Spiral

Ambiguity in a horror movie is tough thing to nail. Too little of it, and you risk over-exposing something that shouldn't be. Too much of it, and you leave your audience with too many questions to bother enjoying what they're seeing. But the worst application of ambiguity is when it's used where it shouldn't be, and Spiral is guilty of that all over the place. The movie is about a same-sex interracial couple and their teenage daughter moving to a quiet little town to get away from the busy life of the city. Why do I mention the couple's sexuality and racial status? Because it has huge importance to the plot, but you don't find this out until much farther down the line. Right away, the younger of the two, Mailk, notices something isn't right in the town. He comes home one day to a homophobic slur written on the wall. He witnesses a weird event across the street at someone's home that looks like some kind of pagan ritual, but is explained away as a prayer circle and celebration of life for someone's grandfather who recently passed. People don't wave or say hi; they look at him with skepticism. He starts having disturbing dreams and seeing ghostly images of a young dead girl that kind of looks like Samara from The Ring. Before passing, the grandfather of the neighbor gives Malik a piece of paper with a bunch of numbers on it (like, a hundred numbers). He starts to get more and more paranoid that something isn't right, while his boyfriend, Aaron, thinks he's overreacting, and their daughter is growing closer to the neighbor boy. It's a fine set-up, even it feels a bit like a weird mash-up of Get Out and Rosemary's Baby, two movies I do not like. But any good horror movie where the premise of "something isn't quite right here" needs to ratchet up the tension, and Spiral never does it. Instead of it being built, it's more sequenced, a straight, dull line, where nothing ever feels like an escalation, just a progression. By the end, when you get answers, the ambiguity comes back to bite this movie hard. What is the significance of the spiral? What is the significance of the plant? What are these people? How did Malik translate a string of numbers into dates when they're just literally a hundred numbers written in lines? And why did the grandfather even give them to him in the first place? And what was the ghost girl about, other than a plot device to give Malik clues? And where the phone calls to his ex-boyfriend really happening? And how much of what we saw was in Malik's imagination, and how much was real? The movie isn't interested in answering any of this. Something sinister is happening, something happened, it's going to happen again, the end. that's what you get. For ambiguity to work, a movie has to connect SOME dots, leaving just enough for the audience to get a partial picture, so they can fill in the rest with their imagination. This movie is only interested in providing the dots and saying "trust us, there's a shape here". After moving at such a languid pace, you should be rewarded with a picture, not punished. That's what this movie feels like: a punishment of your curiosity. You get no satisfaction, no answers, and no denouement. No nothing. Hooptober 2021 movie #11/24.