Cosmic psychedelia collides with grief and rage in Pathetic Fallacy, a vibrant shot-on-film new horror movie from Daniel Isn’t Real director Adam Egypt Mortimer. Anchoring Mortimer’s singular vision and mesmeric visual language is an emotionally devastating lead performance by Scott Mescudi (X), who impresses in his first starring role.
A countdown to tragedy intercuts the tender opening montage that introduces Asher (Mescudi) and Iris (Jessica Rothe) as they meet, fall in love, then settle in for a life of bliss and bickering together, only for illness to truncate their love story. That countdown ends with Iris’s death, leaving a broken-hearted Asher angrily wishing to trade places. His grief is so raw and severe that he’s compelled to journey to the mystical Mount Samdi in the hopes of reconnecting with Iris in some way.
Instead, he encounters a crazed killer (Travis Kimmel), who drives him through a tunnel into an alternate realm of talking animals, including a Faustian spider voiced by Natasha Lyonne, who offers a bargain to resurrect his lost love. But that bargain comes at a steep cost.
Pathetic Fallacy, penned by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (No Exit, Ant-Man and the Wasp), is unlike any other. As such, it’s also a film that defies easy categorization. It’s at once a psychedelic pseudo-musical, featuring original music by Johnny Jewel, a cosmic horror-comedy, a sizzling romance, and a deeply affecting exploration of loss.
Nimble editing by The People’s Joker‘s Vera Drew further keeps viewers on their toes, unsure where Asher’s bizarre voyage will go next as reality and chronology bend and shift. That also entails one rather potent jump scare in a film largely devoid of them.
Mescudi and Rothe deliver achingly raw performances as the star-crossed lovers, and they also provide vocals to Pathetic Fallacy‘s soundtrack featuring original music by Johnny Jewel. But as the central lead, it’s Mescudi who frequently evokes genuine heartbreak that left this viewer in tears more than once. Mescudi bares both body and soul here, parlaying his sizzling chemistry with Rothe into a powerful emotional descent. Refreshingly, it’s rage that primarily fuels Asher’s grief, giving a uniquely bloodthirsty exploration of one of horror’s favorite themes: grief.
Capturing all of the cosmic insanity, which includes all manner of barbaric woodland critters voiced by genre stalwarts like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead as well as Vera Drew, is the stunning 35mm photography by Chuk Owens. Much of Pathetic Fallacy takes place at night deep within the woods, and Owens manages to capture all the horror and insanity with vibrant clarity.
Mortimer experiments further with cosmic imagery, wielding an entrancing visual language that casts a spell. That includes a few hallucinatory sequences filled with trippy, kaleidoscopic VFX visuals that encapsulate this film’s strange, whimsical wavelength.
Grief is so deeply weird and personal. So is Pathetic Fallacy. It’s messy and raw, primal in its sometimes inscrutable rawness yet profoundly complicated. It’s confrontational in its despair, too, which is all but guaranteed to polarize. But those willing to follow Asher wade into the trippy depths of Mouth Samdi will likely fall hard for Mortimer’s hyper-stylized, wholly singular vision.
Pathetic Fallacy made its world premiere at Fantastic Fest.
