Denouement Renouement

Tag: 4.5 stars

  • Hooptober 13: Peeping Tom (1960)

    Film #4 — 1/1 Meta Horror Film; 4/9 Decades

    By C. Ramsay

    Mark Lewis spends his days working as a focus puller on a film production while also doing freelance pin-up photography, seeing the people in the world around him only as subjects for the work that he does, and in effect objectifying them. In his free time, he obsesses over filming and reviewing the next sequence in a documentary he’s making, a snuff film, in which he captures the fear on his current dying victim’s face while he kills them. A quintessential title in the psychosexual horror canon, Peeping Tom uses a meta approach to question voyeuristic complicity, conflating audience members as subject and object alike, and was so ahead of its time in these considerations upon its release that it virtually ended the career of its director, Michael Powell.

    From the opening minute, the viewer is subjected to peering through the perspective of Mark’s rolling camera as he murders a sex worker. There is no time spent concealing or building up to revealing who Mark is; to proceed with watching the film for any amount of its runtime entails agreeing to be paired for its entirety with a perverted murderer with full knowledge of his capabilities and desires. “The morbid urge to gaze” is questioned as much for us as it is Mark, who has made himself such an essential part of his own cinema that it even occasionally projects over himself, alternatively stretching to encapsulate the people in his life, warping and melding place and time within the film and beyond. As we move with Mark, the audience risks being caught: at one point a flashlight shines directly on us, revealing our hiding spot through the screen, and at a couple others Mark chances a brief glance our way, an acknowledgment of our presence and inadvertent support in the actions he takes. In creating a film with the contents and focus that Peeping Tom has, Powell seeks—with the help of the viewer—to identify the line between exploitation and the artistry of perverse subjects such as pornography, violence, and death.

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  • Highlight: Hamnet (2025)

    By C. Ramsay

    Unexpectedly, this came across much more as a horror film leeching from the elements of a traumatic family drama than it did as purely an overwrought romance. Many other horror films came to mind during the runtime, including The Witch, Midsommar, and Mother!, but none more so than Antichrist. There is a world that exists outside of the core family, and other people we see them regularly interacting with, yet they feel ultimately, and unknowingly, confined to their tableaux, unable to integrate into broader society in any meaningful way for the audience to see. It’s as if they live within one of the miniatures from Hereditary, toiling endlessly toward some sort of meaning, some stability, in a world that can only support incomprehensible grotesquery masked by striking beauty. Agnes, Will, and their children are players who are unaware of their roles, trapped in a Hellish limbo, and fated to process loss in incompatible ways.

    The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus tries and fails to retrieve his partner from the underworld, is introduced early on in the film and regularly evoked as a through line as the familial hardships worsen, but this is not the only embedded mythology. Death, too, is conveyed as a character through camera motion—always present, always hovering, but quiet, patient, and waiting. Yet, this characterization is obfuscated as being distinct from the audience due to the shared perspective. We are, and it is, unable to leave the family. We know what we are here for, and though we may wish otherwise, we get exactly that.

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  • Hooptober 12: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

    Film #28 — 3/3 Wildcard Films

    By C. Ramsay

    Jane Schoenbrun has a knack for capturing such a specific melancholic type of nostalgia in their films, with World’s Fair ramping it up uncomfortably high. Centered on a teenager named Casey, we quickly learn she spends most of her time in isolation in her attic bedroom with no friends to really speak of and a neglectful father who seems to find her presence a frustration. Like many kids who have found themselves in the same circumstances, Casey turns to seeking community through unsupervised Internet access, diving too deep into niche rabbit holes of horror-based subcultures and exacerbating untreated mental health struggles in the process. After taking part in the initiation process of the “World’s Fair Challenge,” we stay with Casey as she lives day by day, continuing to record videos of herself possibly experiencing post-initiation changes, and striking up a relationship with another World’s Fair participant who goes by “JLB” and happens to be a middle-aged man.

    There is such a deep sadness surrounding Casey. Her depression and loneliness are palpable to viewers, especially those who can relate more explicitly to the specifics of her experiences, but all of it is rooted in empathy. The film also capitalizes on more deeply immersing the viewer through exploiting what can be accomplished via multi-sensory experiences, and the format of including videos within videos makes the audience feel involved through the sense that we’re accessing videos of Casey the way she is of others. 

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  • Hooptober 12: The Outwaters (2022)

    Film #24 — 2/3 Wildcard Films

    By C. Ramsay

    Following four friends traveling deep into the Mojave Desert to make a music video, Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters combines elements from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Picnic at Hanging Rock to create a horrifying pastiche of back-country dread. Though a weighty share of its runtime feels painfully amateur—a negative reflection of Banfitch’s combined efforts in writing, directing, producing, starring in, doing the cinematography for, and editing the film—the latter half transitions to being evidence of what can be achieved through the confines of a small budget mixed with unbounded creativity. It never feels like there’s much effort put into the characterization of the group we follow, with nearly the first hour reflecting only their drab, predominantly mopey personalities. While this begins as a fault in the writing, it eventually becomes a testament to the gruesomeness presented and the degree to which it makes the characters as they exist sympathetic to the audience. Where every minute initially seems to drag under mediocrity, each later feels endlessly inescapable, with the characters reduced to sniveling, huffing, bestial renditions of their earlier selves who we can only hope are able to achieve some sort of salvation. The plot is structured fairly well and moves in completely unexpected ways, with the fear coming from a lack of formula and no forewarning to the audience of what might happen. Everything is panic, despair, and pitiful terror.

