VIFF review: Sanzaru delves eerily into inherited evil and generational trauma=
Enter another recent horror film that takes its metaphysics seriously
Jan Six stands in front of a portrait of an ancestor.
Streams September 24 to October 7 as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, via VIFF.org
A CARE-WORKER encounters the supernatural in this quietly impressive chiller from writer-director Xia Magnus.
There’s something afoot in the isolated home of Dena Regan, a mountain-sized matriarch (played voluminously by Jayne Taini) prone to hot-footing it down to the lake between spells of apparent dementia and gory self-harm. Health aide Evelyn has her own problems with a nephew sent to cool his delinquent jets at the Regan home, while Dena’s shattered veteran son, Clem, is another ambivalent presence. And they can all hear the mysterious voices emerging from Dena’s intercom system.
Notably, the film takes the viewer directly into the spirit world via a critical dialogue between Evelyn’s recently deceased mother and the entity of the title, named, for reasons that eventually become clear (and upsetting) enough, after the proverbial three wise monkeys. As such, this tale of inherited evil and generational trauma arrives as yet another recent horror film that takes its metaphysics seriously.
We’ve come a long way from The Exorcist, the pinnacle of bonehead 20th-century rationalism grappling with a haunted universe. Eventually, the character Sanzaru evolves from a chintzy strobe effect into something a lot more graphic. Viewers might be reminded of the wandering demon with its erect cock out in the Mexican art-shocker Post Tenebras Lux.
The vital difference is that Magnus’s film has compassion for its characters. It takes no relish in their experience of true malevolence.
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