Apologies for my absence: I kind of fell down a hole called ‘Crusader Kings 3.’ But! I’ve taken a break from puzzling out if I should let my least favorite wife murder my vizier or not to watch a weird little movie. Once again I am clicking on random things I’ve never heard of on Amazon Prime and once again I am Rewarded In Spades.
There is very little about this movie online, so a brief description here: this is a found footage movie, short, hour and 17 minutes, about a man who gets abducted from his prison transport vehicle by a shadowy government branch, put in a solitary room and told to make video diaries about his observations of a creature.
I am very, very picky with found footage. I dislike many of the classics. I like the weird ones nobody’s heard of, The Bay, the Horror in the High Desert trilogy, Mr. Jones. Stuff that plays with the form and format. And Subject has joined the ranks of obscure found footage I will push on people.
Subject, at its heart, is a story about a man being driven insane by guilt. Security footage inside his little torture chamber is interspersed with footage of his wife and daughters, his wife sometimes vibrant and alive, sometimes slowly fading from cancer. Willem, our protag’s, mysterious captor, a holdover from the collective Cold War imagination in his suit and nerd glasses, comes in at certain variables to quiz him on his relationship to his wife and daughters. If he doesn’t answer quick enough, he gets a shock.
You figure a few things out quick: the wife and at least one daughter is dead. It’s somehow Willem’s fault. More things are left up to interpretation. Is the creature morphing into an image of his dead wife or his daughter? Is this because of Willem himself, or did the mysterious facility clone her somehow? Is the guilt part of the facility? Is this just hell? How long has Willem been here, exactly? What is that weird noise the facility keeps making? We never do find out.
As a commentary on guilt, isolation, and dehumanization, this movie is spectacular. Willem is fed in a dog bowl on the floor. He at turns humanizes the creature terrorizing him, personifies the cameras that watch his every move, and begs to be allowed to go back to prison. The cameras, and the creature, watch unfeelingly, and no one comes to help. Even when Dalesky, the evil scientist, says he’s sorry, it’s in a cold, dispassionate tone.
There are some missteps, here, and I’d be at fault not to mention them. First, the dialogue is kind of bad. This may be intentional, and once I realized that I was okay with being along for the ride. The creepy tv in Willem’s cell only plays old movies, and he has a line because ‘All the men and women sound the same.’ I think the dialogue might be shooting for that, as a way to destabilize the audience. Less passive men than I would likely turn it off before you ever get to that point, however.
My other sticking point is the sexual violence stuff. Now I am in no way one of those ‘you can’t write about rape in horror’ types. I just don’t like it when a story brings it up, and brings it up, and brings it up, and then flinches. This movie flinched.
The film is suffuse with the aesthetics of sexual violence. A man in the prisoner transport says “I’m going to fuck your eye holes until you die and cum in your brain.” Dalesky tells Willem he’s better off here than being “Some skinhead’s bottom bitch.” Willem touches himself to couples fighting on black and white movies, watched by the cameras. (Surveillance, to me, carries an implicit threat of violence.) Dalesky asks Willem’s worst fear, and its his father, who he denies all and any similarity to. The creature with his wife-or-daughter’s face climbs onto him in an evocation of sex and vomits into his mouth. In the end, he dies by stabbing himself in the crotch several times, in his mind, at the behest of the creature.
All of which would lead one to believe that his dark secret was that he was sexually abusing his daughters, and killed one to protect his secret. But no. Despite all that, the movie flinched, like they always do. He’s an addict, and the daughter died in an accidental police shooting when he was high.
And the addiction stuff was all very good. His wife dying while he was too stoned to call 911 while she had a seizure? Genuinely gutting. But when you have something that strong, go with that. Don’t almost say something really poignant about sexual violence and identifying and empathizing with the abhorrent only to flinch at the last second. You’re already a compelling paranoia laced creature feature that hooked me, known creature feature hater. Don’t do one of the few things that pisses me off.
Despite my complaining, you should watch this. The found footage is a really unique style, the creature’s progression from strange bandaged thing to wife-daughter-monster was incredible. The creature’s incursions into Willem’s room genuinely terrifying. They do a lot with a really limited set. Captivity stories are really underutilized in horror, and the concept is used to delicious effect here. I absolutely do recommend it. It’s only 77 minutes of your time, and it gives you a lot to think about. Check it out! Or don’t I’m not your dad.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 