    Using an experimental approach, many scenes from the first half of the film are effectively unsettling in how they’re framed and edited, and in the types of audio overlaid instead of relying mostly on musical score. The soundscape overall is fantastic, but sometimes goes a touch overboard, aiming for shock value rather than immersion. Relatedly, the greatest feature of the horror presented is its abstractness: only being able to see a fraction of what’s going on and having our brains fill in the rest, or having visual access to what’s happening but not being able to make sense of it. Where things falter slightly is in occasionally showing too much; if certain visuals were toned down and retained a status of being slightly off from making sense instead of turning into jumpscares, then every scene would be just as effective. For so much imagery in the last act being abstract, there’s also some specific, clear imagery that feels a bit too out of place to meld properly with everything else. Altogether though, the gore is designed well and conveys complete depravity, and the angles of certain shots and how they capture the people in them are nauseating.

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  • Hooptober 12: Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988)

    Film #18 — 4/4 Films Based on Novels

    Also filed under: A-One

    By C. Ramsay

    An extremely slow burning, quiet character study about loss, grief, and the human condition in the face of tragedy. Rex and Saskia, a couple on holiday, pull up to a busy rest stop where Saskia suddenly disappears. Rex, never having given up the search and taunted by postcards from the supposed abductor, returns to the scene after three years desperately seeking answers. Aside from a few minutes the audience has alone with Rex and Saskia at the beginning of the film, the killer is introduced early on. The focus is almost never on who, but on the depressingly unanswerable question of why.

    Jumping between character perspectives, director George Sluizer subjects the viewer to a mixture of firsthand accounts of the actions of certain people as well as the secondhand understanding of them through stories and explanations. From our own viewpoint there is no telling what’s reliable or to what extent, we’re forced to accept what we’re given without question or risk our questions being forever unresolved. The scene of Saskia’s disappearance at the start of the film, shot from Rex’s point of view, provides a sample of the frustration this feeling brings—of realizing something isn’t right and thinking there must be an easy explanation, something simple we’ve overlooked, before the aching sense of dread starts to creep in, giving way to overwhelming panic. Everything can be done right and it still won’t matter.

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  • Hooptober 12: Angst (1983)

    Film #14 — 1/3 Wildcard Films; 6/9 Decades; 2/6 Countries (Austria)

    Also filed under: A-One

    By C. Ramsay

    This might be the most difficult film I’ve ever watched. Opening with a warning to the squeamish followed immediately by some of the most uniquely disorienting camerawork to ever be featured in filmmaking, the viewer is never given a moment to find their bearings. K, the psychopath, provides narration throughout the film explaining his ideas and reasoning. The calmness of this narration initially begs for the viewer’s interest, but is mixed with demented imagery, and the gravity of the descriptions K provides of his actions are dread-inducing. It is incredibly uncomfortable to be inescapably stuck with him for the duration of the film knowing what he’s capable of.

    The avant-garde filmmaking is nauseating, full of fast, swaying motions that are almost always pinned to K and his movements, putting us directly into his headspace while simultaneously victimizing the audience. We see which details tend to stand out to him in potential victims while also being bombarded with extreme closeups of him doing things like eating, something that should be a regular action, but in his case is witnessed as being just as deprived and destitute as the rest of his behaviour. 

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  • Hooptober 12: The Stepford Wives (1975)

    Film #12 — 3/4 Films Based on Novels

    Also filed under: A-One

    By C. Ramsay

    “Tell me about yourself…What does your husband do?”

    Walter, Joanna, and their two young children, Amy and Kim, are finalizing packing their car to uproot from Manhattan to Stepford, Connecticut when they’re first introduced to the audience. Joanna, a photographer, seems distracted in longing for the city before they’ve even left, and the kids are curious of the world around them. When Walter eventually catches up to them with the last of their things, he’s bitter, rushing to take off, and expressing contempt for the liberality of the home the rest of his family has not yet processed giving up. With him driving, they take off for the destination of their new all-white, pastoral, guarded community to start the next chapter of their lives.

    The viewer is transported through the hazy dreaminess of Stepford with a drifting camera that gently follows Joanna as she adjusts to the traditionalism of rural suburbia. People of colour are absent as residents and tokenized when brought up, every woman is expected to be quiet and obedient, and Joanna is the only one who sees the children in the area as people. As her unease about the values of their new town grows to safety concerns, Joanna tries to vocalize her fears to her husband who becomes frustrated, making it clear that decisions he’d previously tried to frame as being mutually beneficial were actually based out of patriarchal conservatism.

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