Interior, The (2015)
Starring Patrick McFadden, Jake Beczala, Andrew Hayes
Directed by Trevor Juras
There’s something to be said for a film that aspires to deliberately dictate the anxiety and fear a viewer experiences through the careful control of pacing alone. Within the horror genre in the last few years, we have seen an increase in independent films (It Follows, Under the Skin, The Babadook) that have elected to more carefully approach their imminently horrific turns of plot — and ask the audience to patiently join in on the journey.
When employed effectively in horror, the “slow burn” approach can allow the most skillful auteurs to play the viewer like a fiddle, showcasing not only a deep understanding of the moviegoing experience, but also a masterful manipulation of our basest of human fears. At their worst, however, these tension-building devices — be they a deceleration of camera motion, the prolonging of ominous notes in the score, or simply a drawn focus on scenery — can be arguably derided as directorial cop-out techniques when the end product just doesn’t justify a long and ultimately hollow ride.
So where does The Interior, Trevor Juras’ unique genre-hybrid of a debut, fall within this scope? Though it is a film that early on has all the trappings of a cynical independent comedy, The Interior is ultimately a very quiet film that seeks above all to draw one in with an allure of mystery and a growing sense of concern. It is a very divisive slow burn that leans heavily on atmosphere, a hypnotic pace, and an increasingly pronounced focus on the minutiae of its engulfing backdrop to affect its audience. It is not “horror” in the traditional sense — and admittedly, it’s barely horror in the fringe sense — but when it works, there is indeed something curiously horrific about the circumstances that befall the film’s protagonist, a disillusioned Canadian twenty-something named James (McFadden) who may (or may not?) be the target of a dark force in the forest.
The film, which most recently screened at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, follows James after he has received an undisclosed medical diagnosis. Up to this point, James has been trudging listlessly through each day of work at a corporate cookie-cutter ad agency, while also maintaining a seemingly detached relationship of sorts with a girl who is at a loss when it comes to his general disenchantment with life. After sticking it to his dismissive jerk of a boss, James is naturally rendered unemployed. He attempts to get a blue collar job to an equally mind-numbing effect and ultimately decides to steal away to the British Columbia Interior for some reflection.
Soon after finding that he may not be able to cut it in the wilderness, he sneaks into a nearby home one morning for a shower and some stolen wine. Following this intrusion, however, James begins to notice a man in a red jacket near his campsite who seems to be moving in on him. Is the stranger seeking to enact revenge on James for his petty crime, or is something more sinister at work here in the Interior that is targeting James?
As you may suspect, the answer is never made entirely clear. At its core, The Interior instead seeks to say something more general about the fearful nature of the unfamiliar — especially those seemingly innocuous curiosities that a wild mind can reimagine as monstrous. Juras’ exploration of how the harsh light of reality (see: adulthood) can knock a once assured spirit into a threatening chasm of uncertainty is surprisingly compelling when played to the first-time director’s strengths.
The film kicks off with Juras painting a droll picture of James’ laughably fruitless existence, anchored by a resolutely smug cynicism that seems more often than not perpetuated by his own self-defeating approach to life. He is the kind of guy who wears a permanent scowl and delivers angry monologues about his boss, but who also finds it appropriate to show up to a doctor’s appointment high as a kite and to leave passive apology notes signed “Jesus” after breaking into a stranger’s home. James, played convincingly through a lens of both obnoxious indifference and abject hysteria by McFadden, is a very specific representation of middle-class disillusionment that makes him the perfect protagonist in a story about feeling irrefutably lost at one of life’s crossroads. What we ultimately witness in The Interior is a guy whose perception of suffering is starkly called into question when he is actually faced with a genuinely threatening level of “otherness” that he cannot handle — a true tale of terror for Generation Y if there ever was one.
One’s questionable perception ultimately becomes the towering monster in The Interior, and the film’s novel examination of someone like James experiencing the unfamiliar reality of life’s less desirable emotions is particularly genius when it is played subtly. The pointedly comedic first act of the film has its smirk-inspiring moments, but the film truly succeeds when it quiets down and focuses simply on the vast woodland landscape engulfing its prey. We never quite know the truth of James’ medical diagnosis, and framed with this uncertainty, Juras pushes the viewer to question everything we see in the Interior, which makes James’ journey all the more amusing as its beauty grows darker. Is the man in the red jacket a real threat, or have James’ anxieties run amok? Is James actually imagining what he sees as result of a neurological disorder, or is he just at the end of his existential rope? The film never answers any of these questions; instead, it forges a unique path that shirks standard horror tropes and instead focuses on making most everything — a cooler, a rustle in the distance, a set of abandoned spectacles — a potential threat. In these moments, Juras depends on the aforementioned tension-building techniques, many of which work to the desired effect until the film’s art-house inspired finale. As we perceive these surroundings through the eyes of an increasingly fearful James, we come to find them terrifying, too. By the time the film’s most horrific image appears, it doesn’t even strike us that, on its own, it is actually extremely silly; at this point, our nerves are shot and we do fear for James, whether the threats are in his own head or not.
As a first-time director, Juras gets major technical points alone for handling his subjects — both McFadden and the British Columbia Interior — with an adroit delicacy. The shots within the Interior are breathtaking in the light and alarmingly unrecognizable when the sun falls. You cannot help but feel a suffocating sense of dread as a slowly drifting James sinks deeper into the thick of the enveloping setting, accompanied by a creeping romantic score courtesy of musical supervisor Tomas Jirku. Where the film tends to falter is in its more gratuitously laborious moments that rely heavily on slow motion and hallucinatory filmmaking gimmicks to convey the already identifiable theme of questionable sanity. When it is understated, The Interior is quite tense and recalls the less-is-more approach that worked wonders for last year’s Willow Creek. Occasionally, though, Juras’ approach falls to a stylistic ambiguity that seems aimed to incite interpretation and discussion, but comes cross instead as a bit tedious and confounding.
Despite some of its more amateur missteps, The Interior as a whole still feels impressively fresh. Juras has displayed a keen sense for manipulating tension and perspective in a way that makes for a special kind of horror experience — one that worms its way into your gut and slowly infects you with unease. The audience for films like this may be modest at this point in time, but they are important films in the genre nonetheless, and continue to prove that sometimes what we can be made to imagine is more horrific than what our eyes behold.
Had a chance to catch The Interior? Sound off in the comments below or shoot me a tweet (@TheAriDrew) and share your thoughts!
-
Film
Categorized:Reviews
