Past Misdeeds: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After the death of his mother Rosalind (Vanessa Redgrave), Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) comes to her house looking for something like closure, or at least to confront parts of the past he shared with his mother. They had been estranged for years, without visits or phone calls, because Rosalind suffered from a kind of mania that drove her to pressing her religion on Leon, playing "games" bordering on child abuse.

Rosalind's house - not the one where Leon grew up in - is a strange place, full of antiques, and statues and statuettes of angels, many of which Leon acquired for Rosalind in his profession in the antiques trade without knowing whom he bought them for. The longer Leon stays the more he is hit by a feeling of something strange, something malevolent even, going on, as if there were some truth to Rosalind's Christian cultish beliefs, and now something were about to punish Leon for his conscious decision against belief. Things seem to move where there shouldn't be movement, Leon is inexorably pressed into confrontation with elements of his mother's beliefs that seem to have taken on life and reality, and something is prowling around the house. Only time will tell if ghosts, wrathful angels, or just Leon's still bruised mind are the cause of the strange happenings.

Rodrigo Gudiño's The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is the kind of film that easily divides opinions, not just because Gudiño is the publisher of Rue Morgue mag (never trust a journo - or blogger - making movies, right?) but because it is a film that combines a lot of elements people usually either love or hate in movies, depending one their temperaments.

It's a slow moving film with comparatively little outward action, utterly dependent on the creation of mood through set design, sound design, camera work, and acting. The Last Will tells its story in a way that not quite answers the question of the reality of what Leon encounters in the house, and consciously keeps parts of the plot's background ambiguous. Seeing that this is also a film circling questions of belief and disbelief via the weird and influences of classic supernatural tales, it's no surprise certain people will find the film boring or pretentious. As with all things mood-based, it's a matter of being compatible with the feeling the film is going for, and if you don't feel it, you just don't feel it, though I'd really wish people would more often differentiate between things that aren't for them, and things that aren't good.

To me, The Last Will is a little wonder of a movie, with a lead actor in Aaron Poole who can carry a film all on his own, never sharing the screen with anyone else. Other actors make their appearances as voices on the phone, in a small bit of video footage, and in form of a long-ish monologue by Vanessa Redgrave that really pulls the film together thematically. But really, the film is centred on Poole, with not a few scenes only showing him exploring the house.

One could argue that the house - on the outside built in a mock-medieval castle style, on the inside a living space reimagined as an angel-obsessed antiques store - really is the film's other main actor beside Poole, as it is the main source of the film's increasingly oppressive mood. The way Gudiño films it, the house is a place probably once meant to fill Rosalind's loneliness through an accumulation of stuff, but now has become something different, a kind of graveyard of emotions and an attempt at keeping a past alive so that it can never truly turn into a new present. In short, it's a place that seems custom-built to create its own ghosts; and Rosalind had turned herself into a ghost even long before she died, it seems. This mood as well as Rosalind's turn of mind might very well have something to do with intellectual influence the Christian sect Rosalind belonged to had on her, but then neither Leon nor the audience ever really learn if they had an active role in the proceedings that caused the house's haunting, or if they just provided more of the emotional trouble Rosalind was looking for.

In fact, the film only ever completely accedes the existence of Rosalind's ghost to be real; we never learn how much of what happens to Leon is caused by her, how much of it is a product of his mental damage, or how much of it has another supernatural source. The film leaves room for various interpretations, if you're interested in them, so you can takes its hints about a cult awakening something supernatural that leeches onto Rosalind's and Leon's private pains at face value, or you can ignore them completely without losing out on much of the film's meaning either way. In the end, the film seems to say, there's really not much of a difference between being haunted by a ghost or being haunted by the past in its non-supernatural form - both things can kill you one way or the other.

The Last Will is also one of the few films questioning the nature of belief and unbelief that doesn't feel the need to come down on either side while damning the other. Rosalind's ghost exists as a creation of her own beliefs, while Leon saves himself by reasserting his disbelief. It's unexpectedly satisfying, and definitely quite a bit less annoying than being petulantly preached at by another movie, quite independent of the direction the preaching comes from.


So, obviously, and not quite unexpectedly given my tastes, I come down on the side of those viewers who find The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh rather spectacular in its quiet, intelligent way. If it were a book, it would probably be published by Ash Tree Press or Tartarus Press, and if that sounds like a recommendation to you, it most definitely is.