Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It seems we’ve reached the halfway point of the fall season, though to be honest, most of the anime I’ve watched this season has just been more Boruto. What can I say, the Naruto world is actually pretty compelling when Kishimoto isn’t writing it, and Boruto hits with a special combination of slice of life shenanigans, grounded family drama, and occasional action flourishes that make it easy to munch through ten or twenty episodes. Of course, I’m also keeping up with One Piece and The Witch From Mercury, so I’m not entirely out of the airing anime loop, but seriously: if you liked Naruto conceptually but were disappointed by its actual storytelling, I would urge you to try out his son’s adventures. That aside, this has also been a fertile week in non-anime media, so let’s break down some fresh stories in the Week in Review!
This week’s most ambitious “watch” was actually The Quarry, the latest quasi-film interactive horror experience from Supermassive Games, the developers of Until Dawn. As you might expect from a house full of horror and game enthusiasts, we’re all big Supermassive fans here, and tend to have a great time with their games regardless of their attendant faults. Slasher structures are predictable enough that seasoned audiences will often find themselves groaning at the choices of one or another character – given that, what could be better than a slasher movie where you can actually change those choices, and hopefully guide your heroes towards a happier ending?
The Quarry mostly fulfills that promise, though it has plenty of rough edges. The game’s greatest strength is its script, which is simply leagues above the standard set by Until Dawn and Supermassive’s other games. This cast of characters is witty and well-balanced, bouncing off each other so well that I often wished one or another pair of characters had more time together. It’s easy to get invested in their stories, and the game wastes no time in setting up a variety of friendships and potential romances to pursue, giving the game that distinctly satisfying feeling of smashing characters together and shouting NOW KISS.
Additionally, The Quarry also eclipses Until Dawn with its significantly more coherent set of antagonists. Each of these games essentially serves as three horror movies smashed together, with Until Dawn combining a ghost story, creature feature, and a Saw-like home invasion, while The Quarry combines a ghost story, creature feature, and spooky hillbilly subplot. In Until Dawn, that Saw-like segment was an errant thread that made close to no sense, drawing the whole story into a sense of incoherent lunacy, whereas The Quarry’s three threats all ultimately prove themselves components of a larger, coherent whole. As a result, The Quarry actually gets more narratively compelling as threads are revealed and intertwined, rather than the nonsense conclusion that Until Dawn devolved towards.
Unfortunately, it’s abundantly clear that The Quarry suffered from a shortened development time due to lockdown, as around half the narrative threads introduced in the first couple chapters go absolutely nowhere. In our first playthrough, my house found ourselves pushing for a romance that simply didn’t exist, all because the first chapters seeded something that could not physically be pursued. Surviving a horror movie generally means paying careful attention to potential resources and alliances presented in the first act, and The Quarry’s lack of follow up for many of its proposed relationships means it can be hard to trust the game to reward your choices (to say nothing of the fact that the relationships which do continue are the least interesting ones of the bunch).
Aside from all that, it’s a Supermassive game. You’ll make character decisions that branch down trees featuring both immediate and long-term consequences, you’ll gather clues to hopefully discover a solution to your ongoing catastrophe (though this, too, seems largely curtailed relative to Until Dawn), and you’ll contend with quick time events to save your character from all the horrors of the night. I’ve always been a fan of interactive fiction conceptually, but my experience with its various extant subfields has been largely disappointing – the specific “interactive fiction community” create games with a technicality of command-language that utterly escapes me, visual novel prose tends to make my teeth itch, and I’m simply not interested in mysteries. Supermassive’s offerings are far from perfect, but they’re polished and committed and obsessed with many of the same things that excite me: nuances of relationship and identity-forming, the chaos inherent in attempting to steer fate, and the delightfulness of big horrifying monsters. The Quarry’s faults are significant enough that it probably won’t make converts of people who disliked Until Dawn, but if you’re up for a spooky adventure with friends, I’d absolutely recommend it.
