Pooka!

Watching Pooka (I'm omitted the exclamation point) is an infuriating experience. The story is about a struggling actor looking to start a new life as he moves into an apartment complex, and takes a job as the mascot of a new toy being launched that holiday season. The toy randomly records and plays back what a person says, and can do it either nicely (a helium-afflicted childlike voice) or naughtily (a sinister, gravelly, demonic growl). As he wears the costume, he starts to have hallucinations and he wonders if the costume is affecting his sanity. The acting is really good. Nyasha Hatendi does a really good job as a man looking to escape past trauma and start a new life. He has the right amount of desperation, determination, and sadness. He and Latarsha Rose are believable as a couple. The direction is excellent. Nacho Vigalondo, who did the criminally overlooked Colossal and the tense if convoluted Open Windows, wants to make a surreal, nightmare-like movie about trauma and the difficulties in coping with it. There's a great visual language to Pooka, especially with the use of red and blue lighting, and also in editing, stitching together scenes in such a way that the viewer will be just as off-kilter as lead character Wilson. As Wilson begins to fray, he's both sympathetic and frightening, and the direction never falls into making him a hero or a villain. He's a guy that is falling apart at the seams. If that were it, if the movie managed to stick the landing, this would be an easy recommendation as a surreal psychological horror, like Psycho meets Phantasm. But it doesn't, and to explain why, I need to get spoilery. If you'd like to not be spoiled and are interested in seeing the movie, skip past the spoiler section. *****SPOILER WARNING***** What I alluded to at the beginning is that Pooka shows its cards right away, but gives the viewer all the reason in the world to hope they add up to something else. People act too unnatural to be real. The way events unfold suggest one of two things: there is something supernatural going on, or it's all a dream. If you've watched enough movies, you know the signs of a potential "it was all a dream" ending. Pooka tries its level best, at first, to present this as a man going mad, but as the weirdness piles upon itself like a shaky Jenga tower, the supernatural explanation gets more and more remote. I spent the last half hour internally pleading to the cinematic gods that this would not end the way it was clearly heading. I did not get my wish. Making it even worse is that there are details in the dream that Wilson doesn't know about until he wakes up and sees them, so the dream ending doesn't make sense as a finale. And on top of THAT is that, after all this, it's a downbeat ending. I have no issue with a downbeat ending, but this isn't scary or ominous or anything. It's just depressing. Instead of coming back to a good reality, it's coming back to a bad one. A tragic one. And one in which Wilson is a crappy person for whom it's hard to have sympathy for. That trifecta -- a waste of 80 minutes, a dream ending that relies on a major plot hole, and a bummer reality -- is too much bad for this movie to overcome. *****SPOILERS OVER***** I admit that, for some people, the weird and wild journey will be where they find the value, and if you're one of those kind, this is a hell of a ride. As I said, the acting and direction in this are excellent. But I need that journey to end somewhere good, and the ending here made the journey pointless.