TRANCE (1998)
"Everything that is, is in the process of becoming something else."
3 out of ****
Starring Alison Elliott, Jared Harris, Christopher Walken, Lois Smith; Written and Directed by Michael Almereyda; Cinematography by Jim Denault
It's hard to make a gloomy mansion possessed by an undead spirit seem like an original conceit, but American writer/director Michael Almereyda gives it his best shot in TRANCE (aka THE ETERNAL). He makes sophisticated use of dark fantasy tropes and a sombre visual palette in this horror story about a 2000-year-old druid haunting the ancestral home of an Irish family, but ultimately fails to transcend the circumscribed limits of the generic material.
The movie begins in America, where Nora (Alison Elliott) and Jim (Jared Harris) and their eight-year-old son are about to leave to visit Nora's aging grandmother in Ireland. Nora falls down a staircase and has to see her doctor; he advises her to call off the trip and reminds her that she should stop drinking because of her headaches. She ignores him. Next stop, Ireland, for a couple of pints of Guiness in a village pub, and, then, as the family drives down the winding road to their destination, strange images obscure Nora's vision, and she crashes the car. The family is miraculously uninjured, and they exit the damaged vehicle to find Alice, who lives with Nora's grandfather and uncle, standing solemnly by the side of the road. She leads them to the family home--a huge ancient house by the dark, treacherous bog.
Almereyda effectively develops a mood of unease and foreboding in the early scenes, suggesting that Nora and Jim drown their personal demons with heavy drinking, and anticipating the incursion of the supernatural into the mundane world by showing us brief elliptical images in Nora's head and having Alice appear with uncannily precise timing. Things become stranger when we meet Nora's uncle (Christopher Walken, sporting an intermittent Irish accent). He is a strange, reclusive fellow, perhaps insane--at night, he leads Nora to the cellar, where he reveals the preserved peat-encrusted body of an ancient druid woman. Of course, the druid will come to life, and she will kill people. And the phone line is down. It is a horror story, after all.
It's a superior example of its kind in large part because Almereyda, in tandem with cinematographer Jim Denault (THE BOOK OF LIFE, CLOCKWATCHERS), establishes a mesmeric, disquieting appearance for the film: it looks the way horror movies should look. Long shots of dim hallways where characters stand shrouded in shadow, silhouetted by distant light. Malfunctioning electric lights which bathe scenes in stark ominous flickering blue luminescence. Abrupt images of weirdly solemn children who appear at odd moments and say nothing. TRANCE is fundamentally a conventional tale, but it is distinguished by its visual elegance, including some sequences shot in Super-8 and, so I'm told, Fisher-Price Pixelvision; the latter produces extremely low-fi images which are remarkably effective here as a vehicle for dissociative and enigmatic flashbacks.
TRANCE also stretches the limits of its genre by making supple metaphoric use of supernatural motifs. Almereyda is interested in using the conventions of horror to explore the persona of Nora rather than to exploit their shock value. Nora's return home, from New World to Old World, seems intended as a symbolic encounter with her past identity, a coming-to-terms with the passionate girl she used to be, before she left for America and the comfort of her vapid marriage to glib, superficial Jim.
The druid, when she comes to life, appears in Nora's form, and functions as an external manifestation of Nora's repressed self, as doubles often do in supernatural tales (Poe's "William Wilson" is a classic example). While Nora is emotive, civilized, neurotic and peaceable, the druid is silent, feral, implacable and violent; Alison Elliott is good in the double role, conveying the differences without overplaying them. The film becomes a confrontation between two aspects of the same woman: it is about the need to acknowledge the past and to assimilate our buried selves.
Unfortunately, whatever its intentions, TRANCE devolves into moments of predictable horror during the final third, which weaken the otherwise intriguing finale. There is, for instance, a ludicrous reversal of situation when a character on the verge of death is saved by an off-screen--and implausible--gunshot. Later, the druid advances menacingly down the hall of the old house while gusts of meteorogically unlikely wind whip her hair about and swirl redundant leaves about her feet. Almereyda has a strong sense of irony, and brings style and flair even to these routine moments; nevertheless, such moments root the film within a moribund genre, when it should be stepping beyond it.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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