Finale (2009) - 3/4

You can always tell a movie has good writing when it resists that temptation for immediate explanation that is called 'spoon-feeding.' Some movies have this imperative to explain. They need to stuff the answers into the audience immediately, lest the audience be lost for even a moment. John Michael Elfers, who wrote and directed Finale, never forces the exposition. He so trusts the audience to endure the temporary confusion and to make the necessary connections when finally he enlightens us that he allows the mysteries to linger until near the film's end. The first ten minutes are very confusing, but the patient viewer will be rewarded. Confusion is not necessarily a bad thing. Finale is partially about confusion. It concerns the confusion of a family in the aftermath of an apparent suicide. As the family members, especially the mother, are thrust into confusion, it's important that we're confused with them. This puts Finale in the tradition of two other great confusion movies, The Seventh Victim and Rosemary's Baby. And not coincidentally, all three films are about satanic cults and families.

Satanic cult films tend toward two poles. There's the realist pole. The Seventh Victim, Race with the Devil and Rosemary's Baby are satanic cult films of the realist variety. The cult is represented as a rather ordinary, even pathetic, collection of humans with no obvious powers. In The Seventh Victim the cult appears more like a resentful upper-class clique than a cult in contact with supernatural evil. Their forces are purely physical (the assassin) and psychological (urging to suicide). Rosemary's Baby has some ambiguity. We're not certain how much Rosemary imagines and how much is real. There may well be a cult, but there may not be any supernatural forces at work. The characteristic feature of the realistic satanic cult film is paranoia and confusion. Paranoia because there is no way to know a cult member from a non-member, confusion because there is no way to know a part of the conspiracy from an ordinary event. There is, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the supernaturalist pole. Night of the Demon, The Devil's Rain and The Devil Rides Out are satanic cult films of the supernaturalist variety. In all three films we're unambiguously treated to horned demons, powerful magic and horrific apparitions. Instead of paranoia, these films create a sense of vulnerability. The Devil Rides Out especially plays on vulnerability as it climaxes with the protagonists huddling in a small magic circle.

Finale falls in between the poles, much like Polanski's The Ninth Gate. As in The Ninth Gate, there is a real supernatural evil at work. As in The Ninth Gate, the satanic cult is an ordinary yet dangerous collection of real people. As in The Ninth Gate, Finale creates a sense of both paranoia and vulnerability as mysterious forces natural and supernatural impose upon the protagonist. The vulnerable target of the cult in Finale is a Catholic family, the Michaels, consisting of a mom, a dad, and three children. The authorities conclude the eldest son Sean has committed suicide, but his mother Helen (Carolyn Hauck) is not convinced. As she investigates Sean's strange behaviour before his death, she finds he had uncovered a cult's secrets and was terrified of the demon they control. Helen becomes increasingly paranoid and worries for her now vulnerable family, especially her teen daughter Kathryn (Suthi Picotte), whose involvement in a drama club may have put her in the cult's hands. Unfortunately, her family thinks she's just having a breakdown.

Helen herself is a fascinating character. She's the center of the paranoia, the Rosemary of this film. Hauck plays Helen manically, lending the film that same sense of urgency found in Rosemary's Baby. One really feels time is running out and it's Hauck's performance that centers the feeling. But where it took Rosemary to the middle of the film to realize she has to do something, Helen realizes this near the beginning and the urgency mounts to the final moment. Also like Rosemary, Helen's a psychologically soft person to begin with, making it easy to distrust her. She has somnambulistic episodes as she dreams of interacting with her dead son. She is, after all, a Catholic; if her son committed suicide, his soul is lost. Since we're permitted to see her episodes subjectively, in some lyrical dream sequences. This leaves open the possibility that she's just paranoid and that the denial she's suffering over her son's death has led her to concoct a satanic cult conspiracy. At least, that's how it should feel for the audience. Elfers seemingly gives away the real presence of a cult and its supernatural powers in the first five minutes, reducing the potential ambiguity. But it isn't impossible to see those five minutes as a vision of Helen's. Elfers uses a hermetic editing style that permits this interpretation.

Both Elfers's narrative and his editing style give the film a hermetic quality. Everything seems linked to everything else. Nothing appears to happen by chance. A chat with a priest, a drama club, teenage romance, the satanic cult, pipe bombs, an abandoned factory and a cat woman all somehow connect. As in any conspiracy theory, nothing's allowed to be extraneous. The editing style similarly makes confusing connections we must wait to understand. For instance, when Helen's living son tells her, "Mom, I want to talk to you about something," Elfers cuts to a shot of a burning house, breaking the unities of both time and space. The significance of that shot doesn't become clear until the end of the third act. The confusion this generated on first viewing immersed me in the paranoia; I felt the conspiracy. Elfers makes everything feel connected with his editing, even if you don't know why it's connected. Perhaps we're immersed in Helen's psychological torment and feel with her the urgency to make sense of all this material.

