The New Daughter (2009) - 3/4

The old "Indian" sacred site is a familiar horror film trope. It is most memorably found in the Pet Sematary films and Poltergeist. Though The New Daughter sounds as though it would be another Evil Little Girl movie, it is in fact an Indian Burial Ground movie. The project of these movies is always to threaten an innocent, white, American family. The full wrath European conquerors have incurred by their disrespect for these children of the Earth and their sacred places is meted out to a single family and sometimes, as in Pet Sematary, that family is torn apart as a consequence. The psychological and moral implications are, of course, instances of "White guilt" and our own way of dealing with it. We give ourselves catharsis by making movies in which some wronged, technologically inferior but spiritually superior society exerts its spiritual force against a totally unprepared, materialistic family. Our sense of guilt is thus manifested, freed from subconscious repression. It's never defeated in these movies; it's rather just avoided. The Indian burial ground in Pet Sematary remains, though Creed may have survived. The sufferers learn new respect. We the audience learn new respect. And our guilt is excised. We've now been symbolically punished on the screen and, whether the evil force wins or loses, we leave with some sort of a catharsis. It's more comforting when the white American family gets a happy ending, of course. To see them actually torn apart places a burden upon the audience by refusing to once again repress the guilt. Of course, the idea that these sacred sites are festering centers of evil spiritual energy and channeled resentment are totally xenophobic notions. There's no room for reconciliation in these movies. There is only the dangerous ancient spirituality and the need to either destroy or get far away from that danger. The New Daughter displays this distrust at least as well as Pet Sematary.

The New Daughter concerns a writer and father, John James (Kevin Costner) who, since his wife has suddenly decided she wants nothing to do with her family, is left to take care of his pubescent daughter, Louisa (Ivana Baquero), and younger son, Sam (Gattlin Griffin). He buys an enormous house in a rural, New England area to be their new home. After discovering a peculiar mound on their property strange things happen and Louisa begins changing and exhibiting unhealthy interest in the mound. John's concern leads him to discover that the mound may be home to some ancient demonic entities.

What's interesting about The New Daughter is the way the influence of the burial ground coincides with budding female sexuality. There are sexual implications to the mound itself. Even the shape and name, of course, brings to mind female genitalia. But more than this, there has always been a curious relationship between female sexuality and the spirituality of Earth religions, an idea that female fertility has spiritual power. Nicolas Roeg's Puffball recently explored this theme in depth. In The New Daughter Louisa is just beginning puberty. At the same time, this mound begins changing her. As it happens, the two events are linked. The whole movie, in fact, is steeped in a mystified horror of female sexuality, not unlike what one finds in Zulawski's Possession, which is about a woman who abandons her family for an alien sexual partner. For one, the family is not just being torn apart by the influence of the burial ground (the mound), but also by the departure of the mother. It's this inexplicable event hanging outside the film's narrative: how could a woman just leave her family? The same question comes up in the previous film I reviewed, Salvage; but in Salvage there was a clear answer. There is no answer in The New Daughter. Without a mother, or 'queen', John's family seems to be falling apart despite his best efforts.

These links between the mound and female sexuality are made explicit. A very obvious metaphor involving an ant colony and its queen makes clear the sexual importance of the mound: Louisa's new sexuality makes her valuable to the mound, which, like the James family, lacks a queen. On first blush, The New Daughter might appear to be an allegory of the experience of female pubescence, like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or Picnic at Hanging Rock. Louisa's own experience of this sexual attention and its defiling properties is hauntingly depicted when she huddles in the shower covered in mud. However, this film, as the title indicates, is primarily from a father's point of view. Costner brings a certain bewildered and beleaguered pathos to the film as the caring, self-sacrificing father, who clearly finds his new role as the lone parent overwhelming. His performance is quite enjoyable, making the most of a somewhat flat character. One does wonder why he never brings his daughter to a hospital, but this is presumably an oversight of the writers; he clearly loves his children, to the point of sometimes being unrealistically patient and sweet. He and his struggling relationship with his daughter is the heart of the film. How her sexuality affects him is the real horror. I've always wondered how it must feel for a father to see his daughter become sexually mature and with that the object of sexual interest to males. He, as a male, knows that men desire and will try to fulfill the desire to have sex with his 'little girl' for pleasure and for reproduction. That paternal horror is uniquely expressed in The New Daughter when John discovers just how important his daughter's sexuality is to the mound. This film is about a man losing his daughter. There are even two clever references to the drowning scene that opens Roeg's Don't Look Now. But in The New Daughter, his daughter remains physically present. It's her soul, as it were, that is lost to sexuality and the mound. In the mound-penetrating climax, we see a man trying to rescue his daughter from the creatures, yes, but from becoming a woman, indeed, from becoming her mom.

