Spoiler Warning
Gothic (gothic-horror possibly?) movies are not exactly my preferred genre, nor are they something I have a great grasp of what elements work best (and which are cliched) in them. I don’t have an in-depth knowledge to pull on to review this movie, but I can at least review this movie from a general standpoint.
And from a general standpoint, I can pretty safely say that this movie is not good. I’d say it’s downright awful, especially because of the ending. However, setting aside things like my personal preferences as to what genre I most enjoy watching, I have to give some credit to this film’s first half.
The basic premise of the film is that Verena (played by Emilia Clarke) is a nurse in 1950’s France who stays at the homes of families who have children she is trying to treat. I’m not entirely sure what she’s helping them with (in the past), but she seems to be more focused on mental health than physical health, so I’m assuming it’s helping them process some type of trauma. This would seem to be the case as she receives a new charge: caring for a young boy (Jakob) who has not spoken since the death of his mother (Malvina), seven months ago. She receives the request from the boy’s father once she’s finished her work with another family, and we learn that Verena has essentially no personal life, and spends all her time helping these families, with no real identity of her own.
She arrives at the house of her new clients, and meets Klaus, Jakob’s father. He tells her that she is not the first nurse to try and treat Jakob, and that all of the others have inevitably given up. Some of them were even driven away by Jakob, who he says adamantly doesn’t want a nurse in the house. The only other two occupants of the house are Alessio (who seems to be the groundskeeper) and Lilia (an elderly woman who cared for Malvina on her death’s bed).
At first, the film seems to have some potential. It establishes a vivid environment that the entirety of the film will take place in. These one-location movies typically make the environments feel more real, and this movie is no exception. One would expect the same would be true of the characters, given that there are only five of them. However, none of the characters feel very well defined, with the exception of Jakob and Verena, but even they aren’t handled as deftly as their importance to the film required. Later on, Klaus starts to get a bit more development, but he never feels fully explored. Even after finishing the film, I don’t know what Alessio’s character meant to the story, and I didn’t feel like anyone’s arc was resolved in any kind of a meaningful way.
He seems to have some weird connection to Jakob, even seeming to undermine Verena’s efforts to reach him. Verena attempts to speak to Jakob and empathize with what he’s feeling, but he sneaks off to go hunting with Alessio, where he decapitates a rabbit they find. One would think this would be building up to Jakob being so disturbed as to be almost violent, but this is only touched on in one scene.
Jakob ‘decorates’ Verena’s mirror in the bloody skin of the rabbit he killed, shocking her into running into his room at night to confront him. However, she finds him kneeling against the wall of his room, apparently listening to something. When she tries to pull him away from it, Jakob goes berserk and runs through the house, breaking vases and furniture until his father finds him and calms him down.
Up to this point, Verena believed Jakob’s silence was out of grief, but now that she learns Jakob may be suffering from a severe mental illness that includes hallucinations, she tells Klaus she has to leave. When she exits the building, however, she sees Jakob standing on a balcony, apparently about to jump off of it to his death. She returns and tells him that she won’t leave him.
Up to this point, the movie has been a bit directionless, but it still mostly functioned as a movie. It was a bit slow (and was getting slower), but it was watchable. From this point, however, the movie completely goes off the rails to the point that it stops making any kind of sense. This happens slowly at first, as things start happening that I have no idea why they were included (at least from a storytelling perspective), until the last fifteen minutes of the movie devolve into complete nonsense.
Verena works to convince Jakob that his mother is truly gone by listening at the same wall he does every night, before she learns that Klaus had been working on a sculpture of his wife before she died, and that he has since given up this practice in light of her death. She tries to convince him to finish this sculpture, as it might provide a means of closure for Jakob. Essentially, she thinks that if Jakob sees his father finish the sculpture, he’ll realize that Klaus has accepted his wife’s death, meaning so can Jakob.
Klaus refuses, until he sees Verena trying on one of the dresses of his late wife at Lilia’s urging. Recognizing a similarity in appearance between Verena and Malvin, Klaus asks Verena to pose for him so that he can finish the sculpture. Verena feels uncomfortable by his request, but later acquiesces (why she does this is never explained). However, over the course of this process, the movie clearly states that Verena has developed a strong attraction for Klaus. This development is never really explored, as it just seems to be relying on the movie cliché of two people falling in love whenever they spend a substantial amount of time together. There are never any lines tying this into Verena’s loneliness, or anything that would indicate that this would let her escape her fate of treating children, only to have to leave them and their family forever.
