Handshake Cinema – Weekend
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In the Russian box office “Two, three, demon, come!”, The debut of two YouTuber brothers from Australia Michael and Daniel Philip. This modest but spectacular horror about communicating with the dead and a hand that pulls to hell was released immediately after Barbie and Oppenheimer, but already in the first week of rental it managed to earn more than $10 million, becoming one of the most successful releases of the cult company A24 .
High school student Mia (Sophie Wilde) wants to be alone, or at least away from her dad, who she thinks is to blame for her mom’s death. She swallowed pills and went to another world. And why, no one knows. Mia disappears at parties where teenagers, instead of peacefully drinking beer and making eyes at each other, are petting with otherworldly forces. They set up a camera, put someone on a chair and, after lighting a candle, they grab a strange plaster hand that looks like a cast from an art workshop. You need to close your eyes and whisper: “One, two, three, demon, come!” – and opening your eyes, to see in front of you someone worse than classmates or neighbors in the area.
The main thing is to be able to unclench the handshake in a minute and a half, otherwise the ghost that came to the call will remain with you forever. According to legend, the hand once belonged to a real sorcerer, and then to some psycho who plunged a kitchen knife into his head.
“Two, three, demon, come!” debutant brothers Michael and Daniel Phillipou begins with a shock scene similar to those they won recognition on YouTube – their RackaRacka channel today has about 7 million subscribers. In this episode, they demonstrate their mastery of technology: a brutal murder and suicide at a party are filmed in one shot – unexpected and cruel, – the dynamism and ruthlessness with which the scene is made set the audience on a kind of wave of expectation of a very literal horror, but the film successfully these expectations of an inventive bloodbath deceiving. It is emotional and painful in presenting the nightmare that haunts the heroine. It is not in vain that Philippa is named among the favorite films of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Return” – they do not count on the fear and shock of the viewer, but rather on his ability to empathize. The authors know how to thrill, but they are clearly not very interested. Like the dead who come into contact with teenagers: it is interesting not to scare, but to talk, to test the interlocutor’s ability to open up.
Go and figure out what is more important here: the whirlpool of personal melancholy, so understandable within the framework of a movie about growing up and familiar to everyone, or the sweet ritual of communicating with the dead, which teenagers get hooked on in an attempt to have an interesting time. Meetings with ghosts, on the one hand, are reminiscent of the Chatroulette service (no one knows which of the dead will answer the call), and on the other hand, it is easy to see in them a transparent metaphor for drug addiction. Three simple actions – and now the pupils dilate, the head of the medium hangs limply, someone else’s voice breaks out of the chest. “I became a passenger in my own body,” Mia describes her experience of meeting the dead.
The Philippu brothers combine one layer (horror of puberty) with another (criticism of addictions, including addiction to smartphones and social networks) with about the same editing dexterity that shocked in their bloody YouTube videos. Something similar—a social statement in the context of an atypical horror film that turns genre tropes and clichés inside out—we saw in David Robert Mitchell’s It, where the specter of unprotected sex terrifyingly slowly reached out to its victims. But that was almost 10 years ago.
Today, “Two, Three, Demon, Come!”, picked up in the American box office by the auteur film label A24, quickly climbed the podium of the most successful releases of this famous film companywhich celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. The connection with A24, to whom the brothers Philippou entrusted the fate of the painting, is important. It seems that Astaire, Eggers and Lowry have arrived in the regiment.
Even more important for understanding the nature of this film is its Australian origin. The Australians, who have a living tradition of their own horror, savage and at the same time psychedelic, blurring the line between brutal reality and inner demons, are able to fill cool modern horror concepts with some kind of natural liveliness. Where else to talk about self-destruction, if not in Australia? “Two, three, demon, come!” stands firmly on the ground, where the most dangerous and poisonous creatures in the world live. In one of the key episodes of the film, Mia sees a kangaroo hit by a car on the road, but does not dare to finish off the animal – either out of conflicting kindness, or because contact with someone else’s pain relieves her of the need to feel her own. It is difficult not to see in the fate of this kangaroo a reflection of the future fate of Mia herself, plowing through the Australian darkness towards the murderous light.
In theaters from 10 August
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