Ah, more random-assed horror courtesy of Kanopy.

I swear there’s more than just horror on that streaming service.

Anyway, these two movies were sitting in the queue and I decided to check them out over the last couple of weeks. Both involve weird crap happening to young women and have haunted house/things aren’t as they seem vibs. One of them is a good slow burn of a film; the other has its moments but is ultimately disappointing.

The Free Fall is from 2021 and stars Andrea Londo as Sarah, who is traumatized at the beginning of the movie when she heads over to her parents’ house only to discover her mother stabbing her father to death before cutting her own throat. Sarah wakes up what seems like years later and is married to Nick (Shawn Ashmore, aka Jimmy Olsen from Smallville) and seems to be living as housewife in this idyllic house. She has very little memory of anything from the recent past, Nick keeps feeding her medication, there’s a stern maid named Rose (Jade Badler, aka Diana from V), and it seems her sister Julie (Elizabeth Cauppucino, who is in the excellent Super Dark Times) has been trying to reach her but is repeatedly turning away.

The film is eerie throughout. Nick is obviously controlling Sarah in one way or another, and the atmosphere is always creepy with weird crap happening from time to time, including flashbacks to the night that Sarah found her parents as well as a night when she slit her wrists in the bathtub. So what’s really going on?

There’s a twist at the end that is really good at first and then pissed me off. I can’t exactly say why without spoiling things. It mostly ruined the movie for me, too, because up until then I thought things were fun if not flawed. Had the majority of the film been a little more restrained in its “everything is creeeeepy” vibe and maybe explained a couple of things just a little more (especially the parents’ deaths), I would have excused it.

Watch or Skip?

Skip.

Relic is not the movie from 1997 but an Australian movie from 2020. With the exception of the occasional police officer and two neighbors, there are really three characters: a grandmother, mother, and granddaughter. The grandmother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), is elderly and experiencing increasing signs of dementia. After an incident where she leaves a bath running and floods the house, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) come to stay with her. Soon after they arrive, Edna goes missing. Then, just as mysteriously disappeared, she returns and starts acting very strange. Again, what’s going on? Why does the house seem to be haunted? Is something possessing or in control of her?

This one’s a good slow burn and is driven by three excellent performances. All three actors give their characters depth and that helps makes the movie one that I didn’t want to look away from. Nevin’s performance as Edna is both scary and sympathetic, and there are times when I could see how there was literally something horrific happening but also saw the extended metaphor for her deteriorating mind. Mortimer plays Kay as a very conflicted daughter. She knows what is wrong. She knows her mother needs help. She even goes so far as to look into a care facility but constantly doubts herself and wonders if she’s doing the right thing. And Sam is stuck experiencing the trauma firsthand and discovers both her grandmother’s and the house’s secrets, which Heathcote does beyond just being a scream queen.

There’s a bit of a twist at the end (but not as jarring as The Free Fall) and it’s incredibly sad. That ending is earned because of the film’s emotional depth. The director is Natalie Erika James; this is her first features and since then she’s done two more, Apartment 7A (which looks like a Rosemary’s Baby type of story) and Saccharine (which IMDb says is about “Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a sinister force after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes”). I might check out those others because this was so well-done.

Skip or Watch?

Watch.