horror. In this regard the film is perhaps the worse offender, in that it explicitly shows Pazuzu’s silhouette behind Regan after Father Merrin is killed by his efforts to save her. This explicit labeling of the story’s shadowy antagonist deflates a huge portion of the fear and tension that have built up prior to the silhouette’s appearance; it takes what has (in the film) been up to this moment an unidentified enemy and explicitly gives him a name and identity. The old truism that the unknown is more frightening than the known holds true here, and we find we can’t be nearly as scared of Pazuzu now that we see him as a concrete entity. In the novel, which unlike its adaptation names the demon in its opening pages, no such climax-interrupting revelation comes; and while Blatty’s text is technically the more egregious breaker of rules due to its presenting its villain’s identity up front, the impact of this flaw is felt less due to its not coming in the midst of such an important scene.

Problems Inherent to the Christian Concept of Possession

Without even considering its impact on horror specifically quite yet, the Christian conception of demon possession is inherently problematic as concerns motive. If we are to accept the Christian definition of a demon as a former angel now fallen and ruled by Satan, the actions of a demonic possession cease to make any sort of sense when considered in detail.

The first of many questions: why possess a human being at all? Blatty’s novel makes a vague comment about Pazuzu’s desire for a warm body, but this causes more problems than it resolves. To begin with, there’s no compelling reason as to why a demon would want to inhabit a body. Even if the Gnostic revulsion for the physical that still pervades a good deal of Christian theology is cast aside, there’s not a particularly large list of advantages for a former angel of God in possessing a meat-puppet. Not only does it seemingly substantially limit the demon’s freedom (rendering it firmly corporeal rather than able to flit throughout the world as it pleases, unable to utilize supernatural powers beyond vague object-moving and other such parlor tricks), it traps it in a body subject to damage, decay, and eventual death. The latter apparently isn’t much of a concern to Christian demons, however—indeed, rather than slowing those processes they attempt to hasten them! Regan is emblematic of a typical Christian possession in this regard, practicing self-mutilation, regularly shitting and vomiting on herself, and growing increasingly sickly. Even if a demon could for whatever reason take enough pleasure in inhabiting a body to regularly attempt to do so, deliberately wrecking its new home and providing it with generally miserable physical sensations rather than pleasurable ones is utterly nonsensical.

The other major question raised by Christian demonic possession: what is the demon’s goal? Presented outside of a Christian framework, possession doesn’t have to make sense; an unknown entity’s goals needn’t be limited to a certain theological system. A specifically Christian demon, though, is automatically saddled with an agenda, one that possession doesn’t seem to suit very well. Causing pain and misery to God’s creatures is a commonly given answer, but if so possession is hardly the most efficient way to go about it; surely using one’s telekinetic powers to, say, collapse a bridge or tear several people’s hearts from their chests is more effective than simply causing one little girl to mutilate herself and shriek obscenities? In The Exorcist, Father Merrin speculates that perhaps the demon possesses a victim in order to drive others to despair; if this is the case, it rather resoundingly backfires, with Pazuzu’s possession of Regan driving her firmly atheist mother to seek spiritual guidance. And if, as is commonly held among Christians who believe in demonic possession, it is impossible for one inhabited by the Holy Spirit to be possessed, isn’t it far more likely that possession would indeed frequently convince unbelievers of the power of the supernatural, rather than causing believers to doubt their faith? Once again, The Exorcist fails to provide an answer, and in this case is not alone.

More interesting than this sort of plothole-picking, though, are the implications that arise when Christian possession is the fuel for a horror novel. It’s my firm contention that all horror, or at least all successful horror, is essentially atheistic or at best maltheistic. This is not to say that horror stories cannot have happy endings (though it’s usually best that they don’t), but those happy endings cannot be obtained through divine intervention. The existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God irreparably undermines the central philosophical conceit of horror—that humans are nothing more than thinking meat, that we are alone in a completely uncaring if not actively malevolent universe, that if anyone is going to save us it must be ourselves (and even the odds of that are inconceivably slim). Once this kind of God is brought into a narrative, it ceases to be horror and becomes nothing more than fantasy, no matter how gruesome its details.

This presents a rather titanic problem for demonic possession stories, at least ones that rely on a Christian framework. We can either bring in God as literal deus ex machina to save the day, rendering our story a completely unsuccessful horror tale; or we dispense with God altogether, which retains a horrific atmosphere but begs the question: what the hell are Christian demons doing in a world without a Christian God?

The Exorcist chooses the latter option. None of the Christian rituals or invocations of Christ’s name desperately hurled at Pazuzu by Merrin and Karras are ultimately effective—they affect the demon not one whit, and Merrin, the perfectly pious saint, dies in the midst of attempting to drive it out. It is only when Karras, furious, demands that Pazuzu come into him, willingly rejecting God and embracing the demonic, that the enemy is beaten; he enters the priest, who promptly hurls himself through a window and down a flight of stone steps. This (if we ignore the book’s sequel, which I’m completely comfortable with doing) apparently kills Pazuzu (yet again bringing up the question of why the hell demons are so keen to inhabit mortal bodies in the first place). It’s a triumph, but rather an empty one; in order to achieve victory, Karras is forced to address the demon on its own terms, rather than relying on a God who is at best unresponsive and more likely simply isn’t present. The film emphasizes this; where the book depicts a priest delivering hasty last rites to the dying Karras, the adaptation shows him breathing his last before even this can occur.

