Cassadaga (2011)
[Reader disclaimer: there will be spoilers discussed. This piece also contains material of a mature nature].
During the month of October, I elected to post a horror film a day on my Instagram (aptly hashtagged "spoopy month"), which is a tradition I started last year in order to recommend niche horror films to my followers. Whilst traipsing my rolodex of horror this year, I recalled a film from a while back called Cassadaga (2011), and felt it was probably time to give it a second viewing.
It is unfortunate when you rewatch a horror film and find it to be lacklustre, and that was sadly the case for this film. Let's start with the first 60 seconds of the film, which were so insanely problematic that I'm almost ashamed to admit that I didn't realise it until I rewatched.
We are introduced to the main antagonist as a child: a young boy playing with a porcelain, marionette doll and donning a cute, pink dress. Cue the parent coming in to cut up the dress and smash the doll, berating her son for dressing up as a girl: now, this maybe wouldn't have been such a problem if it was purely an allegory to being a transgender child, however (contextually) this is about a boy who grows up to become a serial killer. The film is heavily suggesting that the boy's dysphoria and mental instability/bloodlust is intrinsically linked, a dangerous and unforgivingly cliche for transgender characters.
No, the film does not explicitly depict the boy as transgender, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is what they were going for. Perhaps it is a homage to other films who have used this method, such as Psycho (1960) or Calvaire (2004), but either way it's problematic and arguably unnecessary. If you think dysphoria is a motivation for murder, then perhaps you should do some more research on your subject.
Jumping forward somewhat, and staying on the subject of explicitness, the film has a difficult time letting the viewer draw their own deductions. In the first two minutes of the runtime, our protagonist suffers a personal tragedy with her sister being hit by a bus. I'm aware this is supposed to make us immediately empathise with the character, and we are given flashbacks after the fact, but slapping a character death on the viewer so early on in the narrative (and then giving us flashbacks doused in expositional dialogue) is incredibly lazy and unimaginative. We aren't given time to understand the relationship between these characters, why it's so inexplicably tragic that the sister has died: we're just given the basic formula of character + tragedy = jumpstart for the narrative.
Another example is that the writers tried to misdirect the audience to believe that Thomas' character (played by Lucas Beck) is the serial killer, when it is in fact a different one. This isn't especially new but the best plot twists are often the simplest: however, Cassadaga did not execute this in a successful fashion. We are given scenes of Thomas masturbating to violent pornography, withdrawn and rarely seen in most of the film, as if to say "hey look! It's totally this guy! The weirdo no one sees!"
If you're too on the nose with your misdirection, you more often than not end up arousing more suspicion within the viewer than intended. Sure, I thought nothing of it when Thomas' grandmother (played by Louise Fletcher, of all people!) stated that people rarely saw him, but the moment that they showed him pleasuring himself to taboo porn was the moment that it clicked that the film was trying to throw me off and convince me that he was the murderer, which clearly he wasn't.
I will say that this film had moments of brilliance. One example in particular is the first shot we see of Gepetto (the serial killer) in his workshop, overly saturated and industrial in its presentation. It felt very gritty and the scenes of him experimenting on women and turning them into human marionette dolls were wonderfully disturbing, albeit only taking up a few moments here and there throughout the runtime (which I found slightly disappointing, but I'm just a sucker for gruesome, bodily dismemberment in films).
I even liked what the film was going for, blending supernatural and psychological horror together with the introduction of a ghost character called Jennifer (played by Amy LoCicero): the ghost is of one Gepetto's victims who eventually leads the protagonist, Lily (played by Kelen Coleman) to the true identity of the serial killer. It drives the narrative along but still maintains its creep factor, giving us more than one evil to focus on.
However, I can't say much for the rest of the film. A glaring problem I had after watching it again was the plot holes, and I genuinely believe that this film relies on logic where deemed necessary. One example is that Gepetto (who is revealed to be the gardener, Christian, played by Rus Blackwell) mentions Jennifer to the protagonist early on in the film...why? I understand that this is probably an attempt to misdirect Lily (and us, the audience) but I can't quite understand why Christian would mention Jennifer in the first place: in doing so, the protagonist starts to look into her mysterious disappearance, eventually deducting that the ghost haunting her is the same woman. But if Christian had never mentioned it, it's likely that she would've never made that connection.
Another example is that when kidnapping his victims, Christian poses as a wheelchair-bound man with his face covered, and throws his voice so that his victims turn around and he can launch from his chair to chloroform them. At first, I wasn't sure how he was doing this: I've heard of people being able to project their voices and make them sound like they're coming from a different source. But in the third act of the film, it's a female voice that can be heard, not his. So is this a ghost? Or can he magically alter his voice to sound nothing like his? Is he supernatural?
Sadly, we never really find this out. We also never find out why, in some scenes and not others, the Jennifer ghost can be seen by more than one character. And this is perhaps the largest issue with Cassadaga: it wants to be clever and subvert your expectations, but remains inconsistent in the application of its own logic. Intriguing an audience, though, means that they pay closer attention, therefore I'd argue that you cannot afford to skimp out on important details or plot points in a desperate attempt to hurl down the train tracks of your plot without putting too much thought into it.
In conclusion, dear reader, I would recommend skipping out on this one. You cannot fault a film for trying to be inventive and clever, but you can most certainly judge it for failing to do so.
If you liked this film, I'd also recommend the following:
- The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
- Wrong Turn (2003)
- The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
- The Collector (2009)
- Hush (2016)
Overall rating: 5/10
- K
