Author: Ed Bayliss

Settling differences with Susan Hill’s horror

By Edward Bayliss

There’s a wonderful quotation I chanced upon recently in George Eliot’s Silas Marner – itself a novel so well informed by superstition and the supernatural. It goes: ‘Before such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more distinctly felt – like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny air.’ It seems to me that this is the force that fills the sails of good horror. Like the small itch of a splinter between your toes, or in film terms, the almost imperceptible cant of a camera lens, there should exist an unease, barely there but present enough to unsettle you gradually. This is the agitated and wrinkled sheet on which the real time body horrors lie.  

Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic horror novel, The Woman in Black, has borne two cinematic adaptations. Doubtless, most have heard of James Watkins’ 2012 version (starring Daniel Radcliffe), but I suspect Herbert Wise’s 1989 feature leans lonely against the shaded edge of our film shelves – even so, I must remember that I speak for a certain generation. In broad strokes, the films take markedly different approaches in their realisation of Hill’s novel on the screen. Wise’s Woman in Black is much more faithful to its source text, save his strange alteration of Arthur Kipps’ surname to ‘Kidd’, and the fashion of his family’s death; he leaves the meat of the original plot unspoiled. Watkins instead kills Kipps’ wife before the film has even begun, and donates much more of the film’s minutes to the circumstances of the children’s deaths in Crythin Gifford which are treated in more mysterious terms in Hill’s novel. Though I am very fond of the novel, I won’t pedestal it as some god-breathed scripture that must be followed to a T. 

What interests me more are the directors’ treatment of that heap of a house – Eel Marsh House. We must consider not only the fact of the setting, but also the framing of the setting. The Drablow estate, set isolated across a marshy causeway suffocated by ‘sea threats’, is a great invention of horror. In Watkins’ 2012 adaptation, we see it first from high angle shots – it’s a black and brown tangle of trees and rocky outcrops, a kind of unspectacular Mont-Saint-Michel. It’s obscure and dark, very dark. The geography of the ‘island’ I’ve noticed doesn’t actually add up when we arrive at the house on ground level. Whether this is an intentional move from Watkins, I’m not sure. The estate grounds bear all the hallmarks of high gothic horror, with gnarled gravestones, trees antlered with dead branches appearing as grey phantoms, and carpets of smothering moss and ivy covering every unbreathing surface. A bluish grey filter sits on the lens throughout. The gothic catalogue is well read, maybe too well read. 

Herbert Wise approaches the site with much more austerity, open space, and bigger skies. Eel Marsh House’s surroundings are unwooded, bare, and unsettlingly unfilled, except for the romantic ruin of a chapel arch which appears also on the cover of the first edition of Hill’s novel. This is the most notable difference in terms of the Eel Marsh grounds. To return to our initial assessment of ‘good horror’ prompted by the Eliot quotation, it’s the 1989 version that best exemplifies this undercurrent of edge. Let it be said, the scenery of the Drablow estate in Watkins’ film is uncomfortable, but it’s comfortably uncomfortable – for me it’s too explicit in its presentation, too direct. Its effects are overground, like a wind slapping against your cheek, whereas with Wise’s Woman in Black we feel more the unsteady shift of soil beneath our feet. 

Now to the house itself. In the Radcliffe film, much like it’s outside, the inside of the house is in a state of complete disrepair (seemingly abandoned for decades), with Satis house-esque shivering cobwebs and burnt-down candlesticks. An infinitely long corridor on the first floor is unsurprisingly exploited in several POV push shots. The camera, I should say, behaves unsubtly in Watkins’ Eel Marsh House. It too often frames Radcliffe in the corner of the frame, demanding us to look elsewhere in the shot, and ‘shockingly’ discover the blurred shape of Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, against a far away wall. The camera also appropriates the perspective of Humfrye too regularly so that the effect is rendered less and less potent in each instance. Here, the camera gymnastics often distract from the subject, creating a self-awareness, reminding us we are watching pixels on a screen in our sitting room.

