Just Mercy: “The Cabin in the Woods”

Five –somethings (Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connolly, Jesse Williams, Anna Hutchison, and Franz Kafka) take a trip into the woods.

Two white-collared workers (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) prepare an operation in a large round room full of buttons and levers and sealed with a heavy door.

The trip does not last long.

The Cabin in the Woods is a slaughterhouse puzzle box. A Rubik’s cube of menace. A trick film that disappears inside out. A postmodern moratorium, heretofore, on the very mechanics that support it. It’s a film that defeats itself.

The Cabin in the Woods is also bloody fun — and funny, too, and wily in its thin-stringed suspense and rusty metallic muderousness. The film has too much fun with its college-age coed victims to have any reason to be any good at slaughtering them but slaughter the film does, with a fleet menace that is archetypally generic. It’s a film that burns the rulebook after memorizing it.

All a lot of saying about something that should be seen, first, before being dissected and judged. It’s a bit of a lie, the idea that’s spreading that The Cabin in the Woods is a freak out of spectacular surprise. Its twists build off a preexisting foundation, equal parts Raimi and Whedon (no wonder about the latter: he’s a co-writer and producer along with director Drew Goddard), instead of braving new ground. But, yes, the plot is a tunnel of warped mirrors. Beneath its façade of college kid killings — indeed, on top of and around and beside — Goddard’s movie is all loosey-goosey cinematic metaphysics.

These five kids have been written into being and then pushed and prodded and punished toward disarray, death, dismemberment. Goddard and Whedon make them up, and make them well, only to tear them down. That meta-ness is, no spoiler, the center of the film’s conceit and its criticism of the genre it also adores. Horror is voyeurism and victimization. But who is satisfied? Or, rather, what?

The best part of The Cabin in the Woods honors these questions while keeping them at elbow’s length. It relies, instead, on the certainty of its own cleverness: the script’s sharp teeth; Goddard’s keen eye (look close: there are one or two ingenious framings); the performances. The first and second acts are made of this stuff: it’s tongue-and-cheek carnage with a pulse.

The third act, where the slaughter leaves the structural comfort of the cabin, jumps the tracks. The filmmakers are more unsteady charting a new path through the madness and Goddard can’t sustain the world-rending nature of the Big Picture: neither its jokey-ness nor its soul. It becomes carnage with more carnage.

Talk of Escaping: “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

Red is everywhere in We Need to Talk About Kevin: it colors frames, splatters windows, cakes in hair. It slips and sticks and oozes. It covers over.

The color is important because, to an injudicious or less sympathetic viewer, it appears that Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is losing her mind. And well should she, living alone in a squat house by a road surrounded by neighbors who grimace at her in passing, down the street from a job that she barely survives, dodging catcalls from children and angry verbal — and physical — assaults from townspersons.

How did Eva get here? What did she do to deserve this? What has gone so terribly, awfully wrong?

It’s neither the question nor the answer that really fascinates director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay, adapting Lionel Shriver’s chilly epistolary novel. Instead, Ramsay is after something more slippery and, as a result, more unsatisfying.

The conventions are all there in the script, stark as thin daggers of meaning, jutting out to cut passing characters. But the film doesn’t pursue them, not quite. Euro-chic mother raises demonic spawn child (that’d be Kevin) to be a sociopathic slaughterer. Child is imprisoned. Mother suffers.

Child suffers.

The loop repeats, suffocating those within it — and us, the audience. Because what Ramsay is after is that, there, the mood of endless unending repetitious hell. That outletless guilt. That impotent remorse. That ness.

This is where the red helps, as a manifestation of Eva’s own psychic prejudices — her son’s room is surrounded by walls of navy — and of Swinton’s endlessly diligent method performance as a manfiestor of those manifestations.

It’s to Ramsay’s credit that Swinton is successful, partially, amid the half-hidden truths and that what is frenetic is also penetrating. Partially.

But it isn’t to Ramsay’s credit that she has made the sweeping, auteurist gesture of turning Shriver’s novel inside-out, so that we look at Eva instead of with her. That novel, structured as a series of letters, was drenched in language. On screen, We Need to Talk About Kevin is drenched in red.

The words say more.