X

Before I spend several hundred words gushing like a schoolboy getting a kiss from his first crush, I’m gonna get my two tiny nitpicks out of the way. 1) the in media res opening isn’t necessary. And 2) the tiny “twist” at the end also isn’t necessary. Okay, done. Now prepare yourself for me gushing. This is THE funnest, smartest, most tense straight-up slasher movie I’ve seen in years. Maybe decades. And it’s a slasher movie that even non-slasher fans can enjoy, because of how much artistry and skill went into elevating this to more than a mere genre movie. Let’s start with tone and atmosphere. The movie is clearly inspired by dirty, exploitation-style horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House On The Left. Everything from the set design and clothing to filming and cinematography and editing, the movie has a grungy, dirty, low-budget feel to it, but without ACTUALLY being any of those. You can see that there is love and attention and care to capturing the aesthetic but elevating it past the grittiness of the 70’s horror movies. The cinematography is a HUGE part of that. There are so many shots that use the remote landscape, or the claustrophobic house on the farm, or anything else around it, that a movie like Last House On The Left wouldn’t — or couldn’t — do. There’s a shot where Mia Goth’s character is taking a solo skinny dip in a nearby lake, and she’s doing a dead man’s float. The shot is a static drone shot from what looks like 100 feet up; Mia Goth’s naked body is little more than an outline in a vast swath of blue water with a dock jutting out from the left. It’s a simple but artfully effective way of showing the viewer her isolation and vulnerability, and it sets up a similar shot moments later where she’s swimming back to the dock and is unknowingly being chased by an alligator; it easily could’ve been filmed at ground level to make the tension more immediate, but by using that birds eye view, that isolation now underscores the danger she doesn’t know about. The movie is full of shots like this that build tension through framing and cinematography; the creepy old woman peeking out behind a tree, keeping the face of the old man in shadow for several minutes while he threatens one of the characters, even simple static shots of a field, and our characters are tiny specks marching across it. Helping to further cement that tone is the script, possibly the smartest pure slasher script since … Wes Craven’s New Nightmare? Yeah, I think so. There isn’t a single kill, not even your standard prologue or first reel pot boiler kill, until an hour or so into the movie. There are no extraneous walking-meatbag characters either. Every character in this movie — the six people there to film the porn movie, and the elderly couple in whose our building they’re doing it — is important, and every one of them is given sufficient screen time to flesh out their characters. None of them fall into your standard slut or prude or jock or jerk roles either. You will come to care for these characters. They’re not cardboard cutouts for some mutant redneck zombie monster to knock down; they’re presented as living, breathing people. They have thoughts and feelings. They are defined. And so are the antagonists. I won’t spoil what drives the conflict; you need to go in unaware. All you need to know is that it is original, it makes sense, and it’s almost sympathetic in a weird way (not enough to make you actually cheer for them or for the gory deaths of the protagonists, though). And the movie never has to contrive to get these two elderlies into positions to kill, nor does it have to force the protagonists to suddenly become dumber than dirt to be in a position to get murdered. The editing is impeccable. That scene with Mia Goth skinny dipping I mentioned before, when she gets out of the water and onto the dock, you hear a snapping noise and, a beat later, someone say “Action!”. You know what it is — the rest of the cast starting to film the porno — but the way the snap of the clapboard occurs unseen, and with the threat of the gator just narrowly avoided, it’s a subtle trick of editing and it is exquisite. There’s so many other moments of great editing in this as well; again, I can’t spoil, but there’s a kill that gets intertwined with a song on a radio that is just MAGICAL from an editing standpoint. Oh, I can’t not gush about the soundtrack. The score itself is unique and masterful, ratcheting up the dread in just the right way. Think of the best horror scores — Halloween, Elm Street, Psycho, Phantasm — and you notice they’re all fairly minimalistic. You don’t get John Williams orchestral arrangements; this is equally small and subtle and no less evocative. And when appropriate, it also busts out some solid 70’s tunes, from country to funk to rock; you’ll tap your toe to all of them, and they all fit the moment. Lastly, acting. I’m not gonna say there’s Academy Award performances here, but everybody goes above and beyond what a slasher would require, just as the whole movie does. Everybody brings real humanity and depth to their characters. It helps that they’re all seasoned actors here, but the actors invest just as much making these characters feel like flesh and blood people as the script does. With the wrong actors, it could’ve come off terrible. They approach the characters like they’re in a serious movie that just so happens to become a slasher in the final reel. It’s like if 2/3’s of the way into Boogie Nights, you swapped out for Texas Chainsaw. Lastly, there’s the kills, effects, and scares. I don’t scare, period. But there were plenty of times where I was sitting there saying “oh, no, don’t do that” or some variation. You will feel the tension because the movie will force it upon you in the best way. There is genuine tension to this movie, and plenty of creep factor too. While the kills aren’t terribly original, they’re effective, and you won’t notice when CGI is used (and, other than in one kill where it had to be, I’m not convinced it was used anywhere else). For the most part, the effects are down to earth — or they did a hell of a job hiding it — and feel as earthy and real as it would’ve in 1979. From pillar to post, this movie is a raging success. Everything comes together to make a movie that ends as a slasher, but wants to be so much more, and succeeds at every level. Ti West directed a masterpiece here, a movie that takes the slasher genre’s DNA but elevates it by putting a great movie around it without going meta like Scream. This movie is here to elevate the art form, not deconstruct it, and it does so in the most amazing way. This is a slasher you can show people who like horror but not slashers; it’s that smartly done. This was worth the price of theater tickets, I’d happily pay to see it again, and I’ll buy it day one when it drops on Blu-Ray. And you should too.