Rating: C+
Dir: David Prior
Star: James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland Sasha Frolova, Stephen Root
This got buried on release, a combination of COVID fatigue, no marketing and coming after sucky films with similar titles, e.g. The Bye Bye Man, basically dooming any chance of success. Despite vanishing rapidly at the time, it has acquired something approaching cult status. It now has an above-average rating on Letterboxd, and its fans really like it. Certainly, it’s different: an ambitious and almost willfully deep slab of occult, conspiratorial horror, beginning in a lengthy prologue during a mountain expedition in Bhutan, over twenty years earlier, where… Well, shit happens. Let’s leave it at that. Fast forward to the present, where former cop James Lasombra (Dale) is investigating the disappearance of a young girl, Amanda Quail (Frolova).
His search uncovers a mass suicide, a local legend regarding the summoning of the titular urban legend, and a connection to the mysterious Pontifex Institute. This is a metaphysical research organization, run by the friendly, yet distinctly off Arthur Parsons (Root), who are engaged in activities intended to make… Well, shit happen. Quite what Lasombra’s role is in all this is somewhat murky, though it gradually becomes clear he is of some importance. You’ll be forgiven for getting a sense of elements familiar from a lot of other horror movies, including Candyman and The Wicker Man, plus Lovecraft. Yet Prior brings enough which is fresh to the table, preventing this from being just a hodgepodge of warmed-up leftovers. The Bhutanese opening in particular, is striking.
I can certainly see why it failed to find an audience at the time. This is well over two hours long, and it really does not need to be. Plus it possesses an ending which would have had me slashing the cinema seats, had I paid theatrical price for it. On home viewing, at reduced cost, I am rather more tolerant of the wild absurdity, to the point where it seems courageous rather than ludicrous. Dale makes for an appropriate protagonist, a hard-boiled hero who finds himself increasingly out of his depth, along with the audience. He comes with a lot of the typical baggage e.g. he lost his wife and child in a car accident, and is now a solitary figure.
Its path to the screen was an interesting one. By accounts, Prior was largely left to his own devices during production, Fox executives being more concerned about the upcoming merger into Disney. That’s not normally a luxury afforded to first-time feature directors (Prior being better known previously for “making-of” docs, such as for David Fincher). But he was rushed into producing a final cut for tax rebate reasons, and Disney were not exactly interested in doing much with it. The results are an interesting exercise in what happens when a studio both interferes too much with a film, and not enough. It’s not what you would expect, and nor is it a “normal” genre entry. However, it needs a stronger grip on simple coherence.