Cut (2010) - 1/4

In my review of Hush, I write that a new subgenre of horror film has developed throughout the 2000s. That is the terror film. The terror film creates a limited situation, usually located at an isolated house in the country, places a group of "real" people inside the situation as protagonists and then sends a siege of murderous humans as 'monsters' against the protagonists. The motivation doesn't matter. What matters is that the protagonists have a limited number of options and the monsters have a seemingly infinite number of options. This renders the protagonists extremely vulnerable. Each of their decisions will result in terror for the audience, because each could result in death or injury. The result is unpredictable due to the semi-omnipotence of the monsters. The best and purest example of the terror film is The Strangers. Vacancy and Funny Games are also decent examples. Hush and Joy Ride combine the terror film with the road chase film, Joy Ride being the superior of the two. One comes to appreciate the art of these terror films when one is faced with an inferior terror film like Cut.

There is no question that Cut is recycling the ideas of The Strangers and Vacancy. The monsters have painted faces in the style of Vacancy. The setting is a house in the country in the style of The Strangers. The structure of the film is a by-the-numbers terror film. There is the tantalizing ringing of the doorbell at the beginning. It was a knock in The Strangers. In The Strangers, it was paced well and the girl was left alone. In Cut, there are other people upstairs and the pace is just off. The ringing comes too early and too frequently, or perhaps the problem is that the door is too close to the living room and, well, unlocked. Soon it goes beyond a ringing doorbell to breaking something. In The Strangers, a window is broken, if I recall. In Cut, it's a garden gnome or two. There's something vaguely silly about that, but it gets the point across. Eventually, a monster must make an appearance. In The Strangers, one is seen in a patch of deep-focus negative space. No attention is called to his presence; one's eyes are simply drawn to the negative space and one is shocked to discover something there that shouldn't be. In Cut, a startling sound effect tells one, "Look what we have here!" There is no thrill in discovering the danger for oneself. Then the cat-and-mouse game begins. Mostly a cat game, as the monsters seem able to slip in and out at will, just as in The Strangers. The smaller size of the house and the clumsy, roving camera makes these monsters appear as much like actors told to run down the stairs at the moment as like dangerous thugs with knives.

Then there is the issue of "real people." The terror film thrives upon giving us real people. The terror film's vision of 'real people' is nearly always people in the midst of a painful situation that involves much drama. In Vacancy it's a divorce. In The Strangers it's a shot-down marriage proposal. In Hush it's a break-up. Michael Haneke was more clever with Funny Games and gives us people who do seem real without contrived conflict. Cut put a bunch of humanizing or "realistic" character traits on a wheel and spun: a pregnancy here, a career man there, a guy with loan shark troubles, a guy trying to write a cliche horror film script. And they are all very dramatic people. They make the characters in Romero's Day of the Dead seem sedate. They never listen to one another and are yelling from beginning to end. If the "real" people in The Strangers and Vacancy with their bickering and communication problems are annoying, imagine six of them all in a small house together. Two of these characters actually managed to be decently enjoyable, due to being the least dramatic and due to the actors' screen presences. Those are the loan shark guy, Michael (Dominic Burns), and the career man, Jack (Zach Galligan, of Gremlins fame). Of those Michael is the most enjoyable. We first see him telling an uncomfortable story about a public homosexual rape with ambiguous conviction. Let's hope we see more of Dominic Burns in the future.

As always, the dominant attitude of the terror film seems to be that the major problems of our lives that seem so important are in fact so very trivial. In the face of absolute terror, in the face of the absurd threat of having one's life stolen away for no good reason in a purposeless universe, our quibbles melt away and the sense of a life unlived overwhelms. I'm reminded of the John Donne passage Val Lewton cites in The Seventh Victim, "I run to death, and death meets me as fast,/And all my pleasures are like yesterday." It is the inverse. Running from death, all one's missed pleasures are held out of view in a possibly unreachable tomorrow. Careers, pregnancies, money, sex are all such trivial things compared to survival. At least, this is what terror films imply. It's what Cut implies.

Cut also undermines its own implications by implying more, however awkwardly. There is no good reason for what happens. But there is a reason. More of a reason than in The Strangers. The tagline, No second chances tells you so much. In life, unlike in a film or game, one can't rewind or restart. One bad choice can put one up against the aforementioned absurd threat. In Vacancy and The Strangers, there is no bad choice: the threat truly is absurd. In Cut, there is more responsibility, literally and figuratively, on the part of the victims. Cut hates its own protagonists as much as I did. In fact, I probably hated them because Cut did. They had it coming. Even though they didn't, really.

As much as I try to find something worth pondering in all the films I review, as much as I try to support first-time directors, Alexander Williams's Cut offers very little to consider. Aside from Michael's story of homosexual rape and a brief movie-in-a-movie scene, there is almost no extra-narrative material to enjoy and no worldview on display. Cut briskly and single-mindedly enacts its formula; its characters and settings exist for that formula. And that formula has been enacted much better in the other films I mention throughout this review.