Summary:
After the death of her father, a young girl travels to a remote convent on an island to find out why her father funded it for years.
My Thoughts:
I first heard about this film almost a year and a half ago when someone on a Facebook group I was in said this was one of the better Lovecraftian horror films made. I looked everywhere for this movie- streaming services, Youtube, more dubious methods- and still the film evaded me. Then, one night when I was over at a friends for bad movie night, he was scrolling through Shudder and came across the title I had been so long searching for. I practically squealed with delight. The next morning was a snowy Saturday in February, and so, I brewed a pot of coffee and started my day with a wonderfully disturbing nunsploitation film filled with ritualistic violence and, yes, plenty of Lovecraft influence.
Needless to say, my wait was well worth it.
“There are some necessary evils, my child.”
A young woman named Elizabeth (Louise Salter, “Interview with the Vampire”) travels to a mysterious island to see why her recently deceased father was funding the convent that resides there. When she gets to the island, she talks the Mother Superior (Maria Kapnist, “Ruslan and Ludmila”) whom convinces Elizabeth not to cancel the payments without staying on the island a while to see what it is they do there. Elizabeth reluctantly accepts, and soon she befriends a novice nun named Sarah (Venera Simmons). Sarah guides Elizabeth through the convent, and Elizabeth soon begins to suspect that some dark plot might be brewing.
One of the best things about this movie is the way that it doesn’t at all tell you what is going on; you have to figure things out for yourself, you have to be paying attention or else the film won’t really make much sense. The first ten to fifteen minutes of the film, before we flash forward twenty years, have no real dialogue (nuns and people make noises, but they don’t say anything). We’re just shown a group of nuns slowly and insidiously working their way into this otherwise normal convent, planting broken pieces of an amulet around the convent for some unknown reason. Those first minutes really set the tone of the whole film; it’s moody and ominous, the setting is tenebrous and damp, the characters are grim and gross looking- but while all of this is occurring, you the viewer, are left to wonder what’s actually happening. Throughout the whole movie there’s that uneasy mysterious feeling where you aren’t quite sure what’s happening; are the people on the island working to do some dark deed, or are they just a little bit strange?
In a lot of ways, I feel as if this movie resembles movies like “The Wicker Man” and “Midsommar”. The plots and pacing are quite similar; I’d even say that Elizabeth is somewhat like Dani in “Midsommar”: both characters are suffering the loss of family before they’re brought into this weird situation. At the same time, I think this film owes a lot to giallo filmmakers like Argento (“Deep Red”). A lot of his color usage and some of his sound design felt hyper-stylized (there were far too many crying babies in the undertones), very similar to “Suspiria” in some scenes; there were also quite a few scenes that reminded me of Argento’s “Inferno”. It also feels a lot like Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s 1977 film “Alucarda”, but I don’t know how widely known that film was in European markets in the early 90s. The whole atmosphere feels incredibly Lovecraftian; it feels as if you’ve somehow bumbled your way into a dim room where some great, unknowable, slumbering primordial evil had been lurking in the shadows, and you can hear it breathing but you can’t see it, and are trying to vacate the room without waking it. It’s terrifying because you don’t know what to expect, but you know that whatever is coming can’t be good.
The atmosphere throughout this movie is what makes it so compelling, and as we go on, the events that happen to Elizabeth just keep getting darker and darker. The film really starts to ramp up the disturbing and graphic violence as we approach the ending, and it’s there where the film has a few slightly schmaltzy elements, and here I have to digress for a moment to talk about Lovecraft.
One of the best things about Lovecraft is the way that he describes things without really describing them. Take, for example, “Color Out of Space”, a short story which was recently turned into a very solid movie. In that story there’s a part where Lovecraft describes what happens to a boy named Thadeus in the attic, saying:
“When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright […] As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about this horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars to this scene, but the shape in the corner does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment.”
Lovecraft doesn’t actually describe to us what is being witnessed- he doesn’t have to- from his descriptions we can guess that it’s something weird and unknowable and otherworldly, and something horrible befell that poor creature, though we’re not certain what. What the brain can imagine is almost always more terrifying than what storytellers can show or tell us.
I think Sometimes Lovecraftian horror films can achieve that feeling through practical effects, and that’s one reason I always get excited to find another Lovecraftian horror flick. John Carpenter has done it multiple times (“The Thing”, “In the Mouth of Madness”, “Prince of Darkness”), and I honestly thought “Color Out of Space” did a remarkable job. Sometimes, however, those creatures can come off as slightly schmaltzy, and in this film, when the rest of the movie was so dark and so visceral, the rubbery demon thing we see at the end didn’t quite live up to the rest of the movie; in fact it sort of reminded me of the demon at the end of “Kull the Conqueror”, and I never, ever need to be reminded of that movie. Don’t get me wrong, the ending to this film still really works; I just wish they’d have revealed a little less of the creature, and we already see very little of it.
Verdict:
This is a horror film that I would consider a nigh masterpiece. Were it not for a few slightly schlockier moments at the climax, and a few slower scenes at the beginning, this film would’ve received a perfect score from me. It’s starts off dark, and just keeps getting darker and scarier until you’ve completely sunken into a weird nightmare world. I loved this movie.
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