Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are the writer-director partnership who've taken it upon themselves to find new paths into and through well-trodden genre territory. They first came to this viewer's attention at the London Film Festival in 2014 with their semi-unclassifiable Spring, which began as an unusually nuanced Hostel knock-off, morphed into a monster movie, and wound up within the realms of sincerely touching romance. Spring very quickly became a cult movie, one you found yourself pushing on people even as you struggled to explain why they should see it; Moorhead and Benson now return with The Endless, which is literally a movie about a cult, albeit a cult approached from a slightly different angle than the cinema usually permits. The angle is this: what if you had the good sense to haul yourself (or be hauled) away from what the media are reporting as a "UFO death cult", only to feel as though you'd left something behind there, and that you'd made the wrong choice?
The opening act introduces us to two brothers - played by the filmmakers themselves - who left the community their mother raised them in upon her passing, and subsequently developed contrasting personalities. Justin (Benson), the older of the two, has determined to to roll his sleeves up and make a go of it in the real world, no matter that he re-enters society at the lowly rank of cleaner, from which position transcendence seems even further off. His younger sibling Aaron (Moorhead), on the other hand, finds a dusty old tape showing the compound sparking a nostalgia for the place where he was served hand-picked, home-cooked vegetables (rather than the Super Noodles these lonely boys now make for themselves) and left to his own devices, without the mundane earthly concerns of work and rent. On the drive back to the site, for a visit intended to bring a measure of closure (or to remove rose-tinted specs from kid brother's eyes), Aaron tells Justin "it's not a cult, it's a commune". Inevitably, this being a Moorhead and Benson film, it proves to be something else entirely.
We know not what for the longest time. Unlike the cult in Ti West's disappointing The Sacrament, a Jonestown facsimile where we were basically just waiting for someone to bust out the Kool-Aid, the brothers' former home Camp Arcadia proves a far more ambiguous site of inquiry. Yes, it has one or two oddballs, and a light smattering of curious rituals (such as the tug-o'-war with the night), as with any community on this planet, but its residents are far from the hollow, credulous zombies who have traditionally populated screen cults; instead, the boys are introduced or reintroduced to a series of nice, photogenic people in flannel shirts who have inner lives and a karaoke night and a nicely self-deprecating way with the adjective "culty". We, however, come to see them through two sets of eyes. There is Aaron's point of view, that of a big kid falling in love all over again with a place and its people, and there is Justin's point of view, with its innate suspicion that there is something ever so slightly off about it and them - that the whole set-up is a little too New Age idyllic to be true.
That's a tricky balancing act for any film to pull off, and The Endless manages it for a good hour in which you can sense freelance writers everywhere readying Moorhead and Benson for inclusion in that jerrybuilt pantheon of "elevated horror": horror, in other words, that doesn't much look or play like the horrors of our youth, the kind of horror that sparks bloodless thinkpieces on mainstream news websites. My feeling is actually that these filmmakers are to this genre (or any other genre: it's never entirely clearcut what territory we're passing into) what Judd Apatow has been to comedy, namely mini revolutionaries so resistant to the strictures of pre-existing story templates that their output risks sprawling shapelessness. Spring, which ran closer to two hours than normal B-movie length, was fairly loose and baggy, which allowed Moorhead and Benson to work in scenes and character beats rarely seen in genre movies; The Endless is baggier still, using the camp's routines to delay the revelation of what everybody's doing there - and what the film is - until the last possible moment.
You could start huffing impatiently at this, were the shifting and circling around not so clearly part of the film's design. The narrative closing of circles is borne out in everything from a spiralling murmuration of starlings to a ring of Polaroids Justin finds in the dust, and it yields one sharp, lowering matchcut early on, moving us from an overview of the expected UFO landing site to one of the pail of cleaning products central to the siblings' post-cult reality. (Way to bring a brother down to earth.) The extra time allows these writer-directors to better define both their characters and their position in relation to the cult, but I'm not so sure Moorhead and Benson explain the plot continuums they're caught up in to the level The Endless really requires. On further reading, it transpires that some of the new film spins off from this pair's 2012 debut Resolution, and prior knowledge may be essential to understanding what exactly is going on among the film's many sidebars and discursions. We are, it seems, headed into that dangerous brand-building game played by certain franchises in assuming each film is but a fragment of something bigger, a clause in a masterplan.
