We Hate Fun

EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE RUINED

an interview with Gavin Baddeley - Author, Journalist & Minky Musky Sly Old Stoaty Stoaty Stoat

by Annie Riordan - Film Reviewer & Lady Not Appearing in This Film

Well, Lords of Chaos - the book that no insecure metalhead will admit to having read, but who will nevertheless point out all of the errors contained within - has been turned into a movie that no insecure metalhead will admit to having watched, but who were the quickest to point out its many flaws. I have no shame. I watched it. I give no fucks what anyone thinks about that. And just to be a bitch about it, I decided to interview the coolest metalhead I personally know. Unfortunately, that person wasn’t available, so here’s me pestering author and journalist Gavin Baddeley with a shitload of stupid questions about the hype and snipe surrounding this film instead.

GAVIN: I’ve had a love/hate relationship with black metal forever, so watching the troooo black metal crowd getting agitated over this has reignited some ambivalent feelings. I think the responses to the announcement were interesting/silly/bizarre. You had it's wrong because it isn't in Norwegian. It's wrong because it's bound to be inaccurate. It's wrong because it doesn't have the original music in it.

ANNIE: Just this morning I came across an "It's wrong because Aarseth never cut his hair off.”

GAVIN: I remember being struck how the black metal faithful started disowning the book LORDS OF CHAOS some time back. Is it inaccurate? Possibly in parts, but without that book mythologizing events we wouldn't have the scene today, and they certainly wouldn't have found it. I covered it in LUCIFER RISING, but I basically took the piss. One of the things that caught my interest about early reviews was that they described the film as by turns funny and brutal. And that struck me as right. Interviewing these guys - and I believe I did the last interviews with Vikernes and Aarseth before the murder - and there was a really absurd side to it. These weren't philosophers. This was SPINAL TAP directed by Ingmar Bergman. More MONTHY PYTHON than TRIUMPH OF THE WILL or THE RING CYCLE. Then you have these horrible, squalid murders. The contrast is interesting, and almost wholly eclipsed by all of the subsequent mythmaking.

ANNIE: I was surprised by the brutality of the film, honestly. It lingered long on the murders and Dead's suicide. But what surprised me were the people who were put off by the comedic aspects.

GAVIN: That's always overlooked, though Darkthrone, bless their cotton socks, have done their part to suggest that side to things. Have you seen THE MISANTHROPE? A lot of metal reviewers revered it as a window into the darkness of the Nordic soul. It looked to me like Darkthrone taking the piss.

ANNIE: I did see that. It seems to me that people want to take this so darkly, coldly serious that they're turning Aarseth and Varg into what they wanted to be all along, but which neither of them ever were.

GAVIN: Not on their own. I remember a big wheel in the scene at the time saying that Aarseth wanted to be a Manson figure. I believe it was fairly common knowledge that Varg was a horn short of a full Viking helmet too.

ANNIE: The film portrayed him as a bumbling poseur, but who was cold and manipulative enough to portray himself as the real thing. It's kind of jarring.

GAVIN: Who was the bumbling poseur - Aarseth?

ANNIE: No, Varg. His first scene, he's a clumsy, socially inept bumblefuck whom Aarseth dismisses as a poseur. Then he shows up at Helvete (Aarseth's record shop), determined to prove he's the real deal, and win the dick-measuring contest that he creates with Aarseth. It's a jarring transition in a very short amount of time.

GAVIN: People tend to forget that we're largely dealing with teenagers, drinking large quantities of alcohol.

ANNIE: That's made pretty clear - kids, young men, with lots of beer and hormones. But what I've never been able to figure out is just what people DID think of Varg. The movie kind of shifts back and forth between those he think he's a hero and those who know he's an asshole poseur.

GAVIN: It's a comparatively short period of time, among a volatile group of bored kids, so I suspect both could be true. One element often overlooked is the importance of the coverage from Kerrang! Do they cover that?

ANNIE: YES. They even got Jason Arnopp to play himself. They also show Varg calling the newspapers and posing for the cameraman, and the reporters summarily exiting and giggling to themselves about what a fucking idiot he was.

GAVIN: I heard that. I also heard he (Arnopp) can't act (I'm only saying that because I'd love to have done it!). Talk to the original guys, and they tend to emphasize the importance of that. One week they're being mocked in the world's best known metal magazine. Then they have the cover and all of this shock horror coverage. It's heady stuff for teenagers and poured the crucial gas onto the fire. Vikernes obliquely referred to the murders in the interview I did. At the time I just thought it was just more lunacy.

ANNIE: The film indicates that he was the one who inadvertently ratted out Faust in an attempt to prove that the Black Circle existed and was responsible.

GAVIN: That certainly fits with my experience. He started going on about Norwegian Olympic prowess, which was only sinister in retrospect.

