Last night myself and DP had planned to go and see Jo
Nesbo’s Headhunters, the
critically-acclaimed tale of violence and betrayal amongst Scandinavian
recruitment consultants, but other things got in the way of us making the trip to
the out-of-the-way cinema where that was showing, so we had to stay local.
We ended up seeing Cabin In The Woods, which I’d confused with Cabin In The Sky (look it up, IMDBers!) so the entire experience was
something different to what I’d expected.
If you’ve not seen CitW,
don’t worry: I’m not going to give away anything here. Anything even vaguely
spoilery will go into a footnote so you can ignore it if you like. Face it, you
probably know everything about the plot already. What I’m going to say is: go
and see it. I need somebody to argue about it with.
DP loved it, and for eighty per cent of the time, so did I.
Now, I’m not a big horror buff, mainly because I am a weed and a wet, but I do know of certain genre conventions. So when you’re sitting watching a ‘horror’
film, waiting for the first shock, and that first shock is delivered by the
title card, you know you’re watching something unusual. But it’s a Joss Whedon
film, so the undermining of convention is a given.
My problem with CitW is
that it should have stopped at a certain point; a point which would have
delivered a satisfying ‘oh no,
and after all they’ve been
through’ reaction[1]. In fact, I
thought that was the end, and was reaching for my coat, but the damn thing
continued. Having said that, what followed from that point was quite
astonishingly bizarre.
CitW isn’t a
particularly scary film; it shows its hand very early, and from that point you
stop being jumpy about the shocks and start trying to second-guess it. In fact,
I was jumpier about the guy in the hi-viz vest who came into the cinema halfway
through. I thought he’d spotted our illicit home-made popcorn and was going to
call us out on it.
What CitW becomes is
a very knowing comedy, where fans of the genre will have a field day.
Unfortunately, the entire last quarter of it is so knowing, so replete with
references to other films and so desperately over the top that I just wanted to
shout “Stop, Joss Whedon! In the name of God, Stop!” It’s almost as if someone had given a five-year-old a big
glass of tartrazine then asked them to plot a horror movie; insanity is piled
upon insanity until, just before the end, a Very Famous Actor appears and
actually explains the final plot-twist through the medium of Expository
Dialogue.
It’s that mad.
It’s also one of the most fun, most thought-provoking films
I’ve seen in ages. I could now start on about the subtextual addressing of the
audience’s demands, about how the film possibly relates to Hannah Arendt’s most
famous quote, or about the fact that Bradley Whitford is the most under-rated
actor in the world.
But who has time for that?
[1] I’m talking about the scene when
they’ve breached a certain level and you see exactly what the elevator cage is;
the pull-back so you see what’s in the other boxes, with an implication that
the two characters would now spend the rest of their lives there, would have
been a great last image.
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