Review: "The Whisperer in Darkness"

 

Branney, Sean (Dir.), Screenplay by Andrew Leman and Sean Branney, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (2011), The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Inc./Fungi LLC, USA.

 

Much excitement the other day – my copy of “Whisperer” arrived!

I almost persuaded myself that I shouldn’t just drop everything and watch it – I figured that my enthusiasm would somehow affect my objectivity and that I should approach the viewing with a sense of detachment. Then I just dived straight in: who was I kidding?

I’m normally not offended by radical changes to a well-known tale, so long as the intentions of the original author are honoured and preserved. Making the jump from the written word to the cinematic experience requires a bit of give-and-take. That being said, I’ve seen some adaptations of Agatha Christie’s stories (even ones with the excellent David Suchet playing Poirot) where all I’ve wanted to do at the end is spit blood. I assume that the producers and directors have all thought “this is a wheezy old yarn; let’s kick it up a notch by making one of these characters Siamese twins! Or maybe have it turn out that someone completely unbelievable did the deed!” Please: just don’t.

Ten minutes into “Whisperer” I began to be a bit anxious: things weren’t unfolding as I expected and it was starting to look a little dire. George Akeley was cluttering up the joint and, if memory serves, he doesn’t even physically appear in the original story. Along with him were a bunch of Miskatonic academics whose names rang no bells; Charles Fort (played with gusto by Andrew Leman) was swanning around; and there was a debate on folklore broadcast live on radio, courtesy of a toothpaste sponsor. On top of all this there was a bunch of knowing references being slipped continuously into the dialogue and, as many people know, this is just the sort of thing that makes my teeth grind.

So I stopped it and went away to ponder.

 

In retrospect, I was being too harsh. Lovecraft’s tale begins with our protagonist, Albert Wilmarth, having been savaged in the print media over reports of strange things found in the Vermont floodwaters and conducting a desultory correspondence with Henry Akeley. Obviously, this kind of epistolary narrative needs to be massaged in order to fit on the silver screen: creating a scenario, such as a public debate (against Charles Fort, no less!), telescopes all of this information into a single, highly visual event. Bringing Henry’s son George into the action helped replace a lot of parcels and letters to-ing and fro-ing which is what the story offers, and there’s an emotional pay-off from having him disappear later on that was a nice touch. My hat was off to the writers and director for facilitating the story’s progress so far.

There was still the matter of those mystery academics; but more of them later. Back to the film...

 

I was happy to see Matt Foyer back in the lead role. He has a wonderfully expressive face and is especially good at relaying apprehension and dread. I was idly beginning to count the number of times he got drenched by the inclement Vermont weather but then I just stopped: this guy’s a trouper! Did anybody tell him that he was going to spend two-thirds of the movie drenched to the skin? It would have been an interesting drinking game: ‘scull your drink each time Matt Foyer cops a faceful of rain’; you’d be sh*tfaced in no time flat! Kind of like that game where you drink each time C3PO expresses negativity in “Star Wars”; or when Luke whines; or when the Death Star experiences a change of management. You get the idea.

 

There was a sequence in Wilmarth’s home that piqued my interest early on: a whole bunch of family photos were lying around, highlighting a wife and daughter that were obviously no longer with us. Hello, I thought: what are they working up to here? It turns out that they were setting up an avuncular relationship between Wilmarth and “Hannah Masterson” the daughter of a soon-to-be-crazy-and-dead Mi Go collaborator. I had some issues with the introduction of this character (again, not from the source material) but it turned out okay: having her around gives Albert’s character a goal and a focus when everything is going pear-shaped at the end of the film, but the interactions between the two of them were choppy and a bit weird. Whilst comforting Hannah in the barn after witnessing her father committing suicide (involving a fairly gratuitous spraying of chocolate sauce all over her), Albert offers to sing to her, as he did when his dead daughter was troubled: Hannah says “God, no” (or similar) and the relief at having dodged the schmaltz is palpable – and not only from the performers’ side of the screen.

This incident is a little bit of Postmodern strangeness that feels out of place. In a ‘50s film, I’m sure they would have made us endure Wilmarth warbling some corny tune; in the ‘30s – the era this film is trying to emulate - perhaps cynicism would have been too high to go there, but you never know. It feels like a gag which the writers enjoyed that should never have made it to the script, let alone the final edit, and I question the thinking behind its inclusion.

