Prime's Neo-Jungian Faerie-Wave: NEVERLAKE, THE FORBIDDEN GIRL, THE GATEHOUSE

(2013) Dir. Riccardo Paoletti

**1/2 / Amazon Image - B+

You'd be forgiven thinking this a UK production- the actors are all Brits, Welsh, Irish, more or less. But it's an German-Italian joint and--despite the near constant UK-style dinginess of the skies, filmed in Italy, so they say. The story has independent-minded Jenny (Daisy Keeping) spending a summer with her archaeologist father near an ancient Etruscan lake where he's been recovering ancient idols, small fetish totems that used to be tossed in as sacrifices to the spirits of the lake. He's been taking them out, but also throwing stones in, for some reason. Left largely to her own devices, though semi-bullied by a dimly evil au pair named Olga (Joy Tanner), escapes the dreary confines of the old-school house by reading Shelley down by said mysterious lake, a practice that soon draws her an audience of handicapped children with the kind of pale ghostly faces that raise all sorts of red flags for any normal person. In addition to the whole Etruscan statuary element (shoehorned into the narrative with the finesse of a frostbitten safecracker), there's passages from Shakespeare (guess which play? Hint: one of the pale urchins is a brooding older boy with Edward Cullen facial planes).


Enriched with mythic meaning, often to the point of anything else, writer-director Martin Gooch clearly knows his Maria-Louise von Franz, and ably uncorks the genie of archetypal psychology, as Jenny takes on the job of recovering the statues stolen by dad and throwing them back into the lake, and in the process finding a mysterious doorway hidden behind a log pile leading to a secret chamber, and the surprises she finds there are so WTF I feel I've said too much!

Fans of 70s-80s Italian horror will be pleasantly surprised to see ember-eyed David Brandon (Scarlet Diva, Stagefright) aging nicely into the sort of enigmatic dad role usually monopolized by Gabriel Byrne, and--thankfully--there's no romance with the doe-eyed Edward-clone, just the kind of Jungian archetypal challenges, triumphs and dark father pursuits we find in all the darkest coming-of-age crypto-Jungian fairy tales with teenage girl protagonists whose moms are either dead or in Florida. The underwater photography is great and for the most part Paoletti wisely keeps the less-successful CGI chimeras at a hazy distance.


Occasional missteps: the Medusa hair effect of one of the water nymphs, for example would have been much more effective if they moved languid like flowing seaweed (as Val Lewton would have done it) and the Etruscan statue tossing thing is kind of bum rushed past us, as if the writers sincerely hope we won't notice the stank of an upcoming social studies quiz creeping in like a dad trying to interest his children in opera during a long car ride.


Either way, fairly engrossing, with interesting use of pans and dissolves (as in the above, where a painting of robed figures seems to imprint itself on the twilit lake), a pretty riveting climax, lots of drug use (I can't say more), and lovely to see the still-Satanic eyed Brandon still at it and Keeping is a keeper as the can-do 'Nancy Drew on weird drugs' heroine. It's great to see movies where the new girl in town isn't saddled with cumbersome school alienation tropes ("Fitting in is so hard!") or romantic sogginess, just the right dash of Elektra complex. Jenny might get pissed when dad keeps ignoring her, but she finds things to do, and if the climax doesn't quite make as much sense as the filmmakers seem to think, at least they have the courage of their convictions, and one ends up feeling compassion for most everyone of the characters, save one....  