It’s also here that Jakob gets Verena to listen at his wall again…
Only this time, Verena hears the voice of Malvina as well.
And this is when the movie truly takes a turn and it gets progressively worse from this moment until the very end. Verena speaks to a painting of Malvina hanging in the house, saying that Malvina can let her family go and let Verena take care of them from here. This sudden turn of her character (who had been completely convinced that spirits and ghosts were not real nor ever could be), is extremely jarring, especially since it comes mere moments after her abrupt attraction to Klaus (which had only ever been very briefly hinted at in the film’s first half).
Verena begins to bond with Jakob more, though he still refuses to speak to her. This includes her (bizarrely) invoking his mother’s memory to guilt him into playing a piano, before they are seen laughing and playing in the field outside of the house.
However, her relationship with Klaus is not going well. She finds him staring at his unfinished sculpture and asks him whether it’s supposed to be her or Malvina. Klaus seems reluctant to answer, and tells her that he’s going to dismiss her. I’m not sure if this is done out of guilt for his attraction to her, or because (as he says) her presence isn’t helping Jakob.
This sparks Verena into having a breakdown, begging the spirit of Malvina to tell her what to do as she tears plaster off of the wall where she had first heard her voice. Hearing no response, she gathers her things and attempts to leave. However, Klaus stops her and tells her that she has a fever and that he was acting under compulsion from Malvina’s spirit.
None of this makes any sense while watching it, but I will attempt to analyze all of the flaws once I’ve briefly summarized the last few minutes of the movie.
Verena learns in this same conversation that Lilia committed suicide immediately after the death of Malvina, and has been dead the entire time Verena has been here. She flees, only to be pursued by Alessio (for some reason). When she tries to leave the area, she collapses and is returned to the house by Alessio. She finds herself battling illness in the same room where Malvina died, before experiencing a bizarre sequence of visions. One of these involves her being entombed alongside Malvina by Alessio, only for her to find Malvina inside with her and still alive.
She wakes up, seemingly recovered and speaks with Jakob once more. He finally speaks to her to say, “I miss my mother.” Verena replies with, “I’m right here.” Then, she is seen playing at the piano with Malvina’s skill, a skill which she had not possessed up until this point. And then the movie ends.
I’m not sure where to start breaking this down, because none of it makes any sense. First of all, why does Verena see Lilia the day after she arrives? At that point, she hadn’t been influenced by Malvina’s spirit whatsoever, not even enough to hear her voice in the wall. And, if everyone else here has been under her spell all this time, why hasn’t anyone else seen Lilia?
Secondly, if Klaus and all of the others are under Malvina’s spell, why do they act the way they do? Why does Klaus attempt to dismiss Verena when Malvina is exerting more and more control over her, only to send Alessio to recapture her? How does Alessio know to recapture her at all? Was he in on what was happening (whatever that was), or did Klaus just randomly tell him off screen to slowly walk after Verena and bring her back if she ever tried to run? Why can only Jakob hear Malvina? Why does Alessio attempt to keep Verena and Jakob from bonding?
None of the characters’ motivations make any sense. I’m not sure if anyone of them wanted or intended for Verena to be possessed by Malvina, just like I’m not sure how much of what Verena does is a result of her actions or Malvina’s (is she attracted to Klaus, or are those Malvina’s feelings?). I know horror movies are typically more open-ended and purposefully vague, but having such confusing character motivations makes the entire story less interesting.
Also, the movie has far too many abrupt shifts for anyone to be able to follow what’s happening. All of a sudden, we’re told that Verena has a fever. Maybe Klaus makes this up or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe she’s hysterical because of this, or maybe it’s because of Malvina. Jakob seems violent for a few scenes in the middle of the movie, and then never again after that. Verena’s relationship with Klaus doesn’t go anywhere, and as mentioned before, her sudden belief in the existence of Malvina’s spirit is never explored or explained. It seems like all of these changes are supposed to be justified by the fact that the characters are being controlled/influenced by Malvina. But even if the movie made some kind of loose guideline for how much Malvina can affect them or when she’s doing so, having so many of their actions be controlled by her makes all the characters feel like they have no real personality or motivations of their own. As it is, it feels like they can just randomly do whatever the writers decide to have them do in the next scene, without any consistency behind their decisions.
As mentioned earlier, I’m not an expert on horror films by any means, so maybe these vague explanations and motivations will be less of a detraction for someone who is more invested in the genre, but for me personally, I found the ending of this movie to be virtually unbearable.
(PS: if you’re wondering why I reviewed this movie, it’s because it was personally requested to me).
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