Incident In A Ghostland AKA Ghostland (2018)

Although it often feels like a step up from his previous feature film (The Tall Man), Incident In A Ghostland once again shows that writer-director Pascal Laugier is a man who knows how to take some great ideas and squander them for the sake of some misguided attempts to wrongfoot viewers.

It's not long into Incident In A Ghostland when things get uncomfortable and nasty. A woman (Mylene Farmer) and her two daughters (Emilia Jones and Taylor Hickson) find themselves terrorised by a pair of vicious home invaders. As things build up, temporary relief from the onslaught comes when an adult incarnation of one of the girls (Crystal Reed) wakes up from a nightmare. She has suffered ever since that fateful night but at least it is all now behind her . . . or is the past about to catch up with her?

Jones/Reed and Hickson/Anastasia Phillips are both very good as, respectively, the younger and older incarnations of Beth and Vera, with the younger actresses having to put themselves through the wringer as their characters suffer through more and more violence. Farmer is also very good as the loving mother who wants to protect her daughters from harm, and both Rob Archer and Kevin Power do as well as can be expected while pigeonholed as the one-note psychos.

It's interesting that this movie begins with a quote about H. P. Lovecraft, for two reasons. First of all, the quote is one of the few moments of humour in the film. It's attributed to the main character played by Jones/Reed, summing up her literary aspirations and her main obsession. Second, it is in his fine essay, "Supernatural Horror In Literature", that I learned of the term conte cruel, a style of storytelling "in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalisations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors." Sound familiar? It's certainly something that Laugier is known for, with others giving it the modern label of torture porn.

Sadly, despite the humour and self-awareness shown by that opening quote, this is a movie that shows Laugier to be uninterested in anything other than pain and suffering, which becomes tiresome rather quickly, especially after scenes that hint at a much better tale to be told. We could have had a very smart and resonant film here. Early scenes show Reed being helpless, and even disbelieving, as her sister continues to suffer and be abused by unseen assailants. There are two possibilities in those moments, considering what we know at the time. Either an abuse survivor is so damaged by her experience that she cannot return to any state of normality, or someone is still being abused while the loved ones around her are unable to see it. Both of those ideas are intriguing, and both are immediately dropped as soon as Laugier can get back to simplistic moments of abuse and torture.

The film manages to avoid being a complete waste of time thanks to the scream-filled performances of the main actresses, some great production design, and the first 15-20 minutes. But everything else ensures that it also manages to be a crushing disappointment, especially if you were hoping for something with a bit of depth to it. Which actually puts it right on par with his previous feature.

4/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.

Skyline (2010)

Skyline is a fantastic movie, absolutely superb, very possibly the top of its kind. For those wanting a movie to point at and use as an example of everything that's wrong with over-reliance on special effects. Going by more traditional criteria, Skyline is pretty terrible.

Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson star in this sci-fi alien invasion movie that takes a few attractive young things (including Donald Faison and the gorgeous woman who was my motivation for watching this rubbish, Brittany Daniel) and then surrounds them with lots and lots of VFX in an attempt to stretch what should have been a decent 20-minute short film into a 90-minute feature.

Written by Joshua Cordes and Liam O'Donnell (a first-time script from two men who have more of a background in VFX work) and directed by the Strause brothers (Colin and Greg, two men who have more of a background in VFX work), this movie is astoundingly inept in a number of ways. It's impressive that the brothers managed, apparently, to get the film financed without assistance from any of the major studios, but maybe having someone else heavily invested in the thing would have stopped it from feeling quite so self-indulgent and silly.

The acting is okay, I suppose, but all of the characters are too lightly sketched out and pretty unlikable. Balfour and Thompson do their best, but they're not given anything decent to work with and so end up flailing around, waiting for the next barrage of special effects to take over. Faison and Daniel fare even worse, sadly, but even they get treated better than poor Crystal Reed, who is saddled with a character who does absolutely nothing of use at any stage. At least David Zayas gets one good moment, I can only imagine that he campaigned hard for it.

I was going to end on a charitable note here and say that there were one or two good ideas and it's just a shame that the rest of the film was such a disappointment. I can't even do that. There weren't one or two good ideas, with the notable exception of the final few minutes (which has, I'll begrudgingly admit, ONE good idea). The special effects are often well done, but that's all the movie has going for it. Which is not enough to make it worth watching.

3/10

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