Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: David Amito, Michael Laicini
Starring: Nicole Tompkins, Rowan Smyth, A.J. Bond, Nathan Fleet, Brock Fricker, Assen Gadjalov
Meta-fictional scene setting has long been a part of horror’s playful
mien. From M.R. James impressing upon his gathered male students that
the ghost story he was to impart was in turn once told to him by the
narrative’s participant, to Mary Shelley popping up to say hello at the
start of The Bride of Frankenstein a few years later, all the way to The
Blair Witch Project’s various ingenious gimmicks; this negotiation of
the fourth wall is part and parcel of horror’s pleasure, wherein the
storyteller is able to reach across the screen or page and entice the
audience further into their fictional, uncanny shadows.
David Amito and
Michael Laicini’s Antrum (oh, alright, Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever
Made, to give it its full title) takes such japery to an extreme, and
exhibits, in the manner of John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns (which gets
a namecheck here) or Tim Lucas’ wonderful 'Throat Sprockets' novel, a
bedevilled film which will seriously ruin the day of anyone foolhardy
enough to watch it - yikes! The things I do for The Waffler...
Opening with a convincing montage of old silents that feature vivid,
occulty imagery, we are privy to a portentous voiceover telling us about
this ‘Antrum’ film which surfaced from nowhere (Bulgaria) at some point
in the 1970s and then as quickly disappeared, not only because it
was just so fucking scary, but also due to its highly calamitous nature.
It is what Shudder would call a ‘Cursed Film’, with festival programmers
who dared to show Antrum in the ensuing decades coming a cropper: as a
result of screening it, one poor lad got stung by a stonefish (?) and a
cinema in Budapest went and caught on fire during a screening. Real
life bods who are loosely affiliated with the American indie horror
scene attest to the existence and ominous reputation of Antrum. And
then, after 10 minutes or so of this credibly presented documentary
fanfare, we witness this fabled film. Get startled, yeah?
Except, to add injury to potential hermetic insult, this particular
print (the last surviving one, naturally) has been fiddled with at some
point by berserk celluloid vandals who have scratched witchy symbols
into the print and also, for some reason, intercut scenes from a
decidedly less innocent flick into the narrative. Because, as a
standalone film, the main Antrum storyline is a sweet natured '70s set
fairy-tale, featuring a young boy, Nathan (Rowan Smyth), and his teen sister Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) journeying into the woods to dig a hole. The little boy’s
dog has died, and, in the film’s most unsettlingly creepy moment, when
he asks his mom about the whereabouts of the dog’s soul, he is told "Maxine isn’t in heaven because she was bad" (brrrrrr!). Oralee
has made up a story (an early indication of narrative determinism) about
the forest being the place where Satan fell to earth, and that if they
dig a hole on the exact spot where the Shining One landed then they can
rescue Maxine’s soul from Hell - awwww.
This part of the film is shot
using that lovely, buttery light which characterises this sort of
vintage horror, and the soundtrack is made up of intense and originally
deployed ambient noise, which makes it rather remarkable to look at and
listen to. The actors are utterly superb too, inhabiting not only
convincing roles as protagonists but as archetypes of a type of horror
which existed far before either of them were even born.
Along the way artfully scraped sigils pop up on the screen, and there
are subliminal transitions of a horrible black and white snuff film
(think the sort of weird thing that is faked on YouTube and pored over
on Reddit. Apparently, it is rumoured that certain viewers have also
seen a dark faced demon interrupting the narrative at a certain point,
staring at you for a good minute or so while silently whispering your
name, giving credence to the claim that Amato and Laicini are actually
Satanic agents who are playing a long con with Antrum’s deliberately
amateurish approach in order to lull the viewer into false security to
allow their Dark Lord and Master full uninhibited access to your soul. I
didn’t see anything, though. Perhaps you might...).
The orphic static is,
however, distinctly less interesting than the abiding storyline of
Nathan and Oralee trapped in a reverse Eden as they face creeping dark
shadows, strange noises and, ugh, beastial hick cannibals who worship
Baphomet and try to Hansel and Gretel our intrepid heroes. Never mind
the devil, there is eerie poetry here in the obtuse angles of the
camera, the Krzysztof Komeda-esque soundtrack, the weird echoes of the
forest (including, in one inspired moment, the kids ‘hearing’ the
hitherto non-diegetic score).
The overall experience of Antrum, however, is like when someone
prefaces a joke with a massive lead up: telling you how funny the joke
is, how funny they found the joke, how much you’re going to find the
joke funny, etc, before finally telling you the actual joke. What joke ever could overcome such manufactured expectations? Ultimately Antrum
suffers from a similarly self-defeating hyperbole - it isn’t nearly as
frightening or unsettling as the framing device promises. I mean, my
house didn’t even burn down while I was watching it! The shame is that
it didn’t need to be, and, on its own merits, the ‘Maxine’ narrative is
quite arresting, replete with beguiling folkloric touches and striking
performances. The ‘deadliest film ever made’? It’s probably not even the
deadliest film released this month. But don’t let that blind you to
Antrum’s buried charms.
Antrum is in UK cinemas from
October 23rd and on DVD/Digital October 26th.
