Screamfest 2024 Reviewed: The Complex Forms; Beacon
The latter has a terrific Demián Bichir performance, while the former struggles with its identity.
With Screamfest 2024 rampaging through Los Angeles this week, DoomRocket is here to highlight a few of its creepier selections. In review: Roxy Shih’s Beacon and Fabio D'Orta’s The Complex Forms.
THE COMPLEX FORMS (Italy; LA Premiere)
Fabio D'Orta's The Complex Forms is novella-length cosmic horror that strains under the burden of its dark intentions because its visuals carry all the weight. Leave it to the Italians to make a creature feature that looks like a Lexus commercial: its black-and-white photography is lovely to gawk at but fussy in that overly immaculate, vignetted sort of way, composing dread instead of compounding it. Any shocks I got from watching it came not from its premise, which we'll touch on shortly, but from D'Orta's clashing of tones, like watching an intriguing game of chess where one of the players suddenly decided they wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons instead.
Far be it from me to sneer at a playful bit of subversion, but The Complex Forms is too sterile to play along with. Comparisons to Gilliam and Cronenberg feel inevitable — particularly if you consider 12 Monkeys and Naked Lunch among D'Orta's influences here as I do. Those directors' works aren't memorable simply because of their squidgy textures or cracked ideas but because they display a willingness to dirty one's hands by peeling back the humanity of their characters. The Complex Forms is too polished, too neat, to be grossed out or otherwise haunted by, its characters too faintly defined or otherwise inscrutable.
The first third of the film is its strongest and succinctly establishes D'Orta's premise. An older gentleman (David Richard White) agrees to spend twelve days in a country villa to make some much-needed money. All he has to do is manage the kitchens (a happy coincidence, maybe, as he's a former cook), keep the hallways swabbed, and — no big deal — allow his body to be inhabited by what the film's synopsis calls "a mysterious entity." As these Faustian pacts tend to go, the man feels what he gets from the exchange is far less than what he's giving up. D'Orta establishes the strangeness of this situation through a series of monotonous routines, an effective shorthand to convey the sense of ritual and its impending sacrifice. Then, we hear the loudest thunderclap in the world. Alarms blare. And The Complex Forms begins to change its tune.
Describing what arrives with the thunder would give the game away, so I'll be careful here. These beings, once they arrive, blend incredibly well with the sharp B&W cinematography and have an uncanny effect that made it difficult for me to parse what exactly I was looking at. (There's also an opulence to them that I both puzzled over and appreciated for its strangeness.) Size is a critical sticking point for the dark humor and cosmic unease of the film; one of the moments where I felt D'Orta was successfully having some fun with his audience was when one of the villa's tenants complained, "How can something so big fit into a human body?" We never quite figure that out, but it sure is funny — and somewhat unnerving — to think about.
5.5 / 10
Written and directed by Fabio D'Orta.
Starring David Richard White, Michele Venni, Cesare Bonomelli, and Enzo Solazzi.
Produced by Fabio D'Orta, Mariangela Bombardieri, and Mariacristina Bombardieri.
Unrated. Bad news for folks terrified of large, shifting, unknowable things.
BEACON (United States; LA Premiere)
Roxy Shih's Beacon is a paranoid chiller with a premise so excellent that you can't help but be hooked by it. Julia Goldani Telles plays Emily, a young sailor circumnavigating the globe sans GPS, experiencing the sea like her father and grandfather before her. One night, she encounters a wicked squall that crashes her sailboat on the rocky shore of the most isolated lighthouse in the world, run by a most isolated man named Ismael (Demián Bichir). Ismael nurses Emily back to health and claims he's attempting radio contact with the mainland to send a helicopter their way. After a few days on the island, Emily's initial doubts about her would-be savior understandably become more confrontational; who is Ismael, and why does it seem like he's keeping Emily on the island?
I recommend you seek out Beacon when it inevitably drops on streaming. (Hopefully, it finds a solid platform to land on — Shudder, are you reading me?) It's handsomely shot, genuinely gripping, and bolstered mightily by Bichir's terrific salty dog performance. It's a solid movie to catch some stormy night.
Beacon is also an example of a great short concept that struggles to maintain its mesmerizing powers because it's been stretched to feature length. The screenplay, by Chilean writer Julio Rojas, diligently reveals its many secrets and keeps a few more just out of sight, but it's overburdened by too many prickly details that distract from the sense of surreality Shih wants to harness. Without giving too much away (again, this is a movie worth watching, and I don't want to spoil its trickier plot details), Beacon tinkers with isolation, how our perception of time warps under its sway, and the way mistrust can build under these circumstances — all worthy material.
What keeps Shih from successfully cracking its hallucinatory aspects (particularly how these themes intersect with nautical myth) is that we know too much about Emily, and then, when it counts, not enough; her connections to the mainland and other details pad out the length, but they don't really matter in the context of her predicament. Too thinly sketched to serve a thematic purpose yet too conspicuous to ignore. (I'm being vague, so for those who've seen this, here's one quick spoiler-ish bit that explains what I'm on about: the urn.)
It's messy but watchable. The dramatic elements keep this ship together: Ismael's time alone on the island appears to have cracked him somewhat, making trust difficult for Emily. There's a gendered component to their fraught relationship that I wish Shih and Rojas had explored more intently — how Ismael, a father (and, presumably, a bachelor), perceives his new female guest is left in the air until it suddenly crashes into view. There's danger here, but instead, I was only too willing to be taken in by Ismael despite his caginess to Emily, that hokey name, and his penchant for bellowing opera whenever he's in his cups. (Sidebar: What are the odds someone with that moniker would become a lighthouse keeper?) Bichir has an earthiness that makes him appear both gentle and wily, and Beacon is made more compelling simply by watching him fall deeper into the film's many unknowns.
Shih's film is a two-person chamber play that showcases one great performance and another distant one. Telles does serviceable work here, but the depths the screenplay calls for — Emily's connection to the sea, her father, and her survival instincts — become lost in a haze of Telles's faint (more often, confused) expressions. When you have a thriller this claustrophobic — intimate, say — it requires the players to feel real, raw, so when the bottom drops out, we're so ensnared by their personalities that we fall in alongside them. With his frizzed-out beard and a glint of madness in his eyes, Bichir gets us halfway there while his co-star leaves us hanging on the implications of who she is and what exactly took place on this island one fateful stormy night.
6.5 / 10
Directed by Roxy Shih.
Written by Julio Rojas.
Starring Demián Bichir and Julia Goldani Telles.
Produced by Neil Elman, Taralee Gerhard, Andrew C. Erin, Hannah Pillemer, Ani Kevork, Angie Day, Fernando Szew, Tony Vassiliadis, Tomás Yankelevich, Peter Bevan, Mariana Sanjurjo, Alex zito, and Demián Bichir.
Unrated. Includes salty language and some business with an axe.