(2016) Written and directed by Martin Gooch 

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

Though on the surface it's yet another modernized fairy tale where the intrepid young daughter of a slightly-overwhelmed, gruff but lovable widower (Simeon Willis) helps him rescue some mysterious stones in order to save her from a horned monster of the ancient woods, there's a lot more going on here than just the usual trite nonsense we'd get in an American movie following the same beats (the dad doesn't mope around watching videos of his dead wife, and when he dreams of her, it's of their last moments together, drinking in a canoe rather than canoodling at a backyard picnic). She appears to both father and daughter as a ghost, warning them of coming danger.  By day, dad occasionally raises his voice and flies into overwhelmed fits while trying to follow the strange clues and fix breakfast for daughter Eternity (Scarlett Rayner), who's ever bothering him with random questions, but the pair can also share nice moments together (we applaud his knack for taking her on treasure hunts, even giving her maps he's carefully designed to find presents he's buried) and spend evenings outside looking up at the stars ("if I ever get to ill or too old to have a beer under the stars," he tells Eternity, "I want you to put me in a little boat, and set fire to it..." - hey we applaud that notion (and what else is AA, but that very burning boat?)

Fans of Irish horror will recognize this 'if you take things from out of the woods you had best return them' set-up from other films besides Neverlake, such as 2015's The Hallow, where a dad researching something in the woods and living right on the outskirts, unwittingly wakes up an ancient evil... That's all to be expected in a woosdy fable like this, and Gooch wisely keeps the focus on the brilliantly precocious and alert Eternity as she mucks about digging holes looking for treasure, not quite aware of the forces she's messing with (as when she hacks into a power cable) but able to meet the creepy gaze of the enigmatic neighbor with the shotgun, the Dickensianly-named Algernon Sykes ((Linel Aft) without so much as an imperceptible shiver.


But what really sells it is the well-tempered rapport between Eternity--her super long straight hair picking up impressions like a 10 year-old Maria Orsic--and her only-mildly overwhelmed and disheveled, vaguely taller-Ricy-Gervais-ish dad--they seem like both opposites and clearly related--with him gruffly giving her pointers for sticking up for herself against bullies, and gradually realizing he'll be totally overwhelmed unless he brings her along instead of finding a sitter. Once his investigation into the magic stones leads him to the truth, it's nice that he has no problem totally believing Eternity. How often do we see a dad have any other reaction other than either sleepy irritation or pasteurized  reassurance when his daughter starts screaming about something being under the bed? Not this dad! He gets down on his knees to look, and he's scared, and so is the score. This is a world where bumps in the night aren't just delusions. We've crossed over into fairy tale land but without ever being quite aware there was a door to go through.

There's an ecological message underlying things but it never gets heavy-handed. In this case the CGI is better modulated than in most such low budget films: branches reach out and victims of a woodland "Green Man" style horned guardian of the forest captures those traveling through and meshes them into the roots of trees - a pretty scary, well-done effect. There are also some terrifying parental dreams dad has, when he cuts off her iPad scrolling fingers in the dead of night, then wakes up to find he's done it for real! The fairy tale intensity of this all works to keep things uneasy and may scare children into realizing the emotional fragility of adults daily shut out of their kids' lives by cell phones. People straight up die in this film, even an innocent lady cop who spends the day wandering around the woods evoking a mix of Winona Earp's sister's cop girlfriend Nicole, and Amy Pond in her cop costume in the first Matt Smith episode of Dr. Who. (2)

My favorite bit is the third act, when both mom of the babysitter and dad finally believe the kids and they all go on an armed expedition into the woods to find the horned god, and there's even a Goth psychic (Anda Berzina) friend of the sitter (Zara Tomkinson) who drifts over to read tarot cards (and keeps drawing the Devil). As with Neverlake, strange country houses turn out to have hidden rooms deep within secret chambers accessible only from trap doors hidden in the base of closets or woodpiles.  By the end one has grown quite fond of all the characters (save one) and would for a nice sequel. Like Neverlake it has the air of a YA fantasy novel, and there are virtually no boys at all, just a few adult males pointing dad towards the horned truth, and the strange Mr. Sykes. Big old Bechdel score up in here, in short, to make up for the narrative bumps.