There’s a theme here, if you hadn’t gathered. In Wise’s adaptation, the interior of Eel Marsh house is intact and lived in (Alice Drablow had only died a week prior to Kidds’ visit). There is even electricity, as in the novel, and few dark corners for phantoms to lurk. The electrical aspect of the house is used brilliantly. In an outhouse, a panting generator eerily sounds out through the house’s tight corridors. One of the most striking moments of the film occurs when the faulty generator is revived, and all the lights of the house are restored. In this exterior shot, the house again becomes uncannily alive. Wise’s film doesn’t rely on dark corners for the dark deeds of his woman in black. The lens, as though afraid, often shrinks back from the Jennet Humfrye rather than possess her. 

Herbert Wise’s Woman in Black is the better of the two. For want of more coherent expression, it’s better to have uneasy easiness than easy uneasiness on the screen.     

Image credits: IMDB & BFI

By Ed Bayliss

There might not have been a better place to watch Fourth Wall Theatre’s student production of hang than in the Durham Union Chamber, the traditional seat of university debate and dialogue. In collaboration with Durham Law Society, this legal drama pits the grief, anger, and ultimate lust for revenge of a wronged woman known only as ‘Three’ (Alexa Thanni) against the emotional ineptitude of a pair of legal officials (‘One’, Tilly Bridgeman, and ‘Two’, Charlie Fitzgerald). Three must decide the fate of an unnamed man who has committed a crime against her and her family under the supervision and legal advice of Two and Three. 

Minimalist in design, the set consists of three chairs, a desk, and a water fountain. The last of which is used to good effect to fill not only the cups that sit neatly below it but also the toe curling silences that so frequently punctuate the play. One yellow light shines blindingly from the front of the stage. This gave good opportunity for One and Two to stand before the single source of lighting and leave Three in dark, literally, and metaphorically. 

Hang is intentionally frustrating. In the first third of the play, we wrestle with the mundanity of cumbersome legal jargon, protocol, and process. Lines are reeled off in stichomythic exchanges between One and Two with good poise and precision; but all we hear is sound with little to no substance. We develop the neck muscles of a tennis umpire as our sight and attention shift constantly between the two legals in their trivial but constant asides to one another. These are two unprofessional professionals attempting to carry out their jobs ‘by the book’ (bound in bureaucratic red tape) but failing miserably, and often comically. Their dialogues trip over each other as the disillusioned Three remains largely silent. 

Where Three first carries herself with a quiet remoteness and disillusion, clutching her jacket to her body, she gradually becomes more vocal and begins to challenge both Two and Three in their mishandling of the situation, as well as the judicial system in general. At one moment, about halfway through the production, Three delivers an outburst aimed at the sickening diplomacy of Two and Three. At the plastic performance of relatability from the two officials, Three, in a moment of authentic vehemence cries aloud, ‘can you just stop fucking talking!’ Two, wearing a shop-bought smile responds with, ‘I can see how upsetting this is for you.’ 

Director Megan Dunlop manages the space of the stage well to accommodate her audience in the round. One and Two, as though on a conveyor belt, move up and down the central protrusion of the stage in tandem, ensuring all spectators are afforded their fair share of attention. Three has the impressive quality of attaching herself to individual audience members in her particularly turbulent moments of emotional eruption. Being seated on the front row of the benches, I found myself subject to an episode of Three’s fits of anger and felt its effects very personally. Dunlop utilises the off-stage as well; we occasionally hear One and Two squabble over legal technicalities and small prints from the stairwell outside in some instances of comic relief. 

As with most plays, hang finds its ‘crescendo moment’ near enough to the end of the play. But where most theatre productions will raise volume, visible emotion, and physical action, Dunlop’s direction delivers a cold and clinical finale. Three, having contemplated for the man in question the executions of beheading, firing squad, and lethal injection, settles distressingly comfortably on the monosyllables, ‘I want him hung.’ We are told that this will be carried out by an ‘anonymous expert execution team’: it is lines like these that playwright Debbie Tucker Green executes so knowingly in her bouts of black comedy. 

