One of my favorite horror films in recent memory is Under The Shadow from a few years back. It’s a supernatural horror film about a mother and daughter in war torn Tehran in the 80s being haunted by an evil presence. It’s a wonderful blend of horror and social commentary, utilizing history to tell a tale of terror. It was the feature debut from British-Iranian filmmaker, Babak Anvari, and it instantly made me want to see whatever he did next. Now, he has released a follow up, which also serves as his first English language film, Wounds, which is adapted from the novel, The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud.
In Wounds, we follow Will (Armie Hammer), a bartender at a New Orleans joint called Rosie’s. One evening, things seem to be going as usual as he chats up with some of the regulars. However, a fight breaks out, ending the fun for the night for everyone involved. While he cleans up the mess left behind, he finds a cell phone left behind by one of the younger patrons that stopped by. He ends up bringing the phone home, where he lives with his girlfriend, Carrie (Dakota Johnson).
From there, things start to get strange. The first night, the phone starts receiving strange messages. He soon discovers horrific images, and finds out he’s being trailed by the same kids who came by the bar. Hallucinations begin occurring, and things only escalate from there as Will is baffled by what exactly is going on with the phone, which only gets worse as the bizarre occurrences also begin affecting his relationship to the people around him, especially with Carrie and his close friend, Alicia (Zazie Beetz).
Wounds very much operates on a different kind of horror than something like Under The Shadow, which has the horror of the world run parallel to the horror of legend, beliefs, and the unknown. Wounds gets a lot nastier with its jolts, tapping into influences from Lovecraft to Cronenberg while we watch the psyche of our main characters slowly crumble and fall apart.
Anvari is a good enough filmmaker to make several of these moments of terror effective on their own, with solid work from cinematographer, Kit Fraser, and composer, Komeil S. Hosseini, adding a creepy atmosphere to the proceedings. However, something gets lost in translation here. Perhaps certain elements don’t work well on screen as they do on the page. While some scenes are appropriately creepy and tense, many are also kind of silly, and not in a way that feels intentional.
The biggest issue is that the scares and story elements don’t seem to really add up to much. At times, it feels like layers of half-baked metaphors are stacked upon one another, each pushing one another to the side while trying to take center stage. There are some odd digressions from Will early on where he rants about millennials, other moments seem to point towards ideas about masculine insecurity, sometimes the film takes aim at modern technology, and it occasionally uses the horror to explore a relationship that was already on the rocks being further torn to shreds. It’s not like the film isn’t trying, far from it in fact, but there is a lack of focus that results in a shallow experience.
The cast does some fine work, despite some occasionally stilted dialogue. Although, it is Hammer’s film through and through, and he does some really good stuff here. He is able to get across the feeling of someone who has always been confident and had things together, even when dealing with stressful situations, but is slowly but surely falling apart from the inside-out. His self-destructive tendencies, even when it doesn’t totally make sense, is a compelling watch.
The filmmaking in Wounds is just solid enough and it’s creative choices are just weird enough to make it perfectly watchable, but it is ultimately a disappointing film that doesn’t quite come together as strongly as it could have, especially considering the people involved. It doesn’t build to a conclusion that I find satisfying, on a character level, a plot level, or a thematic level. It has its fair share of creepy moments, and a generally intense and oppressive atmosphere, but it doesn’t build up to an experience that one could resonate with on a deeper level.