By Keri O’Shea
Jim Mickle. Joe R. Lansdale. When you hear those two names, chances are you immediately think of the horror genre – so, when both of those names can be mentioned in the same sentence, you’ll definitely expect a certain type of movie. Mickle has, after all, cut his teeth on the horror genre, from his earliest feature, the no-budget zombie movie Mulberry Street (which surprised me with the level of organic social commentary therein), then with the excellent Stake Land and last year’s remake of We Are What We Are, a film which proves single-handedly that remakes are not always a bad thing – far from it. As for Lansdale, even if you don’t know a thing about his books, you’d have had to be living under a rock to miss the cult influence enjoyed by Bubba Ho-Tep. And yet, here we are with Cold in July: a screenplay written by Mickle and friend/collaborator Nick Damici, based on a Lansdale novel, which has nothing to do with horror whatsoever. And the results are superb.
Cold in July is a crime thriller; set in the late 80s in Texas (naturally, given this is a Lansdale story), regular family man Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is awakened in his home one night by the sound of an intruder. Reluctantly reaching into a bedside cabinet to retrieve a handgun, he goes to investigate – and winds up using his weapon, when he is startled during a face-off with an (unarmed) man. He kills the guy stone dead.
Still, these things happen, right? The police, led by the charming and plausible Ray (Damici) assure Dane that none of this was his fault; what the hell was he meant to do when someone breaks into his place? – a man has the right to protect his wife and son. Turns out that the intruder was a wanted man and a felon anyway, so maybe he had it coming. Except said dead felon has a father, who via the press coverage of this story tracks the Dane family down, threatening revenge against them…
…And it was at this stage of the film that my enthusiasm and attention began to wane, to be honest. Firstly, I thought that the pace was jerking along in an uneven way, as if a quick set-up was just being used in order to introduce a Bad Guy who then proceeds to spend the rest of the ninety minutes terrorising a family. I worried for a while there that what I was about to sit through was some sort of love letter to Cape Fear, a similar scenario with a similarly omnipotent, omnipresent villain of the piece.
Happily, I was soon proved wrong, and this early element in the plot is in fact a stepping-stone into far more unfamiliar, unpredictable terrain. Mickle knows what he’s doing, damnit, and what he does here – just as my hopes were fading – is to transform the course of the plot, performing an effective about-face which makes what follows into a pitch-perfect, yet complex sequence of events. As Dane stands in line at the local police station at the end of what you could justifiably call ‘Act One’, a chance discovery leads him to doubt everything he has been told, even everything he has experienced with regards the shooting up until this point. The subsequent developments draw us into a haze of paranoia, doubtful identities, horrific acts, those sorts of ‘voyages of self-discovery’ which alter and darken.
I’m playing coy and throwing nebulous phrases around because it would be a crime to discuss too many of the finer points of the plot here; just know that Cold of July is Mickle’s most accomplished work to date, and his growing confidence – with perhaps the relish at getting to grips with something so unlike any of his previous work, too – allows him to extend his abilities in new ways. He’s always been good at crafting characters whose complete histories never need to be known; here he takes that further, weaving together a complicated and engagingly incomplete array of personae. This expert handling of complexities means that his characters here can appear differently to the audience, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, which adds a great deal to them. This isn’t always as straightforward as it might be. The Dane family, for instance: I had a hard time liking them, even with sympathising with their ordeal at the beginning of the film, however unfair and frightening it is. Hall’s nervy, unworldly behaviour throughout is such a far cry from his work on Dexter that I had trouble recognising him at first – but in his flaws, he’s more believable. He’s a regular guy after all, flung into a series of events he’s unprepared for, and we’re reminded of this throughout. Sam Shepard gets stuck into his role as a con with relish, as does Don Johnson, playing a flamboyant yet deeply humane private investigator – and here, there’s another way in which Cold in July deviates from previous Mickle movies. It’s funny. Not bittersweet, funny. Of course this relates back to Lansdale again and the style in which he writes, but nevertheless it’s clear that the film’s comfortable enough in what it’s doing to provide some wry, but overt humour – not derailing what’s going on in the slightest, but adding depth to it. It’s a new one, but it works.
And, finally, this film’s burgeoning confidence is demonstrated in the fact that it doesn’t feel it has to sew up all of its loose ends. I had some questions left when the credits rolled, not at all because it felt like the plot didn’t work, but because it had worked. Good storytelling can supercede full exposition, without leaving an audience feeling ripped off, without leaving an audience feeling like the writers didn’t know what happened.
Bold, interesting and finely-tuned, Cold in July will almost without a doubt be one of my films of the year. I’ve followed what Jim Mickle has been doing for years now, and any slight reservations I have when a filmmaker declares he’s ready to move away from the ‘calling cards’ afforded by the horror genre into new territory have come to naught here. And, hey – I couldn’t help but notice what I like to think were a few friendly nods to horror during the course of this newest film, a little reference here, a little reference there. I like to think that was a thank you, and not a complete goodbye.
Cold in July is showing at selected cinemas in the UK now.