Three Films Make A Post: True Love Takes Sacrifice

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw (2020): This piece of folk horror by Thomas Robert Lee clearly wants to play in the same ballpark as films like The Witch, Hereditary, or Midsommar. Mostly, however, it makes it obvious how difficult achievements successful films in this style are. In its characters and obscured back story, the film confuses the vague with the ambiguous; in its plot and pacing, it lacks precision, turning into a mere series of scenes instead of a movie. In theory, the film’s strong-ish grip on a visual mood of grey dread is probably meant to hold things together, but because it only ever seems to ape the outward forms of its style rather than the complicated insides, it never gets beyond being a series of moody scenes. Because the characterisation is so vague, there’s no heft to the moments of outward horror, and the titular curse is never any more than random witchcraft tropes stitched together.

Death of Me (2020): But I still think Lee’s movie is more successful than this thing directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, a film that tries to be tourist horror, twisty thriller, and pseudo Thai folk horror at the same time. A stronger script might perhaps have managed to hold the film’s disparate impulses together, but there’s little thematic connection to the various horrors Maggie Q’s Christine goes through; which is particularly bad in a film that’s supposed to be about a secret ritual. The plot twists never feel earned or part of any thematic whole; it’s supposed to be weird because it’s random, one supposes. That the film also makes no attempt to do anything about the xenophobic vibe movies about innocent westerners traveling somewhere only to be sacrificed by the evil locals can’t help but have does it no favours either. Really, I’m perfectly willing to ignore this sort of subtext in films made before the 1990s, or in classic pulp fiction, but in something made in 2020, there’s just no excuse anymore.

Archons (2018): This tale of a one hit wonder rock group going on a psychotropic drug fuelled journey through the wilds of Canada only to encounter the metaphorical as well as the literal things living inside them is clearly the cheapest of these three movies. It’s also the best, mostly because director Nick Szostakiwskyj seems to have a focussed idea of what his film is actually about, does turn this idea into an actual plot with actual characters, adds weird visions, a bit of body horror and some not terribly great monster suits, and then takes care actually putting these things together into a movie that’s more than a series of disconnected scenes. It’s not as moody as Lee’s film, but makes much better use of the mood it evokes; it beats the Bousman already by not being a random series of twists and racist tropes.