Creepy imagery. Ominous music. Quick cuts to seemingly mundane objects that make it feel like evil lurks on the other side. These are all hallmarks of horror movies. Tokoloshe: The Calling certainly knows how to use this stuff effectively. Eerie chanting on the soundtrack coupled with a shot of an old doll, a rattling doorknob or a man smiling makes any of those things unsettling. The filmmakers know precisely how to use sound and visuals to create something chilling. Moment by moment, the movie works. However, overall, it left me feeling empty handed. A metaphor for South Africa’s past featuring many elements that will remind viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, there is no narrative pull here. It is interesting, yet fails to connect on a more substantial level.
A writer, his wife and daughter check into an abandoned hotel, where they start to see things. Meanwhile, a woman talks to a psychologist about her disturbing experiences at the same hotel. These two plots intersect, but the movie is less concerned with telling a compelling story and more concerned with setting a consistent mood. While the former would absolutely have been welcome, director Richard Green and his team achieve the latter pretty successfully.
The performances are good for what was needed, yet Tokoloshe is all about its style. The colors are muted, washed-out, lending a timelessness to the hotel. It doesn’t exist in the present; it is forever in the past. That makes what happens there feel inevitable, like there is nothing the family can do to avoid the evil haunting those rooms. It is a threatening space, even if I never got a sense of the hotel as a complete location. It is a series of rooms in the same building, but the time is not taken to clarify where anything is in relation to anything else. That is a fitting metaphor for the production as a whole because individual sequences are effective, without really combining to become larger than the sum of its pieces.
Scenes where the father talks to someone who isn’t there or the daughter rides through long hallways are very familiar, though they have been well-designed and fit what the movie is trying to accomplish. The stuff with the woman recounting her time there isn’t quite as strong, mostly because it is building toward a climax that doesn’t pay it off in a satisfactory way.
I am mixed on Tokoloshe: The Calling. The visuals are good, the sound is relentlessly off-putting (in the good “something unavoidably terrible is going to happen” kind of way, as opposed to the “please make it stop” kind of way) and the actors do a good job of playing the situation, since they haven’t actually been given characters. It also does what it sets out to do, then swiftly gets out in approximately 70 minutes. On the flip side, the lack of established characters or a real story means the horror stays conceptual. I didn’t really care about anything because the movie kept everything on the surface. I admire the production. Maybe someone knowledgeable about the history of South Africa will get more out of this. Otherwise, it is well-made, if disappointingly thin.
--Ben Pivoz
