Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jill Gevargizian
Starring: Najarra Townsend, Brea Grant, Millie Milan, Sarah
McGuire, Jennifer Seward-DeRock
When it comes to garnering our sympathy for an antagonist, horror has an
advantage over other genres. We expect the villain of a horror movie to
commit all manner of reprehensible atrocities, so any little touch of
humanity can be enough to get us on their side. Combine this with a sort of
cinematic Stockholm Syndrome that tends to set in if we spend enough time
with a villain, and we often find ourselves empathising and dare I say,
rooting for the villains of the horror genre. The first audiences to see
Psycho
likely felt sorry for Norman Bates because they didn't realise he was the
killer, but subsequently most of us know this detail the first time we watch
Hitchcock's thriller, yet don't we all feel sorry for poor Norman when he's
being interrogated by Arbogast, even though we watched him brutally butcher
poor Marion Crane?
An expansion of her earlier short, director Jill Gevargizian's
feature debut The Stylist boasts one of the most demented
antagonists of recent horror movies, but also one of the most sympathetic.
While lonely hair-stylist Claire (an excellent and endearing
Najarra Townsend) is indeed the movie's antagonist, she's also its
protagonist, the character we spend most time with, and through whose eyes
we see the world. Five minutes into The Stylist and we've
witnessed Claire drug a client before scalping her and adding the "wig" to
the growing collection she keeps in the basement of the home she inherited
when her mother passed away. Yet an hour later, when Claire is hiding behind
the shower curtain of a woman she intended to murder, our nails are digging
into our palms as we're desperate for her to evade capture.
Stories of urban alienation have largely centred around male protagonists,
but a female perspective on this has been ripe for examination for quite
some time. It's far easier for a young woman to fall into the trap of social
isolation than for her male equivalent. If a bloke asks another bloke out
for a few drinks, it's pretty cut and dried - you just go out and get drunk
together. But when a woman asks a woman out it comes with extra pressures -
what to wear, what wine to choose, what the trendiest club at the moment is
- essentially all the stress of a date but without the potential for
sex.
The label "social horror" has been co-opted to apply to films that deal
with themes of social justice, but it's perhaps more befitting a movie like
The Stylist, which deals with the horrors of socialising, the struggles of fitting in.
As Claire explains to a client, she enjoys being a hair-stylist because it
allows her to meet lots of new people, but we quickly learn that Claire is
deeply lonely, stunted by cripplingly low self-esteem. Gevargizian and
Townsend express this in subtle fashion, like how Claire does her best to
hide behind her hair, or how she looks with jealousy at the women who
confidently stride past her in the street. When Claire appears to make a
friend in Olivia (indie horror staple Brea Grant), a bubbly client
who hires her to take care of her hair for her impending wedding, it seems
things may be looking up for her. But in one smash cut we see Claire stood
frozen in front of a wall of wines in an off licence, terror strewn across
her face as she worries about making a bad impression on her potential new
buddy.
Once Claire is taken under the wing of Olivia,
The Stylist follows the path of a typical stalker film, but
what sets it apart is the level of empathy the film has for its sympathetic
sicko. We genuinely want Claire to find her place in the world, and for a
while it seems like she might be on the right path, locking up her basement
and throwing away the key. But Claire has become addicted to her murderous
ways, and like most addicts it's only a matter of time before she falls off
the wagon. Watching her wrench open the shuttered basement as she admits
defeat is a moment of sheer tragedy, akin to Travis Bickle sabotaging his
date with Betsy. Gevargizian and Townsend manage to pull off here what
Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix failed to with
Joker, giving us a damaged, lonely sociopath who might have been saved had
society paid them attention, and making us fully sympathise with their
troubles.
The Stylist owes much to William Lustig's 1980 thriller
Maniac. Like that movie it gives us a protagonist/antagonist who scalps their
female victims before attaching the scalps to mannequins. Both Townsend's
Claire and Joe Spinell's Frank seem haunted by the deaths of their mothers,
and of course both come close to finding a sense of normality upon meeting a
woman who initially at least, seems willing to overlook their awkwardness.
The gendered violence of Maniac made it nigh on impossible to
empathise with the burly Frank however, a problem erased by
The Stylist's mousy female antagonist. None of Claire's victims deserve their fate,
but the fact that they're largely an unlikeable bunch of snobs and
judgemental bitches makes it easier for us to stay on Claire's side.
Gevargizian's film isn't just an impressive debut as a character study -
it's also visually striking. Where Lustig exploited the scuzziness of
bankruptcy era NYC, Gevargizian sets her grizzliness against the pretty
backdrop of an anonymously middle class modern North American city. Her
movie is filled with colour, at times resembling a Minnelli musical with its
abundant yellows, and along with cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, she employs colour to create an almost comic book effect, splitting up
the frame into panels with clever lighting. In what feels like a nod to De
Palma, there's a wonderful split-screen moment that uses the technique in
the best possible way, pulling Claire and Olivia together and ending with a
nice reveal that instantly transforms what we thought was a psychological
connection into geographical proximity.
On paper, there's not much to distinguish The Stylist from a
hundred other stalk and slash movies. But most of the best horror movies
take a very simple, even well-worn premise and enliven it with a combination
of a creator's personal vision, a gripping central performance and an
understanding of the technical tricks that make the genre tick.
The Stylist checks all these boxes, and I'll certainly be
booking an appointment with Gevargizian in the future.
