The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

1830. A West Point cadet dies in what at first appears to be a suicide. Somebody breaking into the morgue the evening after to very literally steal the corpse’s heart does make the place’s leadership change their minds about that, though, and they call in a retired New Yorker policeman living in a cabin not too far away from the Academy. Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is a gifted investigator, but he’s not too happy to be drawn into his old profession again. He lost his wife and later his daughter some years ago, and would really rather prefer to drink himself into a stupor and wallow in his grief; he’s not too keen on West Point as an institution either, for reasons that will become clear later. However, he is also fascinated by the case and its macabre circumstances, something that will only increase once further murders happen. Landor acquires a kind of assistant among the cadets in form of one Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). Poe is an outsider among his peers thanks to his combination of romantic weirdness and intelligence as well as his predilection for poetry and the weird. He also has a brilliant mind made to solve puzzles and ciphers, which will stand everyone involved in good stead, especially once things take a turn into the occult.

Going by what I’ve heard, Scott Cooper’s historical mystery with a touch of the Gothic seems to be a bit of a marmite movie, with any given critic either bored to tears or really fascinated by the film and its general mood. I’m part of the latter group, but then, the former seems to believe this in many ways very traditional mystery with an occult bent – and some more modern touches for the last act – to be a procedural. Everyone watches a different movie, apparently.

Be that as it may, I’m not usually terribly font of mysteries that enrol a random famous person from history as a detective; often, because little in these persons’ works or life suggest any interest in these matters (sorry, Oscar Wilde). Poe, on the other hand makes a lot of sense in a detective role, as the father of the modern detective story as well as through his public fascination with puzzles and hoaxes. Cooper, providing his own script from a novel by Louis Bayard makes great use of this, as well as of Poe’s macabre and grotesque and romantic (in the traditional sense of the word) side.

Melling is a great as Poe as well, finding mannerisms and language that makes him feel eccentric and emotionally overblown in many regards, but never drift into caricature. Rather, this Poe is a complete human being, and it makes perfect sense that this version of Poe and Landor begin hitting it off like a strange father/son duo. That Bale’s great doing the very standard “detective haunted by the past” bit should come as no surprise. In fact, he’s so good at it that later developments that could strain belief make perfect sense.

Add to this the film’s wintry mood of rural, US gothic, the various occult shenanigans, and Cooper’s calm, un-showy but often quietly intelligent direction, and a cast so full of great actors (there are Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Lucy Boynton and Gillian Anderson, for example) it can throw away someone like Charlotte Gainsbourg on a minor role, and you’ve pretty much made a film so centred around various of my favourite interests, I’m bound to love it.

As a matter of fact, The Pale Blue Eye does quite a bit more as well. This is very much a movie about how the failure of all figures of authority and respect at just doing their damn jobs and treating their communities with respect and fairness destroys first single members of these communities (in ways that can be lethal, spiritual, or mental) and then the community as a community, without most of these men of authority ever even understanding what is truly happening; one might think because they do not want to see it, though the film isn’t really telling.

Apart from that, there’s also a much more personal story here, about grief, justice, and the things that might come after, but getting further into this would lead us into unnecessary spoiler territory.

Still Crazy (1998)

Tony Costello (Stephen Rea) the keyboarder and sane member of 70s also-ran, nearly great rock band “Strange Fruit”, the kind of band that never quite “made” it, tries to get the old gang back together. It’s easy enough roping their old manager, greatest fan and emotional and professional anchor - also the actual protagonist of the movie - Karen Knowles (Juliet Aubrey) back in again, for the “normal” life clearly bores her shitless by now, but it will take some doing to get the rest of the guys in. They aren’t exactly the best of friends, after all. There is the lure of never fulfilled dreams though. Sure, bass player Les (Jimmy Nail) has managed to build a half-way successful roofing business but where’s the fun in that? And drummer Beano (Timothy Spall) – well, he’s a drummer. The toughest nut to crack will be singer Ray (Bill Nighy). Ray, you see, was only ever the replacement for their first singer - the brother of their now vanished guitar player – who died of a drug overdose, and even apart from that, nobody really liked him, seeing as he is a bit of a pretentious twat. On the positive side, his huge-ass mansion is for sale, so a successful reunion tour just might be exactly what he needs. Of course, even if Karen and Tony will manage to get the band back together, touring life might just break them up again.

Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy is a rather lovely film that uses a lot of well-worn rock and music movie tropes and clichés to talk about what it means to grow older when one hasn’t quite got rid of or perhaps never even wanted to get rid of, those pesky dreams. In the process, the film is at once making fun of many a myth of rock (and 70s rock in particular) and very much showing itself to be in love with these myths.

