Absolutely fucking terrifying. Beginning like a clawing at the back of the skull thanks to excellent sound design and experimental, stripped down music, the film has an eye for detailed staging which makes the Midwest look stark, bleak, empty and nightmarish. It's like listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" - a quaint little place, homely yet peppered with a dusting of snow (this is a Christmas film!) and festering beneath with evil, like a rot, like peeling paint exposing a vile monstrous corruption. It slithers and snakes its way into your mind in a serpentine creep beneath your flesh, lingering on stunning and stark and frightening imagery throughout.
I cannot praise it enough. The classic police procedural detective story is the framework, and will easily draw comparisons to "Seven" and "Silence of the Lambs", well earned. About 40 minutes in I realised that I had cut off blood flow to my hand and thigh from gripping them absent mindedly.
The opening shots in a 4 by 3 aspect ratio are in the style of a projector slide of home movies, adding to the sinister "kitchen sink horror" they're aiming for. When Agent Harker explores a suburban street, the houses are reminiscent of churches... The strongest parts are the simple pieces of imagery: Harker looks up in the library from her studies, and there is nobody there; Harker spreads out her work on the floor to study it, and it is evocative of a summoning circle. Its setting is the early 90s, but even more timely now: the Satanic panic and dread of the Reagan years are in the rear view mirror and we're entering a hopeful new age, but that rot creeps back in, having lingered for new age: Harker sits in front of her supportive boss as he talks through their work, and the portrait of Bill Clinton lingers above him, leering down at them...
Its edits and transitions continue the serpentine, insidious comparisons and thematic emblems, whilst the staging and sets and shot composition will burn themselves into your brain (there's a reason that the poster is so striking, and is indeed in the film proper!) - check out the agents entering the barn, made up like a belly of a beast...
Refreshingly, the movie also has been keeping its trump card close to its chest. Maika Monroe is fantastic as always (want your horror movie to be good? Just put her in the lead. "It Follows" is one of my favourite movies of all time, "Watcher" was fabulous, "The Guest" fucking rules), but Nicolas Cage? Exceptional.
Granted I'm biased: the man is the greatest living actor. I've seen pushback to his performance, and without spoiling all I will say is:
You all loved Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight".
He's an unhinged toxic, festering nightmare of a man, ghoulish pallid and corpse-like, certainly nothing to forget anytime soon.
I absolutely adored this movie, and unusually for a horror movie it pulls it out of the bag and goes stratospheric with its ending: a soaring, terrifyingly ambiguous, all too fitting coda to this horrible dream.
Fuck. Yes.
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