Strange Vistas

mikeflanagan

Hill House

The Bent-Neck Lady, a recurring specter in Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House, buys the mini-series a deep reservoir of goodwill.

Flanagan's single-minded focus on family pathos hasn't always overcome the weakness inherent in its material – Before I Wake had a somnambulist pace, and Doctor Sleep was chockfull of clichés. Now, finally, gets a field to let it bloom in The Haunting of Hill House.

This latest adaptation gets some very loosely inspiration from Shirley Jackson's novel, from which it cribs the title and some of the character names but little else. The story is no longer about a bunch of strangers gathering to investigate supernatural claims but a family pursued by an irredeemably evil manor.

The Bent-Neck Lady is one of the ghosts that keeps coming back for the Crains, the first one we see and one of the many apparitions pursuing the family even after they leave the house. She appears first to Nell Crain, the youngest daughter and, seemingly for a moment, the protagonist.

The story doesn't stay with Nell. Each family member gets an episode, so we get a full guided tour of how Hill House has systematically wrecked their lives for decades. We see the family both when they were growing up in the house, the five Crain offsprings merely children, and almost three decades later when another tragedy brings them together, and they have to find a way to talk to each other again.

This narrative style allows Flanagan to pull perspective tricks. It takes time for us to figure out who is an unreliable narrator and who sees things we don't, a distinction that becomes cloudier when the specter haunting some of the family members might be mental illness or an addiction. Flanagan also takes advantage of the structure to experiment with narration. One episode, for example, is all long takes and no cuts, exacerbating the tension and drama going on.

We revisit scenes, sometimes seeing them from a different character's eyes and sometimes through fresh eyes ourselves, examining new information about them. There are background details to unsettle you but that you don't need to spot. It's not the usual “painting moves in one scene, guaranteed to come after a character on the next one” thing, but a much more subtle approach. It keeps us on our toes, waiting for the one that will.

There is one ghost we viewers do see, over and over: the Bent-Neck Lady. Her unexpected and sudden recurrences feed a morbid curiosity in us. It is also an example of what the series does very much right: by the time we get more clarity on it, half-way through the series, we realize that everything before has been not only mood-setting, but perfectly choreographed escalation.

You need to trust it. It builds up, and builds up, and builds up...

And then it is all over you.

The tension is not only watching the spring get tighter, and tighter, but knowing that even with some surprise releases, there is still a lot more coil to spring on you.

Bly Manor

Hill House, in turn, bought ‌the follow-up The Haunting of Bly Manor some goodwill of its own. Hill House wasn't perfect – one of its stories bore little connection to the plot at large, and it had its moments of fridge logic – but it did its job well. With Bly Manor, the team returns to apply the same structure to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

I should have stopped watching when I realized there were multiple directors, with Flanagan only doing the first episode.

Hill House wasn't a faithful adaptation, but it was better written, better handled. Maybe it's on Flanagan. Perhaps it's because it had more material to go on. Bly Manor doesn't have either and, on its trying to stretch the servings to last nine episodes, it ends up watering down the soup.

So we get again the bit where everybody has their chapter, which feels much less relevant here since we are not seeing how the same event affected a family – we are merely going through why is this specific individual damaged in their special way. Some of the stories feel forced, shoehorned merely for a twist that they keep telegraphing and might as well be lampshading.

The series format allowed Hill House to breathe but causes Bly Manor to feel stretched to the point of transparency. Unsure what to do with its time, the story proceeds to explain every single possible bit of the haunting, dispelling any sense of intimacy that James' original story had. For instance, in the original story, Miles had been expelled from school for an unspecified, terrible offense. That dreadful secret behind the expulsion? We get an entire episode, and it boils down to Miles intentionally being a cunt.

Don't you know explanations go counter to dread? Dragging something into the light only diminishes it.

That's before we get to the acting. Several of the Hill House cast members return to Bly Manor, and by King Hamlet, you'd swear this was their first acting job. Victoria Pedretti, who played Nell Crain before, is nothing short of annoying and doesn't seem to be a particularly good choice for the emotional range that the story ends up demanding of her. I can't say if Nell is the only character she can play or if she needs more consistent direction, but I'm chalking her memorable performance as Nell up to Flanagan for now.

Those are not even its worst offenses – its main crime is that it's as dull as a sack of family tombstones. The second to last episode spends 56 repetitive minutes elabotaring on its convoluted mythology, which not only is mind-numbingly tedious and could last a tenth of its run but manages to get everything to make even less sense. That's not enough for them. We need yet another episode that is little but a walk towards a foregone conclusion, the writers fridging a character because they can't find another way to get out of the mess they've made. Then we get the surprise reveal that everybody figured out was coming six episodes ago.

