The Canal

The Boy pronounced this Welsh/Irish horror film (The Canal) from Tim Kavanagh "solid", adding that he was disappointed they went for the "twist ending tax break". He's established that the only reason horror movies tack on these stingers is due to government programs that provide funds for them.

It took me a few seconds to realize he was kidding, since this film has Irish and Welsh government money in it, and since he's recently expressed a desire to be the next Uwe Boll. ("I could make crappy movies with tax breaks!")

Anyway, it is a solid film, though I found it less engaging then he did, which is interesting, since it's about a man obsessed, which is kind of my thing: David and Claire move into an old house, and after a few years David (a film archivist) discovers that it was the site of a grisly murder. A series of murders, even.

He also discovers his wife is cheating on him, and when she turns up missing, the suspicion naturally falls on him. But he begins to suspect the malevolent forces lurking in the house: Forces which are now after his son, the nanny, himself, and so on.

The movie has a lot of style, with a judicious use of jump cuts that both speeds things along and creates an unsettling effect. For me, one problem was that it also would do a montage of a film projector, and the noise was literally painful. Same thing as Purgatorio, and again, not the theater, as the rest of the dialog and ambient noises were fine, and even a bit on the quiet side.

In fact, I think part of the problem with coercing The Flower into the theaters these days, is that the volume hurts her ears. Mine, too, to a lesser extent, but I'm finally getting deaf enough to catch up to my peers who broke their eardrums listening to that loud music on their Walkmans.

For me, the film really kicked into gear at the end of the second act, when David has sent his son off with his nanny to a nearby hotel to be safe, only to discover they're not safe. There's some good suspense there, and the the lower key threats established earlier on start to pay off.

Anyway, I'm going to SPOIL the movie a bit hereafter. So if you don't want SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW.

You hear me? I don't want any lawsuits over SPOILERS!

By reading further, you have agreed to the Terms of Service of this website. (Not really. Can you imagine?) I'm also throwing in a mild Frozen and Something Wicked spoiler.

There are only two outcomes to a story like this, and of course the movie's going to try to convince you that it's one outcome, only to reveal it's the other outcome at the climax. This is unsurprising, at best, and disappointing at worst, since a lot of times the movie just outright lies to you to convince you that they're going to take path A instead of path B.

Sort of like the whole Frozen deal, really. The movie shows one thing to the audience that makes no sense except as a way to deceive the audience. It's not Something Wicked bad here—few things are—but I pointed out a few places that the movie outright lied to us that The Boy had missed.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO FILMMAKERS: It's fine (expected, even) for characters to lie to each other. It's fine for them to lie directly to the audience (though, as in No Country For Old Men, people will often believe what they're told even if you show them something contradictory). It's even fine to show something that just plain didn't happen, if it's from the liar/crazy person's perspective.

What you can't do is show characters acting falsely when no one is watching, because then you're just lying to the audience (Frozen). Also, when the character is not the narrator, you can't show scenes that reinforce the narrator's bias (falsity or insanity) while pretending that it's not from the false narrator's bias.

I mean, you can, of course, 'cause you're the Man In The Chair, and ain't nobody can tell you what to do, except, I guess, The Studio, The Producer, and The Producer's wife, and also his girlfriend that he made you hire to be the lead. Lots of people can tell you what to do, other than me. I'm just the sap who goes to see your movies.

But let's say you're making a movie about Bigfoot, and Bigfoot is going around eating all the pudding cups. It's fine if your obsessed character sees Bigfoot right-and-left. He's obsessed. We don't expect him to be reliable. It's fine if he sees Bigfoot attacking other people even if there's no Bigfoot there, because again, he's obsessed.

But if you have a character tramping through the woods alone, eating a pudding cup, and she sees Bigfoot come up to her, and Bigfoot takes her pudding cup and eats it, you can't then say "Well, it turned out it was obsessed guy all along! There never was any Bigfoot."

Unless, I guess, you Scooby-Doo it away and have the obsessed guy wearing a Bigfoot outfit. But you can't show Bigfoot when obsessed guy isn't around, 'cause it's you lying to the audience, not the character.

Whether or not this movie actually does that is, I guess, debatable. I think it does. It felt like a cheat.

But in the final analysis, the stinger throws the whole climax into question, as (by tax law, apparently) it must. The movie resolves one way, but the stinger says, "Or is it?" Bleaargh.

Good acting from a bunch of people I've never heard of before. The music was kind of all over the place. Some of it quite good and others a little out of place. Camerawork and editing top-notch.

So, it's still a solid film that's quite effective in parts, even as it cribs from a great many other movies. I just felt a little gypped.