05 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: Some Kind Of Hate (2015)

Netflix "suggested ratings" are the damndest thing.  I'm pretty sure almost anyone reading this can attest to the often 1 star rated film that actually deserved 3 or 4.  I'll never quite understand how their algorithms work to come to that conclusion, but it happens to me 9 times out of 10 when I'm looking for new Horror flicks to watch, with the exception of Contracted.  That movie was a true 1 star (or skull) rated film.  Such is the case with Adam Egypt Mortimer's Some Kind Of Hate.

Lincoln (Ronen Rubinstein), a bullied kid, finally fights back and gets sent to some mountain desert school for a "holistic" approach to healing troubled minds.  Because of how he got their he ends up getting bullied again by another aggressive member of the school.  After a particularly ferocious incident he runs to the basement of an unused building where he meets a spirit (Sierra McCormick) who takes his frustrated cries seriously and brutally.

The film is all about build up.  It very realistically produces the effects of abuse and damaged psyches in the characters.  The cyclical nature of abuse tends to feel unending for many victims and the desire to lash out against even those who are close is only natural.  Breslin's brooding and complicated Isaac manages to stay away from being overly cliched by his shear honesty.  He's angry, but he abhors violence and it only comes out of him when it is driven out by the bullies of the story.  So when an unstoppable force takes his pitiful cries of rage seriously a true disaster lies in wait.  Also, when are angst ridden teenagers going to learn not to trust vengeful spirits?

The one thing that got me about the film was how darkly it was shot and it's clear abuse of desaturated color.  Otherwise I found the editing and framing choices to work incredibly well.  Clearly shot on a low budget with a cast of mostly unknown actors, the film relies on it's ability to make the characters believable and when the killing finally begins are when the inventive choices start to come out.  It doesn't shy away from the blood either, the weapon of choice usually being a razor blades.  There's a bleakness to the film, moments of tenderness are cut short in favor of cruelty, because how else does one explore the effects of cruelty?  The ending is unrepentant and unforgiving.  Not exactly for the feint of heart and probably full of a good many triggers for those of fragile mental states.