Whoah! There’s something to be said for a horror film, or any other sort of film, which goes out on a limb, which smashes through the barriers of expectation and good taste. But this new film from the Iranian director Babak Anvari, who gave us the excellent debut Under the Shadow in 2016, is an awful misfire. He has taken on a starry cast (Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson) for a glitzier and more crassly unsubtle horror movie, based on the novel The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud, this time under the Netflix banner. There are all the usual tiresome jumpscares, and the result is jarringly unsuccessful and wrong.
In fact, the only really good moment arrives very late in the film: Armie Hammer, in a state of extreme emotional distress, appears to eat ET. The rest of the time Hammer is seems to be competing for a bad acting award. Hardly a minute goes by without him smashing his phone on the ground, or smashing a bottle on the ground, shouting and sweating and acting super-scared.
Hammer plays Will, a college dropout and bartender at a rough dive in New Orleans; he lives with postgrad English iterature student Carrie (Dakota Johnson) but is secretly in love with Alicia (Zazie Beetz), a beautiful woman who drinks in his place every night, in the company of her boyfriend, Jeffrey (Karl Glusman). A nasty fight in the bar one night is made nastier by the fact that a bunch of smug under-age millennials filmed it on their phones – but one of them leaves theirs behind. Will figures out how to unlock it (a rather witty, ingenious moment, to be fair), but then gets sinister, daemonic messages. Soon, he and Carrie are dragged through a portal – or, if you will, a cosmic wound – into a world of horror.
Just as in Under the Shadow, Anvari has absorbed the influence of J-horror and the insidious quality of phones and mobile technology. But in the first movie it was interesting and subtle. This is just ham-fisted. The quirky, wacky humour that the film appeared to promise at the beginning – Will has a special rule that naked customers in the bar are allowed to drink free – vanishes when the big scares arrive. Once the wounds have healed, Anvari may wish to make a film with the strength and distinctiveness of his debut.