Along with The Quarry, we’ve also been continuing our regularly scheduled film engagements. First up this week was Possessor, a 2020 psychological horror film by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon. The film posits a future where assassins can essentially hijack a second party’s mind, controlling their actions for some time up to the moment of assassination, and thereby distancing a third financing party from any blame. Top assassin Vos is clearly having trouble keeping her own and assumed identities straight, but nonetheless agrees to carry out a key job, only to find herself struggling with the host’s mind for control.
I hate to brand the son with the sins of the father, but Possessor struck me basically the same way all of the elder Cronenberg’s films tend to: as a clever, short story-worthy thought experiment that lacked the human element to succeed as film drama. It felt like Possessor was trying to make some points related to identity and whatnot, but all of its characters were too unsympathetic and thinly drawn to really parse as full identities in the first place. When you’re attempting to comment on what defines us as people, you have to start from a point of recognizability and then abstract outwards – by failing in that, Possessor merely proceeds as a series of bizarre images and random acts of violence, with nothing tethering the audience to the events on-screen.
Still, some of those bizarre images were quite evocative, so kudos for that. And the film definitely nails its cold, clinical aesthetic, convincingly drawing a line between the aesthetics of hospital rooms and haute minimalism. I assume someone who needs less of a personal element in their fiction might find it riveting, but that ain’t me, and thus Possessor left me as unmoved as most of the original Cronenberg catalog.
Our next feature was Under the Shadow, an Iranian horror-drama set in Tehran in the 1980s, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war. The film centers on Shideh and Dorsa, a mother and daughter who are left alone in their apartment when Shideh’s husband is called up for active duty. When a missile strikes their building, it seems to carry with it a dark spirit that speaks to Dorsa, compelling her into increasingly manic behavior. As their apartment’s inhabitants slowly winnow away into the countryside, Shideh will have to fight to protect her daughter from horrors both mundane and supernatural.
Under the Shadow is an engaging and largely effective blend of genres, using only a slight flourish of supernatural terror to ornament its core emotional drama. Shideh is a former medical student whose leftist activism has resulted in her being barred from reentry into college, and the tension between her and her actively practicing husband largely informs her refusal to escape to her husband’s parents home. The introduction of a djinn seems almost like a punishment for this desperate affirmation of identity, but war-torn Tehran needs little assistance in terrorizing this family; the sequences where she flees into the streets with her daughter, and is harshly reprimanded for her uncovered appearance, are even more frightening than the film’s supernatural threats.
That fact is a credit to the film’s effectiveness as a period drama, and also perhaps a knock against its bona fides as a horror film. While Under the Shadow’s portrayal of Tehran, as well as the steady departure of neighbors as the war intensifies, all build tension wonderfully, the film’s supernatural elements are essentially just a series of jump scares. I’d have appreciated a more menacingly realized djinn, but recognize that the horror elements are perhaps this film’s third-most-significant genre, while the portrayals of its family dynamic and historical context are consistently excellent. An elegant and truly distinctive feature.
We finished off the week with a brief and furious bender, watching Furious 6 and Furious 7 back to back. All I can say for that is, if you like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and cars, you will love the shit out of the later Fast and Furious movies. Though initially focused on illegal street racing, Fast 5 elevated the franchise’s scope to the level of preposterous action heists, concluding on a stunning sequence wherein a vault chained to a car is actually used as a flail for battering other cars. 6 and 7 do everything in their power to top that remarkable setpiece; we’re already at the level of “tanks versus cars” by 6’s halfway point, and its conclusion involves a fleet of cars essentially “whaling” for an escaping plane, firing harpoon after harpoon in order to ground their quarry. 7 manages to again outdo the theatrics of its predecessor, while introducing Jason Statham as the series’ most charismatic antagonist so far. The Fast and the Furious is one of the few American action franchises that truly embraces earnest absurdity and Symphogear logic, and I am so proud of it for that. Keep doing what you do, Toretto.
