By MICHAEL GINGOLD
These three films all world-premiered at this month’s Tribeca Festival in New York City…
MUTTER: THE DIARY OF A MOTHER
Starring Hazar Ergüçlü, Güven Kiraç and Erdeníz Kurucan
Written and directed by Alphan Eşeli
SeventyFourFilms
The opening minutes of MUTTER: THE DIARY OF A MOTHER (pictured above) make it clear that Alphan Eseli is a filmmaker who knows how to grab an audience from the outset. A car roars through fog-shrouded mountains, with a pregnant woman, Gül (Hazar Ergüçlü), screaming in the back seat. Something is bloodily wrong with this pregnancy, and after an obstacle in the road prevents their further progress, Gül delivers an infant that seems barely human (though we don’t get a good look at it just yet). Her husband Cem (Erdeníz Kurucan) leaps out of the vehicle and abandons her, fleeing into the trees as rain pours down, leaving Gül alone with their child. Everything about this sequence feels raw and real, from the extreme emotions to the rain that seems like actual rain and not movie rain, and it’s a stunning introduction to a story about maternal love in the face of monstrousness in the crib and different stressors outside the home.
The haunted-looking Ergüçlü is riveting throughout MUTTER as Gül struggles to care for her newborn through a male-dominated society that is indifferent at best and antagonistic at worst. She’s unable to tell anyone about the uncanny nature of the new baby she’s raising in her ramshackle, isolated home, but you get the feeling she’d be facing the same disdain and prejudices even if her child was normal, and that that’s part of Eseli’s point. Cem remains gone from Gül’s life, but from the way others speak about him, it’s clear he wasn’t the perfect husband; a butcher insults Gül while fawning over the local police chief; and Cem’s boss Ecran (Güven Kiraç), one of the only friendly faces in her life, still ends up taking advantage of her. All the while, Gül nurses the little creature, even when this basic act of nurturing becomes bloody.
MUTTER is mostly a despairing yet riveting drama for a good portion of its running time, before the circumstances lead inexorably to graphically gruesome moments of horror. Redolent with atmosphere thanks to Özkan Karaköse’s rich cinematography and Tristan Bechet’s dissonant yet moving score, it also delivers the goods as a genre piece. The creature, designed by Matthew Hatton (whose credits include FURIOSA, KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and the SWEET TOOTH series), is a combination of physical and digital effects that are impossible to distinguish. The VFX supervised by Tony Landais and special makeup by Hüseyín Akgül are part of an overall craft package belying the fact that this is a rare venture into genre for Turkish cinema. Ergüçlü, on the other hand, is one of its leading lights, and her heartfelt, uncompromising turn in MUTTER makes it abundantly clear why.
RECLUSE
Starring Sasha Frolova, Mia Vallet and Kimball Farley
Written and directed by Henry Chaisson
Spooky Pictures/Blue Finch Releasing
Like MUTTER, RECLUSE is as much a drama about a woman dealing with domestic traumas as it is a fright film, though the setting and plot progression are very different. In Henry Chaisson’s feature writing/directing debut (after scripting gigs on ANTLERS, TV’s SERVANT and others), the torments stem as much from its protagonist’s past as from her present. Joan (Sasha Frolova) is a sound engineer who receives a troubling phone call from her father Lawrence (CANDYMAN’s Xander Berkeley) that compels her to return to the family’s expansive mansion. A celebrated Jackson Pollock-esque artist, Lawrence has been badly burned in a fire under mysterious circumstances and is now confined to bed, wearing a plaster mask vaguely resembling Leatherface’s.
We learn early on of the “Wyatt family curse” that includes the prior death of a child and disappearance of a spouse, and there’s a palpable gloom hanging over the house thanks to the envelopingly dark, contrasty cinematography by Bryce Holden. Just as important as RECLUSE’s visuals is its audio, as sound designers Matthew Rollins and Chaisson infuse the movie with a surfeit of discordant noises, some of which are used to evoke the echoing anguish of the Wyatts’ history. In the here and now, the fact that housekeeper Lydia (Toby Poser from MOTHER OF FLIES and HELLBENDER) greets Joan with a crossbow is a signal that the latter’s visit will be fraught with unnerving encounters and the unearthing of disturbing secrets.
Frolova, whose visage suggests a troubled Scarlett Johansson, elicits our empathy throughout as Joan must come to terms with a couple of closets’ worth of family skeletons. There may be, as Joe Bob Briggs sometimes wrote, a little too much plot getting in the way of the story here, but Chaisson holds it all together with a through-line about how art—from Lawrence’s paintings (which are clearly the product of a tortured mind, and some of which were created by Berkeley) to Joan’s sound work—both expresses and affects one’s state of mind. To that end, mention should also be made of Yulanda Yo-rong Shieh’s production design, which is rife with eerie, specific details in a manner reminiscent of the films of Damian McCarthy.
TURN IT UP!
Starring Justine Nelson, Gwenlyn Cumyn and Jonathan Craig
Directed by Sam Scott
Written by Sam Scott and Gwenlyn Cumyn
Yellow Veil Pictures
Family strife is also part of the Canadian feature TURN IT UP!, with the “family” here being a struggling indie rock band making their way through a series of unfulfilling, underpopulated gigs. Also a feature debut for its director Sam Scott, who scripted with Gwenlyn Cumyn, it additionally shares with RECLUSE a preoccupation with audio—though again, the emphasis here is quite distinct. A brief animated prologue features narration expounding on the kinetic possibilities of sound before we join AC (Justine Nelson), Court (Cumyn), Berg (Jonathan Craig) and Russ (Xavier Lopez) on the road. Their relationships are fraying, and AC in particular doesn’t know how much more enthusiasm she can find for the music—not to mention that she’s afflicted with tinnitus.
Their trek seems to have hit bottom when they arrive at their latest gig, a spooky building where literally no one has shown up. Well, except for a “mannequin girl,” who inspires hallucinations in AC and leads them to discover a truly killer piece of music. They make it part of their show, and discover it has a hypnotic effect on their audiences—and on themselves. It also has one unfortunate side effect that results in explosions of gore and surreal visuals amidst what up to this point has been an engagingly lo-fi ride with the foursome; the tone is more ALMOST FAMOUS than, say, DEATHGASM. All four leads are quite likable, even given that Berg can be a cynical jerk, and they share the camaraderie of a group united by their passion for music that threatens to become undone when success seems far out of their grasp.
That changes once they begin playing that melody, which leads powerful manager Miss Vee (Liv Collins) to suddenly pay attention to them, making them “an offer you can’t refuse.” She seems aware of its paranormal properties, talking of “disproving nonbelievers” and reaching “quadrophonic enlightenment,” and she’s not the only one. A couple of men in black (Kris Siddiqi and Canadian horror regular Ry Barrett) are soon on their tail, and AC is visited at her workplace by the enigmatic Dr. Pretorius (Julian Richings, another Canadian horror regular). As bizarre as some of these folks and certain story turns come to be, Scott maintains a ground-level reality to his milieu and characters, and makes room for scenes like a lengthy, touching exchange between AC and Court in which they dance around their true feelings for each other. At the same time, the wilder moments in TURN IT UP! also land, thanks to showy makeup effects by Craig, Kenny McLaughlin’s eye-filling, colorful cinematography, fun animated inserts and overlays by Anne Douris and, of course, the music by Adrian Ellis and the rockin’ songs.