In choosing this ending, Blatty makes the proper aesthetic and philosophical choice, denying any chance of an all-powerful deity saving the day. Unfortunately, in doing so he exposes the inescapable problem of utilizing Christian possession in horror: why does demonic possession occur if the demons’ foe is both good and all-powerful, and if He does not exist what are the demons doing running around in the first place?

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The monumental status of The Exorcist can’t be denied, and its merits, while they’re of a distinctly potboiler quality, are substantial. That said, it remains an essentially unsuccessful story due both to Blatty’s own choices and the constraints of the mythology upon which the novel hinges. As evidenced by its immense influence and popular appeal, it’s an undeniably powerful tale, especially in its film adaptation. Unfortunately, much of its power comes from one’s own religious belief and the accompanying terror of the forces of Satan. Once that’s left behind, fear starts to unravel in the face of questions—and those questions ultimately can’t be recovered from.

I walked into Carol expecting it to be easier than it was. I expected a tearjerker—it’s a lesbian romance that takes place in the 1950s, after all, and that’s not something that’s going to end well. I expected an emotional catharsis that left me walking out of the theatre feeling drained but also uplifted by negative emotion, if that makes sense. Instead, I walked out confused. Carol is a film that, at first, seems to hold its viewer at a distance, cold and impenetrable.

Its cinematography reflects this mood. The 16mm film it was shot on casts a haze of grain over the proceedings, characters’ faces fogged by swimming particles. Chemical color grading lends a subtle sepia tone to every image, evoking both times gone by and the chill of New York in wintertime; there are next to none of the popping hues or warm tones typical of hot emotions. Its most impressionist moments, with bokeh hanging in the background and raindrops smeared on the lens, are reminiscent of paintings or snapshots from a dreamscape. It’s utterly beautiful, but it’s not the kind of beauty that lends itself to ecstatic feelings; it’s muted, melancholy, as if seen through a car window in the midst of a drizzle (which, indeed, is literally what happens in several scenes).

Similarly, the film’s characters hold each other at an uncomfortable distance for a good portion of its runtime. Anyone who walks into Carol expecting its titular character (Cate Blanchett), an upper-class woman in the midst of an ugly divorce, and Therese (Rooney Mara), a young photographer who works in a department store to pay the bills, to go through the typical motions of falling into friendship and then love is going to be disappointed. Most of their interactions in the film’s first half are stiff and self-conscious, with Carol attempting to seduce Therese but being horribly obvious about it and realizing how horribly obvious she is, and Therese markedly uncomfortable and bemused by this stranger’s attempts at what she initially perceives as friendship. Early on in the film I chalked these interactions up to an awkward screenplay, but eventually I began to realize what director Todd Haynes was doing.

“I don’t know what I want,” Therese says, weeping, in a crucial scene late in the film. “How could I know what I want if I say yes to everything?” As this revelation hit her, it also hit me. Carol is not a movie about love, it’s a movie about selfishness. Carol romances Therese not because she’s in love, but because she desperately needs an outlet for the welling emotions she’s suffering due to the stress of her divorce and the possibility of her husband taking her daughter away from her out of spite. Therese responds to Carol not because she loves her but because she’s infatuated and because she’s possessed of a chronic inability cause trouble for anyone. Carol’s husband uses their daughter as leverage not because he loves Carol and wants her back but because he needs to possess her. And so on and so forth. It’s a quietly devastating study in just how wrong things can become when relationships start to crumble.

Not to say that Carol is an awful person, or that her relationship with Therese isn’t moving. The moment in which Therese realizes what Carol feels for her and decides that she feels something too is quietly beautiful, the consummation that comes immediately afterward shot in such a startlingly intimate way compared to the rest of the film that it feels transcendent. And both women are ultimately victims, living in an age which views their feelings as nothing but depravity. But while the film doesn’t blame the women for their unfortunate circumstances, or consider their attraction at all wrong or unhealthy, neither does it present their story as an easily-swallowed tragic romance. It’s off-putting to have these expectations completely turned on their heads, but the film is far better for it, taking what could have been trite and neat and turning it into something far more disquieting and thought-provoking.

Ultimately, while the film is named after Blanchett’s character, it’s Therese who is its heart and soul. The meek, frightened vulnerability with which Mara plays her is arresting, especially when contrasted with Blanchett’s confidence and maturity. Each performer would deserve a Best Actress win, for the film couldn’t have happened without them. They bring an essential element of humanity to the movie, one that otherwise could have been lost in Haynes’ chilly visuals despite the ultimate humanity of the screenplay. It’s for Mara especially that I’ll be returning to this movie, her film-misted visage a spark of hope and beauty in a great work of art that’s very much concerned with the latter but not often with the former.