One movie that deserved a wider theatrical launch was Possum. Matthew Holness’ debut had an especially restricted theatrical launch in each the UK and U.S., and the whole gross was $33,225. Holness’ deeply disturbing film is an extremely courageous movie and difficult to make a movie with so little dialogue and arguably, subsequent to no plot, harking back to Stalker‘s repetitiveness, tempo, and creeping uncanny dread.
What Is ‘Possum’ About?
It begins with a sequence of jump-cuts and a voiceover of Phillip (Sean Harris) narrating a creepy poem, a wide-angle shot of his silhouette towards a night sky, watching a bag in a distant bed room with a pained expression on his face earlier than segueing into the opening titles. The BBC Radiophonic Score is accompanied by close-ups of a distressed Philip, disjointed pictures of the East Anglian panorama, and stop-motion animation providing a quick glimpse of what he’s hiding in that giant brown bag. All the imagery is solid in sickly inexperienced and a yellow filter.
Phillip is a tortured puppeteer returning to East Anglia by prepare. In the seats reverse him sit a bunch of teenage boys, and he watches one boy, who’s illustrating intently. The boy catches him wanting and shuts the notepad, and so they depart the prepare, just for Philip to observe and ask him what he was drawing. Shocked, the boy runs again to his mates. Phillip returns to a run-down home, home windows boarded up, the backyard overgrown, with the inside wallpaper peeling, filthy carpets, and shut doorways. Upstairs he reads from a scrap/storybook about youngsters in peril from sinister males and big spiders. He takes the brown bag to the yard, removes the factor inside, and spots a fox watching him. Nightmares and actuality overlap in Possum, usually to nauseating impact. The factor has returned when he wakes from a nap.
The solely different occupant within the derelict constructing he calls house is his creepy and filthy uncle Maurice (Alun Armstrong), who alludes to the “scandal” that introduced him again to his hometown. Philip stays monosyllabic and deflects Maurice’s barrage of questions, refusing to offer an indication of his puppetry abilities. Phillip tells Maurice the home is disgusting with its darkish corridors, shuttered home windows, grime, and filth protecting each floor. Philip makes a number of extra makes an attempt to rid himself of the puppet, with every try failing. And when the boy from the prepare goes lacking, he turns into the prime suspect.
Is ‘Possum’ A Ghost Story? A Haunted Children’s Tale? Basic Weirdness?
At first look, Possum could seem as a back-to-basics ghost story within the vein of Johnathan Hill or Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman. It is a psychological character examine a couple of traumatized man eking out an existence in a small city, and struggling within the aftermath of one thing horrible he’s unable to specific. Matthew Holness is firing on all cylinders: hypnagogic-induced wanderings, animal mutilation, displaced folks, tainted locations, and lacking youngsters. Possum echoes Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Tales from the Crypt, and the writing of Roald Dahl. Much just like the animation of David Firth, it captures the essence of nightmares and a quintessentially British random air of weirdness.
Repetitiveness works within the movie. We see Philip return to the woods, and we see him on a bridge, however usually we aren’t positive if these scary sequences are desires or actuality, or a mixing of each. He briefly contemplates suicide. He watches a information report, and discovers {that a} man becoming his description is needed in reference to the disappearance. Maurice tells him that individuals are speaking — he is not clear about what. Maurice is leaving and warns Phillip to maintain a low profile. He stands at his old skool gates and is warned away by a trainer. He later goes again right into a childlike and distressed state demanding to see a trainer, who he hopes will take him to the police.
‘Possum’ Is Filled With Freudian Unease
Adapted from Holness’s personal brief story in The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease (first revealed in 2008 and reissued in 2018 by Comma Press) with every story constructed round a Freudian immediate. The movie turns into extra summary and weird because the story strikes in the direction of its conclusion. Nightmares and actuality overlap, Phillip begins to regress to a childlike state, visions of balloons indoors are engulfed by smoke, Possum is weighed down with rocks, and he returns, hanging on the wall, or in mattress face-to-face with the protagonist. Miles of empty panorama, deserted buildings, and lengthy empty corridors stuffed with shadows. Maurice bullies Phillip into sharing a disturbing reminiscence of the marshes, involving excessive animal abuse. Everything in Possum induces unease, disgust, or bewilderment.
It is not all sinister model over substance although. Despite solely having two major characters, Possum’s Phillip is well-developed, innocuous, and maybe unlikeable, however it’s a testomony to Holness’s ability as a author and director that we care about him by the movie’s conclusion. Maurice is sleazy and malevolent with no redeeming qualities by any means. And but, he’s depicted as completely human and never a whole monster. Holness stays devoted to the supply materials and expands a troublesome brief story right into a characteristic script which may have appeared unfilmable to some other director. The allegory on the darkish coronary heart of the story is, after all, Possum, the puppet, is a psychological straightjacket for Phillip and that is conveyed in each a restrained and refined manner, the conclusion of what it represents is a intestine punch for audiences.
‘Possum’ Has Very Little Dialogue
Holness regarded to the silent period of filmmaking within the expressionist cinema of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, and it’s an fascinating manner of telling the story of a mostly-silent tortured ventriloquist who refuses to (or is unable to) specific himself vocally. “Films like Nosferatu and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the Twenties model), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, these German silent horror movies all fed into Possum in a roundabout way,” the director informed Film4Online’s Alice Werdine. Holness has cited British Public Services from the Nineteen Seventies as elementary in serving to him form the plot of Possum. British Services Videos had been designed as warnings to the general public about automobile accidents, youngster abductions, or worse-case situations, with disturbing visible content material and narrated in a nonchalant voiceover, typically by Jimmy Saville.
Possum takes the killer doll trope deep into the Uncanny Valley. The creature is the definition of Uncanny Valley with a disturbingly lifelike (and but, not like all human face you’re ever going to see) human head and lengthy, furry spider legs. One terrifying sequence has Philip sitting on his mattress with the bag at its edge. First, the legs emerge, then the face, it watches him for just a few seconds, and in a quick blur of motion is almost on him. “The factor is, usually probably the most ‘simple’ wanting and ‘low tech’ builds are the trickiest,” creature designer Adam Johansen informed HeyUGuys. “Possum was a troublesome puppet to construct and tough to function as you might be coping with eight lengthy, skinny, articulated legs and a hand puppeteered physique and head. It requires a number of puppeteers to function it.”
Possum is a nightmare that deserves an even bigger viewers.