Review of Patricia Kepa’s film “Casket of Damnation. Whisper of the Witch”

At the box office – “Casket of curse. Whisper of the Witch” (Trinket Box) by Patricia Kepa and Ecory White. Mikhail Trofimenkov, who did not expect anything but merciless and senseless trash from a film with such a rental name, was somewhat pleasantly disappointed.

The film’s prologue, dated 1936, suggests that Kepa and White studied at a Soviet school, where they selflessly fell in love with Sergei Mikhalkov’s poem “There is such an America”: “Savage deeds / He is now known to everyone – / In the wild state of Alabama / The terrible city of Birmingham “. Mikhalkov promptly responded to the suppression in the state of Alabama, which has the most racist reputation in the United States, against anti-segregation protests by African Americans. “You wanted your little sister / To see with a doll on the grass, – / A six-year-old girl / They beat her on the head with a doll!”

So in The Box, little Mary Ann from Alabama also plays with a doll on the grass and also faces racial segregation, albeit on the other side than Mikhalkov’s baby. The screen girl is white and, despite her tender age, learned from her parents that blacks are not people. Unlike her older sister: the baby caught her having fun in bed with a black guy. Here, as usual, the red-faced dad returned home: an unthinkable scandal in the hard-nosed Alabama could not but be resolved by bloodshed. Moreover, as it turns out in the final, much more abundant than it seems initially.

However, for three-quarters of the film, Kepa and White make the audience wonder with bewildered annoyance what it was all about. The space between the poignant prologue and the poignant ending is filled with an average and sluggish retelling of all the movie clichés about houses afflicted with an ancient curse. The fact that the house is cursed can be guessed from the suspiciously low price for which it is put up for sale, and from the frequent change of owners. However, the heroes of films made in this subgenre themselves have obviously never gone to the cinema, have not seen any “The Amityville Horrors” and are sincerely happy about moving to an inexpensive mansion in a quiet, quiet suburb.

A mixed couple is moving into such a cozy house these days: black Mike (Ecory White) and white Ava (Augie Duke). About them, except for the color of the skin, there is nothing to say. What is known is that it is much closer for Mike to go to work from here. About the work itself, it is known that it is “very nervous”, but, obviously, profitable: Ava can afford to mess around in a new house, which very soon resembles a voluntary prison. I would like to see an ideal family in Mike and Ava: Mike lisps on the phone with his mother-in-law, Ava with her husband’s brother, and everyone is in seventh heaven after learning about her pregnancy. But Mike looks like an inveterate domestic tyrant and a capricious boor who treats his wife with or without reason.

Ava could be friends with an old neighbor (Sandra Ellis Lafferty), who gave her the infamous box with an antique pendant inside in honor of the move. But it turns out that Mike immediately cuts through – “You heard that she called me a fight!” – An old-school racist. But then again, if the heroes went to the movies, they would understand that it was not just a racist who visited them, this is not so bad, but a natural witch. After all, a neighbor with her gray hair looks one to one the way witches have already looked in hundreds of films.

In short, since Ava tried on the pendant, something has gone wrong in the house. It is “something”: more indistinct and monotonous suspense than in the “Casket”, you still need to look. Rustles, creaks, tapping, audible only to Ava, her bouts of sleepwalking and memory lapses. Nightmares haunting both spouses. Nightmares, according to the authors, are so expressive that the line between reality and sleep disappears, but in reality they are boring and somehow crumpled. All this psychological preparation for the inevitable bloody final takes a disproportionate amount of screen time and is more likely to lull the viewer than to sharpen his nerves. He can only guess how all this is connected with the tragedy of 1936, and suspect that Mary Ann, who should be already under a hundred years old, is a neighbor.

The final will put everything more or less in its place. The film will turn out, as it was clear from the prologue, a parable about racial intolerance. Otherworldly forces – a metaphor for the inescapable “ordinary fascism” in American style. This idea could have turned out to be an excellent film for about thirty minutes, if Kepa and White had not traded it, slightly stepping on the throat of their civic courage, for discounted genre effects.