SXSW ended a week ago, but Jenn’s been brewing up this coverage of the virtual offerings from the festival’s iconic horror/WTF section and just finished it up…better late than never, right? Right??
Sissy (2022 | Australia | 102 minutes | Hannah Barlow & Kane Senes)
Cecilia (Aisha Dee) is a millennial social-media influencer with a seemingly perfect life. She happens to run into her childhood best friend, Emma (co-writer/director Hannah Barlow), days before Emma’s bachelorette (or, since this story is set in Australia: “hens”) weekend, for which Emma extends to Cecilia a last-minute invite. Cecilia – who has grown out of her childhood nickname “Sissy” but is re-saddled with it now – decides to accept that questionably-sincere offer from a long out-of-touch friend, and goes about the business of weirding out every one of Emma’s present-day pals. Details slowly start to leak out about what exactly caused the rift in Emma and Cecilia’s friendship so long ago: it certainly had something to do with Cecilia’s arch-rival, Emma’s other best friend and now her maid of honor, Alex.
Horror-movie elements slowly but surely start to encroach on this story of social awkwardness and attempted relationship repair. Kenneth Lampl’s tense score starts adjusting that tone long before anything truly out of the ordinary happens, so that it’s no surprise when the bodies eventually do start piling up. It starts to become clear that mental illness, including possible psychopathy, is at play here, but whose, and to what end? Watching those threads unspool as elements fall into place puzzle-box style is a lot of fun.
Deadstream (2022 | USA | 87 minutes | Vanessa Winter & Joseph Winter)
A second SXSW midnighter also happens to revolve around a social media influencer: in Deadstream (its title a play on “livestream”), streamer Shawn has recently hit a career obstacle in the form of some bad actions and a “cancel culture” backlash and, in a bid to try and find some new content with which to go viral and get his brand back on track, decides to spend the night in a haunted house. You may be surprised, dear reader, to learn that things do not go smoothly for him.
Lead actor Joseph Winter, who is also credited as co-writer, director, editor, and composer, pulls off “unlikeable prick” so easily that the laughs at his expense are effortless, but if part of the intention is also bringing the audience to empathize with his character by the end so that we care about his survival, that doesn’t quite come through – in fact I was still wondering whether we were supposed to be for or against him up through the very last scene. If there’s a political or social message embedded in this story’s ideas, it’s been muddied and confused so as to be basically uninterpretable. And far worse for a horror movie, the ghouls in this flick are shown far too early and too much – as everyone knows, the scariest monster movies barely even show glimpses of the monsters, instead allowing the audience to fill in the blanks ourselves.
The Cellar (2022 | Ireland | 94 minutes | Brendan Muldowney)
Keira (Elisha Cuthbert, of TV’s “Happy Endings” and “24”, seen here with uncharacteristic dark brown hair) is living a comfortable life, a marketing exec in Ireland who’s just moved into a nice new house with her handsome Irish husband (Eoin Macken) and their two kids. Then one night, while the kids are left alone, her teenage daughter, Ellie (Abby Fitz), disappears. She’s on the other end of the phone, apprehensively checking out a noise in the cellar, and then she’s just….gone.
A race to rescue Ellie and decode the mystery that seems to have swallowed her ensues. Puzzling through Hebrew symbology, “a branch of mathematics that was invented by alchemists”, and a sojourn into the underworld, Keira battles grief and gaslighting to pursue the feeling she can’t shake: that Ellie is still somehow down there, at the end of those cellar stairs.
The mythology involved starts to get a little silly and the whole thing takes itself far too seriously, and (slight vague spoiler alert!) wraps up with a surprisingly bleak and open-ended non-resolution. Overall, there isn’t much here with any staying power to chew on, but it’s not an entirely unpleasant way to spend 94 minutes for those with any interest in haunted houses, the occult, Ireland, or Elisha Cuthbert.
Bitch Ass (2022 | USA | 83 minutes | Bill Posley)
I’m not convinced this film fully figured out what it wanted to be before just jumping in. It seems to be trying to position itself as a parody or meta-commentary of 1990s “Black horror” (even opening with Tony Todd…specifically referencing Candyman in a list of “hood horror stories”), but aside from a couple such flourishes, really reads much more like sincere homage than humor. A group of teens carrying out a gang initiation are sent in to rob the house of a man who had been bullied as a child and grew up to become a sadistic killer and lover of board games, both of which the teens must quickly navigate or die. In tone, it certainly lines up with those gleeful splatterfests of years past more than the “elevated” fare that seems to dominate the horror conversation today – and it may have something to say about racial politics, but its concern seems to lie much more firmly in the camp of cruising through its bloody kills at a rapid clip.
SXSW’s presentation of this film on its virtual screening platform did it no favors whatsoever. The movie commonly goes into a split-screen format with several different images taking up space on two or three different horizontal levels across the screen, but the top and bottom of the image are just flat-out cut off by some absolutely incorrect letterboxing. (That CAN’T be on purpose, can it??) Those black bars obscure names in the opening credits and action throughout the film, rendering it borderline unwatchable at times. I’ve got to assume this is why this film was the only one of this year’s virtual Midnighters program for which SXSW did not require an advance RSVP and seemingly had no capacity limit, letting in anyone with the virtual fest pass who chose to hit Play and sit through a three-second White Claw commercial(?), which also contributed to making it feel like a lower-value target. I’d imagine without all that extra baggage, which surely all had to do with this specific presentation and not the essential film itself, that the movie would come across in a better light, so I’m opening to revisiting it again at a later date.
Hypochondriac (2022 | USA | 96 minutes | Addison Heimann)
Morgen did an excellent job recapping the plot and the strengths of this film, which I won’t belabor by repeating, except to reiterate that it is the story of a man (Zach Villa) dealing with a mental-health crisis and unwanted contact by his trauma-inducing mother while trying to hang onto his romantic relationship and career. I was a little less charmed than Morgen was and was especially struck by how one fairly unnecessary element seemed ripped directly from Donnie Darko, but at least there’s some inventive cinematography at play here, and Paget Brewster plays a welcome small part as a psychiatrist.
All five of these films played in the Midnighters section at SXSW Film 2022. In addition to the films reviewed above, the fest included three more without virtual screening availability, opting instead for in-person showings only: those were X (Ti Wests’s newest, in theaters now, reviewed by Josh); No Looking Back (from Russia), and Watcher (Maika Monroe’s buzzy Romania-set Sundance-debuter which already has a distribution deal with IFC Films).
Be sure to check out all the SXSW 2022 Sunbreak Coverage.