Mmmm, and here I am again, after ...3 years? Won't promise to stay as I appear to be erratic, so we'll play it by ear (that's almost a pun given this film), plus am getting notions of splitting up the blog into separate parts - a book bit, a film bit, a me thinking aloud bit, the writing bits - all separate blogs, since people that read one bit didn't necessarily want to read the other bits...Also means I can mess about with colour and background for each and have fun with that. We'll see.
Anyway, to the teeny tiny point of me being here again. Just saw YellowBrickRoad and enjoyed a lot. Made me sit and think. But I have a huge habit of waffling, so I'll get to the point and review nice and short:
SPOILERS! Don't read if you haven't seen and don't want to know parts of the plot...
Summary: Another great reason to never go camping, apart from bugs. Or to set off wearing lots of khaki and old fashioned cameras hoping to be rich from the book you'll write about the history of the walk you're about to take, and what happened to the masses of people who last did it.
Main standout: This film made excellent use of auditory torture by music and sonic strain and stress – poss the best use I’ve seen made of over sound saturation since the original Evil Dead and original Suspiria. This music starts as strange sounds, almost celestial, then sounds mechancial or like wind, then resolving into some maddening 30's/40's type songs that are played on and on, loudly or quietly, stopping and starting, repeating and fading. Its the backdrop of most of the film which has no other score. The jauntyness of the songs had me thinking of The Shining, of course, and the ballroom/bar scene. There's a character near the end a touch like the bartender, but not close enough to be a borrow.
Plus, everyone dies, so I should like it (I like films where no one's left standing - its a brave writing choice), but I felt a bit sad some of the characters died – they were actually likeable. Rare for a horror film. The one that was most me-like walked off a mountain and died a strangely hilarious death of disappearing abruptly from the screen.
Hardly any gore, just people going mad and losing their memories and senses of selves, becoming like children, or their Id – in some cases, beginning to feel murderous…possibly because of some sort of magnetic field (the compasses going crazy, and the co-ordinates and other machines not making sense). It was compelling - I really wanted to know what was happening; plus parts were funny, the way any crisis can be. There was also a slight sense of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975 one) about it, people wandering off and never coming back, seeming hypnotised by their surroundings; but this was the not pastel or pretty version of that similar idea.
I would have liked more explanation for what was happening, but the strange hallucinatory ending made its own internal sense, as did Liv’s character explaining that they walked north "to see why some other people walked north". Which made it sound stupid, like they deserved what happened, which they didn’t; which moreso made it sad. You could see their characters falling away from them, their confusion. (I watched The Visit earlier in the evening, another funny scary film - in some ways the confusion was similar to the grandmother figure, trying hard to be someone else; in YellowBrickRoad the characters couldn't feel like themselves anymore, which left only fear, anger or slyness behind, for some of them.)
Also, come to think of it, it’s the only horror film I remember since Unhinged (the 1982 original), to have a well-constructed monologue right near the end that bookends the film nicely – in this case, the main explorer telling his [now dead but he doesn’t know] wife to not let anyone else walk the road, to let no one else wonder and follow. Which is pointless, partly because she’s dead and can’t hear him, but also because their own disappearance makes for an urban legend now twice as big as the original…of course more people will walk at some point, to see what happened to them.
And the road? You never find out where it goes, really. Only one character seemed to actually see it, but once he got to it, it wasn't there anymore, like an oasis in the desert. Is the grass always greener? Is maybe the film's message, if it has one.
This wasn't run of the mill. I liked it.
Thats it for now :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment