The Sect (1991)

Original title: La setta

After a prologue taking place a couple of decades earlier in the USA introduces us to a rather nasty cult leader (Tomas Arana) with the habit of cutting off faces in a rather occult-scientific way and threatens a decades-long plan, we fast forward into the future of the early 1990s, to a small town near Frankfurt.

After orphan turned teacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis) invites a rather smelly looking old gentleman – who will turn out to have the delightful name of Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom) - into her house because she nearly ran him over with her car, her life turns into a living nightmare, of course involving that face-cutting cult and the endgame of their plan.

In between an actual labyrinth hidden in her house’s cellar that contains a well connected to hell or a comparably unpleasant place, a nasty bug that may or may not lay an egg in her brain, a really creepy weirdo as her love interest, and the eventual realization that her whole life is a lie, the face cutting bit might actually appear rather harmless to our protagonist.

Before Michele Soavi became a work for hire director for Italian TV, and after working as an assistant director for Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, he directed a quartet of incredible horror movies, so wonderfully Italian in all the best ways, it is hard to believe they were made at the tail end of successful genre filmmaking in the country when most of his peers couldn’t get a good movie financed to save their lives.

The Sect is usually the least appreciated of these films. I’m not terribly surprised about that fact, for where the nightmarish mood of the other three films – Stage Fright, The Church and even that of Dellamorte dellamore - is rooted in as much proper narrative as you get with this arm of Italian horror (which isn’t much by the boring standards of the here and now), the film at hand goes as far in the direction of free-floating, macabre strangeness as possible while still being recognizable as a genre narrative. In this sense, as in its extreme – if different – stylishness this reminds me most of my favourite Argento movie Inferno. There as here, narrative concerns and real world logic matter little when compared to creating moods, feelings and impressions through a distinctive visual style.

Which rather seems to be the point of the whole project of the cinema of the fantastic as a whole when seen through the lens of these films, and most certainly the point of The Sect. The irrational and the supernatural by their very nature are meant to defy logic and explanation, and from this perspective, their only proper treatment would be through a film becoming illogical and outright weird.

In Miriam’s specific case, all of her ideas about her identity and the reasons underlying the way she leads her life are completely undermined (rather as if she had a labyrinth where most people have a cellar), and she finds herself the pawn of a ritual the cultists being involved in don’t actually appear to be able to grasp beyond a belief they are involved in a variation of Rosemary’s Baby.

Clearly, unlike the cultists, Soavi (who co-wrote with Argento and Gianni Romoli) was not terribly impressed with the ending of that film, so he writes a better one for Miriam than Rosemary got, an ending that mixes about five surprisingly feminist minutes with a further dollop of utter irrational weirdness only proper in this particular movie.

Needless to say, this is even less a film for everyone than most other movies are; though if it sings to you, as it does to me, it’s going to truly sing.