Based on a novel by Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, the film is about Ig Perrish who has been accused of murdering his girlfriend Merrin. Set in the rural North, everyone in this otherwise small and sleepy town is convinced that Ig is guilty. One day after a particularly drunken night, Ig wakes up with two horns growing from his temples and a strange supernatural ability to peer into the deepest recesses of other people's memories. He then sets out to use this new found power to find out who really killed Merrin.
While I have not read the book, it is described to be a mixed bag of fantasy, crime thriller, and Gothic horror fiction, which the film certainly lives up to. While for the most part, it's lighter than say High Tension or The Hills Have Eyes (remake) the theme and vernacular of the story is very much Aja doing what he's good at. The horns give Ig this window into the deepest darkest side of all the townspeople, exposing them for what they really are. Having grown up in a small rural town I really appreciated how Aja captured and portrayed that slimy dark muck underneath the otherwise beautiful landscape. It's a darkness that once you've seen it in the flesh, it can never be ignored.
Another wonderful aspect of this film was it's ability to blend practical (i.e. real) effects with CGI (computer generated images) to aide some of the more fantastic elements of the story with a realistic texture and hue. So often films either go one way or the other and unless you have a LOT of money it's damn near impossible to achieve practical effects that will stun the audience. On the flip side, when all of the effects are achieved with computers it's rare that they are blended well enough to feel believable in the slightest. I know that part of watching Horror films is about suspending one's disbelief, but practical effects offer a layer of realism that CGI just doesn't meet. For example, part of the lasting adoration for John Carpenter's The Thing are the practical creature and makeup effects which still terrify and disturb audiences to this day.
Back to Radcliffe. Radcliffe runs the gamete of emotional display in this film, but it he does it a way that is fairly believable. He rarely hams it up for the camera and in fact you get the feeling that he is so immersed into the character of Ig that he forgets about the camera altogether. You get to seem him really embracing that little bit of darkness that's in everyone, and he didn't let his accent slip once; believe me that's important. It also helps that he had a great supporting cast. Juno Temple's Merrin glows onscreen in the flash back sequences, and Joe Anderson's portrayal as Terry, Ig's brilliant trumpet playing, drug addled, selfish older brother is a perfect foil. There are also great cameo's from Heather Graham and David Morse among others.
My only real complaint about the film is that I felt it could have pushed the tone harder. I got the sense that this was an effort of restraint from either Aja or the studio in order to make a more accessible film. Humor is quite present in the film, which is good, otherwise the film would've felt pretentious. Still, I have hardly anything really bad to say about it, only that I wanted a little bit more from it than it delivered. All in all, an enjoyable film with some solid acting, and a unique story shot in a gorgeously dark location. Weirdly enough, you can rent or buy it in HD streaming from Amazon, but I'd recommend checking it out in theaters.
4 out of 5 skulls.
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