By Tristan Bishop
Your teen years can be a scary place, what with all those possibilities and unknown quantities rubbing up against hormonal explosions – things can get weird and extreme quite quickly, so it’s unsurprising that filmmakers tend to keep mining the teenage experience for horror films. Of course, the vast majority don’t really tap into that hormonal confusion, preferring to dwell instead on teenage parties and a little adolescent skin – both of which are perfectly exploitable elements of course, but it tends to be the ones that channel the fear of coming into an adult world and its associated feelings that really hit the spot. The last film that pops into my mind that did this correctly is 2015’s It Follows, a film which, not coincidentally perhaps, scared the pants off this reviewer. I mention this because Anguish seems to have a lot in common with It Follows at first glance – it’s beautifully filmed, centres around a teenage girl, and, although it swaps the run-down suburban sprawl of Detroit for unnamed small-town America, has a similar sense of place.
Anguish certainly wastes no time in setting things up – we open on an argument between a mother and daughter in a car about whether or not the daughter is allowed to go on a camping trip with her schoolfriends. The mother isn’t so sure, and so the daughter gets out to angrily stomp home – unfortunately not noticing the truck coming in the other direction…flash forward an unspecified amount of time and teenage Tess (Ryan Simpkins)and her mother (Annika Marks) have moved to the area. Tess’s father is a soldier and has been away from home a long time (he keeps in touch by Skype) and Tess has been a troubled child since an early age, suffering from depression, anxiety, hallucinations and other mental disorders. Tess spends her time sitting out under the stars or skateboarding by herself, and one day stumbles across a roadside memorial to Lucy, the girl who was killed in the opening scene. And something happens – Tess is knocked backwards by some kind of mysterious force, and then starts to experience numerous strange occurrences – seeing dozens of hands on her bedroom window, mysterious figures trying to get into her house, and other strange apparitions. Her mother naturally believes that Tess’s mental disorders are getting on top of her, but the doctors seem unable to help. However, after a local priest gets involved, things get a little bit more complicated.
There are many things to like about Anguish. Ryan Simpkins’ performance is perfectly judged – she comes across as totally believable and relatable as the extremely troubled teen in a performance where lesser actors may have come off as just irritating, and she’s a real credit to the film, pulling us in and making us genuinely care about what happens to her. Whilst the spookiest moments are underscored by jump scare music, a tactic which normally turns me right off, they actually work surprisingly well when balanced against the autumnal colours and folksy score of the rest of the film. In fact, the unusual juxtaposition of style works entirely in the film’s favour – it’s part indie mumblecore drama and part Insidious, which works so well for the majority of the running time as we’re kept on our toes as to whether Tess’s experiences are supernatural or the result of her illnesses worsening – in fact, aside from It Follows, the other film that came to mind frequently during viewing was Polanski’s Repulsion – both in the theme of mental disintegration and also in at least one visual reference.
Sadly this doesn’t last – By the final act the film’s plot has solidified into something unambiguous and frankly, a little silly, and in doing so dissipates whatever unease had been built up in the first hour. In fact, the story ends up feeling less like a horror film and more a comforting tale about passing on and acceptance – which is all well and good, but when you’ve managed to creep out an audience effectively for 60 minutes, you’ve got to expect them to feel a little cheated out of a dramatic or horrific conclusion. I did find myself wondering if the last half hour was the film that the director wanted to make all along, and found he had to push in some horror tropes to make it ‘saleable’. Either way it’s a massive let-down, and a real shame because the first hour really is something different.
Whether you end up loving Anguish will entirely depend on your feelings about the final half hour (and possibly your tolerance for religious material – which, whilst not exactly overdone, is certainly foregrounded here more than your average horror flick). If you enjoyed Insidious et al then it’s certainly worth a go (and is guaranteed to give you a few scares) but otherwise you may find yourself yearning for something which hangs together a little better.
Anguish will be released (in the UK) on 1st April 2016.