The horror anthology can be a tricky, frustrating subgenre to navigate. The truly great ones are few and far between (and even those are largely more a matter of consistency rather than ingenuity), but the promise inherent in all the others of finding a gem in the rough (a common enough occurrence, in my experience at least) can lead to even the most discerning of horror fans wading through piles of shit in search of a segment smacking of real creativity and ideas, if not out of anything other than the same sense of exploratory pleasure/fervor that any genre adventurer is well acquainted with.
The wraparound is of course an essential ingredient in most worthy anthologies, simultaneously tasked as it is with standing outside of the individual stories and acting as its own mini-narrative, while also providing the context and connective tissue for the tales taking place and, in the best of cases (see: Creepshow, Dead of Night, any of Roy Ward Baker's work for Amicus) establishing the thematic and stylistic trends to be followed. It's not very common that these wraparound framing segments emerge from any given anthology as the highlight, but such is the case with The Theatre Bizarre, a 2011 anthology that I'd been looking forward to for some time given the names involved. It's unfortunately largely terrible, but the framing story, titled "Theatre Guignol" and directed by Jeremy Kasten, is a pretty striking accomplishment: a crazed young lady wanders into a desolate, baroque theatre and becomes the sole audience for a paper-mache Udo Kier, who stands on stage and waxes cryptically on the transformative potentials of fiction. It's a clear homage to the Club Silencio sequence from Mulholland Drive, and even directly apes some of Lynch's mise-en-scene, but is distinctly stylized in its own right (utilizing a mixture of both static shots and jagged handheld, for one) and is able to conjure up its own uneasy sense of mystery, if not quite the same well of deep oneiric emotion achieved in the Lynch. The progression of this framing story - Kier becomes more human as the female audience member takes on his theatre puppet characteristics - relies on the ellipses provided by the other separate stories, but taken as a whole this little film constitutes one of the better horror shorts to roll around in recent memory.
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This Man Must Die (Claude Chabrol, 1969) is a perfect title, clearly and starkly expressing the vengeful mindset that engulfs its protagonist, with the same sense of forceful determination that drives its story ahead. As a dramatist, Chabrol tends towards a lot of open narrative space - his M.O. is generally to establish a milieu and then calmly observe the plots and dualities creep into being. Here however, the inciting incident - a small boy is fatally struck in a hit-and-run - occurs before the title card is even punched onto the screen. The father vows to find his child's murderer, and from there on exists not one sequence that doesn't either up the emotional stakes of the pursuit, or shove it along its course in an almost fatalistic compulsion; it's quite easily the most single-minded film from Chabrol that I've seen to date. One scene in particular suggests the determined tone: the father, leaving the house of the murderer deflated after having his revenge plan foiled, stops off at a restaurant to grab a bite, only to be met by a television with a news reporter who is calling him by name, entreating him to return to the location he's just left. The act of watching television is of course one of the great throughlines in Chabrol's oeuvre, a signifier of empty bourgeois leisure. In this film even the TVs won't let you forget; respite is simply not an option.
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I also watched Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) again this weekend. I saw it in theaters when it originally came out and was impressed, but was surprised to see how well it holds up, and I would even venture to say that it's a significantly better film than my initial viewing suggested. It does everything right that the vastly inferior Moon fell well short of - beautifully paced, formally sharp and on-point, and never allows itself to get swallowed up by its silly ideas and obvious genre antecedents. Instead, rhythm, emotional beats and even bits of poetry are consistently foregrounded as the high concept cogs away in the background, rearing its head only to move us from point A to point B (or, given the film's structural reliance on repetition, point A to point A) but otherwise staying the hell off to the side. There's a real quality of gamesmanship evident in the way Jones doles out pieces of the bigger picture while holding others back, and while something resembling a tension/release pattern emerges from within this flow of information and the way it collides with the more immediate suspense of the happenings on the train, it never feels overly schematic in any way and is almost always carried out with a ruthless, lean efficiency. It's in this way that Source Code feels like something more from the school of Anthony Mann or Richard Fleischer than it does the crop of other Hollywood time travelers or beat-the-clockers released in the past decade.
I was also quite struck this time around by the ending, which played to me originally as something of a cop-out, an unnecessary extension towards conventionality after a darker, more resonant closing point had naturally presented itself minutes earlier. On further reflection though, there is something bold about the way the movie seems to press the parameters of the cliched happy ending, how it must move completely out of the movie we've been watching and jump into an alternate one in order to appropriate the veneer of optimism. It's tonally much more complex than I'd given it credit for, and I'm now not sure I'd change a thing about it. This is a great movie.
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