Film #5 — 1/3 Wildcard Films
By C. Ramsay
Opening immediately with a road race that spirals out of control over a bridge, leading to a bad accident in which a young woman named Mary Henry is the only survivor from her car, Carnival of Souls starts big before settling into a simmer for the rest of its run. The aftermath is what matters most, emphasizing Mary’s state of mind as she tries to get her life back on track after moving to a new town to start over. Plagued by visions and struggling to socialize, she teeters somewhere between madness and enlightenment, seemingly terrified of whichever way she might end up falling.
Running off an extremely small budget, perfecting the atmosphere of the film was a necessity to counterbalance the limited options available for presenting the story. Cuts are often used at irregular moments to help convey the fractured sense of time that Mary keeps during her mental and social recovery, and liquid is sometimes poured over the lens mid-shot to visibly warp the world as Mary sees it. Many shots are also used to either play with scale or capture the background, foreground, and Mary in ways that begin to look like they’re blending together, heightening the agoraphobia that she experiences after the crash. The audio is creatively mixed in order to blur what can be heard by both the characters and the audience, or simply the audience. Rhythmic sound effects—the chiming of a store entrance, the sounds of car trouble, creaking doors, and wind—are used at regular intervals while also being interspersed with sudden vacuums of silence. Accompanying these more commonplace sounds is an organ score that’s both eerie and lulling, at times overlaid and at others diegetic, allowing the viewer to sonically identify with Mary’s worsening distress.
Where the atmosphere begins to dissipate is in a lack of leveraging the disconnect between the intensification of Mary’s emotions and the stoicism of everyone around her in relation to them. For a film that runs fewer than 80 minutes, it’s very slow-paced. There are certain feelings exhibited by Mary that we’re able to pick up on by shadowing her through her days, but these moments aren’t introspective enough as they stand, so rather than enriching the story through implication they end up fading into trancelike scenes of wandering for its own sake. However, following Mary this way does allow for viewers to sometimes be shown her direct viewpoint, temporarily possessing her corporeal form to better acquaint ourselves with her world. Otherwise, we usually hover uncomfortably close to her while remaining unseen, pestering her as her visions do.
Irreparably changed from the wreck, Mary becomes haunted in every aspect of her post-accident life. Her mental health issues become exacerbated and allow the trauma to fester, she feels unfulfilled in a job that she doesn’t personally resonate with, and she’s constantly entertaining the gender norms projected onto her by her landlady while fending off the sexual expectations of her male neighbour, through it all longing for something she can never quite place. The emptiness that she always feels, reflected in the spaces of the world around her, acts as a spotlight for the mundane social infractions that are translated to Mary as beacons of terror. Someone staring a bit too long, not answering when being directly spoken to, or drawing too close all end up signaling damnation to her. In an indeterminable amount of time, we watch helplessly as Mary gets pulled further and further from the life she used to know, facing a separation between herself and her values, unsure of which way to turn next and unwilling to make a commitment.
Star rating (/5): ★★★
Recommend?: Yes