In the Corner

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2002)

Spoilers herein.
I was very impressed with this little film. I had stayed away because of the kiddie audience, but I found it intelligently conceived.

The first thing in film is to decide who the camera is. The gutsy thing is to make it a character, and the most straightforward way to do that is by POV shots from someone in the story. `Strange Days' has the best POV sequence I've seen. But these are hard to manage, and almost always used sparingly.
Horror, real horror should rely on something deeper than shock or disgust. Most strategies depend on creating a character (sometimes a situation) that is threatening. In this case, the scares in the theater are due to direct encounters with this character. But even then, that bugaboo is threatening the people on screen, not you.
In this gutsy move, the strategy is all focused on placing the viewer within the film. Every shot is POV, from either a 16mm camera or B/W video, often shooting each other. Rather brilliant conception, but from there one has a few big problems to solve.
The big one is how to handle the exposition. It may not be obvious in most films, but there are two completely independent jobs of the storyteller. The filmmaker is a clockmaker, creating a world, characters and situations within that world. Some collection of devices must be managed to tell or show us the viewers what this is all about. The other job is the real work: allowing the clock to work: the characters and situations developing in some engaging way.
The first part is no small matter in horror or its sibling, science fiction. Most clever approaches use visual shortcuts to refer to previous movies, but that's another story. Another approach is to adopt a world that we all know: from Potter or Ring books, or old TeeVee shows or comic books. What these folks do is a radical departure: they did all their exposition outside of the film, primarily on the web, but also with a TeeVee documentary on the documentary.
(If you like this notion of a created metadocumentary, check out the the mind-blowing `The Falls.')
Then, all the film has to do is reference that `myth' in a few, very well engineered `townspeople' interviews. We have one visual motif, the stick figures. One environmental reference, the stacked stones (and the `coffin' stone). And we have just one narrative device, and this is where the intelligence of the filmmakers impressed.
For all the time in the woods, essentially nothing happens. There's incidental friction; they encounter sticks and stones; one member vanishes; a puzzling `message' is delivered. But there's no narrative advance. Until the very, very, very end, when Heather goes in the basement and sees her friend in the corner. By this time, we have been groping to tie the `myth' to what we see. We are given this one touchstone to the myth, about one child being put in the corner while another is killed in presumably some gruesome way. That connection sears for only a second, then our eye goes blank. (That this was the video, not the film, is especially well conceived.) The whole narrative is collapsed into that one second that we see with our own eyes. Right there. We explain it, not anyone in the film. Scarey as all getout. Clever. Self-referential.