In 2018, the small-budget horror film [Genetic Doom] made a splash on Sundance, with four erotic blockbusters, and became famous with a 100% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In 2020, there is a movie that is quite similar to [genetic doom] regardless of the theme, name or even fate. Also in Sundance to get a stunning reputation, but also as a dark horse to get 100% praise on Rotten Tomatoes.
Major foreign entertainment websites have given them a high reputation for "setting a new high point for thrillers in 2020", "unexpected endings, creepy gods" and "models in new horror masterpieces".
It can be said that it is enough to satisfy people's appetite.
The movie is Relic. A small budget thriller from Australia.
[Lost Family]
Recently, [The Forgotten Family] has finally launched on the streaming platform, giving people a glimpse of whether it really lives up to its name.
The reason why [the lost family] is this year's version of "genetic doom", the two do have similarities in the theme.
[Genetic Doom] Until the truth about cult sacrifices is revealed in the last half hour, it looks like a family horror movie.
In this family, the father is mostly invisible, and the mother is cold and divided. A family of four is seemingly inseparable, and people are delicately pandering and cold, indifferent, but also tempting each other.
In the end, the body of the grandson in the family is sacrificed to the Demon King, and the Demon King finally enters the body and family at the end of the movie, which is unexpected and reasonable.
In [The Forgotten Family], there is also love and indifference about the family home.
The story takes place in Melbourne, Australia, with three generations of female characters as the core.
The film begins with a multicolored Christmas light on the table, the faucet rattling, the water flowing beyond the bathroom, and then down the stairs, an old and naked female body standing in front of the door.
In the instant when the Christmas lights were bright and dim, a vague but existential black shadow seemed to move a little.
Soon after, their daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam, who live in the city, learn of the disappearance of their elderly, solitary mother, Edna.
They drove to an ancestral house in the countryside, where Kay lived as a child. Together with the local police and residents, a search for the mother was carried out, but to no avail.
Her mother, Edna, is in her 80s, has Alzheimer's disease and often gets lost or forgets things.
But from the investigative conversation between Kay and the police, we know that Kay didn't have much contact with her mother, and the last time she called was a day I can't remember.
The world's reasons are always similar: work is too busy.
In order to wait for news, Kay and Sam decided to temporarily take up residence in the old house, which was large and empty, and somewhat old and decaying.
The house itself is like some kind of grave.
There were several parts of the wall that were already rotten black leather walls, and the depths of the walls occasionally made a leisurely echo, and when you looked up, you found that the entire wall was constantly spreading and elongating black spots.
Reaching straight to the roof, it is suspicious.
Kay keeps having nightmares in this house, dreaming of a black wooden house hidden deep in the jungle.
The door opened, and there was darkness, a decaying and aging body, a white sheet that had become so dirty that it was splashed with dirty spots, and a dry corpse collapsed on the edge of the bed in the hum of flies.
Wake up from a nightmare. The next day, the mother returned.
As silent as when she disappeared, showing the alarming symptoms of dementia, no explanation, no uneasiness. Only the dirt hidden under the nails and the black bruises blooming from the sternum.
Although the mother returned, everything became abnormal.
She would often go downstairs at night and talk to herself alone in the air. She would show Kay the "black shadow" under the bed, "It's coming, just under the bed," the gods were nagging.
The state is also good and bad. In good times, he would give his granddaughter Sam the treasured ring, but at bad times, no one knew him, and he believed that his daughter and granddaughter had been replaced.
She was always repeating that there was something in the house.
It was from the storage room that came in," and the house had become strange since his wife's death, and seemed to have gotten bigger and completely unfamiliar. ”
It may sound like the demented words of a lonely old man, but it points to another truth.
In the last half hour of the film, it is revealed whether it is the mother's dementia or whether the house is really weird.
The climax comes when Sam moves from the storage room to a being that resembles an "otherworld".
Pulling aside the juggling piles of masonry in the storage room, there was another passageway, and when you entered, you found that the surrounding area was full of aging walls and rooms corroded by black mold.
It's like rotten ruins, broken, old, unsettling and scary enough. And the space will continue to compress, the ceiling will be lowered, and no circuit will be found.
Like another version of the black cabin in Kay's dream.
As for the truth, in fact, it is also hinted at very early in the movie.
