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Andreas Marawell
Swedish low-budget horror-film auteur with a unique visual, cryptic and atmospheric approach that sometimes crosses the border into the surreal. Frequently makes use of 'cosmic' inter-dimensional spirits that live in a world ruled by inscrutable logic, providing for much incoherent supernatural mystery and impenetrable, otherworldly events. This gobbledygook could easily be taken as mere incoherence, passing off randomness as strangeness, except the film itself and its characters all live in this world that proceeds with its own inscrutable non-logic, therefore the effect is surreal, having a strong oneiric effect. That is, assuming you can get past the strange cheap digital effects that he edits into his films, although they are unique and are effectively creepy in their own way. Like Lynch, he injects exploitative and sexual elements into the mysteries, especially dominatrices and lesbians, and he also places a lot of emphasis on sound design. He has very strange Lynch-esque beings appear in dreamlike fashion to make cryptic comments or give clues, except they are much more incoherent and feel random in this case. The crucial elements that Lynch had but which are missing here, besides more character work, are the small reveals and progressions of the mystery, giving us something to chew on. With Lynch it wasn't just random weirdness and an endless sequences of cryptic declarations by strange beings, there was a thread tied together by dream-logic, and it progressed. This is missing with Marawell. But the unique visual aspect and the oneiric horror are both interesting. His earlier movie 'Flame Beings' only made use of quick flashes of dreams and images but wasn't surreal, and he only developed his unique approach after this film. Bizarre Swedish horror. The introduction starts with a Lynch-esque mysterious man and a little girl in a forest speaking in Lynchian riddles. But then the rest of the movie becomes a more conventional, albeit very atmospheric, 'cosmic' slasher movie with a bizarre killer. A school building is host to some odd visitors at night, some lesbian lovers, an exploitative photo shoot of a some naughty models, and a group of eccentric people taking a class about death in graphic detail to face their fears. Ghosts, smokey creatures, and a huge creepy alien-goddess-creature befuddles and gruesomely dispatches her prey repeatedly until the final inscrutably mystical ending. The artificial acting and accents are a big minus, as is the slasher structure, but the atmosphere and creature effects are effectively creepy. As with Black Ghosts, Marawell has a woman searching for a missing girl, this time her sister. In this case, however, the mystery is in a building populated by strange beings and spirits. The pace is slow, consisting of conversations with people that last saw her, providing only unhelpful clues, and it is her dreams that reveal the path she must take to explore the elusive building. The dreams are pseudo-surreal montages, but it's the beings in the building that are ultra bizarre and nonsensical, some malevolent, but most of them curious about her sister's ability to see into a cosmic horrific mystery. A strange lady (seemingly inspired by the log-lady) offers cryptic statements, prophecies and guidelines. In between, we get scenes from a stripper bar where girls don't strip because they are dressed up as dominatrices. It's a difficult film to describe as it is mostly experiential and not much happens, and the ending doesn't reveal or close any mysteries. As such, it is even more weak and unsatisfying than usual for Marawell, despite there being more character interaction and mystery than in previous movies. Actually, perhaps it fails because of this tease, since it goes nowhere. Maya yearns for her missing, presumably dead, girlfriend, and isolates herself in a remote cabin in the woods, performing strange rituals over a long period in order to reconnect with her. The odd rituals include throwing gooey cream at trees, sniffing and chanting over Lucy's panties, knocking everywhere and calling her name repeatedly, and putting a coal in her mouth which she received in a spiritual encounter. With slow repetition, she gradually achieves another state of consciousness and takes us, the audience, with her to an atmospheric, bizarre encounter with spirits. The spirits are created with a combination of makeup and cheap photoshop effects, but they are so bizarre, oneiric and unique that they are quite effective, if you ignore the budget (let's not forget that Lynch didn't always use state of the art effects either). The encounters with spirits are very incoherent, full of mumbo-jumbo gibberish with rapid shifts between many realities, but they are so systematically incoherent, they turn into dream-logic if you watch this in the right state of mind. Unfortunately, there isn't any plot or character study that emerges, and the whole movie consists of these nightmarish encounters that gradually increase in intensity, chaos, violence and confusion, including some tacky exploitative and gory scenes, until the bizarre and confusing finale where her horniness combines Eros and Thanatos. In summary, there is a lot to complain about, but the film also offers a unique oneiric/nightmarish experience. |
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