The Conjuring

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s the 70s and a hard-working couple with several children move into a rambling old house in the middle of nowhere. They’ve sunk their life savings into the property and are looking forward to a new start. Their pet dog refuses to enter the house. Their youngest child finds an old music box and makes an imaginary friend who might not be so imaginary after all. Another child sleepwalks and sees things. Clocks stop at exactly the same time every night. A boarded-up stairwell is discovered, leading down a cobweb infested basement. Pictures jump off walls. Doors open and close of their own volition. The mother of the family suffers from bruising that doesn’t seem to have any apparent cause. As strange events proliferate, the family prevail upon the help of paranormal investigators who unearth a history of dark secrets and violent events connected to the house.

‘The Conjuring’ does nothing you haven’t seen in several dozen other movies, right down to the period setting which evokes ‘The Amityville Horror’. Its achievement, though, is generally doing these things better than those several dozen other movies. Avoiding their pitfalls. Skirting it, but never quite tipping over into melodrama. Not overly relying on CGI or whiz-bang effects (an exception, involving a bedsheet torn off a washing line in a gale, pays off with such a careworn image that it shouldn’t work … but somehow does). 

Engagingly old-school, ‘The Conjuring’ takes its time in establishing the characters. Let’s meet the family, truck driver Roger Perron (Ron Livingston), wife Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and their daughters Andrea (Shanley Cresswell), Nancy (Hayley McFarland), Christine (Joey King), Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) and April (Kyla Deaver). Okay, Carolyn’s a tad “gee whiz” naïve/optimistic and Andrea’s pretty much got the whole emo sulk routine off to a fine art, but on the whole these are decent people. A regular family. You wouldn’t balk at having them as neighbours. You care what happens to them. That might sound like an obvious thing to say, but you wouldn’t believe how many genre films I’ve sat through whose characters I’ve either not engaged with (‘The Haunting in Connecticut’) or actively disliked (‘Frozen’).

As the ferocity of the paranormal incidents increases, the Perrons engage the services of renowned ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), from whose case files the story is taken. And hence that twinge of familiarity: they were at Amityville, and they investigated the Smurl family haunting, on which ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ was based. I guess ghosts and malevolent spirits just took to a certain kind of New England real estate and acted in remarkably similar ways whenever the Warrens were around.

The Warrens had their detractors throughout their career, and how closely the film chimes with the actual psychic investigation four decades ago isn’t something I’ve been able define based on some cursory internet research into the couple. Nor does it seem a worthwhile exercise. The film throws out its “based on true events” card from the outset and we all know how spurious that “based on” tag can be, what a multitude of sins it can hide. What’s up for debate here is how well ‘The Conjuring’ works as an example of its genre, as a work of entertainment. Did it give me the creeps? Yes, and then some. Did it make me jump? Twice, both scenes using the same visual motif.

I’ve seen nothing of director James Wan’s work beyond the inaugural entry in the ‘Saw’ franchise, and was underwhelmed to the point that I let the rest of the saga happily pass me by. I’m told that ‘Dead Silence’ was horrible in many ways (if memory serves, Tim Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy coined the term “fucktrocious” in his review), and ‘Insidious’ reasonably effective if boilerplate. ‘Insidious’ has now been added to the rental list, and the rather pompously titled ‘Insidious Chapter Two’ is definitely on the big screen radar. I’m curious to find out – and it may well be an investigation as freighted by the unknown as any of Ed and Lorraine’s – exactly where James Wan became such an accomplished craftsman.

Cold Fever

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (Iceland) / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 89 of 100

Hirata (Masatoshi Nagase) is holding down a soulless corporate job in Tokyo, wasting his evenings watching trashy TV in his shoebox apartment and counting down the days till his golfing holiday in Hawaii. Then his grandfather reminds him of his filial obligation to conduct a ritual of remembrance at the place of this parents’ death.

His parents died in Iceland.

On arrival, he is immediately shepherded onto a coach which takes him, not to Reykjavik as per his itinerary, but to a spa called the Blue Lagoon. It’s the first – and certainly least surreal – of a series of misadventures which take Hirata across Iceland to the remote riverside spot where his parents met their untimely end. His trip from the Blue Lagoon to Reykjavik is made courtesy of a taxi driver who makes a detour to participate in a farmyard nativity, and a lift in a Scania truck whose payload appears to be a male voice choir.

On his first night in Reykjavik, Hirata meets a woman who tells him they have a strong psychic connection and proceeds to sell him her car, insisting that it has the right “aura” for a cross-country trip. Personally, I’ve never driven a Citroen DS so I can’t speak for its karmic qualities, but our first glimpse of it doesn’t bode well.

Against his better judgement, Hirata buys the car and sets out on an epic drive armed with a map he can barely read while the Citroen’s radio malfunctions almost immediately, sticking on the most annoying radio station in Iceland. Freezing from the cold, acutely conscious of the language barrier (Iceland’s almost nationwide second language is English, of which Hirata speaks only a little), his journey is variously helped and hindered by Laura (Laura Hughes), an English woman who “collects” funerals; Jack (Fisher Stevens) and Jill (Lili Taylor), a bickering American couple who use sock puppets to talk to each other when their rows reach a certain point; a strange Icelandic girl who may be a ghost and who can scream at a banshee-like pitch capable of shattering ice caps; a hotel full of Icelandic cowboys participating in a ram competition (yes, that’s right: a competition to determine who has the best male sheep); and Siggi (Gísli Halldórsson), a hard-drinking pragmatist who helps Hirata to complete his journey, the final stages undertaken by horse and an on-foot crossing of a distinctly unsafe bridge.

Made a few years before ‘The Straight Story’, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s quirky road movie has a similar good-natured quirkiness to David Lynch’s odyssey-by-tractor masterpiece. Hirata is a sanguine and likeable hero (even his occasional badly-aimed kick at the recalcitrant Citroen is comedic rather than petulant). He’s an affable everyman, an innocent abroad, a stranger in a strange land. And Fridriksson’s Iceland is definitely strange. There’s also a hint of Jim Jarmusch, probably in the influence of Jim Stark, producer of several Jarmusch movies, who co-wrote the screenplay.

Ari Kristinsson’s cinematography is a marvel, capturing the stark natural beauty of Iceland, an aesthetic Fridriksson reinforces by having the opening Tokyo scenes shot in 1:33 ratio in fairly tight and clustered compositions, then expanding the screen to 2:35 as Hirata’s flight descends over Iceland and the vast landscape which will define his journey stretches out in snowy solitude beneath him. It’s a breathtaking moment, brilliantly executed, and the film becomes stranger and visually more beautiful as it progresses.

The final sequence, Siggi’s selfless assistance bringing Hirata to the river, is profound, low-key and sensitively done. It’s the point at which ‘Cold Fever’ becomes more than just another entertainingly quirky indie film, and achieves something spiritual and meaningful.