Even as an exercise in laying out and then solving a puzzle, The Endless can seem erratic. Spring segued fluently from one kind of movie to the next, but this hits a bumpy patch around its midsection - and around that crucial juncture between worlds - with the introduction of several excessively abrasive performers in the roles of desperate methheads, and thereafter lurches forwards in fits and starts. (I also have to confess that Moorhead and Benson didn't entirely work for me as leading men: they convince as bros, but their range is decidedly bro-ish, with none of the expressiveness of Lou Taylor Pucci in their previous film.) The terrain these filmmakers don't get anywhere near this time is that emotional territory Spring passed through. That film, openhearted and openminded, was identifiably the work of young male adventurers still wearing their hearts on their sleeves, yet The Endless feels overly cerebral and closed-off in everything from its narrative trajectory to its casting, culty in the wrong sense of the word: there's a kind of logic to the way it draws circles in the sand, but I spent two hours on the outside looking in at it. Kool-Aid readied, but not sipped.
The Endless opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow, ahead of its DVD release this Monday.
We know not what for the longest time. Unlike the cult in Ti West's disappointing The Sacrament, a Jonestown facsimile where we were basically just waiting for someone to bust out the Kool-Aid, the brothers' former home Camp Arcadia proves a far more ambiguous site of inquiry. Yes, it has one or two oddballs, and a light smattering of curious rituals (such as the tug-o'-war with the night), as with any community on this planet, but its residents are far from the hollow, credulous zombies who have traditionally populated screen cults; instead, the boys are introduced or reintroduced to a series of nice, photogenic people in flannel shirts who have inner lives and a karaoke night and a nicely self-deprecating way with the adjective "culty". We, however, come to see them through two sets of eyes. There is Aaron's point of view, that of a big kid falling in love all over again with a place and its people, and there is Justin's point of view, with its innate suspicion that there is something ever so slightly off about it and them - that the whole set-up is a little too New Age idyllic to be true.
That's a tricky balancing act for any film to pull off, and The Endless manages it for a good hour in which you can sense freelance writers everywhere readying Moorhead and Benson for inclusion in that jerrybuilt pantheon of "elevated horror": horror, in other words, that doesn't much look or play like the horrors of our youth, the kind of horror that sparks bloodless thinkpieces on mainstream news websites. My feeling is actually that these filmmakers are to this genre (or any other genre: it's never entirely clearcut what territory we're passing into) what Judd Apatow has been to comedy, namely mini revolutionaries so resistant to the strictures of pre-existing story templates that their output risks sprawling shapelessness. Spring, which ran closer to two hours than normal B-movie length, was fairly loose and baggy, which allowed Moorhead and Benson to work in scenes and character beats rarely seen in genre movies; The Endless is baggier still, using the camp's routines to delay the revelation of what everybody's doing there - and what the film is - until the last possible moment.
You could start huffing impatiently at this, were the shifting and circling around not so clearly part of the film's design. The narrative closing of circles is borne out in everything from a spiralling murmuration of starlings to a ring of Polaroids Justin finds in the dust, and it yields one sharp, lowering matchcut early on, moving us from an overview of the expected UFO landing site to one of the pail of cleaning products central to the siblings' post-cult reality. (Way to bring a brother down to earth.) The extra time allows these writer-directors to better define both their characters and their position in relation to the cult, but I'm not so sure Moorhead and Benson explain the plot continuums they're caught up in to the level The Endless really requires. On further reading, it transpires that some of the new film spins off from this pair's 2012 debut Resolution, and prior knowledge may be essential to understanding what exactly is going on among the film's many sidebars and discursions. We are, it seems, headed into that dangerous brand-building game played by certain franchises in assuming each film is but a fragment of something bigger, a clause in a masterplan.
Even as an exercise in laying out and then solving a puzzle, The Endless can seem erratic. Spring segued fluently from one kind of movie to the next, but this hits a bumpy patch around its midsection - and around that crucial juncture between worlds - with the introduction of several excessively abrasive performers in the roles of desperate methheads, and thereafter lurches forwards in fits and starts. (I also have to confess that Moorhead and Benson didn't entirely work for me as leading men: they convince as bros, but their range is decidedly bro-ish, with none of the expressiveness of Lou Taylor Pucci in their previous film.) The terrain these filmmakers don't get anywhere near this time is that emotional territory Spring passed through. That film, openhearted and openminded, was identifiably the work of young male adventurers still wearing their hearts on their sleeves, yet The Endless feels overly cerebral and closed-off in everything from its narrative trajectory to its casting, culty in the wrong sense of the word: there's a kind of logic to the way it draws circles in the sand, but I spent two hours on the outside looking in at it. Kool-Aid readied, but not sipped.
The Endless opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow, ahead of its DVD release this Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment