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No Telling
The most fascinating ingredient to Larry Fessenden’s No Telling is how he demonstrates that the lens through which we view a film can become a character of its own. It moves, jerks, observes, and calculates as much as any actor on the screen, and it often exhibits just as many moods and complex motivations. Fessenden did something very similar in his criminally underrated Wendigo (2001), which allowed the camera to be the eyes through which a young protagonist viewed the world. That was a more mature effort from a director who has since added to his cinematic bag tricks, but I think No Telling, his first film, is more effective in the way that it never makes exactly clear to whose eyes this camera belongs and therefore saturates the entire exercise in unsettling, unknown dread. While viewing this film, you can’t help but get the uncomfortable feeling that you’re being watched. The film’s complete title is No Telling; or, the Frankenstein Complex—an interesting variation of the full title for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Naturally, there is a marriage between these two stories: Both concern a scientist’s obsession with defying the unknown via macabre experiments on dead tissue. Both also consider the implications of such experiments beyond their considerable shock value. As Shelley updated the Prometheus myth into the age of antiquated science, Fessenden updates Shelley’s story into the age when modern science seems like the chief authority in the world, often working beyond the constraints of morals or ethics (according to this film, anyway). All three tales are parables, and like many of the best parables, they’re also horror stories. No Telling specifically concerns a scientist named Geoffrey Gaines (Stephen Ramsey) and his Irish wife Lillian (Miriam Healy-Louie), who have moved into a large house in the New England countryside so that Geoffrey can conduct his experiments in private. Like all mad scientist types, Geoffrey’s experiments are vague; they have something to do with "chemo-electric therapy" and require him to stay locked away in a barn with a fresh supply of mice, rats, rabbits, and progressively larger animals (“I need monkeys!” he shouts on a cell phone). He is a charismatic and bizarre little fellow—the kind of man who makes cordial small-talk with his neighbors just moments after secretly locking their wounded dog in his truck for later experiments. Such experiments inspire the constant curiosity of local organic-farming activist Alex Vine (David Van Tieghem), a left-leaning intellectual whose opinion of Geoffrey is constantly pending on what he can uncover about his research. And speaking of uncovering, Alex also inspires the affections of Lillian, who is increasingly disenchanted with Geoffrey and his perpetual complaints of lacking necessary funds and resources. His is married primarily to his work, and that makes their small family a little too crowded for Lillian’s comfort. The plot provides the necessary setup for Fessenden’s paranoid mood, which is primarily based on the secrets that these three key players persistently hide from one another. We know that Geoffrey has unorthodox scientific methods that are clearly unethical; he keeps to himself and never reveals a shred of his work to anyone. Lillian fears and resents her husband’s work, and though she is articulate and opinionated, she is slow to really speak her mind to him in fear of isolating him even more. Alex and Lillian are also clearly attracted to each other and constantly flirt with a potential affair; it is tempting to think that Alex is using Lillian to spy on Geoffrey, but Fessenden presents him as a nice guy who seems to sincerely like Lillian and is concerned for her safety. Between the three of them, a tangle web of deceit and familiar creepiness begins its venomous tangling. Fessenden’s script is well-written but generally predictable. We pretty much know how any film with Frankenstein in the title is going to turn out. What’s fascinating here is the way Fessenden uses his camera to provide additional layers to events and interactions. It is as if the raw emotions that these characters experience are manifested in the way that he shoots their various scenes together. These emotions become the camera’s hidden personality, which both reads the minds of these people and somehow remains just as limited as they are in expressing their true feelings. This technique works to capture their guilt, suspicion, and dread and heightens them beyond the limitations of the rather obvious screenplay. Fessenden thus elevates the material from merely interesting to utterly compelling—he moves the film forward from a sense familiarity into a creepy sense of the unknown. Consider the scene at the dinner table, where the three principle players, along with one of Alex’s assistants (played by Phillip Brown as a Polidori-inspired odd-man out), engage in a debate over the ethics of animal experimentation. It begins as a friendly discussion, in which four people with very passionate opinions restrain their utter contempt for each other’s dichotomous views. This is all well-written and effectively acted, but Fessenden’s masterstroke is to sit the camera in the middle of the dinner table (as if it is the main course staring at them all) and frantically jerk it around onto the characters’ faces in a way that reveals the fury hidden behind their cordialness. This trick is maintained through the entire scene, and the frenzied nature of the camera only starts to slow down as