Past Misdeeds: Mr. Jones (2013)

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.

Penny (Sarah Jones) and Scott (Jon Foster) are retreating into the proverbial cabin in the woods - though it’s a pretty upmarket sort of cabin - to get away for a year to “work on” their relationship, help Scott cope with a never defined mental illness, and give him time and space to make a nature documentary.

Things seem fine at first, but city boy Scott gets bored quickly with the rather samey beauties of nature, and it is perhaps not actually all that great for a struggling relationship when both partners spend all of their time together isolated in a cabin in the woods for weeks on end. Who knew? And, come to think of it, Scott secretly having stopped taking his meds can’t help the situation either. All these turn out to be rather quotidian problems compared to the things the couple soon stumbles into, though.

It turns out they have a neighbour living in a shack close by, a guy in a creepy mask (Mark Steger) sneaking through the woods at night carrying what looks like a lantern, putting up strange and rather creepy totem poles all around the woods. Penny identifies these poles as the work of the mysterious artist only known as Mr. Jones, and after sneaking into their artist neighbour’s – or whatever he is - creepy underground workshop, she gets the brilliant idea that Scott should make his documentary about Jones instead. With the survival instincts of a true horror film character, Scott jets off to New York, where he learns rather disturbing things about Jones: how one day the first of his sculptures (if that’s what they are) just was sent to a New York gallery, and his later ones were sent to seemingly random people. Worse, these people seemed to have had a rather bad time of it afterwards, as if the statues had a malignant influence of some kind on them. More academic research connects Jones’s works to the mythological border between the world of dreams and our reality.

While Scott learns of these things and becomes convinced there’s something definitely destructive about Jones and his motives, Penny has an encounter in the woods around their cabin that convinces her of pretty much the opposite. To her, the statues are something in the manner of occult scarecrows, and Jones’s intentions towards her and Scott well-meaning and protective. Still, when Scott returns, the couple do agree further poking around in Jones’s business to be the appropriate reaction to what they have learned and believe. Not surprisingly, this turns out to be rather a bad idea for everyone involved.

Karl Mueller’s POV horror movie Mr. Jones pushes a lot of my personal buttons, so the director would have had to put considerable effort into making horrible decision after horrible decision to put me off of this one. How many horror films - sub-chapter The Weird - do you find, after all, whose cosmology has quite a whiff of Algernon Blackwood to them, and who put their characters into an illogical – or rather dream-logical - nightmare world for their whole final third without fear of alienating the parts of their audience who dislike getting confused and want something more strict and linear (“plot holes!” I hear them scream while I’m looking at them askance, but then, different tastes and all) from their movies about the abnatural.

However, I don’t even think you can honestly say that Mr. Jones doesn’t make sense. On its own terms, it’s a perfectly logical movie where a leads to b leads to c, only that a and b look rather strange, and that the road between them has a lot of mirrors by the wayside. Speaking of mirrors, the film does make wonderful use of the doppelganger motive, finding a clever and effective way to broaden its meaning through the conventions of POV horror, giving some uncomfortable answers to the question of who is filming certain scenes and why, while at the same time using the opportunity for rather more involved camera set-ups than strictly normal in the style. It’s an economical and clever way to use the style of the film to make the content more disquieting, and turn the clichés of that style sideways until they look strange again, or rather Weird.

There’s quite an obvious allegorical reading to the film too, though if you’re like me and think that allegory is the least interesting use of any given narrative, you can for once be happy in the knowledge that in Mr. Jones, allegory and the coherence of a narrative that can stand for itself aren’t enemies. Of course, it’s also a film where narrative coherence consists of the film stepping outside of the usual lines of coherence into what you might call incoherence, and where symbols become parts of the characters’ reality, which is the sort of thing that happens when a film takes the whole idea of a dream world seriously beyond the opportunity for cheap reality bending any good dream offers. Nothing against cheap reality bending from my side, of course.

Taking a step back from the film’s big whole, there’s also a lot to love about its minor details. It’s not difficult to argue said whole wouldn’t work at all without the care Mueller takes with the details of his film, but even when you don’t care about that, it’s a (creepy) joy to look at the care with which the film’s stick and bone statues are constructed, witness the symmetry and intelligence of the framing of many of the film’s shots (something many POV horror films eschew for reasons of fake authenticity, sometimes successfully, sometimes not), or just the clarity and simplicity with which Mueller uses the possibilities of cheap digital editing to enhance the weirdness of the film’s nightmare-ish final third.


It’s all very lovely stuff, well acted, without fat, and full of the kind of reality-bending, mythology-building moments I love most dearly in horror.