Black Gate

For my last movie of 2018 in the Fantasia screening room I selected a Canadian horror movie called Lifechanger. Written and directed by Justin McConnell, it follows an entity named Drew (narrated by Bill Oberst Jr), who, born human, at age 12 developed the ability and need to change bodies with other people (which Drew does repeatedly through the movie, tying the film together with voice-over ruminations; thus the “narrated by” in the previous parenthesis). The process kills the other person, and leaves Drew trapped in a swiftly decaying body. For decades, he’s had to keep changing bodies every few days, the inevitable rot slowed only slightly by doses of cocaine. Lately, though, he’s convinced himself he’s fallen in love with a woman named Julia. Drew wants to be close to her, but how can he do that given what he is?

That the question feels meaningful makes the movie a success. It’s odd as a story, with beats in unusual places. Drew never seems too curious about his own nature. Which makes sense; by the time we meet him, he’s resigned himself to the terms of his existence. Still, the movie occasionally feels convenient; his habit of living a few days as one of his victims, for example, feels as though it’d be unsustainable. The plotting here is not the strongest, I think, and I didn’t feel tension build in a traditional way. But it’s an interesting film nevertheless.

This is a small-scale movie, a kind of neighbourhood supernatural horror story set in a suburb of Toronto. It feels a little like the low-budget horror films that filled video store shelves in the 80s, but viewed from a different and somewhat more sophisticated angle. It’s a kind of revisionist horror movie, taking the genre and taking a new look at its framework and structure, keeping what makes those things work while using a different narrative approach. The aim here is not gore, though there is that, but explication of character through the use of horror. As such it succeeds; Drew feels like somebody who’s responding as a human being in an inhuman situation — and so has become inhuman himself, and now accepts the inhumanity as natural.

Drew’s a monster, then, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t consider being honest with Julia about his nature. The movie manages a tricky balance here: Oberst’s dry narration and the sharp script keep Drew at least interesting, though he’s fundamentally unsympathetic on a number of levels. Drew’s got a certain amount of self-knowledge but views mass-murder as merely a necessity for his own survival; being that self-obsessed, he stalks Julia, in a number of different bodies, trying to find out where she lives and whatever information he can that will help him get close to her.

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The second film I saw on the last day of Fantasia was a Korean remake of a Spanish original. The Vanished (사라진 밤) was written and directed by Chang-hee Lee, and is based on the 2012 film The Body (El cuerpo), which was written by Oriol Paulo and Lara Sendim and directed by Paulo. Lee’s film begins with a mysterious attack on a morgue security guard who may have seen a supposedly-dead woman (Hie-ae Kim) very much alive. At any rate, the body’s missing now. The police investigate, led by Jung-sik Woo (Sang-kyung Kim), who calls the husband of the deceased Seol-hee, Jin-han Park (Kang-woo Kim), to the morgue and ends up holding him for questioning. Did Jin-han have a hand in Seol-hee’s apparently-natural death? Or is someone seeking vengeance on him? What about his mistress, Hye-jin (Ji-an Han)? Questions and strange incidents multiply, as the police struggle to solve the crime before dawn, when they must let Jin-han go.

This is a movie that challenges the audience to work out what’s happening. Theoretically, even describing what genre it is could be construed as a spoiler; there’s an experimental drug that enters the story, and opens the door to various different possibilities. I can say, though, that there’s a fair-play aspect to the film. It’s quite possible to figure out by at least the half-way mark roughly what’s happening. For better or worse, I can say this because I did figure out what was happening without particularly trying to. I don’t know that it’d be fair to say that the film’s obvious, though; I happened to pick up on a couple of visual clues, and I’m not sure whether that’s chance or whether that’s good directing by Lee. I suspect it’s not intended, as certain scenes played out as though they were still meant to be mysterious. At any rate, I can say that if a certain amount of tension necessarily goes out of the film when you know what’s going on, it continues to be a solid story.

Some of that is just because The Vanished is technically sound. The location where much of it takes place, the morgue that stores Seol-hee’s body, is shot remarkably well. It has a slick, high-tech feel, but also a definite horror sense. There’s something claustrophobic about the building, filled with small rooms and odd nooks. And echoing halls, and an emptiness that can’t be defined. Conversely, the film also uses flashbacks fairly extensively, so the audience doesn’t get bored of the location. The lighting’s moody at every turn, but is on the whole notably brighter in flashback — still cold, still atmospheric, but brighter than the shadow-filled morgue. Tension’s ramped up by the time element: a clock appears every so often on screen, reminding us how little time remains before Jin-han has to be released, and making us question whether we should be rooting for him or against him.

