On DVD: "A Horrible Way to Die"

Mumblecore - that U.S. indie microgenre that has done just about all it can in recent years to claim the term "not-for-profit" - has started to diversify. Stuck in a rut of their own creation (there are, after all, only so many ways one can film one's contemporaries repeatedly failing to hook up with one another), the mumblemovers and shakers have identified genre as the key to their future success. Aaron Katz did clever things with the mystery-thriller in last year's theatrical release Cold Weather, while for the Duplasses and Lena Dunham (if she ever really counted as mumblecore), it's comedy that has provided the way out of this particular filmmaking cul-de-sac: the siblings' Jeff, Who Lives at Home is currently playing in UK multiplexes, while the latter's sitcom Girls has just premiered - to general acclaim - on HBO.

For Joe Swanberg, horror seems to have become the preferred venue: his vampire/mumble crossover Silver Bullets played at last year's London Film Festival, but before that, he took a supporting role in A Horrible Way to Die, a very striking breakthrough for director Adam Wingard. Wingard's film exists within the standard psychothriller template, but seeks to fragment it, shifting back and forth in time and between strands. Its centre appears to be Sarah (Amy Seimetz), a frail-seeming young woman working up the confidence to accept the attentions of Kevin (Swanberg), the nice guy she runs into after one of their AA meetings; but Wingard - who edits as well as directs - keeps undercutting this budding relationship with the progress of a burly, beardy serial killer (AJ Bowen) first seen escaping from police custody, and subsequently observed moving in from the fringes.

If the aim was to unsettle, Wingard succeeds unequivocally: his hazy cinematography (almost guaranteed to induce motion sickness in sensitive viewers) combines with these timeshifts to leave us uncertain where we are, and who's stalking whom exactly. Yet the film's virtues go beyond technical virtuosity. Like Cold Weather before it, A Horrible Way to Die feels like a thematic progression from mumblecore, recognising as it appears to that this generation's awkwardness around relationships - our inability to fully reveal ourselves and our motives, no matter how much we might try, both online and in those hesitant conversations in kitchens that have become a staple of this subgenre - can, in certain cases, be more disturbing than charming or amusing; it's a horror movie that refuses to let its subjects off the hook in more than just the visceral sense.

The degree of control Wingard shows in his first feature to reach the UK (albeit via DVD; he's subsequently contributed to two portmanteau films, V/H/S and The ABCs of Death) is hugely impressive: frankly, it's a welcome surprise to find a young American director working among the mumblecore crowd who knows precisely where and when to cut. The result is a brisk, effective 84-minute suspenser that demonstrates considerable promise: in its quietly chilling feel for the kind of anonymous American backroads and nether lands into which a person or persons might disappear, it'd make an apt (if downbeat) double-bill with Simon Rumley's recent Red, White & Blue, another grungily realist horror premised more on internalities - addiction, and other bad habits - than it is on grabby, gory effects. 

A Horrible Way to Die is available on DVD through Anchor Bay.