Reviews
‘Family’ SXSW Review – Arthouse Horror Movie About Grief and Fear Induces Visceral Chills
The attention-grabbing opening scene in writer/director Benjamin Finkel’s Family effectively establishes the film’s peculiar, esoteric, yet bone-chilling tone. Evoking Relic or Ari Aster’s Hereditary, the cold open sees preteen protagonist Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) banging on the locked doors of a synagogue, pleading to be let in, only for her mother, Naomi (Ruth Wilson), to stalk across the lawn, drag her out into it, then stab her. Without any explanation or context, Family cuts to a less volatile time, unfurling a strange, unwieldy slice of arthouse horror that’s heightened by Finkel’s knack for viscerally disturbing horror and imagery.
The eleven-year-old Johanna, an only child homeschooled by her mom, has recently been uprooted to mom’s creaky old childhood home for closer access to medical care for her father, Harry (Ben Chaplin), who’s slowly deteriorating from cancer. Things are stable enough to start, but Johanna’s superstition to catch a spirit in an oval ceramic birdhouse as a protective means to watch over her ailing dad turns sinister. Suddenly, the family’s stresses get transformed and exacerbated to a frightening degree as Johanna seems to have caught something more nefarious in her birdhouse instead.
Finkel takes a languid, arthouse approach to his grief metaphor, evocative of Terrence Malick’s handheld photography and A24 arthouse style. The young filmmaker demonstrates a penchant for dwelling on superfluous details and camerawork, like pull-out or wide shots that linger on the breeze rustling through trees or childhood bonding captured from beneath the mesh of a trampoline. It’s the type of excess that feels more like a budding filmmaker trying to infuse their debut with their entire breadth of filmmaking knowledge rather than servicing the story. It also winds up creating a cold distance between the audience and its central, unreliable narrator.
Family dwells in that melancholic and terrifying sense of fear and grief that stems from watching a loved one die slowly and the toll that it takes on everyone. Naomi is so thoroughly trapped in her caretaker role that she’s initially introduced as callous and rigid, more prone to scolding Johanna at the dinner table than positive reinforcement. Worse, Harry’s increasing loss of health leaves Johanna neglected and isolated. It’s there where Johanna’s sense of reality shifts; eerie happenings ramp up in earnest, and yet her parents insist it’s the machination of an unruly child.
Cameron Dawson Gray is remarkable as the young Johanna, a desperately lonely child forced to navigate her upended sense of reality entirely on her own. Wilson is imposing and terrifying, with enough subtle nuance and occasional warmth to instill doubt. The shifts in tone and reality come swiftly. One scene sees Naomi give Johanna a sandwich for lunch, where the girl horrifically discovers it’s filled with broken glass. She runs to her grandfather (Allan Corduner), a rabbi in the cold open’s synagogue, who brings her deeply worried parents in for mediation. The constant push and pull in these tonal shifts are meant to maintain a sense of ambiguity, to keep audiences guessing whether an overactive imagination steeped in fear is to blame or something more, but it further contributes to the unwieldy nature of the storytelling.
What Finkel does remarkably well, though, is crafting visceral scares and bone-chilling imagery with an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere. The sound design is skin-crawling and creepy, ensuring every creak and moan the house makes puts you on edge, and that’s before the inhuman whispers and clicks signaling an otherworldly presence. Above all, Finkel mines the uncanny valley for maximum terror, tweaking and stretching familiar silhouettes and frames to viscerally disturbing effect. It’s not just the way the filmmaker distorts the image of the family pet, for example, that unnerves, but how he lets these moments quietly linger, trapping Johanna with them far longer is comfortable.
The film’s climax goes full throttle on the intensity, but when all is said and done, Family remains elusive in its mythology. It’s the type of arthouse horror that makes more sense from a metaphorical standpoint than narratively. There’s vast potential on display from Finkel, especially where the horror is concerned. The filmmaker wears his influences on his sleeves to deliver a bold, esoteric vision. While it might be too aloof and enigmatic for its own good, the distinct approach to horror is so profoundly unsettling that it’s an easy recommendation for visceral frights alone.
Family made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.
Death Down the Aisle begins with the tantalizing image of a bride, Malorie (Jess Brown), dressed in a wedding dress splattered with blood.