The relationship between the film's sexuality and the more political 'white guilt' is curiously xenophobic. Perhaps there's nothing to it; perhaps it just happened to make a good story. What we see, however, is a white girl targeted for sexual conversion and a sort of spiritual brainwashing by a race of humanoid creatures. As racism begins to fade and with it many sexual taboos, an interest in interracial experimentation has become popular amongst white women much more than it has amongst women of other races. There are those who claim this is a consequence of 'white guilt.' The father's horror at his girl being transformed through her sexual interest in the Other, a non-white and in this case non-human race, thus becomes strangely xenophobic. The film, perhaps, allows a predominantly white male audience to see their subconscious resentment at white women in interracial relationships become the object of revulsion and an object to be targeted with violent force within the film world.

Unfortunately, all of these ideas are never explored in sufficient depth. The New Daughter is certainly a film with ideas. Somewhere along the production the ideas were compromised to stick to formula. The presence of Kevin Costner, Samantha Mathis, and Ivana Baquero probably made the producers uneasy about veering from established thriller formula. Costner and Baquero have both shown themselves willing to take daring roles in thoughtful films, but they're doubtless expensive to get in one's film. Consequently, there are a lot of stock conflicts, such as the random bully at school, as well as moments obviously created for no other reason than to make the trailer. Moreover, John has to jump through the formula hoops: he contacts the previous owner of the house and initiates the 'raving warning from an old man' moment; he contacts an expert scholar who gives the end-of-the-third-act exposition of all that's been going on. These moments are ones we've seen many times before. They are unconvincing, despite director Luis Berdejo's efforts to elevate them with visual techniques; they slightly drag down what could have been a very provocative film.

As a thriller, however, The New Daughter is quite successful. Its closest kin is perhaps The Mothman Prophecies. It's not created with quite the mastery Pellington brings to The Mothman Prophecies, but it has a similarly subdued and subtle approach. Like The Mothman Prophecies, The New Daughter creates a chain of unsettling events, moments that breech the ordinariness and make the viewer uneasy. What could be a more unsettling breech of reality than to see one's own child suddenly seem something Other? As one witnesses Costner reacting to one eerie moment after another, particularly his daughter's alienation, one feels along with him increasingly disturbed rather than frightened. There aren't nearly enough quiet films these days, but The New Daughter is one. The ambient score rarely calls attention to itself, just gently pushing the quiet into unsettlingly quiet. We're allowed to rest in the isolated space of the characters, to be with them and drink in the performances. Berdejo, whose first feature this is, has a skillful and very elegant touch in crafting this gently building sense of disturbance. The final ten minutes, unfortunately, do not live up to his work during build-up, as the film suddenly becomes a high-adrenaline monster movie. The same problem afflicted another skillfully built-up film of 2009, House of the Devil. A transition from thick atmospherics to visceral action is very difficult to carry off and indeed it is not carried off in this film.

So The New Daughter is a fascinating film that should have been more fascinating. It teases with ideas, some of which it follows some way and some of which seem to be dissolved by the motion of the plot. At nearly two hours long, there was a clear effort to include a deeper exploration of its ideas. It's just unfortunate that the movement to fulfill certain formulaic requirements interfered with the delicate eerieness and themes developed in the freer parts of the film.