, Jessie Buckley plays a woman whose holiday in the English countryside curdles into a surreal nightmare. Her tormenter is at once singular and plural: a whole village of hostile strangers, all with the face and voice of Rory Kinnear. Garland, the sci-fi novelist who wrote and directed Ex Machina and Annihilation , never explains the nature of this menacing anomaly, this apparent hive mind of identical stalkers.
We are living in an age of metaphorical horror – of scary movies that strive, loudly and unsubtly, to be about something scarier than a sharp knife or sharp fangs, something real and important. The monster that’s more than a monster is nothing new, of course. Just ask any scholar of vampire or werewolf lore what these enduring folkloric icons can represent, or what they have over the centuries.
These are films that basically write their own academic papers aloud, doing the interpretative labor for the audience. At their worst, they can play more like equations than thrillers: solve for X to reveal the cultural or psychological issue the monster is blatantly representing. Not that every film-maker even settles on just one metaphorical function.
Plenty of great horror films released over the last few years have privileged a message above cheap thrills, and deployed a metaphor without surrendering scares. But for every
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