This is a brief (unnecessary) in media res opening before writer Audrey C. Marie jumps the action back to earlier in the day. It’s the day of the wedding, Malorie is preparing to wed Jon (David Alexander) and there’s a whirlwind introduction of wedding guests, many of whom are either family, work associates from Jon’s legal firm, or both.
Most of these relationships aren’t clear until after Jon’s death (this isn’t a spoiler; his death is heavily telegraphed by director Roxanne Boisvert). Only after the murder does it become clear that Death Down The Aisle is primarily interested in exploring red herrings, gossipy busy bodies, and characters making A LOT of phone calls.
Let’s rewind: Malorie is marrying Jon, an older man with an adult daughter, Bridget (Anna Kopacek), who looks nearly the same age as her. Jon works at Stone Legal Services with his brother Zach (Scott Gibson), as well as Malorie’s mother, Pamela (Jayne Heitmeyer) and Zach’s younger girlfriend, Amy (Gracie Callahan).
Each of these characters hand Jon a drink before the wedding begins – Zach – a Scotch, Amy – a coffee, and Pamela – an energy drink. There’s also a mysterious glass of champagne delivered to Malorie’s room that Jon drinks and Boisvert ensures that the audience keeps track of each of them by zooming in each time. This is why it’s no surprise when Jon keels over mid-ceremony, coughs up blood on Malorie’s dress, and immediately croaks.
Naturally it turns out that nearly everyone had a motive to see him dead. Pamela recently quit the firm because Jon wouldn’t confirm her salary; Zach was pushing for a merger with rival Miles (Colin Price) that Jon was unsure about, and the dead man fretted that Amy was a gold digger, so Jon wouldn’t support her promotion, either.
Adding to the too plentiful number of suspects is Malorie’s ex-husband Ryan (Frank Fiola), a recovering addict. Even Jon’s own daughter ends up on the list when it’s revealed that they were fighting in the weeks leading up to his death.
The only one who doesn’t have a motive to kill Jon is Malorie’s best friend Francesca (JaNae Armogan), who works at the wedding venue and thinks she saw something fishy. Naturally she’s killed off before the end of the first act.
What follows is a lot of conversation between characters about the firm, the merger, Malorie and Jon’s relationship, and how everyone is lying to everyone else. The problem is that 90% of these conversations happen via phone or text and few of them are interesting. Marie’s script fails to develop the characters beyond their motive, which means that the majority of the plot developments aren’t particularly engaging because the characters are so shallow.
With so many people and interweaving relationships involved, it’s hard to zero in and identify with anyone. Malorie is clearly meant to be the protagonist because, like most Lifetime films, she assumes the role of investigator, despite the presence of Detective Levine (Christian Paul) on the periphery.
But even she is kept at a distance from the audience. Because we only see a few moments of her relationship with Jon, secrets that the pair were keeping from friends and family don’t carry any emotional resonance when they come to light later in the film. One in particular seems to come out of left field and seemingly only exists to introduce another red herring in order to prolong the mystery for another 20 minutes.
Alas none of the characters get much to do, so none of the performances pop. Kopacek and Callahan look too similar and are styled identically, which sometimes makes it hard to distinguish one from the other. Further issues with casting is that the age disparity between Malorie & Jon and Zach & Amy is never mentioned (neither is Jon’s paternity of Bridget). This may be an ageist observation, but even the fact that Pamela never comments that her daughter was marrying her (Pamela’s) boss seems unusual, especially when Death Down the Aisle regularly suggests that one or more character is a gold digger.
Arguably the film’s biggest issue is that everything circles around the business dealings of the firm, none of which is engaging or interesting (hilariously it’s never even made clear what kind of law they practice!) Without more distinct characters, there’s very little to hang the narrative on.
Unfortunately after a solid opening, Death Down the Aisle gets stuck spinning its wheels, endlessly recycling its red herrings and interminable phone calls between characters. The suspect list is long, but the film’s energy lags through the saggy middle section and the climax can’t bring Death Down the Aisle back to life.
This one could have easily been called “Business Phone Calls”…and that’s not great.
Death Down the Aisle premiered on Lifetime Thursday, June 13.
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