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| Images courtesy of Kino Lorber Films |
Longtime music video director and occasional feature filmmaker
Mark Pellington of Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies has
formed a substantial oeuvre driven by experimental performance art with an
underlying subtle mood of grief running throughout. The man behind such legendary music videos as
Pearl Jam’s Jeremy, U2’s One and more than a few Jon Bon Jovi and
INXS shorts, Pellington also dabbled in existential dramas such as the Alex
Ross Perry cowritten Nostalgia and more recently the Sophie Turner
starring thriller Survive. The
ability to maintain a steady body of work across the board including but not
limited to television has no doubt paved the way for otherwise impossible
experimental theater projects that could only happen with a filmmaker working
out his creative inspirations on the side, with today’s case study being
Pellington’s 2022 haunted dance horror art film The Severing released by
Kino Lorber Films.
Choreographed by coproducer Nina McNeely who is best known
to filmgoers as the dancer behind Gaspar Noe’s Climax with its
increasingly bizarre and frightening bodily contortions, The Severing is
a bit like a slow-motion wallow in the physicality of grief glimpsed in Charlotte
Gainsbourg’s thrashing performance in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Comprised of only six dancers Danny Axley,
Allison Fletcher, Maija Knapp, Blake Miller, Courtney Scarr and Ryan Spencer, the
film is a mannered ethereal but also coarse movement through viscera with soft
somber music by Peter G. Adams and additional music by Jeff Rona with distant
handheld cinematography by Evelin van Rei of the dancers moving about squalid
rough and worn rooms that look like metallic prison cells. Compounded by makeup artist Blake Armstrong’s
work on the near-nude dancers gives the bodies of the performers the look of
bruises and scars and at times the eerie movements of the dancers feels like
implied violence and nebulous anger.
Wordless save for some select biblical looking subtitles in
between shots in reverse motion almost like an animated gif being rewound and
forwarded again on repeat, there’s no script and no narrative, no plot, no
characters and no conventional story.
Instead, its like being in a purgatory you’re not sure of how or why you’re
there only that physically your body is not within your own control. Conceptually speaking, Pellington’s film
though completely abstract and pure is an attempt at getting at the universal
implacable void of grief through nonlinear nonverbal experimental cinema. Though this kind of project could’ve been and
does have the feel of a live stage theater production, edited and shot on film
it takes on the feeling of entering another universe, a netherworld somewhere
between life and death, Heaven and Hell.
The kind of project of creative expression, trying to paint
an abstract picture of a soul in writhing agony was never going to be an easy
sell let alone sit for the general public.
Though running only seventy minutes, experiencing The Severing in
one sitting like the throes of grief itself feels like an eternity. Moreover, the film continues through the end
credits leaving hints of a lack of closure and unresolved yearnings. Yes the physicality of the film is kind of
disturbing and echoes the gulf between beauty and horror in experimental dance
unleashed by Climax.
Still while that film was intended to blow up in the viewer’s
face, The Severing is more subtly seductive in its aims and debatably
the bolder work of the two. While wholly
original and one of a kind, the proliferation of dance horror as a form of
creative emotional expression not only paved the way for such medium challenging
projects as this but it kept the river flowing for the possibilities of more of
these kinds of contortionist theater horrors.
Pellington’s film is a daring exercise in experimental theater with its
choreographer Nina McNeely at the peak of her creative powers on full
display. Largely inaccessible, yes, but
not to be missed by the adventurous cinephile.
--Andrew Kotwicki
