Black Gate

Film noir’s usually thought of as an urban genre. Its standard setting is the mean streets down which a man must go who is not himself mean. But a city’s not necessary; the Criterion Channel recently hosted a collection of Western Noir, films like Rancho Notorious and The Walking Hills. The ingredients for noir — violence, criminality, a morally bleak world — can be brought together anywhere.

Thus The Oak Room. Directed by Cody Calahan, with a script by Peter Genoway based on his own play, it’s a rural Canadian noir that plays with narrative and genre. You can see the preoccupations of CanLit — fathers and sons, hopelessness and a lack of escape, the harshness of the land. But you also see noir: an atmosphere of violence, a sense that everybody’s compromised, shadows and night. There’s no femme fatale here, no women at all, in fact; but there is a concern with truth, as characters tell each other stories and teach other how to bullshit. What’s true and what’s false and why the characters are telling each other the things they do become increasingly important, questions even of life and death.

There’s perhaps less a plot to The Oak Room than a structure, a framework filled with stories and discussions of storytelling. It begins one night in the middle of a snowstorm with a man walking into a bar off a highway in western Ontario. The customer, Steve (RJ Mitte) has a history with the bartender, Paul (Peter Outerbridge). Steve’s come to pick up his dead father’s things from Paul, who’s been holding them. Paul isn’t shy about telling Steve he’d be a disappointment to his old man, but Steve starts telling him a story, about a man who walks into a bar in rural Ontario one night in the middle of a snowstorm.

Why he tells the story, and what happens in it, become a large part of what The Oak Room is about. The conflict between Paul and Steve plays out on a number of levels, and goes to unexpected places. In particular there’s a story that gets told around the middle of the film about Steve’s father which gives a theological tone to events by illustrating a specific kind of damnation. It echoes the theme of mortality, but it also gives the movie a weight, a sense of the meaning behind events and why these stories matter.

On the flip side, that story’s image of damnation could be described as what happens when you have no story to tell yourself about your life and future. This is a movie about storytelling, about the motives for telling stories and about the ways stories have a power over their audience. It’s more cynical than most stories with that theme, though. Stories here delay and obfuscate and set up their audiences as marks. You could call it a movie about the danger of storytelling, but also a movie about how you need stories, and how you can use them.

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The Western’s an American genre in origin, but Europeans from Sergio Leone to Charlier and Moebius have done interesting work in the form. Usually, though, European Westerns follow American heroes. That is, the European creators are still telling American stories. Savage State (L’État Sauvage), a Western from French writer/director David Perrault, does something different, following a French family trying to get out of the American South during the Civil War. It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately, the execution’s lacking.

The movie starts in Missouri in 1863. After a brush with occupying Union soldiers turns violent, a wealthy French family decides to flee the American Civil War and return to France. Patriarch Edmond (Bruno Todeschini) hires a gunslinger named Victor (Kevin Janssens) to accompany him, his wife Madeleine (Constance Dollé), his three daughters, and their free Black servant Layla (Armelle Abibou) who is also Edmond’s lover. They set out for the coast accompanied by a couple other family retainers, but a woman from Victor’s past (Kate Moran) who leads a gang of bandits threatens to bring ruin on them all.

Let’s start with the good: the movie looks spectacular. There’s a long tradition in Western films of stunning landscape cinematography, and we get that here. The first act, largely taking place in aristocratic interiors, is less interesting; but the journey through the wilderness, lush in a way that Westerns usually aren’t, presents one sumptuous location after another. Mountain scenes give us sublime vistas. Deep green forests yield to snow as the journey progresses. It’s a nice picture to look at.

But if that’s the good, all the rest is the bad and the ugly. In particular, the story is at best thin and unconvincing. At worst, it’s a misfire. Nothing builds in any logical way or develops coherently. Character remains underdeveloped. Choices are baffling.

The idea here should be simple: fill the journey that is the spine of the film with thematically-resonant incidents that say something about character. This doesn’t happen. In fact the journey takes a while to get started — as noted, the whole first act — and then doesn’t end either in France or at an American port city, but in a ghost town in a mountain valley. So the movie starts late and ends early.

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Every story’s got a genre, even if the story’s the sole example of its genre, so by extension a lot of stories use genre conventions and trust that the audience will accept them even if they’re unlikely or unbelievable. Often the audience does, especially when the conventions are so common they don’t register as conventions. But a story usually works better the more it can justify its conventions. Especially when the justification, and the convention, work with the story’s theme.

