Any graduate of Filmmaking 101 knows that the best horror movies are transgressively therapeutic. These excursions to the human psyche's dark side expose radioactive images and issues off limits in mainstream filmmaking. SIFF 2009 showcases two such subversive shockers: "Deadgirl," a stomach-turning parable about the extreme objectification of women by adolescent males; and "Hansel and Gretel," a very grim fairy tale about child abuse.
"Deadgirl" (Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel, USA, 2008; 101 minutes)
At the end of a powerfully paced and photographed opening sequence, two high-school losers uncover a gorgeous dead girl in the basement of an abandoned lunatic asylum. Turnabout is fair play: the slackers, who might as well be ghosts for all the attention they rate from high-school hotties, turn their zombie into a sex object, visiting all their testosterone-fueled rage on her helpless body. Starting out in genuinely provocative - if truly repulsive - territory, "Deadgirl" ultimately disappoints, dead-ending in an obligatory gore-and-guts extravaganza. -KAM
9:30 p.m. Thursday, May 28, Neptune; midnight Friday, May 29, Egyptian; 9:30 p.m. June 5, Kirkland Performance Center
"Hansel and Gretel" (Yim Phil-sung, South Korea, 2008; 116 minutes)
When a feckless young man, soon to be a father, wrecks his car on a lonely road, a grave-faced little girl in a red cape leads him through the forest to the House of Happy Children, a charming fairy-tale cottage resplendent with Day-Glo colors, plates of extravagant candies and pastries, and eternally smiling Stepford parents. Like "Pan's Labyrinth," this beautifully designed and photographed fable is rooted in black horror, the awful cruelties adults can visit on little ones. Powered by their fevered imaginations, three damaged siblings rewrite "Hansel and Gretel" to read more like "The Shining," in which the House of Happy Children is really Hell for grown-ups. -KAM
9:15 p.m. Wednesday, May 27, Neptune; 3:30 p.m. Friday, May 29, Egyptian; 9:30 p.m. June 7, Admiral
*
The Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel is an exemplary choice for SIFF's Emerging Masters sidebar (last year's honorees, Fatih Akin and Abdellatif Kechiche, contributed the two best new films in the festival). "La Ciénaga" (2001), her first and still best picture, centers on a dank, visibly decaying mansion on an unprepossessing plateau where several generations of a clan and their various satellites drift like algae. "The Headless Woman," Martel's latest, is in a similar vein. On a drive through the countryside a well-to-do professional woman may or may not have absentmindedly run over a working-class child; she isn't sure, and neither is the audience even though we were along for the ride. The picture turns into a kind of muted psychic horror film, whose most horrific aspect is the way the woman's social set contrives to ignore the situation, even as the stench of truth finds its way up through the plumbing.
Such summaries may remind veteran foreign-film watchers of Pauline Kael's "come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe party," that critic's scathing coinage to characterize Michelangelo Antonioni's films of the early '60s. But Martel's films aren't exercises in moralistic finger-pointing (neither were Antonioni's, for that matter). They're not depictions, but immersions in an atmosphere, a mindset, a spiritual condition.
Martel achieves this immersion by way of an uncannily pervasive sound scheme; framing so tight that the protagonist, variously consumed by dread, distraction and self-delusion, does become a "headless" woman at times; and a judicious manipulation of light and dark and a weirdly translucent visual texture that portrays reality slipping away before our eyes. It's not a fun trip, but it makes for artful and unsettling cinema. -RTJ
"Headless Woman" 7 p.m. Friday, May 29 and 1:30 p.m. Saturday, May 30, both at Harvard Exit; "La Ciénaga" 11 a.m. Saturday, May 30, Harvard Exit
*
"Kisses" (Lance Daly, Ireland, 2008; 72 minutes)
During one especially bleak Christmas, two next-door neighbors in a housing project on the outskirts of Dublin - boy (Shane Curry) and girl (Kelly O'Neill), both on the verge of adolescence - run away from their dysfunctional households. He has an older brother who, when last heard of, was living in the city, so they head there, their expedition given an early boost by an indulgent barge tender.
The metropolis has a faux-magical aura for our runaways - a place where you might run into Bob Dylan, or at least his avatar "Down Under" Dylan (a deft cameo by Stephen Rea). But the city's predatory dark side becomes apparent soon enough.
"Kisses" might have gone wrong in any number of ways, so it seems a small miracle that writer-director Lance Daly gets about everything right. The kids - characters and performers alike - are smart but not smartass, cute but not cloying, vulnerable without jerking tears. The dangers they encounter are real and fearsome - especially the domestic violence the boy fled back home - but not permitted to overwhelm the scruffy fairy tale. This is a charmer, with no saccharine aftertaste. -RTJ
4:30 p.m. Friday, May 29 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, May 31; both at Harvard Exit
*
Of SIFF's two archival offerings for the week, the 1950 "So Long at the Fair" is a minor British classic set during the 1889 Paris Exhibition - a bit of a comedown from the Brit revelations of SIFF '08 ("It Always Rains on Sunday") and '07 ("A Cottage on Dartmoor"), but nonetheless an intriguing mystery that shares a true-life antecedent with Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes." Future horror-filmmaker Terence Fisher co-directed with producer Antony Darnborough, and the stars are the equally pretty Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde.
The other revival, "The Great Race," is a 1965 tribute to the golden age of movie slapstick. Blake Edwards' gifts as a comedy director include cartoonish imagination, an elegant eye and impeccable timing. All are on display in this spectacular period piece about a 1909 round-the-world race pitting (chiefly) Jack Lemmon's Professor Fate and Tony Curtis' The Great Leslie against each other, but the 160-minute picture suffers from roadshow bloat - and Henry Mancini's ickiest theme song ("Come along with me / To the Sweetheart Tree..."). With Natalie Wood, Peter Falk and Edwards favorite Ross Martin doing a sublime takeoff on Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s villainy in "The Prisoner of Zenda." -RTJ
"So Long at the Fair" 1:30 p.m. Sunday, May 31, Harvard Exit; "The Great Race" 6:30 p.m. Monday, June 1, Cinerama
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