I See The Demon
There was a time when I deeply disliked horror movies. I've been thinking about that as Halloween approaches, after a summer when Obsession and Backrooms drew surprisingly big audiences, and a year after Weapons landed in the Oscar conversation. Growing up, so many horror films seemed to revel in violence for its own sake. But then I discovered Possession, The Shining, and Psycho, and I realized I'd just been watching the wrong movies.
What I fell for was a different kind of horror: films that explore dark themes but have more on their minds than shocking the audience. That's exactly what I found in the independent film I See the Demon.
Directed by Jacob Lees Johnson, it follows Lucy, played by Alexis Zollicoffer. She comes home after seeing a strange object floating in the sky, only to find that her friends and loved ones have thrown her a surprise birthday party. But Lucy can't remember anything about her day. As unsettling events pile up, everyone insists nothing is wrong, and Lucy begins to question her own perception and the intentions of the people closest to her. What starts as an intimate psychological nightmare slowly uncovers secrets I'll leave you to discover.
The cast includes Noah Kershisnik, Mallory Everton, and Jon Heder, and the performances are all wonderfully natural. I felt like I was getting to know these people, which grounds a story that is layered and purposefully disorienting.
This is a tough film to talk about without spoiling moments that are best discovered on your own. I loved it deeply. It's scrappy, affecting, and beautifully made.
Blue Heron
I can't believe it's already October, and the end of the year is somewhere in sight. Once fall hits, I start thinking about all the films I still need to catch up on as my year-end list takes shape. In the last week or so, a few have been added, including Blue Heron from Sophy Romvari.
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family move to a new home on Vancouver Island. Their fresh start is interrupted by the increasingly dangerous behavior of Jeremy, the family's oldest child. The story moves between two timelines, as the adult Sasha looks back on those years and how they shaped her. It's Romvari's feature debut, and it's semi-autobiographical, drawn from her own family. It won the Swatch First Feature Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
The cast includes Eylul Guven and Amy Zimmer as the young and adult Sasha, along with Iringó Réti. The film runs 90 minutes.
It's a very powerful film, and it caught me off guard. It's quietly powerful, beautifully crafted, and subtly magical. The cinematography is lush, capturing the greens and gray skies of Vancouver Island, yet the film has so much warmth in the way it looks at this family. At times it feels like a documentary, it's so natural, but it also does things a documentary never could. I'll leave those for you to discover.
I'd heard a lot of people in my circles talking about this one, and I often get my expectations too high and end up disappointed. That is not the case with Blue Heron, as the credits rolled I felt the film in my chest and thought to myself “this film is very special.”
It’s powerful, achingly human, sad, and heartfelt, and it will be somewhere near the top of my favorite films of the year.