This seems only fitting for a film whose tone fluctuates between comedy and bittersweet drama, and which will repeatedly show the sad parts of a character it makes the butt of a joke often enough. The director mostly manages to do right by both sides of his film, too, making fun of his characters from a position of understanding and probably even love. I’ve never been fond of comedy that’s based on hatred and superiority towards one’s characters, so this sort of approach resonates well with me. It also presents a more complex view of humanity than you’d expect of a film that does after all end on exactly the sort of all-including and forgiving rock number on stage you’d imagine it to end on. Sometimes, the film clearly believes, you’re the joke, and sometimes you’re the one telling it, and sometimes you’re the asshole without even noticing, and nobody is perfect. Which may not be deep insights, but still deeper ones than those quite a few of us seem to live by.

The film’s also frequently as hilarious as it is supposed to be, thanks to a cast that’s highly capable of the dramatic parts of the film but also joyfully jumping into the moments of greatest silliness. So if you ever wanted to see Stephen Rea look for his nest egg, a tooth Jimi Hendrix lost in a bar fight, this film is for you. Best in class here, it has to be said, is Bill Nighy as Ray, on stage going through an inspired cross of the performance habits of Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne (with a bit of early Peter Gabriel thrown in when he’s in a particularly troublesome mood), and off stage portraying him as a guy trying to hide his very thin hide and his lack of confidence behind a mix of prickliness and pretentiousness, all the while keeping the man weirdly likeable for someone who should be all rights be completely insufferable.


As I said, it’s all rather lovely.

The Enfield Haunting (2015)

1977. When the Hodgsons, a family living in a council home in Enfield, is terrorized by all kinds of poltergeist phenomena, Society for Psychical Research member Maurice Grosse (Timothy Spall) is called in to investigate. He quickly realizes that much of the activity seems to be centred around the youngest daughter, Janet (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), who, we will later learn, happens to share the first name of his own dead daughter.

After the publicity blitz about the affair starts, the SPR sends the delightfully named Guy Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen) in to help Maurice. Well, they actually send him to debunk what is going on, for Maurice’s public belief in the things he experiences in the Hodgsom home seems like rather bad publicity to the organization. It doesn’t take terribly long, though, until Playfair also realizes the phenomena are very real indeed. In fact Maurice’s and his duty may very well be not to debunk what is happening but to help the family experiencing it.

All the time, the phenomena are getting worse, going from the usual moving objects and smashed up furniture to what very much seems like possession of Janet, and even to physical harm.

I’m really not sure if calling a story told in three forty-five minute episodes a mini-series instead of a movie hacked in three parts as the British Sky did with The Enfield Haunting as directed by Kristoffer Nyholm and written by Joshua St Johnston is a terribly sensible idea, but then, I’m not working in TV, so what do I know?

As even someone only very superficially interested in the history of psychical phenomena will realize, the series is based on what may very well be the UK’s most famous poltergeist case, specifically, it calls itself an adaptation of a book about it by the real Guy Playfair. How much the book or this film have to do with any actual reality, only the people involved will ever truly know, but then I’m not writing up a documentary but a pretty neat little horror series, so this question is probably neither here nor there.

There is a very typical mistake quite a few – particularly TV – adaptations of true (or “true”, depending on one’s philosophy and mood) tales of the paranormal tend to make. All too many of them, while going hog-wild with the characterisation of their protagonists and taking all kinds of shortcuts, eschew being satisfying narratives by seemingly going out of their way to not have thematic through lines and certainly no satisfying endings. It’s understandable, of course, for non-fictional tales of the supernatural are not really supposed to have a theme – life sure as hell does not – and usually just peter out somehow, somewhere.

When it comes to this decision of either making a “realistic” story or a satisfying tale of the supernatural, The Enfield Haunting goes straight for the latter, providing not only a dramatic, emotional ending but also building its story rather nicely on Maurice’s emotional involvement with the Hodgson family who clearly could use a non-horrible male in their lives. As they occur, the supernatural events invite him to treat them as a mirror for some of his own ghosts, suggesting a connection between the two girls named Janet that may or may not only exist because he cares for them both. It’s an important, and rather well written, part of the story that also involves the marital troubles between Maurice and his wife Betty (Juliet Stevenson) caused by the death of their daughter. It would be very easy to use this element of the narrative only to jerk out a few tears from the audience – and the series certainly doesn’t shy away from a bit of tear-jerking – but it is also part of the series’ complex idea of human motivation and connection. The inner lives of people, the series understands, are not single-lane streets, so it accepts complexity and ambiguity in them. So where you’d expect it to have Maurice and Playfair go through the usual believer/sceptic rigmarole, it actually portrays both men as believers and sceptics, depending on the situation, something that practically never happens in this sort of story, and which made me really rather happy.