The apparent Catholic ideology of the film may support this view as well. Nearly every character in the film is ostensibly Catholic. During her drama audition, Kathryn has a self-written soliloquy about the horror behind the figurative masks people wear. There are those in the film who are willing to sacrifice themselves for loved ones and those who sacrifice loved ones to the demon for their own gain. Kathryn's soliloquy, which references God directly, is thus about who are the true Christians. The apparent Catholics who actually pray to a demon for selfish desires are allegorical of those who believe on the surface but fail to show Christian charity. Now we can return to Helen. The whole film is Helen's struggle to protect her family from this demon called 'The Collector', so called because it 'collects' souls. Her efforts transcend merely protecting her living family to redeeming the soul of her dead son. If in her mind the demon is symbolic of separation from God, her willingness to sacrifice her life to stop the demon is a symbolic Christlike redemption of her son. The Catholic ideology doesn't work quite as well if what we see is taken literally, because the Christian belief system only allows the loss of the soul by free will. A demon can't just take your soul. The Catholic allegory falls apart anyway when the explosives and knife-fights begin. Although, there is something eschatologically valid about the destruction of 'false Christians' in an inferno.

I've been praising Elfers's willingness to leave points unexplained and the audience in confusion. However, some areas are under-written. Particularly the demon and the cult. In The Seventh Victim we know what the cult wants and why. In Night of the Demon we understand the rules of the game, what Karswell can and can't do, and how the demon will come. We do get a set of rules on how the demon functions, such as the exact minute it can attack, but not a clever means of getting rid of it. The game of wits from Night of the Demon is reduced to blowing the cultists to smithereens here. But it's not clear what the satanic cult in Finale is all about. The demon seems to have one function: killing for souls. But why do these people want the demon to kill so often? These people function normally in society, so they can't have that many enemies. It's not clear why they resent the whole Michaels family so much either. Is it simply because they're Catholic? Not knowing whether Elfers is himself Catholic or not, all I can say is Finale seems to express a general paranoia about the position of Catholics in a secular world that increasingly villainizes religion and that increasingly encourages self-interested behaviour.

Then there's the appearance of the demon. Tourneur loathed having to show the demon at all in Night of the Demon, but the demon they settled on is indeed a fierce-looking beast. Elfers's demon is relying on his visual style. His style is made up of peculiar optical tricks, such as creative use of lens flares and gels. It gives the film a heavily-processed look, not unlike Saint-Booth's Death Tunnel. The IMDb trivia assures me that Elfers's visual trickery was all accomplished in-camera. If that's true, it's very impressive. But the effect is still similar, regardless of the cause. In many instances it's elegant, such as a horrific suicide scene and the orgiastic demon-summoning. In other instances, it's not so effective: the demon itself is a wiggling bald man in a strait jacket shot through a blue gel, soft-focus and sped-up. It doesn't quite have the menace a soul-stealing demon ought to. Its only means of attack is to telekinetically strangle through mirrors. So it has no actual contact with the actors. It's a valiant effort at minimalist demon-construction, but not very frightening.

But then, The Seventh Victim isn't frightening either. Finale, like The Seventh Victim, creates more of an existential terror, in this case from a Catholic existentialism. And both films anchor that existential terror in atmospheric set pieces, which are really Finale's biggest strength. Helen's dream sequences always show her with flowing lace trains navigating familiar sets given an uncanny feel with wind and well-chosen camera angles; the spaces have a desolation that perhaps mirror her inner turmoil over her lost son. A chase through an abandoned factory beside a cemetery is poetically nightmarish and one of the best chases I've seen in a recent independent horror picture. Helen might as well have been pursued by doubt itself.

Elfers packs a lot of narrative into Finale's ninety-minute runtime, making the comparison to Val Lewton's masterpiece The Seventh Victim a legitimate one. Both films move across a lot of narrative material, over shocking and potent moments swiftly, leaving even the attentive viewer a little behind on all levels. The full impact or significance of some moments don't quite register until one takes the time to reflect or rewatch. While not as delicately constructed as The Seventh Victim or as subtly manipulative as Rosemary's Baby, Finale is a good entry in the tradition of satanic cult pictures.