RogerBW's Blog

2019 horror, dir. Richard Stanley, Nicolas Cage, Madeleine Arthur: IMDb / allmovie. There's something in the water…

Much to my surprise, this film really worked for me. Even though it's a big-budget adaptation of a Lovecraft story, so I didn't go in with high hopes. Like Huan Vu's Die Farbe, the film takes the fairly bare story and adds material; but here most of that additional material is character. Mum has had a mastectomy and is having self-image problems; Dad has moved the family out to his late father's farm in the middle of nowhere, bringing alpacas; the kids are dealing with it in their various ways, not being generic moppet children. It's not deep characterisation, but it's effectively established.

So when something from the skies crashes near their property, they each try to deal with the weirdness in their own ways. And, each in their own way, it doesn't help – not the Cage Rage, not the Wiccan-adjacent ritual, not the motherly smothering protection. That's an excellent way of displaying the essential futility of human effort in this Lovecraft story (and to be fair many others), without simply stepping back and recounting the deaths. And with female characters, too!

(I think one could make a fair argument that "deaths" is not in fact accurate in at least some cases…)

There are certainly trappings of conventional horror here, especially in the visual effects, and I found those as tedious as I usually do; but this is a story about the breakdown of reality and the pointlessness of struggling against it, and on that level it works remarkably well.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.