 

I was enormously pleased with the portrayal of Henry Akeley. I was wondering how they would do this – the Mi Go resemble human beings only roughly in terms of general body mass, so passing one off as the other is quite the trick (although there is a faction of readers who think that this is supposed to be Nyarlathotep in disguise, not a Fungus). In a written story, it’s possible to suspend disbelief a fair bit: your mind creates all sorts of cheats and fudges to convince yourself that such a thing is possible; when the task is presented in a visual format, either it is convincing or the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. In this instance, the house was built on solid ground in a wind-proof environment, and quite a bit of glue was to hand.

I really liked the impression which the actors and writers created that, not only was Henry not quite human, but that, at each instance when we see him, he may not have been the same Mi Go in disguise. Barry Lynch’s menacing, shivery performance as the disguised creature(s) admirably contrasts with his performance as the real and anguished Akeley when projected from the brain cylinder through Fungoid technology. I began by thinking that they perhaps should have made the actor’s skin look slightly waxy to create a sense that his face was a mask; that they took the ‘it’s-his-face-skinned-off-his-skull’ option, was inspired. The moment of revelation of this fact is truly disturbing.

 

And talking of disturbing, the beasties were excellent. I particularly appreciated the presence of Fungoid ‘cybernetics’ in the close-up of the Mi Go on the wing of the biplane: the Fungi are experts in surgical techniques, so it makes sense that they’d mess with themselves as much as they mess with everyone else. The glowing telepathic tentacles were a cute touch too.

The decision to use CGI rather than stop-motion technology is a fraught issue: building an armature in virtual space as opposed to a real one is a question of semantics and rationalisation. I think the issue has to be judged by the results: we get a great sequence of the Fungus on the biplane wing; some other shots – Albert’s encounter with one near the unfolding Gate ritual for instance – are not so hot (and why didn’t that Mi Go tell everyone that Albert was hiding there and have him dealt with? Hmm...).

 

There is, as I discussed in my review of “The Call of Cthulhu”, a virtue in being cash-strapped: limitations allow creativity to flourish in order to overcome the restrictions. There was a lot less of that in this film; or rather, a lot more money (courtesy of Sandy Petersen, as it happens) . Still, there are a few moments when the thinness of the budget shows through. The interiors of Miskatonic University were a bit unconvincing in that they showed massive ranges of white walls with nothing to show that they were spaces in use. Offices with bare walls, empty desks, unoccupied in-trays and waste-paper baskets seemed somewhat unreal: a set-dresser was needed to mooch through and make the place look lived in. There was far too much attention paid to a turquoise-studded Mexican skull hanging precariously on an otherwise blank wall and the effect was like having a tiny, intricate artwork occupying one corner of an expanse of canvas: wasted effort. Perhaps this object is an HPLHS in-joke? Not sure.

Which brings me to those mysterious academics. ‘Turns out, they all spring from the writers’ days of live-action roleplaying, characters from an adventure set in Miskatonic University. According to the special features disc, the thought went something like this: HPL and his fellow writers used each other and each other’s inventions in their own tales, so, in like fashion, the HPLHS guys thought they’d pull in their own characters for their take on the classic yarn. This is fine as far as it goes, but there was so much ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ going on around this lot that it was just plain irritating: no, I didn’t know who these people were; I had to go to the second disc to sort that out. Introducing characters for the purpose of telling the story is fine; just don’t invest them with so much portentous gravitas that it implies they’re of more relevance than they need to be for the purposes of getting the story told. My sense is that it’s this that causes the first act to drag so much.

(Rant over.)

What’s left? I feel bad coming to the music last, when it should really be the first thing I mention. It’s sublime; it works; it underscores the mood without interfering or getting in your face: the fact that you barely notice it, shows that it’s doing what it needs to do and doing it very well indeed. Whenever I feel the need to rewind a bit of a film and play it with my eyes shut, as I did with this, I know the soundtrack is doing its job.

The titles and models are all just perfect: I’ve been watching a bunch of cinema from this period lately, and these guys just nail this stuff. Of course, like Wolverine, they’re the best there is at what they do.

Final analysis? I like it a lot. Some people will rant about how they changed the ending, but really, they’ve just added a plausible finish after the point where HPL left off: in the story, Wilmarth just gets the Hell out of Dodge; the HPLHS guys pick up the pen and write in a suitably creepy resolution, with danger and madness for all (whilst simultaneously ignoring a slew of writing by Brian Lumley). There are some hiccups and misreads along the way, some questionable decisions; overall though, it’s a solid performance and I look forward to their next outing.

Three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.