I find that the journey of Three from woman of victim to vengeance is the most striking feature of the play. It’s true, the production riffs on and satirises the longevity and incommodious nature of ‘the legal process’, presented really very entertainingly by Bridgeman (One) and Fitzgerald (Two). But, the most interesting and gripping aspect of Dunlop’s arrangement was the liberty at which she allowed Three to make the seamless transition from vulnerable sufferer to the cunning and calculated author of the man’s fate she eventually becomes.    

By Edward Bayliss

If I could see the world through the eyes of a child

What a wonderful world this would be

In a nondescript apartment block somewhere in London, screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) struggles to write about his dead parents. As he reaches for a ready meal, the cold blue light from the inside of his refrigerator illuminates his bent-backed posture. Despite his enormous apartment windows overlooking the nation’s capital below, we only really see Adam in the  white glare of his television or computer screens. We are relieved when Scott’s character decides to leave the confinement and impersonality of his high-rise block to travel to his family home, presumably in search of inspiration. Adam stands atop a field and watches the slant of sunset ripple across trees and grasses. Then, in a strangely unthreatening supernatural moment, the voice of a man in the background beckons him to come ‘home’. The man is Adam’s father. ‘Dad’ (Jamie Bell) leads Adam into his 1980s decorated home where ‘Mum’ (Claire Foy) greets him affectionately. Soft amber light swims across yellowed wallpaper, and a thin cloud of cigarette smoke lends a grainy texture to the shot. Adam revisits his childhood (trauma); most notably, to reconcile his sexuality to his parents who were unwitting products of 1980s state-sanctioned homophobia. 

Andrew Haigh’s film operates, apparently, across the separate plot paths of Adam’s personal and familial history, and the ‘real-time’ story of his delicate but passionate relationship with fellow apartment block dweller, Harry (Paul Mescal). We first meet Harry as he knocks tentatively on Adam’s door – he grips a bottle of whiskey – an object that will gain some significance at the film’s climax. Adam confronts his loneliness by wandering somnambulantly into the oneiric episodes of his childhood, whereas Harry drinks deep in an act of burial and suppression. He has, as he admits defeatedly, ‘drifted to the edge’. They begin to talk. And talking, we should know already, is the only avenue of escape from the torture of loneliness. 

Above all else, All of Us Strangers is an acutely honest film. Unashamedly and forthrightly, the lens isn’t afraid to dig through the rubble of lost childhoods and reclaim something of intense value. With a cast of just four, whose faces seem always to fill the screen in extreme close ups, it perhaps can’t help but be sincere. Andrew Haigh’s film, however, lifts the lid on the traditional trauma-confrontation film and takes us on welcome diversions we didn’t know were accessible. The director focuses on the remarkably abstract and obscure way in which mental turmoil affects memory. 

Terrifyingly, Adam’s mind mangles time and reality. It has its toll on him – at one moment he sees his own face warped into some semblance of a screaming Francis Bacon portrait on the curved tube window. Like many directors before him, Haigh enjoys the use of glass and its distorting qualities in his shot selections. Adam finds it too easy to slip into his childhood life as it becomes an attachment onto which he clings relentlessly, almost unhealthily.  Harry  warns Adam: ‘Don’t let this get tangled up again.’ 

We learn two things from Adam’s progress through the film: 1. That you must coexist with your past self; 2. That in equal measure, you must learn to leave that past self behind when you no longer need it. Adam’s parents, you could say, are almost pseudo-Nanny McPhee characters, reminding us that ‘When you need me, but do not want me then I must stay. But when you want me but no longer need me, I have to go.’   

The lyrics that commence this review are heard near the end of the film when Adam meets with his parents for the last time. With golden light seeping into the edges of the shot, Scott’s character and his parents eat at their favourite American-style diner in Croydon. In an incredibly touching moment, Adam says goodbye for good, and they urge him on to his wide futures with Harry. Yes, Adam has seen the world again through the eyes of a child, and it was instrumental in his reckoning with the past, but he must now learn to look ahead, and wrestle with the complexities of 21^st C. life and living. 

