It’s a trio of films in which we get a main guy who feels like he’s losing touch with reality. So, did any of them make my spine tingle? I mean the movies not the men, although, all three guys were pretty cute.
THE TWIN (2024)
Watching this particular entry in the trauma porn subgenre (as I like to call it), I was initially reminded that with novels like Pet Sematary, Stephen King has been doing trauma horror for so long in a way that the current decade of trauma dump overkill rarely does. In King stories, the trauma is there, but the horror isn’t merely a metaphor for the horror. The trauma is what leaves the characters vulnerable to the trappings of actual horror, like the urge to bury your deceased child in a cemetery that brings the dead back to life, only…they don’t come back the same.
There are perhaps five minutes near the end of The Twin that make it seem like there might indeed be a demon “twin”, but this is mostly a movie in which mental illness and grief trigger a character to see things that aren’t really there. And even worse, the therapist in the movie refers to the conjuring of these delusions with the term “fetch”. No, seriously. This movie tries to make fetch happen, and I couldn’t get past it. And I couldn’t even figure out if the therapist was using fetch as a noun, adjective, or verb. Were the monsters “fetches”, were they very fetch monsters, or was the main guy “fetching” the monsters? No idea.
So, our main guy is home with his young son when tragedy occurs, causing him to spiral downward. For his own good, his wife sends him off to live in his dead grandmother’s house (where he already experienced trauma in his childhood!) under the watchful eye of a therapist.
What unfolds is a whole lot of horror imagery. Meaning…the demonic doppelgänger and corpse grandmother the main guy keeps seeing are never really going to hurt him. Cue loads of bogus jump scares. Sigh.
It’s in the final act that the wife and therapist seem to temporarily face off against the doppelgänger that has been terrorizing the husband. That battle doesn’t last long before it’s back to symbolic schizophrenia as the husband is forced to confront his frightful feelings while in a hypnotic state. It’s really nothing we haven’t seen before, although the fetches he fetches were pretty fetch. Fuck it. I’m going to make fetch happen.
THE DARK ROOM (2023)
Sometimes, I can’t figure out what exactly filmmakers were attempting with the scripts they use, and this is one of those cases.
To start things off, the movie opens with one of the final moments showing the main guy being stabbed by the masked killer. Why? WHY? Why show such a spoiler scene first? Especially since the very next scene after the credits shows another victim being stabbed! That could have been the opener if they were so intent on grabbing us with a kill scene.
The film is moody, somber, and slow, with a grindhouse filter to set a tone that the film never quite lives up to.
The main guy works in a photo development shop. He’s bipolar. He has video call meetings with his therapist, played by 80s movie queen Diane Franklin. He has uninteresting conversations with customers. He becomes obsessed with a series of killings happening around town. He gets weird calls from a female. And he has awkward interactions with a reverend who comes into the shop.
While this seems to be trying to play out as a mystery, there are only three characters shady enough to possibly be suspects—the reverend, the woman caller, and the main guy. Considering the main guy is stabbed by the killer in the preview scene at the beginning, that leaves two possibilities. Sigh.
Nothing compelling happens here to keep us riveted. There are occasional kills of redneck dudes every now and then in the first part of the film, but the kills completely stop for the second half. The main guy researches Native American legend and lore, but Native Americans don’t play any crucial role in the movie. The main guy eventually turns his attention to the reverend, who seems totally off. This movie is nothing if not predictable.
There’s all this promise of horror angles—the main guy has sleep paralysis, sees shadow people, acquires a protective amulet, spies on a ritual involving a statue—but in the end, this is seriously just a movie about someone in a mask killing people. Really underwhelming.
BENEATH THE LIGHT (2024)
Yowsah. The main guy in this one has a bangin’ bod, so I’m not bummed by the opening being a scene from later in the movie that briefly shows his eventual encounter with the supernatural as well as his shirtless physique.
This is more trauma-based horror, this time in the form of a haunting. It’s a slow burn about a guy who takes a job working at a lighthouse because he has vague memories of playing with the owner’s daughter when he was a child.
The cast consists mostly of just the main guy, the guy that owns the lighthouse, and a young waitress from the mainland that the main guy befriends.
The owner seems really shady, and as soon as the main guy starts working in the lighthouse, he is plagued with disturbing visions of something happening to the young girl from his past.
As he spends plenty of time shirtless and creeping around the house at night, he experiences spooky situations, but it all feels like some sort of repressed memory plaguing him rather than an actual haunting. Don’t expect to be all that frightened by what unfolds.
There’s more of a mystery aspect to it, so you end up just watching to learn what really happened to the owner’s daughter. And, you know, for more of this…
It’s ultimately not a very thrilling film, but there is a clever twist involving misremembered memories, which is about the juiciest element of the whole movie.