the characters lose their affable facades and start telling each other how they really feel. It’s like the camera is a silent participant in this conversation, interpreting the emotions behind the characters’ words. The effect generates so much suspense that the eventual, angry accusations—seemingly the predictable payoff—become tame by comparison. Fessenden also employs low, tracking shots that move across the ground similar to the unseen evil forces in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead pictures. Whereas those films played up the campy effect of this style, Fessenden here allows these long takes to move about the screen thoughtfully, as if searching for clues regarding all the film’s whispered secrets. There’s a scene where Geoffrey drags an unwilling calf across farmlands in an attempt to lure it into his barn; it is painful to watch not merely for the chilling predictions we make about this animal’s eventual fate, but because the camera angle plays on the calf’s eye-level, watching as it is forced along to its doom. It’s a powerful, terrifying scene that clearly chronicles Geoffrey’s final step into madness, shot from the point of view of an invisible onlooker who follows along in curious terror while sensing the animal’s fear. This review was immediately preceded by a write-up of Fernando Meirelles’ masterful City of God, and perhaps the lingering greatness of that film allows it to loiter in my mind and draw comparisons. Like Fessenden, Meirelles is a natural for using the camera to round out his story; his angles provide additional insight and layers to an already complicated and engaging narrative. Their styles are similar, but their effects could not be more different: Meirelles uses the camera to critique the actions of characters who lack the insight to introspect; the lens is ultimately the voice of the director himself. Fessenden is intentionally vaguer; the camera reacts to the characters and situations not like an omniscient force, but like a character who has been granted access to secret information but nevertheless remains as aloof and interpretive as any person might be in such a situation. In the case of the calf, we get the feeling that we’re watching this scene from the perspective of Geoffrey’s guilty conscience, which was banished long ago yet still remains nearby, sadly observing his actions on its own. Maybe Fessenden’s point is that even if we lose our souls, they still linger around and haunt us like ghosts. Indeed, the only scenes where Fessenden does not employ these types of camera effects hit us with lucid power of their own, if for no other reason than we are given a few minutes of relief from this intensely intimate filmmaking approach. These breaks are not relief; rather, they force us into fierce introspection, where we listen and watch and try to do the work that the camera has thus far been doing for us. We are so into what is happening on the screen, so engaged and captivated, that only the most discerning of cinema goers will immediately recognize that they are being manipulated not by the material, which is standard, but by the sheer power of Fessenden’s stylistic approach. Which is why No Telling is such a good film: Larry Fessenden is a rare artist with total control of his artistic canvas. He has only made four films—this one, the urban vampire thriller Habit (1997), Wendigo, and the North Pole shocker The Last Winter (2007); all of them are horror, and all are ferociously alive and filled with creative energy that seems to marry the low-budget ingenuity of Cassavetes with the scheming sensibilities of Hitchcock. On one level, Fessenden uses the horror film as a metaphor to tap into social and political concerns (in this case, animal rights), but don’t let that fool you—he’s yet to make a film that isn’t terrifying and effective beyond his rather straightforward “message.” You can see the love that he has for making movies in every frame of all his films, and if No Telling lacks any new insight into its overdone subject matter (we all know that stealing dogs and torturing them is bad), the way that the director reveals this insight makes for staggeringly effective viewing. As far as American filmmakers go who push the envelope of originality and esthetic power, he remains one of our greatest young talents. One last observation: The best horror films point out that human beings are the worst of monsters; for all of our civility, we remain victims of our own depravity and madness. An ongoing theme in Fessenden’s work is that supernatural fears are merely the result of our own paranoia. There are no monsters except those who we create in our minds and manifest in our nightmares. Habit concerns vampires, and Wendigo is about a mystical forest spirit, but what’s interesting about both films is that neither of them necessarily believes in these ghostly creatures but rather in terrified people’s ability to be scared of them (I haven’t seen The Last Winter yet, but I understand that it works with a similar premise). Curious that it is only in No Telling that we see a monster irrefutably real, and it is a pathetic, harmless creature created by a slimy human being. Cast: Miriam Healy-Louie: Lillian Gaines A Glass Eye Pix production. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Written by Fessenden and Beck Underwood. No M.P.A.A. rating; contains a few scenes of gore, language, and some brief sexuality. Running time: 93 minutes. Original year of release: 1991. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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