Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”
There are, of course, innumerable and nearly identical stories about the cutthroat nature of the art world, and about struggling to make it as an artist, and this is is certainly one of them. What these stories often struggle with is whether we should care about the artist characters they portray, or whether their ambitions and unearned confidence are meant to be as loathsome as they come off to most audiences. In this case, I think we are not meant to be particularly sympathetic to Hermann (Sean McGrath), who has had a lifelong dream of being an artist, but whose work are the kind of insultingly dumb ideas of conceptual art you always see passed off as a joke, as most of his pieces consists of garbage hanging from mobiles (they look like they’re the work of someone who really loves Freddy Got Fingered), giving them an embarrassingly infantile feel as well. He lives at home with his vague immigrant mother, refuses to get a job (because he then “wouldn’t have time to work on his art”), but is also so pretentious that he regularly calls some of his fellow Portland artists hacks, such as the guy selling kitschy paintings on the street. He is desperate to get his work displayed at a gallery owned by Devora (Anne Sorce), who seems more behind Hermann’s even more obnoxious rival Joel (Tabor Helton), whose own big idea is a big blank mural that people can pay to sign so that “everyone becomes the artist.” Clearly, we are supposed to see Joel as a real hack, but at the same time, it’s not like Hermann, for all his apparent earnestness, is making anything particularly noteworthy, either. I’m sure there are people who work in the arts and entertainment industries that know people like these, probably more than a few, but going by their portrayal in movies you’d think that all amateur artists are self-absorbed layabouts without any capability self-reflection.
Hermann’s only real opportunity is provided to him by another one those “hacks”, his Uncle Felix (John Nielsen), who sells seashell necklaces down in Brazil (Hermann also criticizes him for “exploiting the locals”) and offers his nephew a shoddy, rundown apartment (perfect for an story about artists) that apparently helped him reach his current career heights. After multiple failures Hermann eventually takes up the offer, holing up there to come up with something that might impress Devora. It is there that he finds a painting hiding a hole in the tacky wallpaper of the apartment, and soon the hole begins talking to him, first via written notes tied to string, and eventually in an audible voice (provided by Denise Poirier, best known as the voice of nineties MTV staple Aeon Flux), who promises to help Hermann with his art as long as he “spends some time” with it. It helps by coughing up fleshy owl pellets containing globs that, when added to his dumb mobiles, instantly catch the attention and admiration of everyone around him, including Devora, who begins demanding more from him. I imagine that the extremely minor change in his art suddenly making everyone take a one-eighty on it is also meant to be a joke, and/or a demonstration of the talking hole’s magic powers.
(This plot is somewhat similar to the award-winning horror novel The Cipher by Kathe Koja, which I read about in Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks From Hell. I haven’t seen any stated connections between the two anywhere, so I guess I’ll just assume that the similarities are coincidental?)
From the first moment, Hermann’s “partnership” with the hole is meant to be something more than friendly, as the hole gets Hermann to caress it as it audibly moans, and things only escalate from there. The central drama increasingly becomes about Hermann embracing his newfound success (at first he is judgmental of people putting so much emphasis on selling art, but his tune changes when he’s the one raking in the dough), and trying to start a romance with Devora, while the hole becomes increasingly jealous and demanding of his time. This is where the movie has the potential to really get weird, Brain Damage weird (and I know it’s unfair to keep comparing all small comedy-horrors to that gonzo classic, but I feel it’s especially apt here), and it’s at it’s most interesting when it does. The big moment for that is when the hole seems unable to make “quality” bio-globs, and its suggested solution comes in a form of a note that Hermann initially rejects, and based on his reaction we know exactly what it says without being told. He eventually relents, though, and so he does in fact have sex with a hole in the wall. It is as awkward and uncomfortable a scene as it needs to be, really selling the strangeness of the scenario.
It’s hard not to get the impression that this movie doesn’t have a particularly good impression of women in general, even if it’s male characters aren’t significantly better. Of the the three main female characters, which includes the female-voiced hole in the wall, none of them are portrayed with much sympathy: the hole is needy (it creates more holes in different rooms the longer they stay together so it can always be talking to him), Devora is opportunistically taking advantage of Hermann (though his own romantic interest in her seems to be entirely entangled with his desire for success), and even Hermann’s very chipper landlady (Monica Graves) is seen as an annoyance, and then is shown to be a creepy stalker with a one-sided infatuation with him. Although Hermann’s mother disappears from the movie after he moves into the apartment, her badgering lack of confidence in him certainly early on in the movie fits into the theme as well. There is eventually some conflict between the love interests, as the landlady freely lets herself into the apartment when Hermann isn’t there, and is tricked into looking into the hole when it projects footage of Hermann getting out of the shower (the kind of cartoony ability it only uses once), and then has her eye assaulted with some kind of worm-mouth, the only real jump scare in the movie (the landlady survives, but immediately exits the movie after that.) If this movie is ultimately trying to make some misanthropic points, I feel like it’s a bit too mannered in an indie movie way for that get across—it’s simply not exaggerated (despite the regular use of fourth-wall breaking exhibition labels to jokingly explain the mood of a moment) or cruel enough.
If there is a strong theme here, it’s probably about artists being willing to do anything to be seen, and the few attempts to make these characters even remotely sympathetic is based around that. In one scene, Devora shows her own failed artwork to Hermann (who, being a jerk with no self-awareness, immediately critiques the pieces as looking like “a three-year-old made them”), and how her lack of artistic success made her want to pursue a career running a gallery so she can vicariously live the artist’s life. This ends up playing into the finale, where Devora confronts the hole (it attempts to kill her by sucking all the oxygen out of the room) and learns that it’s the one making the crucial parts of Hermann’s art, and then later takes a chainsaw to it so she can steal it and use it to make her own art. There’s also the story that the street art dealer tells Hermann about a fellow artist so distraught by his lack of success that he ended up cutting off his own fingers, a story that rattles Hermann to the core—until he just so happens to see that guy at the bus stop, and realizes that he ended up having a happy family life. Maybe the whole tortured devotion to your craft thing shouldn’t really be the be-all, end-all of one’s existence? There is clearly some attempt at nuanced commentary here, although I feel like it maybe glosses over some details (like what happened between Uncle Felix and the hole before he ran off to another continent) that would have helped it reach the loftier goals it sets up for itself.
The biggest swerve the movie makes it at the very end, when we suddenly are made to feel sympathy for the hole, and Hermann confesses that it is really the most important thing to him. Does this sort of come out of nowhere? Sure. I can at see how the movie supports the idea that the hole was being exploited in that sense—we get a moment where Joel attempts to force the hole to make him something, where it is clearly in pain, showing both Hermann and the audience the error of their assumption that just because it’s a magic hole in the wall that attacked someone with a worm-mouth doesn’t mean that it we can discount its feelings. This leads to Devora’s thwarted attempt to cut out the whole section of the wall (with blood leaking out of the wallpaper), a final act of abuse against this inexplicable entity, and the hole’s death is treated seriously and sombrely by Hermann, and so presumably the audience as well. I don’t know how much this tragic conclusion really coheres with the irreverence the movie flirted with before, but in terms of making something tonally bizarre (you know, like Brain Damage), it does feel like the right call to make. Making us feel bad about a hole in the wall is probably the most daring thing this movie does.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 