“You’re the one who’s really dead.”
Gothic horror is a genre to which it’s hard to bring anything new. It’s so well-known and so defined by its classics (The Haunting of Hill House, The Others, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and so on) that innovation has been…I won’t say “stifled,” but it certainly hasn’t been attempted any time in recent memory. Besides Marrowbone, the most recent Gothic horror films I can think of are Crimson Peak and The Little Stranger, and neither of those set the box office on fire. But do we want the Gothic genre to change? I don’t think so. Going into stories like this, you wan the isolation, the melodrama, the romance, the family secrets and twists. Marrowbone adheres pretty rigidly to all of this, which is totally fine; for great horror movies, that’s a feature, not a bug. But Marrowbone isn’t a great horror movie. It’s not a terrible one, either; it’s just fine.
The Fairbairn family is on the run. We don’t know from what yet, only that it has something to do with their father. They flee England and take up refuge in Marrowbone House, a secluded hermitage in which the matriarch was raised. They change their last name to Marrowbone to remain anonymous. This is kind of like in the movie The Glass House, in which a family with the surname Glass lives in a house made of glass, and the score is by Phillip Glass. I’m not making any of that up. They make friends with Allie, a girl who lives nearby. One day a man shoots a bullet through a window. It’s the father.
It’s an intriguing setup, but I might be biased because I’m a sucker for Gothic trappings. Marrowbone is a slow burn even for a Gothic movie, though. Slow burn horror is just fine – sometimes I prefer it, actually – but there needs to be a creeping sense of inescapable dread, a sense that you need to look in every corner of the frame for whatever is hiding there. The house in Marrowbone is a classic Gothic creation, and at times is truly spooky, but not consistently enough, which is a shame, because a house without electricity or definable geography is the perfect setting for a film like this.
The cast is the movie’s secret weapon (and the cinematography by Xavi Gimenez; at times this movie is just plain gorgeous). After the mother, Rose, dies, the children are forced to keep up appearances, to maintain the illusion that she’s alive, lest they face separation. Leadership of the family is left to Jack (George MacKay), who must now steward his three siblings: Billy (Charlie Heaton), taciturn and hot-headed; Jane (Mia Goth), sensitive and maternal towards Sam (Matthew Stagg). There’s also Allie, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, with whom he develops a relationship. This is where the film let me down most, I think. Taylor-Joy and MacKay are both fine actors (the former I consider to be one of the best of her generation), but the relationship never quite worked for me. Taylor-Joy does more of the heavy lifting than MacKay, and they don’t have quite enough chemistry.
That being said, for much of the movie, the cast does a great job. They keep things watchable when they threaten to become predictable. A particular standout is Kyle Soller as Tom Porter, a jealous suitor of Allie’s who has suspicions about the Marrowbone family. Characters like Porter show up in a lot of these movies, but Soller (and the script by Sergio Sanchez, who also directed) elevates the archetype by giving Porter actual layers. For the ostensible villain of the movie, when he gets passed over for a job he thought he’d secured and has a breakdown afterwards, you actually feel for the guy. You don’t necessarily root for him, because most of the time he’s smarmy and condescending, but Soller gives him layers.
It would be unfair of me to go too far into spoiler territory, but I will say that every twist Marrowbone comes up with – save for the final one, which is just kind of silly – lands well. Sanchez makes elegant use of the house’s corridors, and one particularly scary sequence is set to “Wouldn’t It be Nice,” which is a clever inversion of the usual spooky strings you’d expect. Sanchez knows his Gothic horror, that much is clear (he wrote The Orphanage, which we covered in our first year of this column), and he has an eye for the material, but his script might have reached a bit too far.
But Marrowbone isn’t an abject failure. The cast is solid, the cinematography painterly and sensitive, and the plot is (mostly) engrossing. This doesn’t come with my highest regulation, but I’m not not recommending it either. Gothic horror is one of the oldest sub-genres of horror there is. It’s a part of literary history, and now part of film history. It might not be as popular as it once was, but Marrowbone came out in 2017, showing there is still a loyal, passionate group of people who care about preserving its legacy.
Thursday, 10/1: Phantasm
Friday, 10/2: Frozen
Saturday, 10/3: Suspiria
Sunday, 10/4: Suspiria (2018)
Monday, 10/5: Emelie
Tuesday, 10/6: Castle Freak
Wednesday, 10/7: Session 9
Thursday, 10/8: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Friday, 10/9: We Are Still Here
Saturday, 10/10: The Changeling
Sunday, 10/11: The Bad Seed
Monday, 10/12: Verotika
Tuesday, 10/13: The Legend of Hell House
Wednesday, 10/14: Lake Mungo
Thursday, 10/15: Puppetmaster
Friday, 10/16: Marrowbone
Saturday, 10/17: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Sunday, 10/18: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Monday, 10/19: Sweetheart
Tuesday, 10/20: Girl On the Third Floor
Wednesday, 10/21: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Thursday, 10/22: Triangle
Friday, 10/23: Dog Soldiers
Saturday, 10/24: Noroi: The Curse
Sunday, 10/25: Train to Busan
Monday, 10/26: Tales From the Hood
Tuesday, 10/27: Mandy
Wednesday, 10/28: Sometimes They Come Back
Thursday, 10/29: Veronica
Friday, 10/30: The Wicker Man
Saturday, 10/31: Child’s Play
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