Folk horror in the style of Malick and more genre curiosities at the tail end of Sundance

As both A.A. Dowd and I have noted in our ongoing coverage from Sundance 2022, the festival’s genre bench is especially deep this year. This is an ongoing trend, a reflection of changing attitudes towards horror movies that Dowd and I have discussed at length on our Film Club podcast. So I won’t bore you with grandstanding about why this is the case. I’ll simply note that, as the old barriers continue to break down, the boundaries between the genres themselves are proving equally porous.

Just look at the work of filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who specialize in lo-fi genre-benders like Spring, The Endless, and Synchronic that defy easy classification. The duo started their career with a movie about two guys barricaded in a remote cabin, 2012's Resolution. That makes the pair’s latest, Something In The Dirt—a movie about two guys barricaded in a run-down Los Angeles apartment—both a return to their roots and a pandemic-safe script idea.

Moorhead stars as John, a classic L.A. dirtbag who moves into a lease-free, suspiciously vacant apartment in Laurel Canyon with no questions asked. Benson co-stars as Levi, John’s downstairs neighbor, whose fondness for Ayn Rand and vague comments about belonging to an apocalyptic “church” become very relevant later on. While smoking cigs on John’s fire escape one aimless afternoon, the pair witness a phenomenon that might be a ghost, might be a portal to another dimension, or might be intelligent extraterrestrial life attempting to make contact.

Although synchronicity, time loops, simulation theory, Pythagoreanism, the occult origins of Los Angeles, and the “music of the spheres” all come up in Levi’s rants, the whatsit factor—i.e., what the “anomaly” is and how it works—is less important here than in earlier Benson and Moorhead films. John and Levi don’t really care about any of that. What they do care about is making a documentary about the thing, whatever it is, and selling it to Netflix for a shitload of money.

That gives Something In The Dirt a satirical edge, turning Benson and Moorhead’s signature genre-bending storytelling into commentary on how partially informed, jargon-spewing jackasses “doing their own research” could end up dooming us all. The idea that filming something confers it with importance is reinforced by the prestige documentary-style footage that frames the film: In talking-head interviews, we learn that John and Levi’s boneheaded antics did end up influencing humanity—for the worse.

Over the past decade, the directors have learned a few tricks about how to keep two guys talking in a room interesting, cutting in stock footage, animation, and grainy home video when the imagery starts getting stale. The movie drags in the middle anyway, as Levi’s ideas grow increasingly scattered. But by blending reality and fiction, re-enactment and documentary, conspiracy and science, this sly sci-fi indie reflects the paranoia that resonates through our current era like so many low-frequency electronic hums.

A bright spirit also guides viewers through the shifting narrative of You Won’t Be Alone, another Sundance genre title. But the particular energy here isn’t electric in nature. If you think burnouts rambling about Jack Parsons is esoteric, then this blend of folk horror and Terrence Malick-style cinematic spirituality may be too much for you by half. But for those with a taste for the ethereal and philosophical, director Goran Stolevski’s feature debut is an entrancing work that takes viewers back to a pre-modern way of life, and to pre-Christian modes of belief.

We open with a pact made between a downtrodden Macedonian peasant woman and an immortal witch nicknamed Old Maid Maria, who still bears scars from being burned at the stake centuries earlier. Old Maid Maria has a taste for the blood of infants, you see. And so, to save her baby from the witch’s thirst, the woman hides her daughter in a sacred cave until her 16th birthday, at which time the witch can take the girl as her own. Once she comes of age and leaves the cave, that feral child narrates the majority of the film, learning the art of shapeshifting—it’s gorier than you might think—from Old Maid Maria and traveling between genders and species trying to understand the nature of human and non-human life.

This film was my first introduction to Macedonian folk tales. But these not-quite-human women reminded me of faeries and changelings from Irish folklore, as well as the Japanese figure of the kitsune onna, a fox spirit that shapeshifts into a woman so she can marry a human man. Noomi Rapace briefly appears in the film as the spirit’s first human host, an abused wife whose abrupt change in personality is attributed to one too many blows to the head. She’s the only real star in the film, however, which actually works in its favor.

Over time, the spirit gets better at inhabiting human bodies, and You Won’t Be Alone takes a turn from the mythological to the spiritual. This is where the Malick really comes in, through shots of hands outlined against glowing sun and light dappling through ancient forests. The film comes by its animist convictions honestly, however, and if you give in and float down its stream of consciousness, its insights into the oneness of all living things can be quite poetic.

The Sundance Midnight selection Piggy, meanwhile, is made of blunter stuff. Its combination of genre elements is perhaps the most eccentric of any of the films discussed so far in this dispatch. Believe it or not, this is a riff on Catherine Breillat’s 2001 arthouse shocker Fat Girl by way of horny teenage fan fiction—specifically, the type of story written by angsty adolescent outcasts who daydream about Michael Myers killing all the bullies at their high school.

Spanish writer-director Carlota Pereda makes a lot of bold narrative and stylistic choices. But the bravest member of the ensemble is star Laura Galán, who plays the title character. “Piggy’s” real name is Sara, and she’s the lonely, studious eldest daughter of doting but clueless parents in a small Spanish town. Sara’s family owns a butcher shop, which gives Pereda plenty of opportunities to set the mood with shots of cleavers cutting through marbled cuts of meat. Those sequences don’t get their nightmarish mirror images until later on in the film. First, we pass through a painful gauntlet of adolescent cruelty, as Sara is tormented by three popular girls who steal her clothes and try to drown her at a swimming pool one hot summer afternoon.

Here’s the trick, the first of many the film has up its sleeve: As Sara is being forced to walk home in her bathing suit, barefoot and crying as passing cars hurl bottles and insults at her, she sees those same girls being herded into the back of a van by a menacing stranger. They cry for help; Sara, stunned, does nothing. By this point, Piggy has done such a good job of placing our sympathies with Sara that my first thought as a viewer was, “Those girls don’t deserve to be saved.” Pereda seizes on this ambiguity and pushes it to its limit, blending real-world peril with revenge-driven fantasy until the line between the two dissolves in a blood-soaked climax appropriately set in an abandoned slaughterhouse.

The lines between fiction and reality are similarly permeable in Leonor Will Never Die, which is part of the fest’s World Dramatic competition. Though this is a film about death (among other things), the mood is much lighter. It was the last film I was able to squeeze in on a final night of Sundance catch-up, and I’m so glad I did; it’s the kind of colorful and imaginative movie you hope to champion as a critic from a film festival.

Sheila Francisco stars as Leonor Reyes, an aging filmmaker whose glory days as the queen of Filipino action cinema are long gone. How gone? The film opens with a representative from the electric company stopping by to serve her a disconnection notice. But although her son and ex-husband fret over her, Leonor doesn’t care that much about her material circumstances: She lives through her old films, and recently picked back up an unfinished script that has poignant parallels to the death of her son, Ronwaldo, decades earlier. When a head injury lands Leonor in a coma, the film’s already-fractured sense of reality begins to fold in on itself, forming layers like a puff pastry of meta storytelling.

Shades of everything from Adaptation to Black Dynamite run through this affectionate ode to family, creativity, and cheesy ’80s action movies, which blends winking comedy and magical realism in an excitingly original way. This is Manila-based writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s first feature film. I hope to see it traveling the winding highways of the festival circuit until it finds a distributor that truly appreciates it.