by Helen Barlow
Oh the horror! The Sundance Film Festival is known for unveiling horror film treats and this year is no exception. Interestingly, the best reviewed films have been foreign-language efforts and one is principally from Australia. Australian-Macedonian director Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone is as original as horror films get, with IndieWire calling it “a heady and haunting folk tale among the best horror debuts in years”.
Stolevski [above], who had made 22 shorts before making his feature film debut, manages to keep dialogue to a minimum, apparently employing an old Macedonian dialect when it is necessary. Set in a 19th century Macedonian village, the poetic, artful film follows a 200-year-old childless witch, Old Maid Maria, who had been burnt at the stake but managed to survive in a horrendous form, as she vents her frustration on women with children. She starts out by making a pact with a woman to hand over her daughter Nevena at age 16 and Nevena too becomes a witch inhabiting the bodies of others, including Noomi Rapace’s [below] abused wife, in a particularly gory manner. Nevena had led her early years hidden away and yearns to have a life of her own, especially since she has achieved happiness after assuming the body of a woman played by Alice Englert.
Stolevski had made relationship dramas in the past and was keen to show the humanity here. The film is in the dramatic competition, so is up for awards on the weekend and is surely a contender. It will release via Universal Pictures.
Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil [main image], which Variety calls “a queasily effective Danish horror film on the discomfort of strangers”, screened in the midnight section and has been picked up by Shudder. It follows a Danish family as they are befriended by a Dutch family while on holiday in Tuscany. Variety compares the scenario to Wolf Creek and Funny Games.
I was interested in Mimi Cave’s Disney film Fresh [below], to see what Hollywood heartthrob Sebastian Stan was doing in a horror film. Quite a lot as it happens. The film starts out as a regular rom-com with Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) struggling in the world of internet dating having just met a sexist pig. After she is befriended by Stan’s Steve in a supermarket, they start dating and she believes the respectable plastic surgeon might be the one. But when they go off to his swish country house, things start to unravel, with Steve’s carnal interests proving quite demented.
It turns out Steve is a cannibal who seduces young women and carves out pieces of them to sell at a high cost. Noa is in contact with other women in his lair, who eventually include her best friend Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs) after she tracked down Steve and captured by him as well. Will the young women manage to escape, or will they have their parts extracted? The film culminates with a bloody climax that gives Stan a lot to chew on, while Edgar-Jones (actually a Brit known for her work in the series War of the Worlds and Normal People) and newcomer Gibbs are revelations.
While the aforementioned films screened at less busy times in the virtual festival (Sundance is virtual for the second year), after a gruelling run of screenings it was a big decision last night whether to watch Andrew Semans’ Resurrection [below] at midnight before hitting the sack.
I’m pleased that I did, as Rebecca Hall’s portrayal as Margaret, a high-flying executive and single mum who encounters controlling man from her past David (Tim Roth), was unmissable. Ultimately, it was difficult to sleep as I kept pondering the ending. While the secret Margaret harbours is “batshit crazy”, as one reviewer puts it, the trauma she continues to deal with is mistaken for delusions — a scenario that is common in abuse situations for women.
Sexual abuse was in fact a recurrent theme in Sundance documentaries, most notably in HBO’s Phoenix Rising, Amy Berg’s two-part story of Westworld actress Evan Rachel Wood [below], who now advocates on behalf of sexually abused women including herself. In 2018, she testified for the Sexual Survivors’ Bill of Rights in the US Congress and was able to push through The Phoenix Act that extended the statute of limitations for domestic felonies in California.
Phoenix Rising follows how Wood was in an on-and-off relationship with heavy metal rocker Marilyn Manson (aka Brian Warner) for around four and a half years from 2006, when she was 18 and he was 37. Looking back, she reveals how she was groomed and “lovebombed” with phrases like: “I’m your vampire,” “You are the blood in my heart” and “I want to stay with you forever,” but what is truly shocking is her recalling Manson raping her at age 19 while filming the video for his song Heart-Shaped Glasses where the sex was meant to be simulated. On Monday, Manson’s attorney disputed her account insisting the sex was simulated. Berg, who is no stranger to controversy or to abuse stories — she made 2014’s An Open Secret about teenagers being sexually abused in the film industry as well as 2006’s Deliver Us from Evil about abuse in the Catholic Church — noted at the film’s Sunday Q&A how powerful players in the music industry need to “take inventory of themselves” as they are still protecting Manson. Other women have also come out as Manson accusers and maybe that’s in the second part that wasn’t screened.
There are glaring similarities between Phoenix Rising and the Bill Cosby four-part documentary series, We Need to Talk about Cosby, directed by comedian and CNN host W Kamau Bell, as both docos discuss the statute of limitations for accusers in the US. The other similarity is that the people who enabled the sitcom star are yet to be reckoned with, but that would be part of another film, as it isn’t dealt with here – something that one of Cosby’s accusers, Barbara Bowman, was keen to point out at the Sundance Q&A.
The documentary mini-series shows how throughout his career Cosby drugged and had sex with women at an astounding rate, with the frequency increasing at the height of his fame. At least 60 women have publicly accused him of sexual assault. On screen, of course, he was America’s favourite dad and worked as a gynaecologist no less, a role that was of his choosing. He maintained a supposedly happy marriage and family at the same time and the documentary notes how he had immense energy and a drive to be famous and is credited with elevating black America to a place it had never achieved before. But at what cost?
We also see how Cosby was convicted of sexual assault in 2018 and how the ruling was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on a legal technicality, allowing the comedian to go free. The documentary is a must see even if this is not the end of his story.
