MIFF Session 6: ROSE: A LOVE STORY

A man emerges from a cabin in snowbound woods. He locks the door from the outside to keep whatever is inside in. He checks rabbit traps he's laid and returns with a pair of them. Back home, his wife Rose is trying to write a novel but she's blocked. She prepares the rabbit for dinner in a mask as he goes off to another room, applies leeches to his legs and puts a bowl of blood on the table for his wife. That's why they live in isolation. Not long after, he goes to investigate a cry in the night. It is a young woman who has been caught in one of the traps. Even out there in the wilderness, far from servos and town life, life is complicated.

Vampires have it tough in fiction. No one takes them seriously anymore so the only way they can find work is as a parable driver. It might be addiction or illness but it's there to coagulate a point. This one is about the illness that is always on the pop of undoing a marriage. It takes massive labour and skill to get people to buy tickets to see a marriage under strain of MS or dementia but chuck in vampirism, call it elevated horror and you're there.

It sounds like I'm down on this film but I'm not, really. Performances, visual style, story and dialogue are all well above the norm and the subdued central issue is kept under firm control. My problem is that it puts so much work into that that when the genre aspects kick in (as they must for the story to work) the risk is one of unintentional comedy. The indications of blood addiction and the consequences of leaving it unsatisfied are made with a circularity that suggests mundanity. While there are foreshadowing hints of violence they are so undercut by the effectiveness of the day-to-day that the climax has been drained of power.

Yes, the story of a doomed marriage is a powerful one and the thematic boost from an investment in genre fiction is done with confidence but this has become expected of a contemporary vampire tale. George Romero's film Martin did this brilliantly by making the immortal figure stuck in his teen years and only slightly playing the comedy of that and then only after introducing the character's ruthlessness and violence. That was in 1977. The struggle Rose faces is that there is really nothing engaging anymore about making the mythical plain. The reason running zombies aren't as scary as unstoppably shuffling ones is the same as vampires who don't live for the kill, you make them too much like people and you need to make their monstrosity frightening. That just doesn't happen here.

It might be unfair to damn this film with the term elevated horror but it does seem to be trying for it. The phrase is more likely the resort of those who wish to elevate themselves ... above a genre that is one of cinema's oldest and longest lasting. If not, what is the point of introducing a horror trope to begin with? Why not have a serious condition from the real world? Because you want to come in with an elevated horror credit and be the life of the party? Ok, that is doing a disservice but the sheer quality of the parts of this sum to be let down by the trope of its promise all but begs it. Pity.