It also uses this approach in its treatment of the supernatural as something that can be threatening and horrifying, and certainly very cruel, but also quiet and kind. Accepting ambiguities seems to be the modus operandi here, and I’m certainly all for it.

Mind you, there’s no ambiguity to the existence of the actual supernatural in the series’ world, but then, there are really only a handful of cases where keeping the supernatural absolutely ambiguous in a tale of horror is anything but frustrating and even a bit cowardly, and I’m pretty sure it would be pointless for The Enfield Haunting. At the very least, the film’s acceptance of the supernatural as a given does provide us with some very good set-pieces. Some of the scenes of Janet – and others – speaking with the voices of the dead are really rather chilling, and the sequence with the medium in the second part manages to start out as a bit of a joke yet becomes increasingly uncomfortable and tense, even more so because it starts as anything but. Series director Nyholm generally manages to keep even the more typical bits of poltergeist business interesting, often concentrating on giving them a physical impact that makes them feel real. These scenes are not, as such, original if your know your horror, but they are so well staged and scripted originality doesn’t come into it.


Nyholm and the script are very ably assisted by a fine cast. I was particularly enamoured with Timothy Spall’s performance that at first seems to be all facial hair and a very late 70s embodiment of growing old badly but that reveals a complex and humane soul. And when have you last seen a movie or TV show this interested in a guy who looks like Spall here that uses him as its actual hero? Eleanor Worthington-Cox is also particularly good, selling all elements of the role - the intelligent teenager, the literally haunted kid, the various characters that will speak through her, and the near brokenness of the final part – without ever laying it on too thick.

Wake Wood (2011)

After their little daughter Alice (Ella Connolly) was bitten to death by a dog, veterinarian Patrick (Aidan Gillen) and his wife, pharmacist Louise (Eva Birthistle), have moved to the small country town of Wake Wood to get over the loss a bit more easily.

Now, about a year after Alice's death, the couple has reached the stage in their grieving process experts call "clinical depression". Especially Louise still can't cope the loss at all, a problem that's not made smaller by the fact that she knows she won't be able to have any further children. But it turns out that Wake Wood is just the right (or maybe just the wrong, given the movie's genre) place the couple could have come to.

The town's inhabitants semi-secretly still follow certain pagan traditions they are willing to share with Louise and Patrick. With the right ritual, there's the possibility to bring back to life anyone who hasn't been dead for more than a year, at least for three days, which surely is better than nothing. The couple is desperate enough to go through the rather frightening ritual, and their daughter is reborn.

However, not everything is well; something's just not right with Alice apart from the fact that dead little girls shouldn't walk around.

As far as I know, some amount of money of the revived Hammer Films went into the production of Wake Wood, though I'm not sure in how far this is "A Hammer Production" in the sense that the re-animated studio had actual influence on the film, and not just a film Hammer bought to put their logo on the DVD after the fact.

It doesn't matter too much anyhow, because, unlike that unnecessary Let The Right One In remake and the horrible Beyond the Rave, Wake Wood is a film that has a lot more going for it than the once good name of Hammer. For one, the film has a more than decent script, that - apart from an ending that asks for more suspension of disbelief than I'm able to achieve and the fact that there wouldn't have been much of a plot if the local pagans had bothered to explain what can go wrong with their rituals under which circumstances a little better - is well constructed, features believable grown-up characters, and does the classical clever horror film trick of using the supernatural to explore some rather horrible emotional depths.

Director David Keating manages to tell a story that could have easily turned into bad melodrama in a dignified way that doesn't shy away from looking at the less picturesque truths about loss. Wake Wood doesn't look down when it comes to its characters' suffering, but it's not a film whose cruelty is gratuitous or without compassion.

I'm also quite enamoured with the pagan ritual at the core of the film's plot. The whole set-up, especially how the archaic and the modern come together in the way the townsfolk practice their religion, carries an air of authenticity. Here, I think, do the comparisons between Wake Wood and The Wicker Man I've seen made come in, but except for the believable religious set-up, both films have nothing much in common; there are completely different aesthetic and thematic interests at work in both films. Be that as it may, it's not difficult to believe that, if there were pagan necromantic rituals that actually do work, they'd look a lot like the one in Wake Wood.

I'm not as enamoured by the film's visual presentation. The cinematography is at times a bit bland, and Keating as a director does not seem to be too interested in the "visual" part of visual storytelling, and wastes some opportunities of enhancing the film's mood further through the landscape it takes place in. Obviously, the film's visibly low budget couldn't have helped there.

Nonetheless, I can heartily recommend Wake Wood. There isn't that much horror made with a grown-up audience in mind around right now, and the films strengths are winning out over its weaknesses quite nicely.

 

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