Take Minor Premise, the first film I saw on the twelfth day of Fantasia. It’s the debut film by director Eric Schultz, with a script Schultz wrote with Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey, and it tells the story of Ethan (Sathya Sridharan), a neuroscientist who thinks he’s worked out something fundamental about the human psyche and developed a way to control consciousness. He experiments on himself, hoping to balance his emotional landscape and enhance his intellect. Things don’t go according to plan. Ethan shatters himself, so that different parts of his mind are in control of him at any given point, and his more coherent parts must work with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook) to find a way to undo the experiment — before the physical stresses of the division kill Ethan. Mysteries abound, as Ethan’s memory isn’t consistent across all his different moods; he’s become different people, and some of them may have their own agendas.

A lone mad scientist developing a technology beyond modern science is a convention freely used in science-fiction and horror stories. It’s uncommon in reality, where much research is done in teams. But it’s a well-established storytelling device, going back to the Romantic era and Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. The trick is making the audience believe that the scientist of questionable mental stability is able to make their breakthrough on their own. The scientist has to be written as somebody who’s that smart, and that individualistic. And the breakthrough has to be something credible — an obvious advance that’s close enough to reality, or depicted as close enough to reality, that you believe a single researcher in a lab could come up with it.

Minor Premise does all this. It’s a well-told story in general, strongly constructed and well-paced. But it handles its science-fictional conventions with an eye on its characters, and its thematic ideas play into both. This is a film about the nature of character, and the specific character of its lead is examined in a way that’s both dramatic and specifically science-fictional.

Of course, for that to work, the character has to be credible. And Ethan is. He’s vain, and smart, and the writing shows him to be smart enough that we understand his vanity while also seeing his blind spots. We see how he could have been smarter in the past, and why he thinks his life would be better if he had been that much smarter; we see how, as an intelligent man, he values his intelligence and assumes that if he were even more brilliant he’d be able to see through other people before they betray him. We can see why he’d attract someone like Allie, and why he’d inevitably drive her away.

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One of the crucial differences between the way a storyteller approaches the tale they’re telling and the way the audience experiences that tale is that the storyteller typically knows the ending in advance. If they don’t start with the ending and work to that, they’ve usually still worked out multiple drafts of the story, if only in their head. The audience, on the other hand, at least on their first experience of a story doesn’t get to the end until they’ve gone through the whole of the work leading there. Even if they’ve heard something of the ending, or guess at it, the body of the work is necessarily the main part of the experience. If you just get the ending, you haven’t really gotten the whole story.

This is worth noting because if a story’s ending is weak, or markedly out of tone with the rest of the work, there’s a temptation for a critic to say that the ending let the story down. From an audience perspective, that’s absolutely true. From a storyteller’s perspective, it instead suggests that the rest of the story was misjudged. Something, or multiple somethings, did not work in harmony with the vision of the ending that was always there.

Which brings me to Come True. It’s a science fiction film that played Fantasia, and it was written and directed by Anthony Scott Burns. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) is a teen in a big city who’s falling asleep at inappropriate times. Alienated from her family and spending nights in a park, she stumbles on a sleep study researching dreams, which promises to give her a bed for a month. But odd things happen at the study. Other participants drop out. One of the men running the study (Landon Liboiron) seems to be following her. And her dreams may be getting worse.

On a sensory level, Come True is a powerful movie. Burns also composed the soundtrack and handled the cinematography, and his work in those departments is excellent. The whole movie seems to take place in a twilight of filtered light and odd sounds on the edge of hearing. Nightmares are given a creepy and distinctive visual form, the camera steadily moving through worlds of shadowed shapes.

And the first half of the movie is a sharply-told story about science digging into mysteries that might hold more dangers than the researchers know. The film moves well, passing swiftly through Sarah’s struggles at home and school to spend time at the mysterious study, and in this context that’s a strong choice. This is a movie that knows what’s interesting about its ideas, and those things are not the usual elements of everyday life.

