Movies
Psalm 21 (V)
“The unfocused nature of the film, the uncontrolled nature of the music and badly measured performance of the central actor – put all this together and you’ve lost my attention pretty fast.”
Jumping of the Nordic momentum raised by films like Let The Right One In, Antichrist and Cold Prey, Swedish actor-turned-director Fredrik Hiller delivers his debut feature in a rather messy fashion. Psalm 21 is one of those Christianity-themed, supernatural thrillers that I really wanted to enjoy. It’s just that too many things kept bothering me throughout.
The offset here is the fact that the Swedish church officially denounced the existence of a Christian hell back in the eighties. Hiller’s protagonist is a young priest who follows this ideal, but is destined to discover that hell can be many things. Things get going when the preacher, Henrik, gets a mysterious phone call that his estranged father – also a priest, although a more old-fashioned one to say the least – has died. Henrik journeys into the northern wilderness of hillbilly Sweden, only to wind up amongst ghostly apparitions of his dead mom (and her friend) and a gordian knot of a family belonging to his father’s parish.
Needless to say nobody and nothing is what it seems, including the film, which seems to wander aimlessly between ghost story and family-tension, never really combining the two and ultimately abandoning both for a totally misplaced attack on modern Christianity. Furthermore it seems as though Hiller – and maybe to a wider extent, his composer – has been hellbent on making a horror-flick regardless of the lack of horrific tension in his own script. The music is ridiculously bombastic throughout the film, almost never leaving room for any real intimacy and jumping at every chance to poke, jump, rumble or pull out any other ancient trick trying to scare us. It never works. There is but one kinda creepy scene in the film and even the climax of that one sorta rips of Annila’s similar, but vastly superior Sauna. Aside from that Psalm 21 is all about harmless cgi-enhanced ghosts of elderly women. That and an overacting lead performance by Jonas Malmsjö as Henrik – a protagonist who is literally outplayed by every actor he encounters except the elderly-women-ghosts.
The unfocused nature of the film, the uncontrolled nature of the music and badly measured performance of the central actor – put all this together and you’ve lost my attention pretty fast. I’m generally always intrigued by Christian horrors, but this one left me just kinda bored. So Hiller is right. Hell can be many things. It can be the Catholic Church’s tendency towards sodomy, as the film suggests. It can be modern day widespread religious misconceptions. And it can be sitting through films made by confused filmmakers with something on their mind but a weak understanding of how to pronounce it.
Screened at CPH:PIX 2010
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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