One could say that Here Comes the Devil opens with a bang. Literally. The opening scene is striking; two women having passionate sex while a loud and unpleasant soundtrack obliterates your ears. The scene is reminiscent of something David Lynch would parade around in front of his audience. Director Adrián García Bogliano seems to be heavily influenced by the surrealist filmmaker. Although Lynch is a great inspiration, he is often hard to replicate and Bogliano can only seem to get some of it right.

The opening sex scene is followed by a brutal attack on one of the women from the opening tryst. A mysterious stranger breaks in to the house and begins to beat her before hacking off some of her fingers with a machete. We never see the face of the assailant as he flees from the house after the other woman runs in to save her.

Cut to present day and we meet Felix, his wife Sol and their children as they are on a small road trip near Tijuana. During a brief stop at a gas station the children ask if they can play in the hills. The kids run off and Felix and Sol stay behind in the car and wait. In what has to be the most extraordinary, and utterly baffling, scene of the film, Felix ferociously seduces Sol in their car. It’s one of those experiences where you chuckle to yourself and ask, “Am I actually witnessing this?” It’s sensationally erotic.

There is a lot to admire in Bogliano’s film. He creates an undeniably strong atmosphere; sometimes it’s suffocating. Bogliano also seems to be heavily inspired by 70s filmmaking, which is not a bad thing. There is a montage midway through the film that is one of the best pieces of filmmaking in the horror genre that I’ve seen in years. An unholy mixture of blood and satanic, sadomasochistic behavior; the montage is a highlight of Bogliano’s film.

Bogliano is also inspired by the who’s who of horror. I couldn’t help but feel that the gas station location and the missing person scenario was inspired by the marvelous Dutch thriller Spoorloos. And of course we cannot forget Peter Weir’s classic, surrealistic Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which a group of girls go missing at a rock formation, which is eerily similar to the one seen in Here Comes the Devil.

The biggest thing that holds Here Comes the Devil back from being a good movie is the overall cheapness that expels from it. In some scenes you can hardly hear any words being spoken by the characters (while in others the soundtrack explodes like a bomb). The film itself looks to be made with low rent cameras and the film’s poor lighting just seems to make it look even worse. In the end, the film’s high aspirations are done in by its low production qualities. Another thing that hurts the film is the pure sporadic nature of the film’s tone. Bogliano builds a great amount of tension in a lot of scenes but ruins them with odd sound cues that take you out of the moment. It’s just too much at times, which is unfortunate since Here Comes the Devil gets a lot right. While I’m not going to recommend the film, I’m very excited to see what director Bogliano cooks up next.

Here Comes the Devil trailer

Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio is very much a movie about movies. In it we follow Gilderoy (the excellent character actor Toby Jones), a sound man who accepts a job offer in Italy on a giallo slasher. Its 70s setting helps put the focus on Gilderoy’s analog sound work which requires some creative ways to get desired sounds. All we see of the giallo film is a psychedelic credit sequence but there are plenty of times where we watch Gilderoy stabbing cabbages, pouring hot oil on a pan or blending tomatoes to mimic the sounds of the heinous acts we aren’t able to see. Eventually all of the fake brutality gets to Gilderoy, and he slowly becomes unable to tell the difference between the film and his own life. Strickland uses plenty of tools to show Gilderoy’s feelings of alienation (there are no exterior shots) and loosening grip on reality, but the results are a mixed bag. Some sequences, like one where Gilderoy is mimicking sounds of the night, are executed beautifully in a way where it’s hard to tell what’s real and fake. On the other hand, Strickland makes a big mistake by subtitling all of the Italian in the film which, since Gilderoy can’t speak a word of the language, doesn’t give us the same feeling of confusion or alienation that he has. By the end Berberian Sound Studio dives right off the deep end with a moment similar to Bergman’s Persona, but its abrupt ending doesn’t make for a conclusion that’s too fulfilling. Berberian Sound Studio is definitely unique with some wonderful moments that nail what Strickland is going for, but it’s too uneven to be something truly great.

RATING: 7/10

Berberian Sound Studio

Next up was Here Comes The Devil, a US/Mexican horror film that left me feeling baffled after its screening. It starts off with a graphic sex scene between two women which ends with a machete wielding madman trying to murder one of the women before fleeing to a mountain. Suddenly the focus shifts to a vacationing family who let their son and daughter go hiking up the same mountain. The children don’t come back but are found by the cops the next day. The parents soon notice that their kids seem very distant, and when a check-up at the doctor reveals that the daughter doesn’t have a hymen the mother assumes that they were sexually assaulted by someone. Of course things aren’t that simple, and soon enough the mother starts to believe some sort of evil presence is involved while her husband takes the usual ‘skeptic/rational’ role. At the beginning of Here Comes The Devil I wasn’t enjoying the cheap and cheesy execution. The thing was shot on what looks like a poor DV camera, the compositions were laughable with their extreme close-ups and similarity to comic book panels, and the aggressive sound design was grating. But as it went on I started to warm up to director Adrián García Bogliano’s weird methods. His use of quick zooms and shoddy special effects felt like they came straight out of a student film, but the story kept the film going at a nice momentum. Towards the climax I even started to warm up to some of the absurd framing, but it wasn’t strong enough to salvage too much. Here Comes The Devil may be awful a lot of the time, yet I can’t deny its power at keeping me invested throughout.

RATING: 6.5/10

Here Comes The Devil

NEXT UP: I take on Thomas Vinterberg’s seemingly divisive The Hunt and try to not get seasick while watching Leviathan.

Recap of some of my Tweets from today:

Follow @WayTooIndie for full coverage of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival!

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO: Some fantastic moments but it gets too bogged down in its insanity to be truly great #TIFF12

— Way Too Indie (@WayTooIndie) September 11, 2012

Now in the hot docs cinema waiting for HERE COMES THE DEVIL to start #TIFF12 twitter.com/WayTooIndie/st…

— Way Too Indie (@WayTooIndie) September 11, 2012

HERE COMES THE DEVIL: A very strange movie that almost (Almost!) won me over in the end

— Way Too Indie (@WayTooIndie) September 12, 2012