At last a great horror film that's not from Asia

Rating: Null/10 (28 June 2015)

First of all, I'm an amateur of the genre: I watch dozens of horror films a year. It is quite a frustrating habit: very rarely you run into something remotely satisfying, and even more rarely into something that actually scares you. But this has been a very good year so far: first I found Lake Mungo, now this extraordinary gem. It's hard to say anything about it without spoiling the experience on some level. First of all: forget about what you've read as taglines or synopsis on IMDb: nothing of that will give you a clue of what this film is about. Sex is the least of the matters -and by no means this is, as I read here, a moralist or anti-sex film. Please, don't look for such direct and basic metaphors, this is not a high school class. Also forget about the possible goofs or contradictions pointed out in other reviews: would you look for coherence in David Lynch? or in a nightmare? Same indulgence should apply here. What matters are the images that this film succeeds to create, and that will linger in your mind much afterwards. The film avoids all the usual clichés that were just around the corner: no dilemma about the protagonist being or not being crazy, no romantic sub-plot, no one screaming at the camera all-of-the-sudden, no blood, no violence, no FX. Fiends are people -only very awkward people. The horror here is of the most subtle kind: nothing that you can't avoid by running away or even by walking fast. Three images kept ringing in my head while I watched it: 1) the twin girls at the end of the corridor in The Shining (the cinematography is almost an homage to Kubrick, with visually stunning symmetric shots and striking music), 2) a scene of the underrated Tsukamoto's Nightmare Detective 2 (the film also draws from the bone of Asian horror, leaving aside the already boring girls with hair on their faces -namely, the reference to a urban myth, and a story that takes place exclusively among youngsters), 3) Robert Aickman's story The Fetch. I cannot reveal here the reasons why, but I will tell you this: the fiend here has that slow, inexorable, despairing way of approaching you that horror has in nightmares. This film will be a classic of the genre, and I definitely will be following David Mitchell's efforts from now on.