Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. After the overwhelming sequence of complex and criticism-rich films from last week, I was more than ready to enjoy some straightforward comfort food. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a whole bunch of horror screenings for this week’s post, but don’t worry, I also found time to check out a hidden gem of animation, along with whatever films I’ll hopefully add to this post between writing this paragraph and releasing it. In the meantime, it’s starting to feel like our house is actually running out of reliable horror selections, so if you’ve got any suggestions, please do your best to terrify us. Alright, let’s kick off the Week in Review!
Our first feature this week was a thrilling exercise in dramatic economy, The Djinn. The film centers on a young boy named Dylan, who lives alone with his father, and is apparently mute as a result of some past medical operation. Dylan believes his mother’s absence is his own fault, and so when his father heads out for an overnight work shift, Dylan uses a magic spell to wish for a voice. However, Dylan really should have double-checked the fine print, as in order to achieve his wish, he must survive an hour of being hunted by a malevolent djinn.
Nearly the entirety of The Djinn takes place in Dylan’s small apartment, with the film’s tightly controlled cinematography making a labyrinth of its scant rooms and corridors. The intersection of bedroom, bathroom, and dining room swiftly becomes a familiar point of danger, while sequences like Dylan being trapped in the bathroom are tiny masterworks of escalating tension. The film essentially synthesizes the specific fear of wondering what’s behind a certain door, or what’s hiding under a certain bed, into ninety minutes of anxiety. Top that off with phenomenal sound design and a strong performance by our child lead, and you end up with a thoroughly satisfying dose of horror.
After that we cast our net a little wider, checking out the recent Thai mockumentary horror film The Medium. Set in a remote village in northeastern Thailand, the film ostensibly features a documentary crew making a film about a local medium named Nim. However, it soon becomes apparent that Nim’s niece Mink is being harassed by supernatural forces, and the documentary shifts to follow Mink’s story as well. As Mink’s condition deteriorates, Nim ultimately seeks help from other mediums in order to conduct an ambitious exorcism ritual.
Director Banjong Pisanthanakun combines a few strains of horror in constructing The Medium, demonstrating found footage’s dramatic range through his fusion of documentary-style setup, more traditionally hand-cam rising action, and a Paranormal Activity-inspired penultimate act. Additionally, producer Na Hong-jin’s presence seems clear in The Medium’s gorgeous and melancholy pastoral photography, all of which feels strongly reminiscent of Hong-jin’s The Wailing. And beyond its technical and aesthetic merits, The Medium is also simply a damn fine horror movie, effectively building both an ambiguous occult mythology and a palpable sense of despair as the film continues.
Similarly to The Wailing, there is a sense of fatigue in this world that goes beyond the narrative horrors. Nim’s connection with the supernatural is framed as a dying art from the start, and Mink’s condition only ends up exacerbating existing familial tensions. But like in much of the best horror, there is no clear moral lesson to be divined from The Medium’s tragedy. Sometimes violence is senseless, and sometimes terrible things happen to good people. Watching The Medium feels like slowly descending into quicksand without a hope of rescue (in a good way). An ambitious, poignant, and effectively terrifying production.
Our next horror selection (look, I told you) was another distinctive found footage curio, the ambitiously titled Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made. Antrum’s gimmick is that it’s an allegedly “lost film” from the ‘70s, a cursed artifact that brought death and destruction to the few people who actually watched it. This gimmick is elaborated over the course of a fifteen minute documentary/interview segment that I frankly could have done without – I’m aware I’m watching a piece of fiction, there is no actual suspense regarding the danger of this film, and telling me “three days later… he DIED” has roughly the same dramatic impact as “BUT WHO WAS PHONE?”
Fortunately, the film-within-a-film that is their invented ‘70s artifact is actually a highly effective slice of folk horror. Telling the story of two children who are attempting to “dig a hole to hell” in order to rescue their dog’s soul, Antrum effectively merges the skuzzy ‘70s home movie look of something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a stark woodland setting, benefitting from all the advancements of our post-Blair Witch era.
The film’s use of sigils and scriptures allegedly inserted into the film stock is persistently effective; seeing mundane objects briefly highlighted by black magic is a disorienting thrill, and helps bolster the film’s demented nursery rhyme tone. Similarly effective are the discordant scenes of devilry also spliced into the film stock. I get the impression this film’s creators felt their film-within-a-film conceit gave them “permission” to include such anti-naturalistic touches, but frankly, I’d love to see more films embrace such dramatically purposeful assaults on our sense of aesthetic normalcy. Horror is built on surprise, after all, and what’s more surprising than upending our expectations of aesthetic constancy? An easy trick to overuse, I’m sure, but Antrum serves as a tidy demonstration of its dramatic potential.
Alright, as a reward for sitting patiently through all those horror movies, I’ll offer one potentially useful recommendation: Rainbow Fireflies is a masterpiece, and easily one of the greatest anime films I’ve ever seen. The film centers on a boy named Yuta, who takes a trip to a dam shortly after his father’s death. When a sudden storm arises, Yuta is carried away by the floodwaters – only to wake up thirty years earlier, in the village that will soon be lost under the waters of the dam. Befriending a boy named Kenzo and a girl named Saeko, Yuta enjoys one final summer in their village.
You’ll note I didn’t mention an outright conflict in that description, or really any sort of narrative thrust at all. Rainbow Fireflies is not that kind of film; it possesses no obvious antagonist, and though the loss of their village is a great tragedy for its cast, they have no power to change the course of progress. This village will be lost, and those who inhabit it will eventually be scattered to the winds – but for now, the sun is high and the water is warm. Let us enjoy this perfect afternoon.
Rainbow Fireflies is a story about saying goodbye, in a variety of ways. Central characters Yuta and Saeko are each suffering from an unbearable grief, a loss so close and so total that moving on seems impossible. Their sorrows are contrasted against the generational grief of their doomed village; as their friends laugh and play through summer days, the fundamental ephemerality of youth is amplified through our knowledge of the village’s approaching fate. Meanwhile, the camera’s own perspective seems to hang closest to the village’s elder priest, who constructs town projects for the children in order to give them something to remember it by. Nostalgia for a lost rural Japan hangs palpably throughout this film, illustrated not through tragic absences, but through its glorious illustration of one final childhood summer.
Of course, as is frequently the case, ephemerality and beauty are linked in Rainbow Fireflies. The very title points to one of its hard-earned theses: that the beautiful things in life shine all the brighter for their briefness, whether it be the light of a firefly or the laughter of a child. But to be honest, I’ve rarely found that maxim to offer much consolation for the things I’ve lost; I’m thankful, then, that Rainbow Fireflies agrees we cannot live without hope for the future. Rather than simply basking in nostalgia, Rainbow Fireflies emphasizes the cruciality of finding a future light to reach for – and beyond that, it possesses a profound respect for its child leads, emphasizing that children have the strength to look forward even from tragedies that would stall weary adults.
Oh right, and the animation! God, I haven’t even talked about how this film looks, and it looks amazing. Loose and simplified character designs allow for an astonishing degree of character acting fluidity, with no draconian adherence to base designs limiting animators’ expressiveness of illustration. These irregularly illustrated forms meld beautifully with Rainbow Fireflies’ painted backgrounds, and for its climactic moments, the film allows its most accomplished animators to create tiny masterpieces of their own design, setpieces that make no concessions towards cohesion with the film’s general art design. Every shot of this film is a marvel of animation flexibility and fluidity, discarding debatable virtues like naturalism or “constancy of aesthetic” in order to better bring its final summer to life. Rainbow Fireflies is without question one of anime’s great works.
