Flasz On Film

Every cultural microtrend has its own lifecycle. Some last longer than others but for the most part the logic governing their biology remains the same.  

At first, progenitors emerge with ideas that look as though they were ahead of their time. In retrospect, additional pre-progenitors or distant ancestors can be identified, sometimes decades ahead. However, because culture and entertainment are in large part driven by public engagement and the follow-on profit generation, eventually one or more progenitors become successful enough that first-wave imitators emerge. Then, a trend is established with its rules and stipulations slowly crystallizing around what’s considered the main body of the trend. Some trends tend to genres. Then, second-wave imitators come, often in droves, while their creators capitalize on the popularity of the trend. And then, we approach the tail end of the trend (like a poet, didn’t even know it) where the successful examples of capitalizing on the trend are slowly supplanted by examples that are progressively less inspired. Call them third-wave iterators who don’t necessarily know intrinsically or feel the reason why they belong to the trend, but they know it was cool to do so just a moment ago, so—hey-ho—they race to bask in the warmth of the limelight hoping to snag some of the leftover cultural kudos… not knowing the music is about to stop and the curtain is going to fall in a manner of mere minutes.  

Problem is that it’s difficult to pin down exact moments when cultural trends transition between those stages and only in retrospect it is possible to demarcate those phases with any degree of educated certainty. That’s because nobody decides—there is no cultural microtrend committee or any other deciding body governing any of this—when stuff happens. It’s like the Darwinian theory of evolution. There never was a distinct moment when velociraptors turned into chickens but on a sufficiently long timescale we can see how these two species are connected to one another.  

Same goes for cultural microtrends where it’s impossible to discern when any particular fad has gone over into the tail end of its lifecycle and it can only be certainly stated when a sufficient volume of examples is reached indicating that inspired creators have run out of steam and uninspired ones took over while their backers still thought it was a good idea to bankroll their efforts. And crucially, only when the public at large stops caring, even in the presence of a niche cult following (because there almost always inevitable there is going to be one), we can say the trend has entered its Lebensabend. 

But there are heralds we can usually pick out of the crowd, sometimes long before a trend zooms past its use-by date. They’re hard to spot and it’s impossible to define what makes a movie a kind of doom-swallow that heralds the arrival of the inevitable and that we are about to hit the bottom of the gravy train. And here I am telling you that Alexandre Aja’s newest movie Never Let Go is one such doom-swallow: an early herald of the impending demise of what we have gleefully identified as “elevated horror.” 

In many ways, this movie starring Halle Berry (who is always great to see in any movie, by the way) looks fundamentally interesting with its intriguing premise suggesting a potentially post-apocalyptic setting, a fable-like iconography, a host of elements with clearly metaphorical interpretation and a basic interest in balancing suspense and dread with instances of visually acute scare generation. 

So, we are introduced to a family of three, a mother (Halle Berry) and two sons (Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins), who live in a dark, dark forest. But it’s not a regular forest. It’s a haunted one. There are things-slash-people-slash-ghostly reveries wandering this place and the only way for our family to stay safe is to always stay tethered to their house with an unreasonably long piece of rope. Because when those things touch them, it’s curtains. Lights out. They’ll be cursed with evil the mother character seems terrified of. And they can’t be touched as long as they are tied to that house with that rope. It’s as though it was all designed as an adaptation of an obscure playground game, derivative of “The floor is lava.” However, it quickly becomes obvious, at least to a viewer who might have seen a movie or two in the last few years, that not everything is what it seems and that those apparitions-slash-ghosts-slash-unwashed zombies may be manifestations of something else entirely. And that not everyone can see them. And maybe, just maybe, that their house in the forest may not be humanity’s last stand after some kind of an unspecified apocalypse. It may all be an elaborate ruse. 

On paper, it seems to work just fine.  

But movies are not made of paper, at least successful ones are not. For some weird reason, Never Let Go does not play like a movie worth watching, or at least one intriguing enough for you to get invested in and explore whatever horrific mysteries await our heroes. Instead, it plays like a movie you’ve seen a hundred times before… and that’s because you probably have seen this movie a hundred times already.  

Everything—and I do mean everything—in this movie is surface level. From the iconography and aesthetics to the thematic underpinnings and the anatomy of the film’s central twist; everything. And that’s not necessarily a detriment because sometimes it’s OK to follow an immediately accessible narrative where characters go on adventures, do stuff that means what you think it means and engage with antagonists who are easily identifiable as such. However, this isn’t supposed to be one of those films. Quite the opposite, it was written and put together with express intent to obfuscate and cover what the movie is about with a primary layer of storytelling which the viewer must decode. It’s a fable steeped in metaphorical iconography and storytelling meant to be interpreted on a different level once the viewer figures out the movie has a false bottom. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work because the puzzle built around the narrative with all those ropes, zombies and what-not is almost too easy to put together.  

