Degrees of Creep

So how are we all doing? I had this whole plan to cover all the April releases I couldn’t get to last month, and here it is May 11^th and … yeah. I bet you’re getting tired of apologies, right?

Before anyone asks: Yes, all the end-of-life shit is still going on, and it’s awful. But this is a distraction so I’m going to keep right on doing it, and eventually we’ll be back on track and those of you who’ve bought a paid subscription – and thank you, so much, for doing that – will be getting your money’s worth again. (That said, I’d also understand if you dropped back to the free tier for a while.)

Right now, though, I am behind. So let’s catch up, starting with two Universal releases that arrived on Blu-ray last month: Night Swim and Lisa Frankenstein!

There’s an essay to be written about the current schism in American horror, and how audiences seem to want either the tony, thinky shivers of an A24 release or the goofy pop thrill of a self-aware Blumhouse joint – and nothing in between. (The Scream sequels are the sole exception, mainly because that franchise pioneered the winky splatter on which Blumhouse makes its bones.)

Night Swim and Lisa Frankenstein each tried something a little different, and fell right into the abyss between the two poles. The former is Blumhouse’s attempt at elevated horror – troubled family buys a house with a haunted swimming pool – while the latter is Diablo Cody’s attempt at early Tim Burton, a high-concept reworking of Mary Shelley with a big scoop of ’80s kitsch. Neither film fully manages to pull off what it’s attempting, but at the same time neither feels like a failure.

Night Swim is expanded by writer-director Bryce McGuire from his 2014 short film, and you can absolutely tell. It’s a threadbare narrative with a very clear solution – pool is evil, so don’t go in the pool – that just can’t sustain a feature despite McGuire’s attempts to root it in genuine human drama, with parents Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve (recent Oscar nominee Kerry Condon) struggling with his career-ending illness and their resulting changes in their financial outlook and his self-image – while their kids try to tell them the pool keeps trying to eat them. A movie like this needs to go off the deep end, or at least into it, but it never really does. It’s too polite.

Lisa Frankenstein has a different problem, which is that Diablo Cody didn’t really think it through. Now that Jennifer’s Body has been reclaimed as an unrecognized feminist horror masterpiece (which I almost agree with, except that the whole thing falls apart in the third act), Cody’s return to self-aware horror was supposed to be a triumph … but the script is a grab bag of half-considered horror iconography that lumbers around in search of a coherent statement, not unlike the reanimated Victorian (Cole Sprouse) besotted with Kathryn Newton’s Lisa Swallows, a version of Winona Ryder’s winsome Lydia Deetz who’s actually disconnected and sociopathic rather than just a baby Goth.

In her directorial debut, Zelda Williams does a decent approximation of Burton’s vibe and even captures the way he finds sweetness and even warmth in horror imagery: Lisa and the Creature really are soulmates, and though she didn’t choose to raise him from the grave she’s happy to have him around, excusing his occasional murderings and replacing his rotted body parts with pieces of her freshly dead friends.

That’s the thing about the movie that works: Newton and Sprouse have a lovely sympathetic connection that made me wish Cody’s script was actually rooting for their relationship, rather than using it as the inciting incident for a series of gross-out effects and lazy genre references. Mary Shelley and Lisa Frank deserve better than this, and so do horror fans. I mean, Warm Bodies is right there on the shelf.

Both Night Swim and Lisa Frankenstein offer polished but not terribly illuminating supplemental material – director’s audio commentaries, EPK-slick featurettes and, in Lisa’s case, a handful of deleted scenes and a gag reel. Night Swim is clearly too Elevated for a gag reel.

If you’re looking for something that plays in that more cerebral horror space, though, Well Go also brought Matt Vesley’s Monolith to disc last month. And this one delivers.

An Australian thriller with a COVID-friendly premise, Lucy Campbell’s script focuses on a single character – an unnamed journalist (Lily Sullivan) hiding out at her family home in an attempt to revive a derailed career. Urban legends and unsolved mysteries are good clickbait, so she’s been making podcasts about these strange black bricks that have been turning up in weird places, their origins and purpose a total mystery. And no spoilers, but shit gets real: I won’t discuss the plot any further, but this is considerably more than an evil-pool situation.

Monolith is a slow-burn creeper about how belief can be a comfort and a poison, and how the search for answers to external mysteries can be a way of avoiding painful personal truths. The script’s twists are provided in an organic fashion, the soundtrack is immersive and specific (as befits a film about a podcaster), and Sullivan – the Australian actor, mind you, not the brilliant American comic who’s become a fixture of Scott Aukerman’s Comedy Bang! Bang! universe – sells it with a nervous, shifty presence that’s entirely different from her bright-eyed Deadite-stomping turn in last year’s Evil Dead Rise. Like Tom Hardy in Locke, she’s the only person on screen for the entire running time, coming apart in real time as each new revelation drops into place. Campbell’s script teases ambiguities we can’t fully understand as it tees up a very ambitious ending, and Sullivan takes it there.

The extras on Well Go’s Blu-ray are minimal – audio commentary by Vesley, Campbell and producer Bettina Hamilton, who are rightly proud of what they’ve achieved on a very small budget, a brief behind-the-scenes featurette and a trailer – but that just allows more room for the feature, presented in a pristine 1080p/24 transfer that replicates the deliberate digital sheen of Michael Tessari’s cinematography, and delivers that meticulously engineered soundtrack in 5.1 DTS-HD. I did wonder whether a 4K release would bring out more details in certain, um, atmospheric shots; maybe Well Go will roll out a UHD edition down the line. Which reminds me, I still need to pick up The Wailing.

 Night Swim and Lisa Frankenstein are now available on Blu-ray from Universal Studios Home Entertainment; Monolith is now available on Blu-ray from Well Go Home Entertainment. Night Swim includes a companion DVD!