MIFF Session 10: SOMETHING ELSE

Hank and Abby are a great couple. He has a goofy manliness and she seems to be made out of sunlight. Both are clearly intelligent which might be the problem as, when she leaves a note on the fridge and disappears he collapses into the slough of despond that a sudden drop in information leads to. He leaves her too many voicemails as though he's throwing bottle messages into the dark. 

And there's something else. Something is attacking the house. In fact, every time he looks through his camera or just daydreams of her the sharp clawed thing attacks the front door. He's in a small southern U.S. town and his friend, the sheriff assures him it's just a bear, another friend suggests it's a wildcat. Even though he has only heard it and seen nothing more than the claw marks on his front door he is convinced it's out there, however much he sees the sense of his friends' caution. He's in an emotional abyss where the slightest things can look like hell. So, has he created his own monster? Will the love of his life come back and, even if she does, will things ever be the same? Only the last part seems impossible.

Co-lead, writer and co-director Jeremy Gardner has already delighted the adventurous movie hunter with his no-budget wonder The Battery which did the near impossible by refreshing the zombie movie, here he is looking at the monster in the dark and, once again, his audience is the winner. As a nearly meta touch this film is adjacent to the universe that indy champions Benson and Moorhead (Spring, The Endless) and involves them as producers and even put Benson in a main role as Shane the Sheriff. This strain of sci-horror that has been developing in shadows of the already shadowy A24 label of "elevated horror" (I hate that term but it's useful here). This one allows for deep character development, gathering the indy feel from Hal Hartley in the '90s all the way up to contemporary mumblecore, but delivering on the crises and the scares. The humour and the scares come from well wrought stories and easy self-parody does not make it to the screen.

That means you need good dialogue and casting to match and, in this case, strong ensemble direction. The gang's all here. There are a few monologues as characters talk to each other candidly and they feel natural. The show don't tell envelope does get pushed but its set in such poignant dialogue that it manages to feel natural. We've come a long way in the twenty years since the Blair Witch Project which was shot and improvised by its actors under remote direction and the big bad was a constant unseen threat. Now anyone with a shop-bought computer can make a monster worth the name but it still takes cinematic skill to stop an audience from laughing in derision. The laughs I heard at striking points in this film were not derisive, they were shock. The shocks are thrills and the thrills give this life.