Capital, pincers and other scary things – Weekend – Kommersant
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Lorcan Finnegan’s horror film The Evil Eye is released, which tells about the hard life of a prosperous British family, in the service of which a Filipino housekeeper got a job. The director of Vivarium, although in a less surrealistic style, continues to criticize the society of consumption and sophisticated exploitation.
Christine (Eva Green) has a lot of trouble, but she seems to be happy. She is beautiful and young. Everything is fine with the house, everything is fine with work: yes, you need to rush in the mornings in order to be in time for the photo shoot of the new children’s collection of your brand, but a great husband (Mark Strong), who, by the way, also makes good money doing mysterious marketing, will help to pick up from school daughter Robert. And in the courtyard of their three-story historic mansion with fireplaces, workshops and servants’ quarters, there are two black cars (my husband, of course, has a Tesla). But no happiness lasts forever (more precisely, you have to pay for everything), and after the bad news on the phone comes illness – with hallucinations, memory lapses, breathing problems and sudden bouts of weakness. Months pass, doctors are confused, there are more and more pills on the bathroom shelf, it seems that you can forget about a career, and now, at the threshold of a completely exhausted woman, a tiny Filipino housekeeper named Diana (Chai Fonacie) appears from under the ground.
Diana, of course, is not Mary Poppins, but she cooks wonderfully, perfectly re-lays the linen and kindles the fireplace, and most importantly, with some unknown passes, she helps to relieve Christine’s acute condition. With her, the hostess can again do design. And oddities like an altar built in a room under the roof or “charged” cans of water can be overlooked. In the end, Diana herself said that she was not just a governess, but a real Filipino witch, in whom the soul of “ongo” once settled – a force that can destroy and heal. This is the time to say that in the original the film is called “Nocebo” – that is, the antonym of placebo, the real medicine that harms the patient.
A few years ago, before Covid, Evil Eye director Lorcan Finnegan landed on the Cannes Critic’s Week program with his second feature, Vivarium. Who watched this surreal thriller with Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots is unlikely to forget it, but the new film by the Irish director, perhaps, is only in one way similar to that holiday of absurdity and mortgage nightmare. In the “Evil Eye”, as in the “Vivarium”, one can feel the social fuse. However, unlike past work, Finnegan’s new film is firmly rooted in reality. It is extremely detailed and, by and large, consists, like a witch’s belongings, of irreplaceable trifles: pebbles and herbs, twigs and potions, fleeting fears and fleeting visions, calm tones in which the walls of Christine’s residence are painted, and cracks that leave on these ideal covers the reality of beliefs and psychiatric diagnoses.
The main message of The Evil Eye is almost Marxist: gradually this movie unfolds as a story about the exploitation of a person by a person – it’s not for nothing that such an insect as a tick crawls out to the fore. Either a phantom or a real parasite bites into Christine, and her life turns upside down. At first, the viewer is comfortable considering the emanation of this tick and Diana, who appeared on the threshold of Christine. After all, there is a certain inertia in the tradition of the story of servants taking possession of their masters. And in the cinema as well: let’s remember at least Joseph Losey’s The Servant or M. Night Shyamalan’s recent series House with Servants. But everything is not so simple.
In the context of The Evil Eye, one can also talk about another trend – the emergence and full-fledged formation of a wave of social horror. Once upon a time, such films were innumerable – “Candyman” by Bernard Rose and “Night of the Living Dead” by George Romero. But recent years have given us a scattering of various nightmares based on the social problems that torment humanity. This is lurid general discourse about the essence of inequality like the Spanish “Platform” (2019), where the victims on the lower floors of the experimental high-rise ate dinner after the inhabitants of the upper floors, and Jordan Peele with his exacerbating the racial issue “Get Out” (2017) and “Us” ( 2019), and, of course, Netflix’s “His House” (2020), which is about migrants, seems to be an ordinary movie about a haunted house, but about African refugees in Europe. What can I say, if even in Ari Astaire’s Solstice (2019), a seemingly classic folk horror in its form, one can find features of a grotesque debate about the traumas of globalization and environmental problems.
The Irishman Finnegan, by the way, is directly related to folk horror. His first film work – “Without a Name” – just told about the invasion of a surveyor armed with a total station into a dark Celtic forest. But if there the mushrooms eaten out of boredom were the starting point for horror, then in The Evil Eye the circumstances are much more serious: the very structure of the global economy is at stake, in which the British Christine and the Filipina Diana are tied by bonds that are stronger than any spell – financial and labor obligations.
In theaters from November 17
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