Nevertheless, you can still lend this movie some rope (sic!) and remember that at this point in the elevated horror game we have become so well attuned to the idea of seeing through the narrative and identifying elements meant to be read allegorically that it is just a given a viewer skilled in the art would figure this movie out in minutes. It’s not hard to add two and two together and see how these visions are only perceived by the mother or that those visions are personal to her. Or that the whole narrative is meant to be interpreted as a study on mental illness and a deconstruction of a warped parental drive to keep one’s children away from the evil of the world even at the risk of refusing their right to grow up and leave the nest. It’s all there tattooed across this movie’s forehead, as far as I am concerned, but I am willing to concede that the journey is as important as the destination and just because I figured out what the twist is well ahead of time doesn’t mean the movie is boring or bad.  

Problem is that it is boring and bad and altogether unsatisfying because even as far as the journey is concerned, not much in terms of novelty or inspired drive is on offer either. It’s all a bit too pompous and self-serious, to be perfectly honest and I think there is a way to do a movie like this right. You can either go the Shyamalan route and indulge in totally earnest self-awareness while allowing the characters to be a bit goofy on occasion, while retaining suspense and dread as a counterpoint to the caustic humor found in the character work. Alternatively, you can go the Ari Aster way and commit whole hog to the scares, the dread and the utterly unsettling tone of the experience while slowly revealing your cards. Never Let Go could have swung towards The Village or Knock at the Cabin and delivered something interesting. It would have still been at least a tad derivative, but at least it would have been interesting to follow the narrative down the rabbit hole because the characters would have been fun to hang out with. Or it could have been taken down the route of The Night House, Saint Maud, or Beau Is Afraid where the unsettling experience would have been the thing that keeps the viewer watching.  

Sadly, Alexandre Aja and his partners in crime either chose not to commit to any of those options or didn’t know it had been in their interest to do so. Maybe the filmmakers just thought it was enough to put characters in a forest, give them some rope to hold onto and stick a few old people in makeup in the background, and the rest would sort itself out. Because how difficult can it be to make an elevated horror film these days? Everyone seems to be making one these days so it can’t be too hard, can it? What with the template and all being all widely available to the public, source code and everything…

But it is hard. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it successfully, but it takes both a good idea, a good grasp of the metaphorical layer and an understanding of what makes great elevated horrors great to pull this off in a meaningful way. It just goes to show that putting Halle Berry in a forest with two unlikeable child actors and peppering the whole experience with blatantly obvious non-diegetic jump scares does not a good movie make.  

Alas, it may be that Never Let Go will be seen as one of those early signals of the elevated horror trend coming close to folding upon itself. Sure, there’ll be more good ones to follow, and this one isn’t the first dud in the lot either. Remember Antlers? Exactly. But what I’m trying to say is that the experience of watching this movie made me think lovingly of other films I’d rather be watching instead, like The Village or Us or Hereditary, as the Aja-directed effort offered nothing of value or interest to me that I haven’t seen before or haven’t seen before done in a way that engaged me intellectually or emotionally enough to want to persist on the journey. It’s a slog and I can only expect that in the years to come we’ll see dozens more of such experiences, just as we saw way too many found footage horrors in the years after The Blair Witch Project, only a handful of which were worth remembering.  

And if there is any consolation I can extract out of this otherwise abysmal theatrical experience (which should have been a direct-to-Netflix affair akin to Bird Box, but what do I know?), it is that I can also now clearly discern a microtrend-within-microtrend emerging here. See, there was a time in the early 2000s when the incredible popularity of M. Night Shyamalan’s early movies sparked a wave of imitators like The Others, The Skeleton Key or Gothika. In fact, one could potentially stipulate that the current wave of “elevated horror” either began or was immensely turbocharged by the arrival of Shyamalan’s movies. And now, the cycle repeats because Shyamalan’s recent re-emergence with Old, Knock at the Cabin and Trap seems to have reinvigorated the field once more. Not that it needed any such boosts with Jordan Peele, Ari Aster and others roaming free, but it seems that the microtrend of elevated horror could enter its tail-end phase under the aegis of post-resurgent Shyamalan inspiration that is unfortunately misinterpreted as an excuse to rely on nothing else than a shallow hyperbole and a fairy-tale aesthetic.

Sheesh.