the first halfish sets this up to be my favorite horror movie since messiah of evil. the dream visuals, if a little too slick, are ethereal-eerie and feel like a look into another world with its own logic and machinations, not simply a dark place rendered by graphic designers to be creepy.
even the messy end is infiltrated by an immaculately spooky and wonderfully weird sequence where the main character is wearing a brain-scanning helmet tethered to a monitor that…
drenched in crunchy, oppressive, scabby textures. impeccable, demonic use of sound. there are some scenes here that capture the deep, core fear of being held captive by unstable person, fascinating parallels of sexual assault, and one scene that does something interesting with the backwoods-hillbilly-microculture, alluding to a primal communication and understanding between them.
the religious subtext is subtle and works for me. i like how the start of the film sets Marc up to be pathetic and comical but reveals him to have an unglorified, innate saintliness that in its own way is as goes as unnoticed as the rural outsider-society.
It's 1998 and Macs come in rainbow colors and girls covered in iridescent glitter fasten rows of pink plastic butterfly clips in their hair. It's 10 years till the first Black President and the newest Hollywood adaptation of Cinderella is class-conscious and feminist. Drew Barrymore has the face of a Waterhouse sylph and is allowed to experience a full range of emotions, from the righteous fury of the oppressed to muddy-faced self-doubt and smooshed-clay ugly crying to heartbursting, impossible love…
An experience so wholly removed from structured human society that even its dress-up parody as reality television is an hour of real-life-uncanny-valley. Where do all the braincells that die during Real Housewife episodes go? What is a breathing Youtube comment like? All of them and all our post-Millennium brainwaves pool here, into this fritzing phantasmagoria, where wasted time has gone insane trying to chart its purpose. The fleeting bombardment gets at the soul of twenty-four-cycle content overstimulation and makes you feel like this is being made for you, only you.