I want to say that there's a good series to be found here, at half its length and with a single, talented helmer. I'm not sure I can convince myself that's the case. As it is, Bly Manor is little but a reminder that sunk costs are sunk costs, the time spent is no longer yours, and sometimes you should drop a story early on.

#mikeflanagan #victoriapedretti #carlagugino #katesiegel #annabethgish #timothyhutton #horror

Ewan McGregor in Doctor Sleep

Near the climax of Mike Flanagan's mash-up Doctor Sleep, Rose the Hat, the story's main baddie, walks the hallways of the Overlook Hotel looking for her prey. The hotel is still alive, famished. As she steps into the elevator hallway, it unleashes the vision it used to terrify Danny and Wendy Torrance with – torrents of blood, flooding the hallway, threatening to drown her.

She slows down her stride, stares at it, amused. It's a curiosity, not even worth turning her body towards it. She smiles, more intrigued than scared, and continues walking.

It couldn't be a better representation of how the horror genre has moved on in the 40 years since The Shinning came out in 1980. Scenes that used to be impressive, outrageous, are now commonplace. The Shining itself has become a staple, the baseline.

Still, Stephen King wrote a sequel, so someone would end up adapting it. Might as well be Mike Flanagan, who recently did a fair job of adapting King's Gerald's Game.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: I wish I could like this movie more than I do. I do. I almost managed to convince myself after watching it that it was above mediocre.

I don't even want to blame the crew. This movie is a collection of thankless jobs.

For starters, it's made forty years after The Shining came out, so you can't assume viewers have seen it. You need flashbacks to that contextualize what is going on for people who just wandered into the multiplex. You'll need to repeat scenes from the classic if you want to be on the safe side. But that means you'll need to re-enact so you can use the same actors to connect last movie's events to our current story.

And then, there were significant differences between the King's source material and its adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. King's sequel follows up on his book's ending, not the movie's, which King hated. Flanagan, though, can't disregard Kubrick's masterpiece since – let's be honest – it's what may bring most people to his movie instead of sending them to the paperback.

So what you get is a mash-up of both, the equivalent of a $50 million fanfic-slash-cosplay production, where Flanagan recreates scenes from the original, or tries to get actors who are a good twenty years younger than The Shining to pass for Shelley Duval and Scatman Crothers and so many others (no attempt at mimicking the inimitable Joe Turkel, fortunately), and melds the endings for both the movie and book into a single body. For fans of the original, or even anyone who has seen some of the oft-repeated clips, it sinks deep into the uncanny valley.

Then there's the power escalation and misery inflation.

That's not their fault. It is King's. Stephen King's writing has gone downhill with the years, and, since things that used to impress us no longer do, he has resorted to bumping up the world's wretchedness and the power factor of the characters.

You can't just have good old Danny, whom Dick Hallorann described as shinning like nobody else he had ever met. We get Abra, a girl who is an order of magnitude more powerful than anyone Dan Torrance himself had ever encountered. A haunted building is not enough of a threat. But that's not enough. We need The True Knot, a troupe of traveling psychic vampires, each with their unique abilities and whose leader, Rose, might be stronger than Danny and Abra put together.

A recovering alcoholic who is a threat to his family is no longer enough of a problem. King's book, on full-on misery inflation, gives us no less than two characters whose background includes his now requisite child abuse (much more stark on the original than what the movie suggests). Danny has grown into a violent alcoholic, because... it's in his blood, I guess. Not enough? How about a toddler dying from neglect (or violence)?

The True Knot are not just psychic vampires – they feed on children who have the shine, the same psychic ability Dan and Abra share. But you can't merely abduct and murder children for their power, can you? You need to torture them, make them die a long, painful death, because... um... fear purifies the “steam” they release, making them tastier? Whatever. We need children screaming.

King spent too much time trying to shock readers and not enough creating a real sense of dread, and that leaks into the movie.

Gerald's Game, I wrote back then, had some masterful scenes filled with anguished discomfort despite its duct-taped tacked-on ending. Nothing quite like that here. The most memorable moments come when the members of The True Knot die, their death rattle a gurgling groan like Gmork drowning on his own blood.

Most of the fun here comes for us movie and horror nerds. We get to enjoy Flanagan's attempts at blending both ancestors into a single alternate timeline, trying to walk both paths simultaneously with results that, if you know the original material, can be endearing. We can get some amusement by recognizing faces from Flanagan's troupe (Katie Parker, Bruce Greenwood, James Flanagan, Carel Struycken), most of them hanging out in the background. There is a brief moment where Kyleigh Curran, who plays Abra, has fun aping a young Ewan McGregor. Rebecca Ferguson's Rose The Hat is a delightful predator, a boho panther sashaying her way into devouring you.

