The Harbinger (2022)

(This is about Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger, not the movie by Will Klipstine of the same title, from the same year).

It’s the height of the pandemic lockdown in the US. Monique (Gabby Beans) leaves the home where she is sheltering with her brother and father when her old friend Mavis (Emily Davis) asks for her help with some unspecified problems. They haven’t seen each other for years, but Mavis once saved Monique’s life during a hard run-in with mental illness, so even the pandemic is not going to get in the way of the woman repaying the favour.

Mavis’s problem is rather disturbing. As she tells it, she is plagued by nightmares, or more than nightmares but dream states which don’t end like normal dreams do, and can take days out of her life.

In these nightmares, Mavis regularly encounters a being dressed  like a plague doctor; she has started to believe it is this entity that attacks her through her dreams, with the end goal of completely erasing her from existence. She doesn’t believe she can take it any longer, so Monique’s support is supposed to be a life line for Mavis. Her supposed saviour is sceptical when it comes to the objective truth of what Mavis thinks is happening to her, but she has lived with her own mental illness long enough herself not to disbelief the truth of the experience. Unfortunately, her attempts of helping Mavis seem to infect her with the same entity her friend is fighting.

Andy Mitton is one of the more interesting directors working in the indie space right now. He is particularly good when it comes to portraying those states where dream and reality seem to drift into one another and the ground of reality turns into quicksand. So a dream horror film like this does certainly play to his strengths. There’s a strong sense of proper dream logic to the nightmares Monique will begin to suffer through (we never get into Mavis’s mind this way). The dreams are suffused with a sense of dread that feels very personal and individual to Monique, distorted echoes of a past Mitton never exposits at us, because is is always clear enough how to understand the reality through the nightmare – without things becoming bland.

How personal these dreams feel is rather typical of Mitton’s films (perhaps with YellowBrickRoad as an exception), where the supernatural is always very effectively connected to a protagonist’s inner life, in often subtly revealing ways. Consequently, the film at hand takes great care drawing Monique and her lockdown-reduced social world in meaningful ways.

The Harbinger doesn’t just want to tell a tale of personal horror taking place in a world of real global horror but also attempts to reproduce some of the psychological effects of the pandemic, all those little feelings of wrongness and the low-level dread many of us suffered under at its height. The titular monster isn’t a metaphor for the pandemic itself, exactly (because allegory is the lowest form of art), but embodies elements of how many of us felt about it.

It is also a very fine horror creation, a being that doesn’t just kill you unpleasantly like your run of the mill dream demon does, but rips people-shaped holes in the world, in memory and reality, holes whose existence you can only realize through the feeling of absence and loss caused by them. In The Harbinger, taking away lives is secondary to the titular entity taking away all the small kindnesses and gestures of human connection that now never have existed either, making the world a worse place little by little, absence by absence. Something which the film portrays chillingly despite its small scope.