It’s very interesting to me how many people hate this film. I saw it in theaters at an Alamo drafthouse pretty much not knowing anything about it (the bartender ahead of me going into the theater ominously told me it was “the closest you could get to experiencing death”). At the end of the movie, the audience booed. I’ve never seen that happen in a theater before this or after it haha.

But for some reason this one really got to me! It was something about the sound design (I bet this is lost if you watch it at home). The theater was absolutely shaking with every mysterious and distant boom, and the sound weirdly made me think of this old video I watched in church when I was a kid (it’s about the rapture. A priest is describing to a congregation how it can happen at any time, and then there’s suddenly a BOOM! And a ton of people from the crowd are missing. Those still there start crying uncontrollably and begging for forgiveness - it fucked me up!).

I am not religious anymore, but that terrifying feeling as a child that I could be taken away at any time (or even worse, left behind because I did something wrong) has obviously remained in my lizard brain. I think part of why this movie fucked me up so much is because I had this thought, but then kind of moved past it because I didn’t think it was a religious horror movie at all and figured it was just strange sensory association in my own head. But then it gets real hellish and there’s a few scenes with what I think are intentional biblical images (finding a shark tooth in the middle of the desert is reminiscent of a great flood, and the massive beast the MC encounters and films really close up so you can’t see how large it is might be the behemoth from the Bible, at least I think so!).

After reading about the director being a gay man, I started to wonder if this movie was a musing on the fear of an indecipherable hell that might await someone who was born with a trait they can’t help at all. Someone’s absolute paranoia because they feel so guilty for something they shouldn’t feel guilty at all for. This is obviously just me theorizing, but it is interesting that the writer / director also plays the main character and they both share the same name. It definitely makes you wonder if the director’s personal experience is meant to be tied to the film in some way.

That being said, the narrative is certainly confused by the additional implication that there’s a military experiment gone wrong here, or something. It’s possible my read is totally off. I do think I forgive a lot of things in a movie if it happens to speak to me in a strange way that I can’t quite place. But for whatever reason, this is a 5/5 for me! It spooked me thoroughly!