Relocating the Devil – Weekend
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You can still find cutting-edge horror films at the Russian box office: following the Sundance hit “Two, three, demon, come!” – “Spell. The Evil Within” was featured at another indie festival, SXSW. We tell you how the film intertwines the horrors of one-story America, Hindu mythology and migrant experience.
High school student Samidha (Megan Suri), the daughter of immigrants from India, would like to lead an ordinary teenage life in the American suburbs, but something always gets in the way. Either her mother (Neeru Bajwa from “Pokerface” and “Missing”) demands help with preparing prasad (offerings) for Durga Puja, which is why the girl cannot go to the party, then her strange childhood friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) , wandering like a ghost along the walls, distracts from chatting with a classmate. The joys of puberty are not enough, but everyone around her reminds her of the cultural borderland: her mother is afraid that Samidha will forget about her roots, a peer asks to speak in Hindi in order to make a video for social networks – how can she assimilate and not stand out? The situation gets completely out of control when Tamira talks about the demon in the jar that she carries with her everywhere and simply disappears. There will be no time for first love and success in studies.
38-year-old debutant Bishal Dutta heard about the girl muttering under her breath with a jug from his grandfather, who told his grandson many mystical stories. It was they, mixed with American horror films, that shaped the director’s idea of the macabre. Having moved with his parents to the United States when he was four years old, at five Dutta watched “The Terminator” (1984), where he saw a heart torn out, and was greatly impressed. Already as a teenager, this childhood experience took shape into a love for horror films: the future director’s taste was influenced by “Alien” (1979), “The Shining” (1980), “Poltergeist” (1982), “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984) and “ The Conjuring” (2013). So the Russian localization would hardly have bothered him, although the original title is a little more mysterious: “It Lives Inside” – in the spirit of the A24 slow burner “It Comes at Night” (2017).
Dutta’s film, by the way, is in the package of the studio Neon – a direct competitor of A24 in the segment of “quirky small films”: the pop terrorist attack “Vox-Lux”, turning the rape-revenge genre inside out (“Rape and revenge”) “The Revenant”, a cyclical rom-com “ Hang Out in Palm Springs,” the Danish-Afghan animadoque “Escape,” the culinary action movie “Pig” with Cage, the younger Cronenberg’s body horror “Infinity Pool,” Cannes triumphs “Titan,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Anatomy of a Fall”—all it was produced and/or distributed by them. “Spell. The Evil Within,” which opened with the Audience Award at SXSW, fits in well with these wildly cute films. Is it that directors of Indian origin are still represented even in indie and genre cinema much worse than their colleagues, say, of Korean and Chinese origin. Off the top of your head, you can recall “The Evil Eye” (2020) by the Dassani brothers, produced by the tireless Jason Blum, who is involved in a good third of hit horror films today (from “Paranormal Activity” to “The Invisible Man” and “M3GAN”).
“The Evil Within” flaunts a not so straightforward sign, although it is not difficult to guess that the creature in the can is mental torment in the flesh, the curse of foreignness that haunts Indian settlers even in philistine paradise. Horror has a long-standing connection with relocation: just remember the eternal migrant Dracula, the Torrens family, for whom the change of place did not benefit, or stories about moving into a new house, where the devil is always welcome to guests. What can we say about moving to another country and culture, when on the one hand there is pressure for homesickness, concern for loved ones and the traumatic experience of exile, on the other hand there is fear of sidelong glances and infringement of rights. However, Bishal Dutta reflects not the small demons of intolerance – peers with Samidha behave awkwardly, but rather in a warning manner – but rather the internal conflict from the clash of cultural matrices. The fight against the demon of negative emotions is being waged from the same angles from which the English immigrant Hitchcock exposed the psychosis of American hypercontrol in the 1960s, and ten years later the New York native Carpenter exposed the Halloween hypocrisy of philistine do-gooders. But the horror is still there.
It is symptomatic that Samidhi’s discord is first noticed not by her mother, but by her literature teacher, African-American Joyce (Betty Gabriel from Get Out), who interprets this plot from the life of a teenage girl in her own way. If not as pubertal restlessness, then as an external conflict with the environment – in the spirit of “Candyman” (1992) by Bernard Rose. There, the vengeful spirit of the artist, who after the Civil War found freedom, but not the right to love the landowner’s daughter, “stood up” for the African-Americans suffering from Chicago’s development. The Hindu warrior goddess Durga, who embodies both feminine strength and the energy of liberation (her popularity increased during British colonial rule), could fill a similar role in The Conjuring. However, Dutta offers a more ingenious solution, rhyming the test of Samidhi with the battle between Durga and the demon Mahishasura, whose defeat Hindus celebrate every year. As they say, this is how we win.
In theaters from September 28
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