Ruth Wilson and Ben Chaplin in a shrewd horror film

‘family’

Elisha Christian

The horror behind evil spirits and unexplained phenomena in family The film is based on a harsh truth: a young girl’s fear of her father’s death. In his confident debut film, writer-director Benjamin Finkel wraps this fear in horror metaphors, taking us inside the mind of a child who imagines the worst. The film becomes increasingly tense and emotionally wrenching, even as Finkel ramps up the genre touches that feel unnecessary.

Joanna (Cameron Dawson Gray) is a lonely 11-year-old girl whose family has moved to another part of the country so her father can get better cancer treatment. Finkel’s director’s statement explains that this is a personal story, inspired by how he felt when his father suffered from cancer throughout Finkel’s childhood. Echoing that experience, the film is almost entirely from Joanna’s point of view. From the beginning, we are in her nightmares and imagination, as her mother comes with a knife, her dog disappears into thin air, and her mouth bleeds from the glass inside her jelly sandwich.

She has a small birdhouse—blue, egg-shaped, painted with gold stars—that she thinks she can use to summon good spirits to save her father, only to feel it getting worse that she has summoned evil instead. Among her other reactions to his illness, she blames her parents at different times, imagining that they are trying to hurt her. It exists almost outside of time. A video camera is used to film the videos, not a phone, but a time period is never specified, which enhances the unreal feeling.

Ruth Wilson takes on the toughest role as Naomi, Johanna’s mother, and gives another intelligent performance. Naomi is often harsh, harsh, and impatient with her daughter, reflecting how Joanna views her. Other times, she is kind and loving. Wilson blinks back and forth as she adjusts these shifts. She creates a character who is under tremendous pressure, who may not be able to truly comfort her daughter enough but never aims to hurt her. Ben Chaplin depicts the way her father, Harry, nobly tries to live a normal life, but cannot. He became weak and in pain, and eventually had a seizure. Chaplin also occasionally turns into the bad father of Joanna’s nightmares, though Finkel paints those moments on a larger scale.

The film has a connection with Ari Aster Hereditaryusing horror as a metaphor for dark family dynamics, as its explicit title family She suggests. But it’s so clear early on that the terrifying apparitions and her parents’ evil behavior come from Joanna’s mind that the jump scares are less jumpy than they might have been. Finkel directs the actors and camera with admirable precision, and the horror scenes are beautifully crafted, even when they are standard tropes: lights shine eerily from the isolated family home, surrounded by dark woods; A plane was dropped following a narrow, empty corridor towards a glowing room; Harry as Joanna imagined him crawling down the stairs to the basement. Throughout, Gray convincingly displays Joanna’s pain.

Elisha Christian’s cinematography deftly points out the difference between the clarity of real life and the dark colors of Joanna’s imagined scenes. Olivia Peebles’s production design enhances the unnerving tone, in a large, perfectly comfortable old house that can suddenly turn ominous. Even the props are just right, with the strange little blue birdhouse looking claustrophobic enough to be unsettling. Finkel’s screenplay is simple, as it relies wisely on images. Still, it’s a bit wonderful for a child displaced from her old home to read Wizard of Oz She named her dog Toto.

At the point where the reality of Harry’s condition is at its worst, Finkel leans into more extreme touches, with an almost faceless skeletal creature haunting Joanna’s thoughts. This growing horror mirrors her experience, but by then her pain has become so deep and raw that the ghoulish apparitions seem to diminish its value. Finally it seems wrong to call family Absolutely horror movie. Horror acts as an attraction here, drawing viewers into an intensely personal film about the kind of trauma that never ends.