The Rizen (2017)

1955, in what we will later learn is an underground research facility below Kent. A woman (Laura Swift), let’s call her Frances for that’s what her documents say, awakens while being dragged through a dark – probably dank – tunnel by a humanoid creature with a bandaged head. I hope you like this tunnel, for you’ll look at it for large parts of the rest of the film. Anyway, Frances manages to bash the creature’s head in, and begins to make her way through the underground facility. Unfortunately, she’s suffering from a bout of amnesia, so she has no idea where she is, why she’s there, or what she is supposed to do. Gradual flashbacks (aka the only parts of the film not taking place in the grey and black tunnels) reveal that she has been prepared – programmed more like it – to do something very important indeed. But what? Who knows? On the positive side, she is rather good at killing the bandaged creatures, and soon saves a fellow amnesiac wearing the uniform of a movie scientist (Christopher Tajah) to team up with. Eventually, they realize the researchers have ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe through which something very nasty is trying to enter.

Not completely to my surprise, given how many of my favourite plot and background element The Rizen hits, I found myself enjoying Matt Mitchell’s piece of cosmic pulp horror quite a bit. It’s a film where I have to give fair warning, though. This was clearly shot for very little money, so there’s quite a bit wrong with the film on a technical level: there’s the general tediousness of watching characters spending much of their time in blackness with greyish walls that suggest little money for production design, acting that’s often pretty terrible (with Swift the obvious exception by being alright for many of her scenes and actually good in the rest), and a running time that’s about twenty minutes too long and could have been much improved by cutting out the ineffective humour and the ill-placed “romance”.

There’s also the strange phenomenon of how much better the flashback sequences look – they even have actual set design! -  and how much more professional the actors in them are as well – even Swift who is in both seems just much more in control in these scenes.

The thing is, despite the flaws, there’s a fine creative core to the film, with some well realized ideas about weaponized occult research, some mysteries that work well because the film isn’t answering them, and some really fun monsters, all involved in a plot that really knows how to do the pulpy side of cosmic horror justice. Despite its low budget, The Rizen effectively builds up the background to its horrors in the flashbacks, and ends on a genuinely exciting climax. On the monster side I am particularly fond of the bandaged head design we get for most of the time. It’s much creepier than cheap masks or CGI and uses the power of a viewer’s imagination to good effect, while also getting an excellently weird explanation later on. The action scenes, even though a bit repetitive, are much better realized than is normal in this sort of thing, too. They feel weighty and desperate, while still keeping the silliness that makes this pulpy rather than classicist cosmic horror. I suspect Swift’s background as stunt performer helped quite a bit in this regard.


While The Rizen obviously resonates with those parts of me that thrive on Lovecraft and what something like “Delta Green” made of some of his ideas and creations, there are some thematic concerns on display here that belong to it alone, thoughts about free will, heroic sacrifice and heroism that fit very well into the rest of the film’s ideas. It seems rather telling – as well as awesome – that the most important heroes here are a woman and a black man.