By Edward Bayliss

When asked why he is so committed to his profession as a surgeon and scientific experimentalist, Dr. Godwin Baxter, or ‘God’, replies coolly: ‘My amusement.’ Physically disfigured and clinically disposed, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) bears all the hallmarks of a madly possessive psychopath as we see him rear his newest design, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). Godwin’s literal brainchild (Bella’s brain is replaced with that of her unborn baby) is a young woman beginning to understand afresh the ways of the world. You’d be forgiven for thinking Godwin was a wicked and perverted man. It is however established early in the film that Bella was dead when Godwin performed his restoring surgery on her, and that Godwin is characterised more as a father figure than a Humbert Humbert of Lolita. He asks his creation, ‘Would you rather the world did not have Bella?’   

Bella learns quickly; at first we see her stumbling across the black and white marbled floors with the awkwardness of a toddler, then, there comes her self-realisation and yearning for ‘experience’ and ‘adventure’. The main object of comedy in the film exists in the contention between Bella’s naïve outlook and her exposure to ‘the real world’ as she elopes with the seedy Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). For her, sex is ‘furious jumping’, food she dislikes is allowed to be spat out at high society dinners, and it is acceptable for her to ask Wedderburn in public if he would like to ‘tongue play’ her. Her physical comedy is also deftly crafted – she hasn’t yet mastered her own body, let alone her mind. It is hard to overstate the hilarity with which Bella’s character is met, accelerated also by Wedderburn’s growing frustration with her and his constant reprimands (‘You cunty cuntface dipshit’). 

The two embark on a kind of odyssey, travelling to Lisbon, Alexandria, sailing across the Mediterranean, and eventually arriving in Paris. Lanthimos’ fantastic use of soundstages with painted glowing backdrops adds a surrealist slant to these settings in the film. These are especially striking as they are pitted against the black and white Victorian gothic look of London, with its strangely postmodern architecture and steampunk-inspired outfit. We move from the trivial treatment of gore and exacting empiricism in Godwin’s laboratory littered with nightmarishly Boschian animal hybrids, to the artistic and cultural wonders of the continent; the wide eyed Bella is arrested by such beauty. In tandem with Bella’s growing emotional awareness and intelligence, the camera becomes more excitable and adventurous. Its fisheye lens begins even more to distort and liven the frame, with increased use of wide angle tilt-shift shots (almost Luhrmann-inspired) that place small figures against fantastical set designs. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan clearly has had his fun, not at all at the expense of the film. 

Bella encounters emotions unlike any she has felt before as she exclaims energetically, ‘my soul has been buckled’. Her mind becomes alive to ideas of politics and philosophy. Where once we might have considered her the ward, child, or sexual object of Wedderburn, she now intellectually outperforms him, and even prostitutes herself in Paris as an act of paradoxical sexual self-determination. At one moment in the brothel, Bella carries out vicious intercourse with a customer, at which point the camera shrewdly cuts to her reading a book entitled ‘Ethics’. She involves herself with socialist doctrine and vies for workers’ rights along with another prostitute colleague. Despite her means or methods, she is as the brothel manager asserts, ‘a woman plotting her course to freedom.’

Poor Things is, at its most basic form, a study. Occasionally, the camera will retreat into a circular frame and watch from a faraway wall, as though we are peering cautiously through an unadjusted microscope. This is a study that calls into question the critical notion of selfhood. Who is Bella Baxter? Is she the warped play-thing of Godwin? her unborn baby whose brain she possesses? or simply, her own evolving and learning creation? Moreso, Lanthimos makes it difficult for the viewer to discern who the real monsters, or ‘deformed’, are in his film. We meet so many characters who are debased, ugly, and despicable, but essentially human, that it leaves us wondering what exactly a ‘monster’ is. 

My friend and I left Tyneside cinema with much to discuss – a train delay of over an hour gave us ample time to do so. I agreed with him when he said that it feels, upon watching Poor Things, like you have just read an entire book. That is how much this film offers.