Friday, September 14, 2018

'Don't Leave Home' And The Creepy Tiny

Image: Cranked Up Films
Are we all just puppets in a giant dollhouse?

I saw director Michael Tully's indie horror film Don't Leave Home the same weekend I was dazzled by the elaborate circus dioramas at the now defunct Bay Area museum Playland-Not-at-the Beach (the dioramas, and almost everything else from the museum, will be up for auction Saturday!), so it was a plate-o-shrimp moment when the film's opening credits began to roll over close-ups of spooky dioramas.

Don't Leave Home is actually the second horror movie this year (Hereditary being the first) to center on artists who work with miniature dioramas, and I'm not quite sure why tiny reproductions of real things lends itself so well to the creepy. Is it the association with childhood and dollhouses? Or the idea that we might just be tiny puppets manipulated but some creator's larger hand?

Ann Margaret Hollyman stars as Melanie Thomas, an artist working on the opening of a solo exhibition which centers on depictions of mysterious Irish legends and disappearances. One of those events involves Father Burke (Lalor Roddy) an Irish priest who, in 1986, was commissioned to paint a portrait of a young girl praying before a statue of the Virgin Mary. Shortly thereafter, the girl went missing, seemingly vanishing into thin air. At the same time, her image disappeared from the priest's painting. While the priest was ultimately absolved of any wrongdoing, the event was deemed an "evil miracle," and he was forced to go into hiding.

When Melanie gets an unexpected art commission from the same reclusive Father Burke, via his "assistant," Shelly (Helena Bereen) she impulsively accepts the invitation to Ireland, and takes up residence in the former priest's creepy and remote mansion, where she is instantly warned that she might see some...things, but not to trust her eyes.

While what follows too often depends on the "is it a dream or reality?" trope, the film does manage to produce some scares, and several very eerie images, culminating in a party scene and art auction that rivals Get Out on the "white people be hella creepy" scale.

Along with Get Out, Don't Leave Home brought to mind Rosemary's Baby, Robert Altman's Images, and the aforementioned Hereditary. But unlike Hereditary, which I felt was done in by an unsatisfying ending, Don't Leave Home ends on an almost perfect note, with a final line that haunted me for days.


Don't Leave Home opens today at San Francisco's Alamo Drafthouse.

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