(Note: There are some very big spoilers in the following review. So go forward accordingly…)
The Tall Man(2012) is the newest horror film from director Pascal Laugier, the artist who directed Martyrs (2008), one of the finest and most devastating films of the New French Extremity, and of the Torture Porn Age in horror (2001 – 2009) too.
But where Martyrs functioned as a (blazing) horror movie first and meaningful social commentary second The Tall Man is approximately the reverse. It utilizes horror trappings -- and a horror-filled first act -- to tread deeply into controversial social issues.
The result is a unique film that raises provocative, even incendiary questions about “how we live now,” but ultimately fails the basic litmus test for all horror films. After approximately the forty-five minute point, the movie is no longer scary in even the slightest degree. Melodrama supplants suspense, and the film concludes with a heavy-handed voice-over address about the events that have transpired.
As you know, I often argue in my books and on the blog that the horror film is the perfect vehicle for social commentary because, in some sense, it is already a derided outsider. Because of their taboo-breaking, convention-shattering nature, horror films can speak meaningful to societal terrors in a way that mainstream dramas can’t. There’s nothing I like better than a horror film that picks up on the Zeitgeist, or intelligently debates an issue that vexes or roils us.
Because I hold this belief, I must admit that I’m conflicted about The Tall Man. It is a film made with great skill, and yet which doesn’t quite, in the end, come to together in the way that I believe the filmmakers hoped it would.
I appreciate that Laugier -- a talent I admire -- desired to make a horror film about something he saw as important, but I also feel that there’s a bit of a bait-and-switch going on here. The movie starts out as out-and-out, ramped-up horror effort, and ends as a preachy polemic about poverty, the hell of good intentions, the sanctity of family, and the evils of socialism. I’m not sure entirely that the equation works. By the closing credits, you may feel more manipulated than entertained, in part because the “villain” is really not a Tall Man…but a straw man.
I’ll attempt to refrain from discussing too much here in terms of plot specifics, because enjoyment of The Tall Man arises from a shocking revelation that arrives about one-third of the way in.
It’s one of the most effective and surprising “tricks” I’ve seen in a horror movie for a good while, even if the fall-out arising from it is that -- for a good twenty-minutes or so -- the audience is left wondering what the hell is happening.
But suffice it to say, this is a film that cleverly plays on your assumptions. You gaze at the security bars on a country home’s windows, for instance, and assume they are there to keep something out, not prevent someone from escaping. I appreciate that Laugier operates on this level of ambiguity quite a bit in The Tall Man.
Writing in generalities now, you probably already know that The Tall Man is about children, at least if you’ve watched the trailer, or read other reviews. In a poverty-stricken Pacific northwestern town, a strange “Tall Man” has been seen taking away local children in the thick of the night.
Thus far, eighteen children have disappeared from one tiny town. The police, led by Stephen McHattie of Pontypool(2008) and William B. Davis of The X-Files, are unable to determine what has happened to the children, or even if they are dead or alive. The little ones just disappear without a trace…leaving grieving parents behind.
The film’s protagonist is Julia Dunning (Jessica Biel), a young nurse whose husband, a doctor, recently passed away. As the film opens, Julia helps to deliver a baby under unusual circumstances. The mother is an under-age teenager, and the baby’s father is actually the mother’s alcoholic step-father. It’s not a pretty picture, or one of domestic bliss.
After a long day, Julia goes home and plays with a little boy named David (Jakob Davies) before tucking him in and going to bed herself. Then, in the middle of the night, she awakens to find the “Tall Man” in her house, attempting to abduct David.
What follows is the film’s most harrowing sequence as Julia attempts to retrieve the boy and accumulates a number of bloody wounds in the process. She gets dragged along the highway asphalt, bitten by a vicious, snarling dog, and tossed into the mud and pounding rain. This extended sequence is superbly executed, and absolutely heart-pounding. The sequence activates the film’s most powerful fear response, at least if you’re a parent: the fear of losing your child. There’s one moment when Julia almost gets David back…but trips, and misses him. You just know that is a moment that, in similar circumstances you would replay constantly in your mind.
But then things get really, really weird in The Tall Man.
The presence of William B. Davis in a prominent role may suggest to you the film’s ultimate direction: conspiracy.
The Tall Man is indeed abducting children in this poverty-stricken town, but the crux of the issue is the reasonbehind these abductions.
And that reason, alas, forms the basis of The Tall Man’s extensive social commentary. Much is made in the film of the rotten national economy in America, the general joblessness of the town, and the citizens who -- despite loving their children -- linger in cycles of domestic abuse and alcoholism. The film’s straw man is the argument that there are, apparently, some affluent, well-to-do west coasters who believe they can raise these children better than these white-trash folks in “Real America” and thus take steps to see that this occurs.
These west-coasters are (apparently) well-meaning, if emotionally remote, but they destroy the lives of the town’s folk in their radical attempts at social engineering. Entrenched in their actions is the belief that they are superior to others, and can offer more to poor children than their biological parents.
It’s sort of the ultimate Glenn Beck-ian fear.
Coastal elites are coming to steal your children and re-educate them, if not in FEMA camps, then at least in urban liberal enclaves such as San Francisco. It’s the fear that socialistic government thinks it knows what is better for your child then you can do. I should hasten to add that children in horror films always represent "tomorrow" or the "future," so if children are being taken away from Red State America in The Tall Man, Red State America dies. It's an existential horror. Not only are socialists stealing your children, they are destroying your very way of life.
The only problem is that if you examine closely the “underground railroad” for poor, abducted children as it is highlighted in the film, you began to realize how haphazard a construct it really is, and how easy exposure and legal repercussions would be for those well-to-do, children-stealing liberal elites.
Child abduction is still a punishable crime in America after all, and those responsible for it take an awful risk that the transplanted children wouldn’t attempt to: a.) re-connect with their families at some time in the future or b.) inform the authorities about what happened to them. The final scene in the film is an utterly ridiculous one as two transplanted kids from the same poverty-stricken town encounter one another in their new locale.
Certainly, precautions would be taken so something like that would never, ever happen. The whole take-children-from-the-redneck-poor-and-give-to-the-liberal-rich-plan would be imperiled if the children started comparing notes.
Just to be clear: I don’t necessarily object to the paranoid, right-wing tenor of the film’s revelations. I can entertain any philosophy for 106 minutes.
What bothers me is that there is no veneer of plausibility underlining the story, and so the argument against socialism becomes not one based in reality, but a straw man argument. The villainous liberal elites are able to totally erase children from history and start them off on new lives with no exposure and no danger. The film even forgets that there is this thing called DNA, so that even if a child is abducted to San Francisco for PBS re-education and a life of Birkenstocks and soy-milk lattes, their DNA will remain the same, and thus they will remain track-able under certain not-entirely-implausible conditions.
Another way to look at it is this. When the film’s whole story-line relies on an obviously unhinged woman -- ostensibly the only health care-giver in her town -- stealing children and keeping them as captives for long spans in her home, you know the believability factor just isn’t very high. Wagering everything on an unstable human being isn't a very good plan, especially for the systematic relocation of our most precious resource, children.
What I demand of any horror film with social commentary -- right-leaning or left-leaning -- is that the commentary be applied sensibly and logically. And it mustn’t overwhelm the film, lest the movie become a political statement over a horror movie.
With The Tall Man’s final, breaking-the-fourth wall close-up -- accompanied by the leading words “Right? Right? RIGHT?” -- the movie trips over that important distinction and never stands back up.
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