Fantastic Fest is now over. All the good nerd boys and girls have gone home to hibernate until next year. It’s a time a quiet reflection and rehydration.
It was a strange year for the fest. In some ways it felt like its first time at bat instead of a festival with 10 years of experience. The new venue, the new ticketing system, and some rainy weather lent the whole thing a bit of a loose and chaotic vibe. Gone were the ordered lines and ample personal space. In their place was an overstuffed herd of geek cattle that often turned into wild stampede when the gates were opened.
These are relatively minor setbacks, however, and are sure to be fixed by next year. The heart remained intact and the programming was as good as its ever been. I was not able to see as much as I had hoped, due to life constantly getting in the way. It Follows, Cub, Nightcrawler, Force Majeure, The Duke of Burgundy, and Felt were all buzzed about movies that I didn’t get a chance to see. Thankfully, with the rise of digital distribution channels, all of these will likely be available to the general public very soon.
But lets move on to what I did see. The three films I’m talking about today were all thematically of a piece. All deal with motherhood, in their own way, and none of them are pretty.
The Babadook
The Babadook was a bit of a known quantity. It has played other festivals and has garnered a reputation as being one of the scariest films in recent memory. Perhaps my expectations were too high but I did not find the movie all that scary. What I did find, though, was an incredible look into the stresses of single parenthood.
The movie follows single mother Amelia, played brilliantly by Essie Davis, as she tries to raise her tyrant of a son, Oskar. Oskar’s father died in a car crash driving Amelia to the hospital to deliver Oskar, and Amelia has been living with a buried resentment for her son ever since. It doesn’t help that he’s loud, disobedient, and seems to have a delusional obsession with monsters.
Watching Amelia be slowly beat down by a son she has to actively try not to hate is the most compelling aspect of The Babadook. It’s a movie that could have worked even if the stress and resentment wasn’t physically manifested in the form of the titular fairy tale monster.
The Babadook is a creature from a pop up childrens book that mysteriously shows up in the house one night. Oskar asks to be read the book as a night time story, which ends up unleashing the monster in the house. The monster itself is of a somewhat silly design, knowingly harkening back to the silent film era, but manages to raise a few hairs due to some expert direction that wisely doesn’t show too much.
The real horror comes from watching Amelia become broken down and possessed by this spirit, which causes her to finally act on the negative feelings she has for her son. The movie cleverly makes the audience switch their allegiances as we realize that Oskar is just a misunderstood boy who hasn’t been given the love and guidance that a child needs. He truly loves his mother and has wanted nothing more than to protect her from the monsters he’s always known are there.
It all ends up being a rather sweet movie of parent and child finally coming to know one another.
Ich Seh, Ich Seh (Goodnight Mommy)
On the other end of the spectrum is this years secret screening, Goodnight Mommy. The last word I’d use to describe this film is sweet. In fact, by the end I was physically exhausted from how hard I was tensing up during the climactic scenes. It’s a harrowing experience.
The movie follows, once again, a single mother struggling to raise a possibly delusional child. This time the struggle is amplified as the mother is dealing with twin boys.
Goodnight Mommy has a reversed trajectory from The Babadook. We begin the film on the side of the boys. We stay with them as they play and run around their beautiful modernist home in the country. Mommy is a minor celebrity and in an effort to fight off age, she has had some cosmetic surgery. As a result, her head is completely bandaged and she mostly hides away in her bedroom to heal. From the children’s perspective, though, this makes their mother appear to be absolutely monstrous. A ghoul hiding in the shadows of their home. It doesn’t help that when the bandages are removed, she doesn’t quite look like Mom anymore.
This causes the boys to doubt that mom is really mom, and it begins a supremely uncomfortable antagonistic relationship that culminates in some of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen on film.
Goodnight Mommy legitimately shook me, and that’s a testament to its quality, but I did think there was one major problem with the film. There is supposed to a mystery central to the plot, something that, once revealed, is supposed to change the context completely. The issue is that this mystery is strongly telegraphed and painfully obvious. You’ll know what’s going on with the boys within the first 10 minutes of the movie, which makes a lot of the first half of the film tedious as it tries to draw out this secret.
Once it abandons this and the facts are laid bare, however, Goodnight Mommy turns into truly effective horror. Make sure you have the stomach for it.
Everly
Closing out the single mother trilogy is Everly. An over the top action cheesefest from director Joe Lynch.
Salma Hayek stars as Everly, a woman who is kidnapped and sold into sex slavery soon after the birth of her daughter. Now, years later, she is trapped in a hotel with other women in similar situations. The movie begins with Everly naked and defenseless following an offscreen incident of sexual abuse. She finds a gun that’s been stashed away for her and proceeds to kill everyone in the room.
The rest of the film takes place in a single hotel room as Everly fights off wave after wave of bad guys trying to kill her, all while trying to contact the mother and daughter she hasn’t seen in years.
That makes the film sound far more serious than it actually is. Everly actually reminded me of the wacky genre films of the 80’s. The enemies often seem like they come out of an arcade fighting game. Jokes and cheesy one liners abound. The violence is over the top. It’s quite a bit of fun, but also comes off as tonally inappropriate. We are supposed to really feel for Everly as she scrapes and scratches her way through every encounter but its hard to take any of it seriously when the villains are constantly giving into action movie cliches like giving speeches with their backs turned instead of killing Everly when they have the chance or fighting her one by one when they could easily overtake her by fighting together.
Overall the movie didn’t really work for me. It uncomfortably straddled the line between trying to be a real movie and being a cartoon. It’s a decent late night tv movie though.