i'm thinking of ending things | The Last And Best Horror Movie Of The 2010s

        Host is a horror movie made during quarantine about a seance over Zoom and, well, you know what toiling with seances brings. The entire conceit of them keeping Zoom pulled up, no matter how the horror escalated, was because they didn't want to be alone - which definitely resonated for me more than any other 'found-footage' movies since '99 where they just keep rolling. But something that caught me by surprise, and it probably shouldn't have, is a scene where one of them finally flees her apartment and she takes the time to put on a mask first. It upset me and felt comfortably relatable because it's the first time a piece of fictional media has really shown that. I got weirdly choked up because I felt like "this is our reality...because I saw it in a movie." It made our perceived 'moment' feel more permanent. So Host is the first movie of what 2020 is to us now despite it coming out in August, because this year didn't start gestating until early March; January and February are remnants of a pre-COVID world. That meme about May 1st being March 60th is increasingly fucking a c c u r a t e.

   Time doesn't mean anything now and it'll be less relevant next year since most of this year's planned releases were packaged and put in the fridge until 2021 can heat them back up. So since Host is the first movie of 2020 then i'm thinking of ending things is the last movie of the 2010s - kinda like how Blow Out came out in 1980 but is still very much a late '70s movie.

   Writing for The Guardian, Steve Rose tried to coin the term "Post-Horror" to describe the new wave of existential horror with How Post-Horror Movies Are Taking Over Cinema. To him Get Out, It Comes at Night, and especially A Ghost Story (which has genre iconography but isn't categorically Horror in any sense of the word) were "a new breed of horror creeping into the multiplex, replacing jump-scares with existential dread" as if...that's a new concept. "Post-Horror" suggested that Horror died because it was becoming more artful. In the same retail tagging gun sits Psychological Thriller (or its cousin "thinkin'-man's thriller") ready to label any thriller that happens to have a complex lead manipulated by a Machiavellian villain. It's loathsome for a lotta reasons but chiefly for the most obvious one: we don't call funny movies "psychological comedies" if they happen to be darker and more character-driven than raunchy slaptstick. I'm not sure when thrillers fell prey to that semanticism but I feel like it was born out of elitist 1991 Academy Award voters wanting to elevate Silence Of The Lambs above what it is: a horror movie. The worst example of this kind of contrived upgrading was this hilarious piece about The Devil's Rejects, courtesy of The AV Club:

   "It doesn't take too great a cognitive leap to find the parallels between how Wydell responds to the Rejects' atrocities and how the American government responded to the terrorist threat after 9/11. And just as it seemed impossible for the U.S. to blow the sympathies and goodwill of the world in the months and years following the towers' collapse, so too goes our alignment with Wydell once he drops all pretense of being a cop, apprehends the Rejects with the help of some roughnecks who call themselves The Unholy Two, and turns the tables on them. The sharp political subtext in The Devil's Rejects is embedded deeply in the story, more so than the wealth of other post-9/11 horror films (George Romero's Land Of The Dead, 28 Weeks Later, Joe Dante's hour-long Homecoming, et al.) that have it a little closer to the surface. Much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—the most obvious of many reference points for Zombie—brought the butcherings in Vietnam home, The Devil's Rejects captured the tenor of the times as effectively as any earnest war movie could."

  No matter which ones you love, like, hate, or otherwise, the past decade had plenty of horror movies chock full of intended allegories, subtext, metaphors, and notations that critics were free to ride into analytical oblivion. 'Post-Horror,' thankfully, never stuck because, for the first time, Horror had prestige respect. Does it need it? No. But do I like what we got out of it? For the most part, especially since they all fit into the mosaic that ending things finishes sewing together, as the logical trend syncretic of the 2010s' Arthouse Horror boom:

 It Comes At Night, Take Shelter, The Perfection, Black Swan, Midsommar, Oculus, The Invitation, The VVitch, The Devil's Candy, A Dark Song, It Follows, The Babadook, Get Out, The Lords Of Salem, Neon Demon, Mandy, Gerald's Game, Goodnight Mommy, Us, Raw, Under The Skin, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Suspiria, Hereditary, Enemy, The Lighthouse, and especially mother!

   Playing on horror conventions without ever cheapening itself nor the genre by winking about it, Charlie Kaufman's a respectful out-of-towner in Horror's homestead. Like any of them this is a horror movie built with creepy mood, atmosphere, and mounting tension; forecasts of threats hold us hostage but there isn't a single scene of violence in the entire movie. It got to a point where I wanted someone to get stabbed just to get it over with - but that's too easy for Kaufman. There's even a scene of violence in the book but Kaufman opts to interpret that moment his own way, which is how everything else here is handled. He makes us laugh, he makes us think, he makes us insecure, he makes us reflect, and he never lets us off the hook. I was so on edge that I had to pause it to calm down. I wasn't just tense but coming apart at the existential seams - and I haven't been emotionally unstable lately so it wasn't all Me.

   It's fiercely dialog-driven and the conversations are minefields of agita while discreet voiceover desperately tries to survive being hijacked from inside out. Kaufman imbues it all with his typically absurd, neurotic sense of humor and Thewlis and Collette are the funniest part because they manage to find great comic timing while time itself is melting from Kaufman's abstract editing. Deliberate continuity errors will move furniture, kill the dog and change characters' names, clothes, ages, careers, and even mental well-being. It's as much a movie about having manic depression or alzheimer's as it is a surreal nightmare about aging and death - or all of the above. And there's more, a lot more, but that's best left to an out-and-out interpretation on your part. I'm nowhere near done unpacking it, myself. I guess that's why critics keep calling it a "psychological thriller"????? Must be!!!

   The characters will maddeningly acknowledge only pieces of the dysphoria and then get distracted by, say, the sudden craving for ice cream or being 'possessed' by the roaring ghost of Pauline Kael (played to spot-on perfection by Jessie Buckley's perpetually evolving performance). It's a wildly unexpected and brilliantly self-indulgent way for Kaufman to drive home a point about identity and interiority. Anyone who's seen Adaptation knows Charlie couldn't just adapt someone else's novel without fattening it up with his meta drippings of intertextuality.

  Like Kaufman, David Lynch is too idiosyncratic to be "inimitable," so much so that if you're rolling your eyes at the mere mention of Lynch then you know how right I am. As endless as the "mindfuck" headlines are, the fucking comparisons to Deputy Director Gordon Cole are even worse. I'm not gonna contribute to the pile and call this movie Lynchian, but it reminds me of what Lynch accomplished. When critics would write about Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017 with shit like "there's nothing else like it on TV" and/or "it makes the rest of tv obsolete," it always peeved the fuck out of me. The former trivialized how influential the original Twin Peaks was and the latter trivialized how versatile The Return revealed TV to be. ending things isn't TV but it's the closest a movie has gotten to The Return's abstract sensibilities without being derivative (the only other thing remotely close is the last 15 minutes of Annihilation but it's not enough). Comparing them, with their long and short narrative concord, is like playing the accordion.

 

  When it's opened all the way with the folds of the bellows pulled apart, the many tips of the spine are the 18 parts of The Return. But when you close it and it's one solid squeezebox: that's ending things showing how malleable horror can be. I hope Kaufman returns to the genre but if he doesn't, someone will pick up where he left off or carve a new path in the snow. Hopefully.