By Ben Bussey
The latest from US no-budget indie horror filmmaker Dustin Wayde Mills is based around a simple but potent “what if” question. Our protagonist is an anonymous serial killer played by Reagan Root, who in the opening scene emotionlessly puts a gun to her head and ends her own life. The big “what if,” then, is what if suicide is not a way out? What if those stony-faced old religious types are right, death is not the end, and that which waits beyond proves even worse for those of us who have – ‘ulp – sinned? This is what our anti-heroine finds herself facing, and – as you might anticipate – the situation doesn’t exactly turn out to be a barrel of laughs.
We’ve been following Mills’ work on and off for some time now at Brutal As Hell, though given how prolific he is (averaging around four releases a year for the last few years) it can be tricky to keep up. Aside from being fiercely independent – making movies with a distinct personality for the equivalent of small change – Mills is also admirable in his refusal to rest on his laurels, progressing from the self-consciously tacky B-movies he started out on (e.g. Puppet Monster Massacre, Bath Salt Zombies, Kill That Bitch) into considerably darker and artier territory in his more recent work (Her Name Was Torment, Applecart), but all the while keeping a firm emphasis on his key fascinations of bloodshed and nudity.
A Black Heart in White Hell very much belongs to the latter, artier end of Mills’s ouevre, and certainly sees the director further exercise his taste for flesh and blood. As with his last feature, offbeat portmanteau Applecart, this is a black and white, entirely dialogue-free film (two words scrawled on a mirror aside), conveying the story by action alone. Also in common with Applecart, A Black Heart in White Hell is an easy enough film to summarise – the title alone more or less says it all – but a trickier one to categorize, existing in some twilight haze between arthouse and exploitation. On top of which, it seems to further defy categorization in that, at a little over 30 minutes long, it seems too short for a feature film, yet a little too long to really class as a short. All in all I don’t think it’s necessarily the most interesting or engrossing of Mills’s more recent films, but it’s certainly another striking piece of work.
Root, in her film debut – and a pretty meaty first role it is, absence of dialogue notwithstanding (not that that ever hurt Holly Hunter) – is on screen for more or less the duration, and like most of Mills’s earlier leading ladies she spends the bulk of that time completely naked, or clad in little more than white underwear and blood. Mills has long understood the old maxim that nudity is the cheapest special effect, and the easiest way to keep the viewer at attention – but the key thing is that his films generally don’t stop there, making a point of providing the audience with some more substantial food for thought once they’ve had a taste of the eye candy. However, in the case of A Black Heart in White Hell, I can’t help feeling the film pretty much says all it has to say early on. It takes a cyclical format as Root’s killer forcibly relives her murders and suffers the karmic consequences, and by the time the second murder comes around it’s quite clear what’s going on, so in some respects the film carries few surprises beyond that point. That said, the ways in which Root is punished for her sins do get progressively more bizarre and extreme; Mills might almost be making up for the lack of gore and creature FX in Applecart, as it gets piled on pretty heavy here by the end. This absurd splatter might threaten to derail the otherwise sombre tone, but at the same time it does further cement the weirdness of it all.
Quite what Mills is saying with this film, if anything, is very much left open to interpretation. It’s easy to view it as an exercise in Catholic guilt, or simple sadistic voyeurism; yet some gender-war commentary is detectable too, given all Root’s victims are male. A Black Heart in White Hell might be all, some or none of these things, but it’s a noteworthy curiosity, if a little insubstantial; I find myself wondering if it might have been more effective in a shorter format as a final chapter on Applecart. Existing Mills fans will definitely be interested, although if you’re new to his work I’m not sure this would be the best place to start: I’d suggest Skinless, which probably offers the best balance of Mills’s sleazier and artier impulses.
A Black Heart in White Hell is available on demand at Vimeo, and on DVD from the Dustin Mills Productions store.