PS-= For what a visit from boozy relatives from across the pond, after some eccentric uncle played by Christopher Walken discovers a mummy druid priestess in the bog, check out another big favorite discovery of recent years, Michael Almereyda's The Eternal (1998)

Dir Til Hastreiter

*** / Amazon Image - A+

What a difference a talented ambitious cinematographer makes! Merely OK films become great, or at least worth a glimpse. 99% of the unknown stuff floating on Prime is shot on HD video, in this case it's the staggeringly pretty looking (especially for such a dismal and unfair imdb rating, a staunchly undeserved 3.4) movie that lets you know just how good digital film can look with the right painterly craftspeople at the helm. My observation through relentless slogging is that such brilliance is almost always the result of an Eastern European craftsman making it over to the west and getting their start in low budget films, knowing they will be future calling cards for Hollywood (like Vilmos and Lazlo) or staying home to deliver beauty that, like in Ivan Brlakov's stunning work The Bride, (also on Prime, which would be in this list but for its atrocious tone-deaf English dubbing), transcends the film it services. In this case, it's Hungary's Tamás Keményffy, who brings a golden dusk sharpness to German-Dutch production, The Forbidden Girl, a (filmed in English) tale of which I stumbled on knowing very little about, but was just drawn to the cover art, which suggested some dusky photography and imaginative make-up.


The result? It might be my favorite random discovery since Bitches' Sabbath (i.e. Witching and Bitching). It's a little rough around the narrative edges, but it's a nicely acted ands sometimes well-written tale of the anointed son of a deranged (Baptist-style, for some reason) preacher whose mysterious dream lover may well be either a witch or imprisoned by one, and all in a very matriarchal witchy situation as Toby McLift, the son (Peter Gaidot) of the apocalyptic preacher, is hired as a tutor in ann ancient, crumbling mansion that just happens to hold his true love chimera girlfriend whom he thought daddy killed before he was dragged off to an asylum. If he thinks he's going to have an easy time teaching her though (she has no memory of him) or rekindling their passion, he's wrong - as her guardian, a towering, supernatural Germanic watchdog malevolent spirit played Klaus Tange (Strange Color of Your Body's Tears) skulks ever within hearing range.

Hamburg-born, Strassberg-trained actress Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen is alive and wild as this forbidden girl Laura, a classic Jungian anima figure, whose kept in a tower, away from the eyes of strangers, though why her guardians should want a doe-eyed lovestruck mental case like British-born dreamboat Peter Gadiot up there as a tutor is anyone's guess, unless it's because he bears 'the mark' that will open doors to Hell or something. That's not really a spoiler if you've seen enough of these kinds of films. That's business as usual. But what's not usual is the great use of a crumbling mansion - scenes by a leaf-filled crumbling half-full indoor pool, for example, or along dark twisted hallways, and into small ditches around the property while formulating their escape. The dark father non du pair, forbidding superego injunctive character is played by the pleasingly weathered Danish actor . And in bed, withered and dying though slowly growing mysteriously younger with Gaidot's presence (ala Hasu, or I Vampiri), is the enigmatic witch Lady Wallace (Jeanette Hain). You won't need a copy of Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces to figure out what's really going on (or why even a tiny amount of sunlight let in, when a shade slips open, can set fire to ancient books and generally wipe these witches out. As the light creates a weird camera obscura image on the side of what looks like a transparency projector, we're forced to admit that, unconvincing as it is, it's all way prettier, better, and more genuinely surreal than Lynch'sTwin Peaks: The Return. 

But these kinds of dark fairy tales are never about that - they're about the journey, these are the equivalent of the tales children love hearing over and over, because the story rings deep into the fabric of our unconscious tapestry, shaping the way we view the world and giving our dreams the narrative structure our unconscious is often not enough of a dramatist to provide, resulting in a jumble of characters and events that fade before they can be tabulated in the morning. Here we get the same balmy 'living all ages of life at once' thing we get in Valerie and her Week of Wonders, Lemora, and even Muhlholland Dr. to a weirder degree. It's not 'better' than those films, but it is certainly lovely to look at, with deep blacks and rich moody colors that evoke the saturated interiors of Next of Kin's old folks home, or the autumnal leaf-bedecked scenery of José Ramón Larraz films like Symptoms and Vampyres.