A clairvoyant Child Protection Services agent investigates a case
involving a malevolent and abusive spirit.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Abel Vang, Burlee Vang
Starring: Michelle Krusiec, Madelyn Grace, Ken Kirby, Ellen
Wroe, JR Cacia
Jamie Lee Curtis has been the subject of much mockery for her one track
obsession with calling the recent lame-brained reboots of the
Halloween franchise studies in "trauma." Every interviewer
who asks Ms Curtis what these movies are about receives the same
reductive answer – "It's about trauma." Some wag even made a hilarious
YouTube montage of every time the actress mentioned the T-word in an
interview. If Curtis had starred in the Vang brothers'
They Live in the Grey, she would no doubt be telling anyone who would listen that the film
is about "grief."
There sure is a lot of grief in They Live in the Grey, but it's not good grief, just a shallow representation of that mental
state. The movie piles on the misery from the start, when we witness a
failed suicide attempt by our protagonist, Child Protection Services
agent Claire (Michelle Krusiec). Claire is tormented by the loss
of her son Lucas, but also by the ghosts she sees everywhere she turns.
Lucas's death ended her marriage to her police officer husband (Ken Kirby), who is trying his best to get Claire to talk about her…grief.
It seems a little hard to believe that CPS would keep someone as
noticeably emotionally damaged as Claire under their employ, but this
movie isn't exactly an accurate representation of how such agencies
function. Claire finds herself assigned the task of investigating a
young girl, Sophie (Madelyn Grace, whom you might have seen in
the awful sequel
Don’t Breathe 2), whose parents – Audrey (Ellen Wroe) and Giles (JR Cacia) – are suspected of causing her physical harm. Claire first notices a
scar on the child's face, which Audrey claims is the result of a fall
from a skateboard. Claire's suspicions of Sophie's parents are ended
when she encounters the ghost of a malevolent young woman in the
family's home, and she commits herself to exorcising the ghost and
allowing Sophie to remain with her parents.
I suspect Krusiec is a perfectly talented actress, but it's difficult
to tell from her one-note performance here. Her directors appear to have
simply instructed her to look miserable throughout, and her performance
consists of the sort of closed faced mannerisms an actor might nail
after a semester at performing arts school.
The Vangs' obsession with their heroine's grief makes for a dreary and
patience testing film that runs at a ridiculous length of over two
hours. The movie has the look and feel of those later
X-Files episodes were Mulder stopped wise-cracking and the
show began to take itself too seriously. There have been some great
horror movies about grief, but They Live in the Dark is
less Don’t Look Now, more Don’t Watch Tonight. It's not so much about grief as simply a
portrait of grief. The Vangs point their camera at a grieving mother for
two hours, but they fail to say anything about grief.
The only notable element of their film is how it's set in an
Asian-American milieu, where perhaps feelings aren't expressed as openly
as they might be among Black, White or Latin groups, and where there's a
notable absence of any religious elements. Yet while Claire keeps her
feelings to herself, the film doesn't use any of the tools of cinema to
extract those feelings and convey them to the audience through images.
Instead we just get a bunch of sub-Sixth Sense ghostly
encounters. One of these involves a police officer killed in the line of
duty who keeps asking Claire "What day is it?" After the two-plus hours
of dreariness that is They Live in the Grey, it's a question you may well find yourself asking.
