The Poppies of Terra #57 - Sometimes Dead Is Better

The title of this piece is a reference to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983), in which a father, overcome by the loss of his two-year-old son in a horrific accident, tries to use a supernatural burial ground to resurrect him, with predictably disastrous results. It was a book King didn’t initially want published because, in short, he felt that it crossed a line. King’s story is certainly a grim one, and contains several disturbing sequences, but it follows in a lineage of what we might call parental grief-revival narratives going back at least to W. W. Jacobs’ celebrated short story “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902). A Dark Song (2016), directed and written by Liam Gavin, is a memorable filmic exploration of similar ideas, featuring an uneasy alliance between grieving mother Sophia Howard and master of the occult Joseph Solomon. Here Sophia wishes to reconnect with her deceased son, and the theme of forgiveness plays an important role in the proceedings. I remember being entranced by the movie, and relishing its fastidious engagement with the protocols of the intended ritual.

Bearing some kinship is The Surrender, Julia Max’s directorial debut, now available through streaming. The film opens with the at-home hospice care of an old man at the hands of his wife Barbara (Kate Burton) and his daughter Megan (Colby Minifie), who take turns managing morphine and sorrow during his final pain-addled days. These two performers are a joy to watch, conveying a wealth of intimacies through utterances made and perhaps more so through those only half-expressed, each of their micro-gestures riven with the complex history of their heavily fraught dynamic. The loss of husband and father respectively is the ultimate pressurizer of their feelings; but it’s also a distorting field, warping inner and outer realities in ways that can seemingly bring them closer while paradoxically also isolating them from each other at the same time. This divergence becomes gratingly evident when Megan realizes that Barbara has made arrangements for a man to come to the house and guide them through an occult exercise that will allow her husband’s spirit to be returned to his body. As with A Dark Song, not everyone who enters the magic circle will emerge, and, as with that earlier outing, one of my favorite elements of The Surrender pertains to the details of the conjuration. 

The film’s austere cinematography, by Cailin Yatsko, nicely complements Max’s stark direction and the minimal set production. In a way, you can imagine The Surrender as a stage play, one in which ingenious creative solutions have been devised to communicate the characters’ shifting realities without lofty budgets or effects. The stripped-down imagery is severe and memorable. Burton and, particularly, Minifie, are magnetic, channeling not only raw vortices of pain and longing, but also the coating of rust that has settled over their ways of being in the world. Alex Winkler’s score is layered and haunting. I enjoyed the two distinct ending reveals. And the film’s title works on at least three levels: Barbara’s inability to surrender to her own grief, the “surrenders” necessary to complete the ritual, and the implications of the closing shot. Having the protagonist mother be willing to endanger her own daughter in the service of regaining her husband is an interesting upset of the standard progression, adding texture to this kind of narrative. Desperation and codependency don’t respect our assumed hierarchies of love.

Another recent film, currently in theaters, tackles similar territory. Bring Her Back, the sophomore effort of directing duo Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, tilts things in yet another direction, presenting a mother who has retired after many years of counseling and takes in two siblings from the foster system for reasons initially unclear but clearly not on the up-and-up. The brother-and-sister duo, Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), carry their own loss, as their father has recently died. And at Laura’s house they soon discover Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who obviously has distressing burdens of his own. A perfect powder keg of trauma and dysfunction. 

The Philippous’ debut, Talk to Me, didn’t. While I appreciated its stylized kinetics, in the end it felt a little like the kind of party trick depicted in the movie itself, in which an embalmed hand is used to channel spirits from beyond by a group of raucous teens. This time around, the directors’ work comes across as deliberate and assured, less of a jingle, more of a jangle. Bring Her Back is committed to a sullen and somber mood, effectively mingling grotesque body horror with wrenching psychological abuse. The only reprieve from its tragedy is melancholia, and the only release from its tension, tragedy. I could sense the film losing some of the audience in the last act. Clearly, this was not the ending they were hoping for. I don’t object to the screenplay’s decisions, and feel like any other outcome would, in a sense, betray the film’s emotional premise. 

As King did with Pet Sematary, some have asked whether Bring Her Back goes too far in its explicit depiction of cruelty against the young. In storytelling, the door of creative liberty opens both ways: gratuitous shocksploitation and genuine visionary expression are two alternative perceptions of passage through the same portal. Which is which largely depends on one’s individual sensibilities and previous genre experiences. One person’s La Mesita Del Comedor (2022) is another’s Martyrs (2008). Though provocation vs profundity may finally lie in the interpretive blade of the beholder, for me tone is a useful way of assessing the experience. Rather than “Is this permissible?” I prefer to ask “Is this interesting?”

In Bring Her Back, I found it so. Without getting into specifics, I'll say that the notion of unprocessed grief devouring whatever it finds in its path, no matter how seemingly unchewable, is viscerally literalized by proxy. Other images are attended to with similar care. Before driving out to Laura’s home, for instance, the film shows Andy tying one of his car’s damaged side-view mirrors into place. When they arrive, he accidentally hits an outcropping of stones, and the side-view mirror becomes dislodged, his earlier fix undone. Beyond the ominous foreboding of the small accident, which reveals Andy’s nerves, a neat subtext surfaces. The mirror is an instrument of reflection: Andy has been struggling, and his ability to perceive himself clearly is about to be heavily compromised, jolted out of place by forces beyond his control.

The performances are everything one can hope for in horror, which is to say, all one can hope for, with Sally Hawkins’ Laura as the perfect manipulative foil for the three younger characters. Aaron McLisk does a beautiful job with cinematography and the production design by Vanessa Cerne also merits praise, turning Laura’s secluded home into a character all its own. The film’s overall aesthetic is expertly crafted. While nothing feels showy, it’s clearly also not accidental. 

Both of these films open up worlds where characters tumble. No matter how perfect the magical circles of their spells, grief decenters. If, as the ancient saying goes, God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere, then mortal loss is a finite sphere, the center of which becomes all places, the circumference forever beyond reach. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” wrote C. S. Lewis. Through their uniquely twisted incantations, The Surrender and Bring Her Back reveal that the statement also works in reverse.