Tony’s
watching a magic trick.
If your entertainment
diet is mostly mainstream pop culture, it can have the effect of
eating mostly marshmallow with the occasional ice cream sundae –
all sticky sweetness, cream and sprinkles. That, after all, is part
of the mindset that leads Hollywood to be known as Tinseltown.
If that’s most of
what your entertainment diet’s composed of, what you need
occasionally is an off-kilter, nerve-grating,
‘What-the-hell-is-actually-happening?’ semi-horror movie of
ever-shifting perceptions, just to sharpen up your senses and keep
you right. Imagine off-kilter, nerve-grating,
‘What-the-hell-is-actually-happening?’ semi-horror movies of
ever-shifting perceptions as roughage, as bran if you like, in your
entertainment intake, there to ground you in the world of the dark,
the dubious, the mysterious as all hell and the slipping out of
certainty with every fifth breath that is probably a closer
representation of what’s actually going on than any of your
pop culture fast food.
Welcome to
Disappearance At Clifton Hill. It’s about as roughage-heavy
as you can take in any given day without doing yourself serious,
twitchy, paranoiac damage.
The film, written by
Albert Shin and James Schultz, deals with the life of Abby (Tuppence
Middleton), who on a day out with her family as a child, encounters a
boy who she then watches get pummelled and bundled into the back of a
car, seemingly kidnapped with no other witnesses to the crime, in
Clifton Hill, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
Cutting quickly to Abby
as a grown-up, we focus on the death of her mother and the subsequent
impending sale of the family’s guest house to local big shot and
probable wrong ’un Charlie Lake (Eric Johnson). Abby’s obsession
with the events she witnessed as a girl have done much to alienate
her from her sister Laure (Hannah Gross), and the two also find new
sources of grievance over the plans to sell the family business to
the latest in a long line of kingpin Lakes. Meanwhile, Abby, newly
back in the area, niggles away at her earlier experiences, and begins
to piece together what she thinks is a case. The boy she saw was the
son of local mega-magicians, the Moulins (think Siegfried and Roy,
but straight and even more Eurotrash), and he was reported to have
committed suicide.
Abby gets on the case,
and seems to find leads that prove it was more than that – some
leading to a disturbing murder plot, some leading, perhaps even more
disturbingly, to the demands and proclivities of Charles Lake II,
father of current bed and breakfast buyer, Charlie. But in a movie
which also includes legendary creepfest-director David Cronenberg in
an on-screen role as a local historian, river-diving archivist,
conspiracy theorist and podcaster, you can be fairly sure that
nothing you think you know is necessarily what you really
know. The more threads Abby pulls, the more complex the story of the
kidnapping seems to become – is there something with which the
Moulins’ assistant and tiger-trainer, Bev Mole can be charged? What
exactly happened to her husband when – as some people believe –
he wanted to report her to the police? What, in fact, actually
happened to young Alex Moulin? Was what Abby thought she saw what she
actually saw? Is her journalistic training leading her down
false trails, and if so, have they been laid down for her, and by
whom, or is she simply putting two and two together and making eight
to escape the boredom and mediocrity of her life?
The whole tone of the
movie is tinged with nerve-throbbing uncertainty – the colour
palette is oddly murky, the music is like having your aural nerves
played by something that’s half-bow, half-breadknife, Cronenberg’s
cork and leather voice as Walter the historian, smoothing you through
from one scene to another in some cases and pointing out how
depressingly wrong Abby is in others, has the effect of lacing the
movie with a shot and a half of vocal whiskey, keeping you off
balance, always demanding you look deeper to some truth that may be
there or may be absolutely conspiracy-mythical. Walter’s beef is
with the generations of the Lake family – but is there anything
real to their perceived iniquity? Abby focuses on the bizarre
relationship of the Moulins – especially their relationship with
the truth, and feels they’re the more likely suspects in the
disappearance of their son, with possible aid from Bev and her
husband. Even towards the end of the movie, after a handful of other
revelations which we won’t pre-empt for you, when it looks as
though either through justified hunches or dumb luck, Abby’s done
something good, the film undercuts your certainties, making you
confront what you think you know about coincidences, consequences,
chains of logic and the relationship even Abby has to the truth.
While Tuppence
Middleton invests you in the movie and in Abby’s character quite
firmly enough to pull you along, you’re not far into the movie
before you’re suspecting everyone of everything and trying to work
out on which layer of the storytelling, if any, the truth actually
lives. Again, Shin’s direction, the cinematography from Catherine
Lutes, the almost-intrusive musical landscape created by Alex
Sowinski and Leland Whitty, and some quality ‘wrong ’un’
performances from the likes of Marie-Josée
Croze and Paulino Nunes as the Moulins and Elizabeth Saunders as
Bev Mole all serve to wrong-foot you, drag you in, pull any number of
rugs out from under you and leave you ultimately pinballing from
supposed fact to supposed fact, uncertain of your own name or purpose
in life, let alone the existence of any truly good or decent people
in the world – or at least in the movie.
You’ll be quite ready
for more bubblegum pop culture by the time you get to the end of
Disappearance At Clifton Hill, but here’s the thing – the
movie won’t actually let you go for quite some time once you’re
done with it. It will keep coming back to you in the darkness behind
your eyes, prodding you, reminding you of the questions with which it
leaves you at the end about truth, honesty, paranoia, and a need to
buy into storylines for the sheer diversion they bring from whatever
your life actually is.
Disappearance At
Clifton Hill is absolutely a disturbing movie, but it’s one
that’s studded with moments that won’t leave you alone, not
because they’re gratuitous or graphic – there’s perhaps one
uncomfortable jump-scare in the whole thing – but because they’ll
make you question everything you know, everything you think you know,
and everything you need to believe in, while delivering a modern
gumshoe mystery with a lead character who may or may not be either
right or trustworthy about anything.
Tony lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who,
Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the
70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book.
With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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