One of the least heralded tropes in the horror toolbox is the idea of wrong geometry, the idea that the shape of the world is just a little off. It's a trope that finds expression in that meme that presents people with obsessive compulsive disorder with an 89 degree angle. The idea of wrong geometry gets a work out in stories like The Haunting of Hill House, where walls are upright and doors are sensibly shut, or At the Mountains of Madness, where the city of the Great Race of Yith defies Euclidean notions of dimension and sanity. It's an effective trope because when it's done well, it's profoundly disorienting. Wrong geometry--specifically wrong geography--is at the heart of Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023, directed by Teresa Sutherland), in which being lost in the woods is a gateway to more cosmic horrors.
The film opens with Varney, a park ranger in (the fictional) Arvores National Park, putting up a paper sign at his ranger station before vanishing into the wilderness. It says, "I owe this land a body." He is never seen again. Arvores National Park has a history of disappearances, including one involving Varney's replacement, Lennon. In her youth, her sister disappeared into the park. Her career choice is partly motivated by a desire to find her sister. Some of the other rangers think she's crazy. At the orientation for new ranges, her boss, Ranger Zhang, tells her new underlings to "Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories, kill nothing but time" before sending them all to their various districts. Lennon wastes no time in starting her search. She spends days at a time away from her station. She eventually meets Jackson, the ranger from the adjacent district and they become friendly, if not actually friends. One night when Lennon is actually in her station, a man shows up begging for help. His girlfriend has vanished. When Lennon calls it in, the search crew arrives with Jackson taking the lead. He orders her to stay in her hut, but she can't resist the search. She finds the woman out in the dark. Her first words to Lennon are, "Are you real?" When she takes the woman back to the other rangers, Jackson is infuriated that she disobeyed him and Zhang tells her to pack her things and stay put. In five days, they'll have a conversation and it is implied that Lennon will be sent packing. But Lennon refuses to stay put. She resumes her search for her sister with the time that's left to her, but now, the world seems to have slipped sideways. She gets lost. She finds herself in parts of the park that are much farther than she could have traveled. She starts to see visions. She stumbles and hits her head, and perhaps that's where the visions come from, but she eventually makes her way to the heart of the mystery. And she discovers that she now owes the park a body, too...
There's a moral quandary at the end of this movie that is entirely unexpected from a story almost entirely concerned with the expiation of childhood trauma and guilt. The theme of trauma and guilt is a dollar a dozen in this era of high-toned arthouse horror. Most such films either use their experiences as a kind of therapy or chart a downward spiral. I don't remember seeing a film exploring trauma and loss veer quite so far away from them at the end the way Lovely, Dark, and Deep does. It arrives somewhere entirely unexpected. When the metaphor for Lennon's trauma veers away from her own personal needs and whatever entity lurks in the woods demands compensation for what she took, it's suddenly not talking about her problems. It uses her problems to transport her to where they need her to be, but it's suddenly not about her at all.
Although this is Teresa Sutherland's first film as a director, she wrote The Wind a couple of years ago and it has the same feeling of a woman going mad when confronted with the vast indifference of nature. Both that film and this one are characterized by a striking feeling of existential solitude. Even when Lennon encounters people after her own encounter with the uncanny, there's a sense that that encounter has severed her from the company of other human beings. The older couple she keeps encountering as her geography loops back on itself can neither see her or hear her as they reenact their mundane camping trip in increasingly horrific ways. The woods show Lennon how to participate, but she refuses. Another film would cast that as a redemption, saving her from her own lunacy, but not this one. These are not the gods of humans. These are alien, more akin to Lovecraft's Great Old Ones than to any version of the Abrahamic god. They demand a sacrifice and aren't going to stay the hand of whoever they task with delivering it.
Georgina Campbell has a challenging role as Lennon because the character is almost all interior. Once she's on her own, she doesn't have a lot to say or anyone to say it to, so almost all of Campbell's performance is body language and expression. This is doubly challenging given that the film has a bare minimum of special effects and no real violence to speak of (though one scene of a character getting shot is a bit disturbing). The filmmaking itself has to rely on the savvy of its visual storytelling to move things along. It's inventive enough along these lines making use of its locations (filmed in Portugal, but set in California(?)) and enigmatic images like the black doe that crosses Lennon's path at points throughout the film. Director of photography Rui Poças is particularly good at pushing mundane locations into menacing landscapes. The landscapes are treacherous, too, guiding Lennon and the viewer farther and farther from the safety of a rational world. The ideas about cosmic forces may be Lovecraftian, but the presentation is more akin to the work of David Lynch or even Luis Bunuel, who are/were surrealists who work with the everyday quotidian world, twisting it just so. This film isn't quite so deadpan.
Even so, Campbell is carrying everything. The film guides us through her back story with a disorienting mix of memories and visions, but it's her presence in the here and now that sells the story. Even as she's plumbing the depths of her own trauma, she's forced to navigate the horrific situation she's in once the world of the film slides sideways. The other characters in the film, Jackson and Zhang, are not quite as sympathetic to her plight as you might expect. The early part of the film suggests that Lennon has a reputation as a crazy person, but as the film goes on, that fails to explain these characters' actions. They seem actively malign at points. It's no surprise after Lennon disobeys direct orders from both of them that Jackson's is the voice with which the forest chooses to communicate. There's some ambiguity here, too, given how the film ends. Is any of this real? Two separate characters ask that very question inside the text of the movie. Although the film endeavours to provide an answer, its set of reality remains an open question to the very end. What makes the film compelling is how this set of reality twists Lennon into a different person at the end. I think a lot of people who have read weird fiction about cults worshiping the Elder Gods or the Great Old Ones or what have you have wondered how someone becomes initiated into such worship. This is even relevant in the real world, given the fatal outcome of such worship in the Heaven's Gate UFO cult or the People's Temple in Jonestown or Q-anon people. This film suggests one process by which someone might lose themself to such forces, abstracted through the lens of genre. It's what gives the film its kick.
Some viewers will have a difficult time with both this film's pace and with the enigmatic nature of its images. I know that I found its slow burn a bit of a challenge. But I think it's worth the effort. The final scene is both heartbreaking and chilling. Lennon's single word for a final line is like a bullet in the brain, short and abrupt and lethal.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project again as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code, silent, and older international horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 4
Total films:6
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