Lawrie Brewster and Sarah Daly's Lord
of Tears (also known as The
Owlman) was one of the most
impressive indie horror titles of 2013: a beautifully shot,
marvelously spooky and atmospheric hybrid of Lovecraftian nightmares
and gothic Scottish gloom. It was an attention-grabbing debut which
announced the director/writer duo as a major force to watch out for
in the horror genre. Now their follow-up feature, The
Unkindness of Ravens, has
arrived on blu-ray and DVD, and it not only fulfills the promise of
that debut, but exceeds it. Everything that is great about Lord
of Tears is equally strong here
– director Brewster's spellbinding cinematography and atmosphere,
and writer Daly's surreal, nightmare-like storytelling sensibility –
but it also manages to address most of its predecessor's flaws. Lord
of Tears, for all its strong
points, did have a few first-major-feature weaknesses, particularly
some awkward or excessive choices in its editing and pacing. Brewster
clearly learned from the experience, and guides The
Unkindness of Ravens with a sure
hand and a strong sense of pacing and momentum. The film pulls the
viewer into its oppressive darkness with an ever-mounting, fatalistic
dread, and while
it may not have quite the level of terrifying images that Lord
of Tears provided,
it brings an unexpected psychological punch that will stick with you.
What
is so unexpected about The Unkindness of Ravens is that, while
it functions perfectly well as a horror film, at a deeper level it is
much more of a psychological drama – and a very surreal one at
that. The
film follows an Afghanistan vet struggling with severe PTSD, who
travels to an empty cottage in the wilderness to work on his mental
health through contemplation and art. But the isolation has exactly
the opposite effect when his inner demons start manifesting as
physical ones: bird-faced executioners reminiscent of Medieval plague
doctors, who have come to take him to the hell he thought he escaped
when he returned home from war. The film places us in the tormented
mind of our protagonist, Andrew (Jamie Scott Gordon of Lord
of Tears),
and takes us on a journey that is psychologically-subjective in the
extreme. What we witness may be his slipping further into mental
illness, with his guilt and fear and suicidal tendencies manifesting
as hallucinations to torment him, or maybe he actually is being
haunted by spirits that prey on the wounded. Since we see everything
through his perspective, which is unreliable at best, we have no way
of knowing for sure, and that is exactly the point. Whether real or
imagined, the titular ravens represent the horror and suffering that
came back with him from Afghanistan, and his fight to stay out of
their clutches represents his inner battle to stay sane and stay
alive. He came to the cabin to face and make peace with his traumas,
and in a metaphorical sense, that is exactly what he's doing; it just
requires a journey through hell that is (maybe) literal rather than
figurative.
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| Gaze into the abyss, and the abyss gazes back into you. |
The film works very well on both of its levels: as a surreal horror fever-dream, and as an emotionally-evocative and unexpectedly deep portrait of a wounded soldier struggling with mental illness. That it works so well as the first, however, depends entirely on the second. More so than Lord of Tears, The Unkindness of Ravens doesn't care to bother much with jump-scares and things of that nature; it instead aims to be unnerving on a deeper level, which depends on horror that is as psychological as it is visceral. The film spends quite a bit of time getting us into Andrew's mental state, often through powerfully intense flashbacks to the horrors he lived through in the Middle East. These flashbacks are key to allowing us to understand and feel his pain. They are also arguably the most impressive parts of the film, from a technical standpoint: that a low-budget indie shot in Scotland can so harrowingly recreate an Afghanistan battlefield is quite a feat. Much credit for the impact of this also must go to Jamie Scott Gordon, who has the extremely challenging task of carrying most of the film as a one-actor show, with all the other bit players strictly existing on the periphery of his very intimate psychological journey. He is excellent, both in moments of quiet struggles and moments of fury. I really hope that his strong work here gets him larger recognition beyond the indie horror community; he clearly has strong dramatic chops, and this movie is for him what Moon was for Sam Rockwell.
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| May the World Tree in the American Gods series be this spectacularly creepy. |
The
film's horror imagery is also very impressive, and uses the Scottish
wilderness location to very strong and moody effect. While Lord
of Tears evoked
Slender-Man-ish imagery filtered through classic Old Dark Haunted
House vibes, The
Unkindness of Ravens uses
mist-filled landscapes, dead trees, and overgrown shells of buildings
to create its atmosphere of old-world horrors brought forward from
both Pagan times and the Middle Ages. As with Brewter's previous
film, the cinematography is stunning: he has an eye for locations and
shot compositions that are absolutely beautiful in their haunting and
sinister way. He also has a patient ability to locate really eerie
images in nature which give the landscape the feeling of a dream; his
filmmaking is totally attuned with the darkest and most
mystical-seeming aspects of the Scottish wilderness. Then there are
his monsters, the humanoid birds of prey. Taking heavy design cues
from those creepiest figures of Medieval history, the beak-masked
plague doctors, they are very effective and menacing villains. Not
quite the stuff of nightmares that Lord
of Tears'
Owlman is, but very spooky all the same. On that subject, it is very
interesting that both of Brewster and Daly's horror films are based
around creepy humanoid bird imagery; it's an odd niche to keep
exploring, but they're clearly onto something, because it works just
as well the second time around.
If
there is a flaw to the film, though, it is that the horror imagery of
the raven-people ends up feeling a bit overexposed and excessive by
the end. Ultimately we see too much of them too clearly, and their
scenes become a tad repetitive after a point. The third act is very compelling in its own right, and pulls out all the stops with
some genuinely shocking results, but in the end I felt that it could have
used a bit more of Lord
of Tears'
subtlety, wherein the Owlman was usually only shown in brief flashes
just long enough to haunt your dreams. It is a tradeoff, though,
because Lord
of Tears
had its own detrimental self-indulgences in the editing and pacing
departments, and those flaws are largely corrected this time around.
Brewster clearly learned a few things about the pacing of scenes from
revisiting Lord
of Tears,
and despite its flirtation with visual excesses, he paces the story
and suspense of this follow-up film in a significantly tighter and
more disciplined way. The
Unkindness of Ravens moves
with a fierce momentum that never lets up, and outside of the
complaint of seeing a bit too much of the raven-people and their
torturing ways, I never felt that a scene ran too long or overstayed
its welcome. While I did have that one complaint about this film, I
nonetheless have great respect for it, as an extremely strong work by
a filmmaker who is really coming into his own as an
auteur.
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| Really makes you want to vacation in Scotland, doesn't it? |
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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