Soon after arriving at the old house, Sam turned out a picture book, and one of the pictures on one page of the album resembled the disturbing black wooden house in Kay's dream.
Kaye explained that it was a small house inherited from her parents. Her grandfather lived there alone until he died, and no one knew how bad things were before he died.
"I don't think he's getting the hospice care he deserves," she said. But ironically, in the blink of an eye, she said that she was going back to Melbourne to find a nursing home for her mother.
When the wooden house was demolished, only a glass window was left behind, and it eventually became part of the old house. It is also its existence that creates the "other world" in the room.
This is clear. [The Forsaken Family] is a "house of evil" movie about the interior of the human mind.
It uses constantly emerging mold and decay images to simulate the old age spots on people's bodies after aging, and the corpse spots of people who die.
Turn the themes of "aging, empty-nesters, and dementia" into a visual horror.
At the end of the movie, the twilight and lonely old man is stripped of a layer of disguised skin, and finally reveals a terrible body like black bark, a strange and aging skeleton, and an immortal and inactive withered body.
A family of three lay together. Sam notices that even his mother, Kay, is starting to "mold.".
Why does the family end up "moldy and shedding", is it some kind of genetic disease or a curse? What exactly is the "black shadow" in the old house, and why has it always existed but never appeared? Was the sound in the house once from a "nother world"? And who made it?
What is the supernatural force that controls everything in the house? ghost? psychic? Or is it the same demon as [hereditary doom]?
In the many puzzles left unsolved, the film ends.
This has also become the most complained about part of this movie, in addition to "slow pace" (but people are literary films) and "not scary enough" (indeed there is no jump scare scare, the essence is a psychological horror film):
Left too many ambiguous pits to fill!
Interestingly, however, the answer to some of the pits may have to be found in a 10-minute short film [Creswick] before the director.
Telling the story of the wooden house, [Creswick] has a certain meaning of a prequel to [the abandoned family].
"There's something here, there seems to be something else living here". From the eve of the father and daughter's decision to move out of the cabin in the woods, everything began to become unusual.
That night, the daughter in the nightmare was awakened by a strange noise, went to look for her father's traces, circled around the forest, and finally returned home, and her father appeared out of thin air.
They said goodnight to each other as usual, only to find that the daughter was horrified to find that her father had carried something strange on his shoulder.
This black humanoid thing may be the source of the "curse" of the family in [the forsaken family].
One day, everyone you know and love will die. The same goes for parents.
Even if parents are fortunate enough to live a long life, aging and the problems that come with it are almost inevitable. Their bodies become stiff, fragile, gray, full of folds, and their memories and thoughts will even disintegrate and fade away.
On the eve of Mother's Day in 2020, there was a news item on the hot search.
Ma Mou, a 58-year-old man in Shaanxi Province, pulled his 79-year-old mother with a trolley to an abandoned grave and buried her alive. The reason was that the mother was incontinent and made it smelly and dry everywhere at home.
In the Japanese movie "Kaiyama Festival Examination", a custom once existed in a Japanese mountain village is shown. Once a person lives to be 70 years old, he is sent to the mountain and will live on his own.
The independent "cult" tribes hidden in the city also have the so-called "Cliff Jumping Festival".
It is the old people who voluntarily jump down from the top of the mountain on the "Cliff Jumping Festival", and the crowd of onlookers celebrates their deaths and festivals.
In [the abandoned family], leaving the elderly and dying elderly alone in the mountain hut to survive has almost become a similar "custom".
Daughter Kaye had a line saying, "This kind of thing was common at the time." Although they were not given the hospice care they deserved, they were insignificant because they were common.
Although the wooden house was demolished, by the time her mother, Edna, was still alone in the huge house.
Wandering in the larger and larger room, forgetting the faces of daughters and granddaughters, the more and more dark spots and gradually peeling skin on the body.
The horror in this story is never a ghost and a shock, but an overly real empty nest old man facing the loneliness of aging and forgetting.
Mold grows on the body, but mold is the mind.
In this sense, [The Lost Family] is a movie that is more terrifying than [Genetic Doom]. It may not be "scary" enough, but it's effective enough.
Because everyone will age, and everyone will eventually face death.
How do you rate [the forsaken family]?