Horror is a big part of Austin, Texas. It’s not just the wonderful Fantastic Fest that unfolds every September, but the genre has been a major part of every SXSW I’ve ever attended. Even the Headliners here have an adults-only edge to them from the gore of “Death of a Unicorn” to the murderous betrayals of “Holland” to the malevolent scheming of “Drop.” I saw a little less indie horror than usual, and what I did see ran the gamut in terms of quality, but there’s a definite sense that SXSW horror wants to be “elevated.” It can’t just be a clown in a cornfield. The clown has to represent something.
All three of these films are dense with themes that are woven around their scares. Only one of them truly succeeds, even if the other two also have elements that could lead to genre nuts embracing them. Probably a few Texan ones.
The best of the trio by some stretch is Kevin and Matthew McManus’ “Redux Redux,” a film that takes elements of the serial killer genre, aspects of grief drama, and a splash of multiverse storytelling and mixes them into something that feels fresh and new. It’s a harrowing movie about a woman who can jump multiverses as swiftly as any MCU hero, but her goal is a heartbreaking one: She’s trying to find the alternate reality in which her daughter wasn’t murdered by a serial killer.
Irene Kelly (the excellent Michaela McManus, sister to the sibling writer/directors) has killed her daughter’s murderer hundreds of times. She has a machine that allows her to jump timelines, but the terrifying truth is that the serial killer Neville (an imposing Jeremy Holm) only varies slightly in each of them. In some, he’s a waiter instead of a line cook. In some, he’s not at work so Irene can find him and kill him in his apartment. In some, she has to murder him at the diner. But the trauma comes from the fact that her daughter is always dead. She keeps jumping and keeps getting vengeance on Neville, but if you think it would be a hollow act that doesn’t exactly provide closure to kill your child’s murderer once, imagine doing it hundreds of times. Irene is a shell, even in her slightly varied encounters with a charmer played by the always-charming Jim Cummings.
Everything shifts for Irene when she enters a timeline in which one of Neville’s victims gets away. Can Irene save this surrogate for her daughter or possibly even use her to get some kind of cosmic vengeance that heals her trauma? The McManus brothers (“The Block Island Sound”) play with audience expectations of what we expect or even want to happen. It’s a horror film about cycles of grief and the truth that vengeance is not the same thing as closure. It’s smart, terrifying, and the best indie genre film I saw at SXSW this year.
Peter Cilella’s “Descendant,” which has already been picked up by genre streamer Shudder, could be called “Close Encounters of the Father Kind.” It’s a story about a potential alien abduction, but it’s really about the anxieties that swirl in men when they’re about to become a father for the first time. It intermingles pregnancy and alien imagery in inventive ways, even if it runs out of ideas and sometimes struggles with much to say beyond “fatherhood is terrifying.”
Ross Marquand gives an impressive physical performance as Sean Bruner, a security guard who’s trying to get a better job to help pay for the family he’s starting with his supportive wife Andrea (Sarah Bolger). They seem to be a pretty average L.A. couple, but there are hints that Sean’s past is a dark one, including a father who committed suicide when Sean was only seven.
One night, Sean climbs the roof of the building he’s guarding to replace the bulb in a security light and lights fill the sky. Has he been abducted? Quick cuts to Sean possibly aboard an alien ship imply as much, and he’s spit back into reality, but he’s not quite the same. He starts to draw detailed things on a sketchpad and even gets creative with paint at work and at home, an ability he never had before. He can overhear conversations in other rooms as if they’re on a distant AM radio, and most of them are about how he’s going crazy. He starts to feel pulled toward something related to his past while also genuinely falling apart physically, although I wanted Cilella to take the body horror potential of “Descendent” up a notch or two. There’s a version of this film in which Sean goes full Cronenberg that’s willing to get a bit gnarlier.
Having said that, Marquand ably carries the weight of the waking nightmare of Sean’s post-abduction existence. He looks increasingly defeated as Cilella plays with the mystery surrounding his abduction and his mental state. What happened to him on that ship? Could this even be a “Jacob’s Ladder” situation in which Sean’s reality has shifted? Cilella keeps the plates spinning enough to make one curious about his follow-up. “Descendent” may not completely work, but it’s a promising debut.
Finally, there’s the frustrating “The Surrender,” Julia Max’s personal debut film about messing with the one thing that’s guaranteed for all of us: death. Max has some intriguing ideas, but she’s too willing to verbalize them with dialogue that sounds unnaturally intent on conveying theme instead of building character. “The Surrender” fits in a long line of movies about the danger of defying mortality but doesn’t do enough to stand out in the subgenre. Its most interesting elements circle themes of what can go wrong when a parent and child don’t agree on not just what to do with their dying loved one’s estate but his very existence. Most older people have detailed instructions on what to do in the event of their death. Number one should probably be “Don’t bring me back.”
Megan (Colby Minifie of “The Boys”) has come home to help her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) through the final days of Megan’s father Robert (Vaughn Armstrong). Megan and Barbara are clearly a bit different when it comes to the practicality of someone’s final days as one gets the impression that Barbara has tried a few, shall we say, “alternative” medical routines such as using a dreamcatcher and other forms of witchcraft adjacent techniques. When Megan finds a bag of human teeth under her dad’s bed, the word “voodoo” is used. She has no idea what she’s in for.
When Robert dies, Megan learns that it’s not the medical authorities on their way but someone very different, someone who is going to bring Robert back. A mysterious, mumbling figure walks Megan and Barbara through a ceremony, after which things get very weird.
The final act of “The Surrender,” wherein it seems more like Megan and Barbara might have joined Robert on the other side instead of vice versa, contains some strikingly terrifying imagery. It just takes a little too long to get there as Max circles a few of the same ideas while defining the mother/daughter dynamic. Having said that, the final scenes of “The Surrender,” ones that seem to blur time and space, contain an unexpected emotional wallop. Why would we want to bring back a loved one who was never really there in the first place?
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