The unkind old South – Kommersant

Vincent Grashaw’s What Josiah Saw is out. Mikhail Trofimenkov I was pleased that the film turned out to be by no means an example of the horror genre, as it is presented. For all its minority, it belongs entirely to the great tradition of “southern Gothic”.

From the novels of William Faulkner to the films of Terrence Malick, “Southern Gothic” has poetically demonized or even demonically poeticized the American South. Once “good old”, but hopelessly fallen into lumpen decadence. Inhabited by people who have been bruised by economic decline and religious rigor. Obsessed with deadly impulses for others and, above all, for themselves.

The Graham family, whose members, scattered from their native nest, Greshaw first skillfully breeds through the three chapters of the film, in order to bring them together on his father’s farm in the last short story, are exemplary southerners. Flesh from the flesh of the rusty earth in a ring of barbed wire, which the rusty tractor “Betty” stubbornly refuses to plow, and the only thing left for the natives is to pour rusty moonshine from copper mugs into melancholy.

The faces of the Grahams, even those of Mary, who seems to have successfully escaped from the captivity of the earth, are worthy of the characters in a horror movie. Especially with the tyrannical widower father – his wife hanged herself a long time ago – Josiah: Robert Patrick’s majestic pervert sometimes suddenly resembles an aged “eraser head” from David Lynch’s fantasy. Grashaw, alas, inflicted a severe wound on the visual sinisterness of the film, accompanying the action with almost constant music of an even more sinister kind, which at times already sounds parodic.

The demons tormenting the Grahams seem by no means of an otherworldly nature, but rather, so to speak, socially determined. The original title of the movie is What Josiah Saw. The answer to this question sounds at the very beginning of the film and is unexpectedly harmless. An old man with intense sexual innuendos – he forces his son Thomas (Scott Hayes) to masturbate to porn magazines left over from runaway Elia (Nick Stahl) – hallucinates almost childishly. All I saw in the yard was a tiny man in a green suit, defecating with a rainbow. What is called, drank to the leprechauns.

What Thomas sees, that none of the other heroes sees, will become clear only in the final: the most mundane and weak-willed Graham will be the most bruised in the head.

“White Trash” Eliya, a trailer occupant and client of prostitutes who served time on a vague charge of pedophilia, does not see anything special himself. But the old fortune-teller sees something fatal in him: Elia ended up in the gypsy camp, working off a debt to the godfather Buk, another variation along with Josiah on the theme of a specifically southern God-father, senseless and merciless. Jesus did not spend the night here, the Old Testament rules the show here. But the vision of the gypsy refers not only to the massacre that will inevitably break out in the camp, but to something hidden in the distant past and the near future of Elia.

Finally, the bloody nightmares that haunt Mary (Kelly Garner) at night can easily be explained by her sad personal fate. Even though she is married to a wealthy man, even though she works as a photographer, she painfully regrets that at the age of 18 she decided to be sterilized. The only way to quench the thirst for motherhood is to adopt a child, but doctors and psychologists have too many questions for her. However, if that were Mary’s only problem, she would be the happiest woman in Oklahoma.

The family reunion—the Grahams are required to sign a deal to happily sell their land to an oil company—only reinforces the old adage, “never go back to the same place.” Especially in the American South. The concentration of perverted secrets reaches, breaking the unhurriedly confident rhythm of the film, a grangignol apogee, and metaphorical and natural skeletons rain down from all the “cupboards” of the film and the cabinets of the father’s house. However, you can guess about it from the very first frames with that very rusty earth.