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There is a certain tone I find in some works of science fiction, almost all from Europe, a ‘literary’ approach that uses science-fictional imagery with self-conscious irony in a way that at least approaches allegory and often satire. In prose I associate this approach with Lem and indeed Kafka; in film, with Tarkovsky’s science-fiction (adapting Lem and the Strugatskys) and Alphaville and On The Silver Globe. The focus in these works is less on world-building than on symbolism, and often on a narrative structure that layers stories within stories and plays with chronology. At their best, these tales emphasise the purely fantastic essence at the heart of science fiction: a type of wonder that uses a modern vocabulary.

This year’s Fantasia Festival had a film in that tradition called Undergods. Written and directed by Spaniard Chino Moya, it’s officially a co-production from Estonia, Sweden, Belgium, and the UK. A series of interlaced stories told by a couple of bored men on a long journey by truck, it openly refers to the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of the early masters of the kind of fiction I described above. That made Undergods the second Hoffmann-influenced film I saw at Fantasia after Tezuka’s Barbara, which was inspired by the tales of Hoffmann at several removes. Hoffmann was a writer who played about with doubles and alter-egos — one of his unfinished novels, Kater Murr, imagined the autobiography of a complacent bourgeouis housecat written on the back of letters by a frenzied Romantic composer — so it’s interesting to note that Barbara evoked the content of Hoffmann’s stories without their complexity of form, while Undergods had the form of stories commenting on stories without much of the fantastic content.

The film opens with the truckers (Johann Myers and Géza Röhrig), gathering corpses in a ruined city. They start talking about their dreams, which leads to them telling three stories. In the first, an older man (Michael Gould) and his wife (Hayley Carmichael) take in another man (Ned Dennehy) who claims to be a tenant in their building who’s locked himself out of hs room; he’s helpful, but doesn’t leave, and soon appears to be manipulating them for some unknown reason. From there we pass to a father telling his young daughter about the aftermath of those events, and then launching into a bedtime story. That story’s about an old and wealthy businessman (Eric Godon) who betrays a brilliant but naive architect (Jan Bijvoet); in revenge the architect kidnaps the businessman’s daughter (Tanya Reynolds), leading the businessman to team up with her boyfriend to try to find her — eventually ending up in the city of the corpse-gatherers. The last story begins where the last ended, with a prison in the ruined city, where an inmate (Sam Louwyck) is released to return to his family in a modern city in the developed world; Sam’s wife (Kate Dickie), thinking him dead, has long since married Dominic (Adrian Rawlins) whose perspective we follow as the family tries to adapt to Sam’s reappearance.

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There’s an old line that says science fiction literalises metaphors. It’s a line that applies to fantasy and horror, too. It means that, for example, a realist book may say that somebody walking through their old house is haunted by memories like the ghosts of their past, while a horror story might have that person be actually haunted by an actual ghost representing that past. What is metaphor in one case is literal in the other. But still a metaphor, as well, still symbolising something more than itself. Part of the trick of writing stories of the fantastic is knowing how to handle the metaphorical and the literal — knowing exactly how literal to make the literalised metaphor, and how to explore what literalising the metaphor brings the story, and how to explore the metaphor as metaphor while keeping it a literal thing.

All of which came to mind when I saw Unearth on the start of the eleventh day of the Fantasia Film Festival. The movie was directed by John C. Lyons and Dorota Swies from a script by Lyons and Kelsey Goldberg, and it’s concerned with industry coming into a small town and unloosing something terrible. But it’s a slow build to get to a point that most horror movies would put up front, and by the time the horror emerges you wonder if it was really needed.

The film follows two families struggling to make ends meet, one a farming family headed by matriarch Kathryn Dolan (Adrienne Barbeau), the other by garage owner George Lomack (Marc Blucas). The first act of the film introduces us to the Dolans and Lomacks and shows us their hopes and dreams being strangled by poverty, so that we understand why George is ready to lease his land to an oil company. The company moves in and starts a fracking operation, causing the environment to degrade rapidly. And then something worse is disturbed.

But that something worse does not become obvious until over an hour into a 94-minute movie. When it does, it pays off some hints and imagery from earlier in the film. But those hints have been so subtle it takes a while even after the horror really emerges to understand what it is we’re seeing.

For much of the movie, in fact, it looks like the oil company and perhaps capitalism in general are the monsters. The oil company emissary offers a sinister deal to various characters, preying upon the weakest and least able to resist. After the evil deal’s made, the surroundings become a hell. This is barely a metaphor; the need for money and the corruption of the land make the oil company, distant and untouchable, a demonic force.

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