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Dark Whispers: Volume 1
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Dark Whispers is an
anthology/omnibus film: a series of short stories connected by a framing
device. I was struck by the fact that – just like in Mary Harron’s The Expecting (2020) styled for
bite-sized chunks on the quickly defunct Quibi format – the horror or frisson effects
get no chance for a slow-burn build: within some of the stories, the shocks or
switches (of both content and form) start right in; just as, in the framing
tale, it takes about 3 seconds for the solitary hero, Clara (Andrea
Demetriades), to gaze at an old photo of her departed parents (she’s about to
clean out their place) and feel a heavily audio-juiced chill …
This kind of project has a semi-reputable place in the
history of cinema, and some outstanding exemplars (particularly from Italy,
like The Witches [1967]) – although
it’s hard to find one that hits top quality all the way through (usually, and
to quote Meat Loaf, two out of three ain’t bad). There are different ways that
producers have used to cohere package-movies: around a theme (Eros, 2004), an actor (Silvana Mangano
in The Witches), an art form or
medium (opera in Aria, 1987), a place (Paris vu par … in both 1964 and 1984), a political project (Far from Vietnam, 1967) …
Sometimes the conceit that binds the whole is
ingenious and surprising, sometimes clumsy and obvious. Sometimes the pretext is
mixed, possibly confused: Seven Women,
Seven Sins (1986), for instance, boasts a typical 7-deadly-sins narrative
mosaic, but it primarily exists to showcase the work of seven female
filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman and Valie Export. Dark Whispers also has a dual focus: it’s a spotlight on the horror
genre (anthologies are legion in this field), and it’s entirely directed by
women – eleven in all. (There’s also plenty of women working in other cast or crew
roles, such as writer Claire D’Este.) Plus: all of the directors are
Australian. This hybrid concoction makes sense if one knows the exciting pocket
of screen culture from which, in part, the project emerged: Tasmania’s Stranger with My Face festival/workshop/competition devoted to generating horror projects by women (I was privileged to be a guest
there in 2012 – the festival event folded, for the time being, in 2017, but
there are ongoing online seminars and related presentations).
However, there’s one big difference between Dark Whispers – only the first volume,
it seems! – and most other anthology films, and it's a difference discreetly unannounced in the final credits. Where
most omnibus projects commission their diverse parts from scratch, Dark Whispers is a collection of
pre-existing short films – some going as far back as 14 years (and several of
which were showcased, in one form or another, at Stranger with My Face). And why not? – it’s an
anthology-as-curation concept, well-suited to contemporary tendencies in the
international art world. But this fact also helps explain the film’s sometimes
disconcerting heterogeneity: it boasts not only a vivid excursion into stop-motion
animation (Isabel Peppard’s Tim Burton-like Gloomy
Valentine, 2006 – Peppard went on to co-direct the impressive documentary Morgana [2019]), but an extremely wide
assortment of dramatic and comic tones. And the origins of the parts are also
diverse: some are very low-budget independent productions, others are relatively
handsomely resourced film-school assignments.
So, it’s best to take it in doses, one short film at a
time. Megan Riakos’ wrap-around segment (strictly speaking, the only “new”
material here) tries hard to get some quasi-narrative peaks and valleys going –
the narrator-figure midway through burns in fright the “Dark Whispers” book
bequeathed by her Mum, but it bounces back intact; a spooky figure peeks in
through a door, and so on – but, however well mounted, it hardly pulls the diverse
pieces together in any satisfying way. Just remember, even Wim Wenders had a
hard time composing a decent framing story for the entirely separate episodes
of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Beyond the
Clouds (1995) – and the Master chopped out most of the Apprentice’s work
anyhow, as painfully detailed in Wenders’ diary-book My Time with Antonioni!
Angie Black, maker of the excellent experimental
feature The Five Provocations (2018), swiftly whips
up the atmospherics in Birthday Girl (2008), as a hospital elevator takes a woman (Sarah Bollenberg) through the
phantoms of her familial past. Like many shorts, it seems like a sketch for
something that could have been developed much further – but, as is, it’s enough
to make one wonder whether Pedro Costa saw and was inspired by it for the
extended elevator sequence of his Horse
Money (2014), first used as a stand-alone short in the anthology Centro Histórico (2012).
Briony Kidd (the mastermind behind Stranger with My Face) offers us a
conceptual, meta-horror tale in the equally sketch-like Watch Me (2016): a celebrity (played by Astrid Wells Cooper) feels
alive and “on” only when her fans are looking at her (even, it seems, when she
goes to the loo) – and if all those eyes are taken away, the darkness literally
closes in. It’s a neat and cinematic idea.
Lucy Gouldthorpe’s Grillz (2015) rides, with irony, the never-ending vampire craze – with a special
stylistic nod to Abel Ferrara’s black-and-white The Addiction (1995), already a major source for Christos Tsiolkas’ 2005 novel Dead Europe filmed by Tony Krawitz in
2012. Marion Pilowsky’s The Ride (2011), featuring Anthony LaPaglia, veers more to psychological thriller than
strictly supernatural horror (not a problem per
se), but its anecdotal pay-off is too easily seen coming.
Janine Hewitt’s The
Intruder (2005), shot on 35mm, is a formally accomplished riff on phantom
visitation in a suitably Gothic house on a stormy night, with a Persona-like face-off of two women
(Asher Keddie and Bree Desborough) – I liked it far better than Olivier Assayas’
similar mélange of elements in Personal Shopper (2016). Spirits also
play a prominent part in Jub Clerc’s Storytime (2005), which connects to the indigenous spirituality mixed with genre-play of
Tracey Moffatt’s influential, one-and-only feature Bedevil (1993)
– and also inherits some of its problems as a realised work.
Kaitlin Tinker’s The
Man Who Caught a Mermaid (2016) pulls a disconcerting, Polanski-like
switcheroo in its surreal tale of a gormless guy’s dream-come-true – and this,
in another odd parallel echo, was in the same year as Stephen Chow’s immortal
comedy The Mermaid! The depiction of
grimy suburbia – so prevalent in Australian cinema, whether shorts or features
– is taken up a few notches in Madeleine Purdy’s eventually gory Little Share House of Horrors (an
episode from the 6-part 2016 web series Girt
by Fear viewable in its entirety at https://www.girtbyfear.com.au/),
full of tricksy effects and camp gags. Is the young-adult share house indeed a
principal motif of this national cinema? It’s certainly one of Australia’s
soul-links with the UK.
The real gem, for me, in Dark Whispers is Katrina Irawati Graham’s White Song (2006) which, while standing way outside the framework
of all other episodes, literally gets a few aural echoes in the framing story.
Inspired by figures and tales from Indonesian mythology, this one plunges right
into its weave of voice-over and heightened imagery (a little in the latter-day
Terrence Malick vein) without giving the impression, for once, of leaping too
fast into the terrain of the unknown.
It’s a gorgeous and haunting piece, and the only one
in this omnibus that generates a genuine (and chilling) eroticism. Even its
resolution-message of healing and rebirth – in water, no less! – works well
and satisfyingly. Graham has made two other short films, and also co-written a
2016 telemovie. When will she get to make a true sequel to this splendid “white
song of deep death”?
MORE anthologies: The Blues, Fallen Angels, Inside Out, Lumiere and Company, Strangers, Tales from the Darkside Vol.1, Wild Palms, Four Rooms, Aria © Adrian Martin 30 May 2021 |
