Grace, a young woman, reluctantly returns to her crumbling hometown, only to discover her brother has mysteriously gone missing. Consumed by guilt, she embarks on a harrowing journey to find him, which leads her deep into the dark wilderness surrounding the town.
Every year, I find myself confronted with another vague-dread movie featuring gorgeously shot renditions of some wooded area interspersed with a single person struggling in the woods. The making of a film such as this wears down the viewer primarily because the literati posture its attempting to make on horror mostly feels like labor. I don’t envy the opaqueness of these films. If they intended to mystify and unsettle, they achieved it with full force. What I do begrudge is bending the concept of ‘moody’ to pad a runtime and ultimately lean on a few filmmaking tools to fill in the gaps left behind when you let go of deeper character and story. “Baal” fits this bill to a tee. It leans heavily on intermixed timelines, non sequitur editing, moody sunset shots of the Australian outback, and ungodly amounts of scoring to manufacture tension that’s missing from a survival story bent to horror.
Joseph Sims-Dennett returns to the big screen with this incredibly light survivalist horror. Meg Clarke plays Grace Jennings. She’s returned to her hometown to track down her brother after her father’s death. While there, she discovers her family’s inheritance and her brother’s disappearance. Enlisting the aid of her former history teacher, she ventures into the Bush to track down her transient brother, where she discovers men lurking, following the God of Lost Souls.
The film spends its first half flashing back and forth between Grace’s struggle in the woods and her return to her hometown. It waffles between Grace meandering the woods, lost without her guide, and her skulking around empty houses and talking to former family members. With barely enough story set up, the second half follows Grace as she awakes from a nasty fall. She limps and moans through the woods, discovering a body before eventually finding a colony of backpackers living in the Bush. Conveniently right as she discovers them, there’s a solar eclipse and a few masked shirtless men slaughter the backpackers and take Grace hostage.
The first half settles into a neat rhythm, parceling out information from time to time and establishing mood, but the last half repeats so many of the same bits only to provide an inconclusive finale that it frustrates. This isn’t the frustration of an unearned ending; its more the disappointment of watching Grace limp through the woods, stop to freak out, discover something vague, and continue limping. The repetition of these long wooded scenes gets broken up with non-diegetic inserts (maybe a few frames in duration) of flames, eyes, or a skull. It creates an impressionistic version of a horror film so hellbent on establishing mood that it sacrifices a great many things, including coherence.
Meg Clarke must be a goddess to carry this film. The way the first half gives her so much to work with helps highlight how little she gets to do in the last half. When she’s describing her abusive father, she steels herself. When she cries to her mother for ignoring her brother’s calls, tears roll. She’s more than capable of carrying a film that’s nine-tenths just her wandering the woods, but her performance gets hamstrung in the last half by a series of confusing twists and turns that seem to exist purely for ‘symbolism.’ Knowing she can absolutely crush a scene means feeling disappointed when she has to repeat the same emotion repeatedly. Against her, the only other talent popping on screen is her guide, Mr. Green, Leighton Cardno, who maybe gets the most to work with out of anyone in the script.
This is a movie built on insinuations and subtext. The disappearing youth, the mystery of the mine, the lingering question of Grace’s father’s greatest sin that seemingly everyone except the audience knows about. These are all concrete questions posed at the very beginning of the film, which sort of fall by the wayside as Grace drinks river water. The idea here falls to pieces by the very end, and yes, visual clues might wrap some of these mysteries up, but why centralize these story points if you’re only going to distance yourself from them later on? It trivializes the audience’s expectations and frustrates viewers to think they invested in the wrong thing. None of that is to say the movie is inherently bad for making these choices, but it adds up to a certain number of foiled expectations that will grind against the director’s desired abstract ending.
I wish I could say this was my first time experiencing a movie like this, but “horror” movies with lots of mood and not a lot of story are pretty standard. The milieu of second-and-third-tier A24 flicks inspired a new generation of filmmakers to coast on overscored survivalist dramas as if the subtext was enough to carry the entire film. For every “Under the Skin,” there’s a “Baal,” and unfortunately, the magic of those successful, deeply earnest films comes like lightning in a bottle. I commend director Joseph Simms-Dennett for putting together this gorgeous view of the Australian wilderness but the cautionary tale at the heart of this is: Making a vague film with a thin plot that’s functional is a much harder needle to thread than simply running into the wilderness with your lead actor and a camera. It requires precise intentionality and respect for the audience.
“Baal” recently had its World Premiere on October 1st at Beyond Fest XII