Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alex Herron
Starring: Alicia von Rittberg, Herman Tømmeraas, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Stig R. Amdam, Morten Holst, Ragnhild Gudbrandsen
The Satanic Panic era of the 1980s and 1990s saw high profile figures like
Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera lead the way in blaming society's ills on
anything that could be considered slightly adjacent to Satanism. Listening
to Heavy Metal, enjoying horror movies or even wearing too much black could
get you in trouble, with several cases of young people wrongfully jailed for
crimes they didn't commit. The irony of course is that Christians were the
ones you really had to watch out for, something highlighted a couple of
years ago in director Marc Meyers' 1988 set
We Summon the Darkness, which posited a group of Metal fans battling an evil Christian pastor.
While that movie was largely unremarkable, it was a long overdue piece of
restorative cinematic justice for scapegoated fans of the darker arts.
Norwegian director Alex Herron does something similar with his debut
feature Leave, portraying the infamous Norwegian Black Metal scene as populated by
thoroughly decent folk, unlike the film's grace-saying, Bible-bashing
baddies. It's a bit of an odd one, as Norway is literally the one place
where Christians' concerns about Satanism and Metal were well-founded, with
Satan-worshipping Black Metal musicians and fans famously committing a
series of grisly killings and burning down churches. If ever a group of
people would make effective horror movie villains it's the Norwegian Black
Metal crowd, so it feels like a missed opportunity not to exploit their
infamy.
The film opens with a cop finding a newborn abandoned in an American
ceremony, wrapped in a cloth adorned with Satanic symbols and with an upside
down cross dangling around its neck. Two decades later and the same cop has
raised the child as his own daughter, Hunter (Alicia von Rittberg).
Pretending she's heading off to Georgetown to begin college, Hunter actually
takes a flight to the Norwegian city of Bergen, having followed several
clues in search of the mother who abandoned her.
Booking into an eerily abandoned hotel, Hunter has a creepy encounter with
some form of spirit, a supernatural element that the movie subsequently
sidelines so heavily that it's a surprise when it pops up again at a later
point. Horror gives way largely to thriller territory as Hunter stalks
Cecilia (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), the Metal vocalist she believes is
her mom. Confronted by Cecilia, Hunter learns the dark truth of her origins,
which leads her to the secluded island home of her grandfather (Stig R. Amdam) and his various odd family members.
Leave's early Bergen sequences hint at a far more thrilling movie, one in which
an outsider immerses themselves in the local Black metal scene in search of
answers. Von Rittberg may be German, but she's thoroughly convincing as the
sort of wide-eyed innocent all-American girl that might find herself in
trouble in Europe. As such we genuinely fear for her as she initially seems
to make enemies of intimidating Nordic rockers. Once Hunter heads to her
granddad's island the movie devolves into stock representations of creepy
Christians, which at this point are as clichéd as those of Satanists four
decades ago.
Leave is one of several new horror movies I've seen recently that
have an odd lack of peril. Hunter is alone in her quest, and as she's the
film's sole protagonist we have little doubt that she's going to make it
through the film in one piece. With no other potential victims, there's no
sense that anyone is in any real danger. We're left to watch Hunter conduct
a haphazard investigation into her past which despite some effectively foggy
locations, plays out like a bland TV detective drama. Too much of the film
involves Hunter listening as some other character reveals a bit more of the
plot. Black Metal acolytes may appreciate a movie portraying them in a
positive light, but with its lack of thrills, Leave is
more Easy Listening than Hard Rock.
