A Fantastic Fest ’10 review
Cast:
Amy Seimetz as Sarah
AJ Bowen as Garrick
Joe Swanberg as Kevin
Directed by Adam Wingard
Review:
Among the seemingly endless spate of movies at the 2010 Fantastic fest featuring men, women and children being brutalized, A Horrible Way To Die is probably the most understated of them, which automatically places it among their best. A serial killer movie more satisfied to observe behavior than either analyze or exploit it, Adam Wingard’s film takes an almost mundane approach to subject matter typically suited to sensationalism, in the process creating a portrait of insanity that is chilling precisely because it makes it seem so commonplace. Simultaneously filtered through familiar genre conventions and dotted with pure character-study details A Horrible Way To Die is an effectively intense and moody horror film that rests on its writing and acting rather than subscribing to rote depictions of violence.
The film stars Amy Seimetz as Sarah, a young nurse who is trying to rebuild her life after enduring two significant traumas: an addiction to alcohol and the discovery that her ex-boyfriend Garrick (AJ Bowen) is a notorious serial killer. While attending regular AA meetings, Sarah meets another recovering alcoholic named Kevin (Joe Swanberg) and they soon begin a sweet, furtive courtship. But after discovering that Garrick escaped from prison and has apparently resumed his killing spree, Sarah’s sense of security quickly begins to deteriorate as she tries to maintain the pretense of normalcy while trying to deal with the possibility of him coming after her looking for revenge.
Superficially, A Horrible Way To Die feels a little bit like the sequel to a slasher movie, where the prototypical “final girl” emerges shaken but resilient from her experience with a killer, and attempts to start over â until he came back! But the fractured narrative, constructed by screenwriter Simon Barrett, not only provides nuance and character detail generally absent from these kinds of films, but sort of combines time lines of the past and the present to offer an explanation how and why Sarah didn’t know that Garrick was a killer. And quite simply, the reason is that he mostly seems perfectly normal, which makes him seem all the creepier when he’s interacting with his victims before killing them.
AJ Bowen won the Best Actor (Horror) award at Fantastic Fest for his performance as Garrick, and you only need to watch him in a few scenes to see that he roundly deserved it: maintaining an eerie calm even when he’s dispatching his victims, he gives Garrick a narrow spectrum of reactions but keeps that spectrum within realistic, if not immediately familiar parameters. Listening to a passerby volunteer a casually racist comment, he is appropriately surprised; and during their happy moments, Garrick shows true affection and sensitivity. The fact that he also has inside him a murderous psychopath creates an ongoing sensation of uneasiness, and it’s a credit to Bowen’s talent that he keeps the audience off guard even as he’s attempting to be, say, reassuring.
Despite its overwhelming strengths, the film does have some noteworthy shortcomings, including some plot details that take the film in different directions, but the biggest of them is the way the film is shot. I typically don’t have a problem with the use of hand-held camerawork as a device to create tension, but Wingard uses it for the vast majority of the shots in the film, and undermines the dramatic impact of a couple of very important scenes by allowing the camera to move in self-conscious, distracting circles. Thankfully, Bowen and Seimetz’ performances rescues the film from deteriorating into either some sort of z-grade giallo or a self-parodic art experiment, but the visual style ultimately works too often at cross purposes with the stillness and introspection of the story.
That said, the film is mostly riveting, and remarkably unique, especially for a horror sub-genre that seldom offers anything new but the ways in which characters are killed. This film isn’t brutally visceral like Mother’s Day, or psychologically meditative like Kidnapped (review); rather, it operates on a simple, but not simplistic, level of interaction that allows us to identify with the characters and their struggles on an immediate, human level. And within a genre replete with over-the-top ideas and gratuitous violence, a film that functions in a way that’s not only believable, but actually somewhat realistic, is itself a small triumph. In which case, A Horrible Way To Die may promise – and deliver – intensely powerful depictions of some terrible things, but as a moviegoer, and whether or not you’re a fan of horror films, there are significantly worse ways to sit through two hours in a theater.