Slim pickings, though.

Flanagan has gotten good at being good enough in the near-decade since he made Absentia. After Gerald's Game, his Haunting of Hill House made me believe he was on the verge of breaking out of the prison of decent and move on to great. He'll need to pick better material first.

#mikeflanagan #stephenking #horror #miseryinflation #ewanmcgregor #rebeccaferguson #kyleighcurran

Carla Gugino tied to a bed, viewed from above

Jessie Burlingame ends up handcuffed to a bed, keys just out of reach, not a single person for miles. Living person, at least. Her husband, the one with the bondage kink and the rape fantasy, is dead on the floor. The heart attack probably did it, but banging his forehead on the tiling didn't help. She's pretty sure he's dead, at least. There's too much blood.

This rekindling of the flame is going worse than she expected.

I'd said while writing about Before I Wake that Mike Flanagan likes his crucibles. The characters in his movies are always trapped in a situation and squirming to get out of it. Jessie is the personification of that narrative device.

On the one side of the bed, Gerald's Game is a sensational example of how to adapt a book. It tweaks details, focuses on the performers, retains the story's strengths while enhancing it with the right cinematic language.

Carla Gugino gives a protean performance as Jessie. There's little artifice she could default to, no gimmicks she can pull. She has to spend most of the movie in a single position, handcuffed in place as Jessie is. She doesn't even get a change of outfit. It's all expressions, intonation, what little body language she gets to show.

Bruce Greenwood does a great job as her husband Gerald, whose eponymous game put her in that position. He has a rakishness to him, with Greenwood looking better at sixty-two than I expect I'll ever look, but it's balanced out with a husband who still wants to care. Gerald is someone used to getting things his way, but who wants to make it work with the wife instead of going out for the hookers and mistresses he could have.

(And I'm sure does)

On the other side, there's the issue that as a faithful adaptation of Stephen King's book, it'll carry the weaknesses of the material.

For instance, what's up with her background?

We need a new term for what's going on with characters, where what used to be considered a tragic backstory is now the baseline. People have to be sadder, had to have had a worse life than you thought. A good tear-jerking story doesn't bring in as much waterworks as it used to. Their drama needs to be more dramatic.

It's so much misery inflation.

Is it not enough for a woman to be in handcuffs, ogled by a ravenous dog gone feral, dying of thirst, losing her mind and talking to both herself and her dead husband, terrified by (one would hope) hallucinatory threats?

No? Not enough?

Does she also need to have been sexually abused as a child as well?

I'd have been freaking out at the handcuffed thing myself. Maybe “being eaten alive” at most. We wouldn't need dredging up any past horrors to compound the present ones.

It's Stephen King's fault, not the movie's. There are too many echoes from his other stories, from the solar eclipse to name-dropping Cujo. He writes these things for himself now, all the stuff he's put out blending into one big gumbo pot in his head.

And then there's the inspiring, talky, tacked-on ending. King is a great tease, but when it comes to fucking, he climbs on top and writhes around for a couple of minutes before declaring he is done.

Before it gets to that duct-taped apocrypha, though, you'll get some masterful scenes. Gugino's arguments with herself are impeccable. Greenwood is the perfect bastard, released from all social constraints by death and her agonizing wife's imagination. There's a scene, as Jessie finally figures out a plan, which felt like it went on forever, me squirming on the couch, calling out “oh fuck no” several times. I exhaled when it was over. There's constant tension before and after that horrifying moment.

That's what we watch horror for, so the movie succeeds. Even if the coda feels like someone stapled it on right before release because they felt we needed to get an uplifting lesson out of the whole thing.

#mikeflanagan #stephenking #geraldsgame #carlagugino #brucegreenwood #horror #miseryinflation

Movie poster for Before I Wake

A family home, a widowed mother feeling cornered by her sister's return.

A mirror, full of ghosts, and the siblings who take it back to the house where it took their parents, trying to destroy it before it possesses someone else.

A couple alone with an adopted otherworldly moppet, bringing it back to the isolated house where their child died.

Mike Flanagan likes his crucibles.

It's not surprising. He makes movies for horror fans and crucibles make for a convenient horror setup. There wouldn't be much suspense if people could easily walk away from the problem, would it?

In Before I Wake, Thomas Jane and Kate Bosworth play the Hobsons, a couple whose own kid drowned in an accident. The adoptee is Cody, an adorable, all-too-well-behaved child who you just know is hiding something – even before it the social worker talks about his string of failed adoptions. It doesn't take too long to find out what: Cody chugs energy drinks and pops caffeine pills like they're Flintstones Vitamins, trying to keep himself awake.