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Many people collect something, whether it’s rocks, stamps, coins, glass animals (especially favored by emotionally fragile Southern girls who find themselves trapped in Tennessee Williams plays), or in this social media era, grievances. A lot of us here at Black Gate collect books. For almost all of my life, this has been my own particular preoccupation, but much as I love my books, I must admit that collecting them has its drawbacks, a fact I’m reminded of every time someone new comes to my house and I again have to answer the question, “How many of these have you read?”

I do have another collection, though, one which costs nothing, never needs to be dusted, doesn’t require a forklift and flatbed truck to transport, and takes up no room. (Except perhaps emotionally.)

Several years ago, I was watching The Vikings, a 1958 bit of pseudo-historical nonsense starring those Nordic icons Ernest Borgnine, Kirk Douglas, and, fresh from the fjords of Brooklyn, Tony Curtis. At one point during the festivities, some horn-hatted character or other turned to one of his fellow Norsemen and declared, “Love and hate are horns on the same goat.” I instantly experienced a celluloid epiphany, and my new collection was born; from that moment on I began to obsessively accumulate Fake Folk Wisdom From the Movies.

You know Fake Folk Wisdom. You’ll find it in any movie set somewhere east of Suez, or in which native Americans appear, or where lederhosen-wearing peasants named Hans and Karl grab pitchforks and head up the hill to storm the castle. You’ll be knee-deep in it in any movie where a Swede portrays a Chinese (Warner Oland as Charlie Chan) or a Hungarian plays a Japanese (Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto). Virtually every line Anthony Quinn ever spoke in his sixty years in Hollywood was Fake Folk Wisdom of one sort or another.

Fake Folk Wisdom didn’t issue from the depths of the Black Forest, nor was it born on the banks of the Nile, the Danube, or the Ganges, but instead flowed freely from the bourbon bottles that graced the desks of writers’ bungalows at Paramount and Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox and RKO.

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I went by the screening room early on August 2, the last day of the 2018 Fantasia International Film Festival. It was my final chance to see some of the things I’d missed at the festival, and if I watched three movies in the screening room before heading off to watch the two films I wanted to see that evening at the Hall Theatre, then I’d total 60 movies on the year. And I knew going in what the first film I wanted to see at the screening room was, a film that had gathered a goodly amount of buzz around the festival. On the first day of the festival I’d begun Fantasia 2018 with the revisionist Western Buffalo Boys; now I’d begin the last day of Fantasia 2018 with a different kind of revisionist western.

Five Fingers for Marseilles was directed by Michael Matthews from a script by Sean Drummond. A South African film, it starts in the days of apartheid, when five boys have formed a pact to protect their town from outsiders: the Five Fingers, they call themselves. Then White soldiers show up, and things go terribly wrong. Tau, the proudest, kills a man. Twenty years pass; Tau (grown into Vuyo Dabula, who has had roles in Invictus and Avengers: Age of Ultron) becomes a thief and hardened killer, has a change of heart, is imprisoned, is released, and finally returns to his home, to the small town named Marseilles in emulation of a distant European centre. The Five Fingers are no more; the leader’s dead, another one’s become mayor, another’s the chief of police, another’s a priest. The girl who once was closest to the Fingers, Lerato, is now a woman (Zethu Diomo, Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Book of Negroes) running a saloon, with a son by a dead man. And a gang’s trying to take over Marseilles, the Night Runners, led by the mysterious and charismatic Sepoko (Hamilton Dhlamini). Tau wants to put violence behind him and try to be a better man. But can the bad men around him be stopped by any other means? And even if he must again take up the way of the gun, will his childhood allies stand with him? Or can he surround himself with a new group of Five Fingers?

The western aspects are strong in this film. It’s a conscious evocation of the genre without being derivative, romantic, or overtly knowing. It never winks to the audience. But it builds a story around a bad man trying to be better, with a mythic past of violence behind him. The heroes and villains both have the fable-like qualities of good western characters. Not just Sepoko but each of his Night Runners have individual looks. The Five Fingers, meanwhile, are shown early in the film riding their bicycles across the land very like young horsemen — a nod, without being a wink, to the iconography of the cowboy.

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