Farewell to four intense years in China and back home for a foreseeably longish while, entailing inter alia a welcome broadening of film-going possibilities. Yesterday, namely, afforded the possibility of visiting Lisbon horror movie festival MoteL/X for the first time. Now in its 11th edition and running mostly in one of the very few remaining old style grand film theatres of Lisbon [S. Jorge, where I saw for the first time Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) and many other Cinemascope Technicolor oneiric extravaganzas, and at which bar there's no popcorn but you can have a gin tonic and many other such libations, need I write more?], MoteL/X program now runs dozens of titles. Yesterday we watched one of the festival's last sessions, Housewife. If Housewife is anything to go by, MoteL/X is outstanding.
Housewife is the 2nd feature film directed by young UK-trained Turkish director Can Evrenol, whose previous Baskin (2015) also premiered in MoteL/X last year.
Housewife tells the story of Holly (Clémentine Poidatz) who witnessed her psycho mother murder her older pubescent daughter upon discovering she started having her period by drowning her head in a toilet seat and then her father with a knife as he tried to rescue Holly from a similar fate, and who in adulthood marries an occult expert (Ali Aksöz) all the while retaining an understandable hysterical/obsessive reaction toward all things bloody/toiletty and subsequently, due to her husband's professional interests, gets acquainted with brilliantly named apocalyptic cult group “Umbrella of Love and Mind”, whose guru (David Sakurai, not bad but needs to work on evilness) promises to rescue Holly from her demons, at which point things start to get really complicated as I strongly recommend readers find out.
Yesterday's session was only the second showing ever of Housewife, so material on the film, online or otherwise, is extremely sparse. In a brief personal introduction before the session, Evrenol himself said Housewife is among other things a love letter to some of the films which influenced him the most. Now I guess these would have been The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979), Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976), Cinderella (seminal version remaining arguably Disney's 1950) and Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) in a roughly 40%/40%/10%/10% ratio. Stylistically, Housewife is heavily reminiscent of early Cronenberg, with a nod to 60s/70s Italian Giallo in the vein of Lucio Fulci and a plot structure infused with time paradoxes a la Chris Nolan. But Cronenberg is the definite influence here: not a warm colour, not a high note are allowed, infusing from the outset angst, ominousness and discomfort,
In the last 20 minutes or so a slightly splattery turn of events relieves us from taking things as seriously as we till then had, as will turn out not without good reason, but to me robbing the film of full impact. No matter. On evidence of a single film, Can Evrenol has emerged as successor/competitor of Cronenberg and/or Shyamalan, on equal footing. Doesn’t happen every day.