Horns

An uncomfortable hybrid of fantasy, horror and romance genres (with elements of black comedy and religious allegory generously drizzled in) make French extremist (High Tension) Alexandre Aja's Horns a film that's ultimately more interesting to think about than it is to watch. It's the sort of movie you're glad to have seen, even if you're sometimes taken aback by the juxtaposition of moments of stunningly leaden literalism with whimsy, of romantic fantasy with full-blown heavy metal horror.

Given the source material, Joe (son of Stephen King) Hill's 2010 cult novel of the same name, we might have hoped for metaphoric magical realism -- maybe something along the lines of a Guillermo del Toro-realized Gone Girl. Unfortunately Aja seems to be aiming more for a Twilight as directed by David Lynch vibe. To that end, he hired Lynch's Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Wild at Heart cinematographer Frederick Elmes to shoot this story.

Yet while Elmes' visuals are remarkably beautiful, the movie itself is a disappointment. Because while Hill's prose supports nuance, Aja seems determined to strip away any ambiguity, to present a comic-book story about a kind of devilish superhero extracting vengeance on an unfair world. It feels more like a commercial decision than an artistic choice.

So what we have here is the story of a small-town DJ, Ig Perrish (former Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe), who is suspected of murdering his girlfriend since childhood, Merrin Williams (Juno Temple). Ig is the only suspect in Merrin's murder because he was seen arguing with her on the night of her death. Her body was found beneath the treehouse where the couple spent long hours in each other's company.

But while everyone is convinced of Ig's guilt, the police are unable to make a case against him. Everywhere he goes in his little logging village, he's confronted by people who want him to "burn in hell." News crews shove microphones at him, asking him, "What's it like to get away with murder?"

Meanwhile, we understand that Ig is an innocent, anguished man. But then demonic horns sprout on his head, and he discovers he has acquired the power to make people confess their darkest desires to him, as they beg his license to act out these fantasies. It slowly dawns on him that he can use his powers to track down Merrin's killer.

Yet while Hill's novel is a meditation on good and evil, a transposing of John Milton's Paradise Lost into a post-literate tabloid key, Aja treats it as a revenge fantasy. Hill's Ig is a Lucifer figure who decides that it's better to reign in hell than stoically suffer the atrocities of the world. Aja's Ig is a satanic detective. It's not that the novel is dumbed down for the screen so much as its serious undertones are subverted by some pretty broad comedy that becomes predictable after the second or third lurid "shock."

But we are required to review the movie in front of us, and not the one that might have been.

As it is, Horns is a relatively well-made, unambitious genre movie with a decent cast and a carefully curated indie-rock soundtrack that might prove more durable than the film. For a lot of people, that's probably enough.

MovieStyle on 10/31/2014