Strange things happen when Cody is asleep. Some of them are pleasant, colorful, things borne out of dreams. But every kid has nightmares. There be monsters.

Flanagan has a talent for tension but flounders with actors. Near the start of the movie, he shows us the Hobsons' tragedy, makes us feel the desperation of a boy who can't help himself and knows he is dying. It lasts only a few seconds, but it adds weight to the Hobsons' situation in a way that ten minutes of character discussion wouldn't – particularly considering how Jane and Bosworth phone in their performances.

Before I Wake gets the cat out of the bag right away and starts flinging it around. Characters pick up on what's up immediately. It avoids those annoying moments where you just know someone who had seen at least a couple of horror films would have saved themselves a lot of grief. Instead, it uses that same character knowledge, the normalization of the unreal, a grasp for how to play with the rules of the supernatural, to fuel one of the most uncomfortable behaviors one could expect from a grieving parent.

If only Jane didn't sleepwalk through the whole movie, or Bosworth hadn't become a discount Rachel McAdams.

At least that lets secondary players a chance to shine. Jacob Tremblay plays Cody with a light touch that's surprising in someone so young. The kid is too cute by half – he'll be playing a serial killer in no time flat. Dash Mihok, who I've seen in at least a dozen movies but never noticed, is a bundle of raw nerves and gets to deliver one of the movie's best lines (”I wouldn't say that around here. They'll fit you for slippers”).

It just doesn't come together. It's not only the leads who are to blame, though. The monster's origin feels arbitrary, its moniker something retrofitted because they felt a thriller needs some sort of revelation. It all leads to an ending that, had the actors been better, could have had the weight of two people brought together by tragedy yet managing to find a way forward.

It doesn't. The whole thing instead feels like a kludge, the tacked-on optimism half contrarianism and half pandering. Not every horror movie involving children needs to be The Babadook, but it wouldn't hurt for them to try for its single-mindedness.

#horror #mikeflanagan #thomasjane #katebosworth #annabethgish #jacobtremblay

A character standing inside a tunnel, backlit

We had a Viewmaster when I was a kid. It was this small, orange-red plastic thing where you inserted a cardboard disk, then you could see stereoscopic images. You were looking through it at a light, and the images had this vivid, three-dimensional quality that's impossible to achieve with just projection. We only had a handful of disks for it, but I think they were all kid's stories.

The one that I vividly remember, because it terrified me, was Three Billy Goats Gruff.

I remember the bridge, the bloated troll hiding under it, the terror that each goat might be eaten as it crossed over, but mostly, my disbelief as a child about the strategy that the goats were seemingly using to save themselves.

Mike Flanagan's Absentia tells you where it's going right at the start, when broadly-drawn former-junkie problem-child Callie shows up at her sister Tricia's house carrying, among her meager possessions, a copy of Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Tricia's husband has been missing for seven years, and she's wrapping the paperwork to declare him dead in absentia. In walks Callie, setting up a predictable confrontation between the reliable sister who has managed to maintain a house by herself (and is gearing up to be a single mother) and the nomadic rebel with the crazy ideas. A confrontation that takes too long to appear, since Callie is busy hallucinating about her husband... and her (never quite explained) discomfort at dating someone after her husband has been gone for almost a decade... and Callie is dealing with some oddball tunnel behavior.

Mostly, it takes a while because Absentia is busy getting all tangled up in its mythology, and trips a few times before the end.

It's less disciplined than Flanagan's more effective Oculus, and thus, less tense. It's funny to think that even though it's the smaller budget movie of the two, Oculus is the one where he seems to have focused on the script more, honing it until the edge itself could strike fear into the characters' hearts. But Absentia was made a couple of years before, and to his credit, he seems to have learned from it.

Gotta say I like the look of his movies. They seem homemade, like they were put together for $200 among a group of someone's friends, or people who answered a newspaper ad. When the movie works, like in Oculus, this lends it some verisimilitude. But when it doesn't, it makes them look amateurish.

It does have several things going for it. The unsettling way in which her dead husband integrates himself into Tricia's daily life, reminiscent of the ghosts in the Pang Brothers' The Eye. Doug Jones, wearing the least make up I've ever seen him wear, with a young Anthony Perkins playing his kid. The fresh mythology. A perspective switch that made me stop and clap.

Absentia is but a chrysalis for something better that never finishes emerging during its run time. That better creature, however, is gradually coming out on Flanagan's other films. He hasn't yet shown the raw, focused talent of a young John Carpenter, but he seems determined to make up for it with constant improvement.

#absentia #horror #mikeflanagan #catherineparker #dougjones #courtneybell