ANNIE: What was YOUR initial impression of Varg? Kid playing dress up, trying to be intimidating? Which is how they sum him up in the movie - always posing, always acting.

GAVIN: I think a lot of teenagers do that, so it's not too much of a stretch to see events in that light. I got the impression he was more interested in Tolkien than politics or religion. It would've been more surprising if they had've been fully credible, rounded personalities at that age. So much has been projected onto this retroactively, starting with LORDS OF CHAOS the book. You have to remember, I only spoke to him once. It didn't seem all that important at the time to be honest.

ANNIE: What I don't understand, going back to the fan reaction to the film, is why everyone seems to think that the watching of this film can turn one into an instantaneous poseur. Granted, Fenriz, Necrobutcher and Varg have all come out against it, but none of them ever said that nobody should watch it. However, that's what I've been running into. "This movie is bullshit, anyone who watches it is a loser, etc." But then they all watched it anyway and are now happily tearing it to pieces: "That never happened, that was bullshit, he said, they said, blahblahblah.” The simple fact of the matter is, none of us were there. We don't know what happened. I can't blame Fenriz or Necrobutcher for not wanting anything to do with it because they've already lived through it once, but the general public is so murderously divided over this movie.

GAVIN: I think a certain section of black metal's become a cult. And as such it needs a foundation myth, and this is their foundation myth. They feel ownership of it, and feel threatened by having it challenged. They claim they're concerned that it'll be inaccurate. They're actually worried it's going to be accurate.

ANNIE: But none of them will ever know for sure. Only Varg and Euronymous know, and one's dead and the other is batshit.

GAVIN: Of course not. And I doubt the people involved have particularly clear memories of how things went down. That's not how memory works. It's also not how film works. This is a biopic, a drama, not a documentary. It's trying to get at some artistic or emotional truth. This concept seems beyond many of them. I remember quizzing somebody who'd been outraged at the film not being in Norwegian - the first time I remember somebody bitching about a film not having subtitles. So a film set in Ancient Rome isn't in Latin? THE DEATH OF STALIN isn't in Russian. But we have to have a film about dysfunctional Scandinavian teens in Old Norse or something?

ANNIE: The one thing I did quite like about the movie is the way they seemed to nail Dead (Per Ohlin). Val Kilmer's son (Jack Kilmer) played him, and did a damn good job.

GAVIN: It's that same juxtaposition of the horrific and absurd. The dead bird in a bag thing is hard to take seriously, then there's the shotgun suicide, and quite literally BOOM! Things get seriously dark and out of hand.

ANNIE: It's hard to grasp the sharp turns this whole thing took. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't know. Or I've forgotten how fucked up it is to be a stupid kid.

GAVIN: I think most of us can look back on our adolescence and think 'I did whut?!' Didn't Varg also get angry because the film failed to portray Aarseth as a repressed homosexual? When LUCIFER RISING came out he wrote a very pissy dismissal of it - pretending he'd never given the interview. I showed it to my friend who edited the book and he hooted with laughter. He wanted to know why Varg was quibbling about a detail concerning the possessive form of Euronymous, seemingly regarding this as a greater injury than repeatedly stabbing the man. The boy ain't right.

ANNIE: There were actually a few (quite a few) scenes with a distinct homoerotic flavor, but they also portrayed Aarseth as having a girlfriend he was genuinely gaga about. It also showed Varg as getting massive amounts of pussy, which I have a hard time believing.

GAVIN: He (Varg) did say some odd shit about sodomy when I interviewed him. But he said a lot of odd shit.

ANNIE: He did? Hey, isn’t pyromania the first sign of sexual dysfunction? 

GAVIN: I'd have to check back - it's in LUCIFER, but I think so. I have no idea what Varg's pussy situation was back then. He seems an unlikely dreamboat - but I guess a lot of them are. That pyromania angle's interesting. Rather outside of my area, but I'll bet there's some mileage in it. Particularly if you want to get all Freudian on their collective asses. I'm guessing the TROOOO black metal bods are worried about the whole thing jumping the shark. But it jumped the shark pretty much when it started. When King Diamond did photo shoots with topless nuns, or Venom posed with axes while still wearing their specs. But I think they had a sense of humour, and I think that's key. I don't think any of this would've happened if they'd had a sense of humour - for good or ill.

ANNIE: It's almost like they were just having a massive pissing contest. Varg and Aarseth, I mean. Who can be the most evil? No one else (with the exception of Faust, but the film also hinted at a bi curious angle there) seemed to really give a shit about starting KRIEG or what fucking ever.

GAVIN: (Anton) LaVey emphasized to me that humour was key, and he was a very funny man in person. I think there's a temptation for some teens to get caught up in a quest for authenticity and purity. But I don't think life's like that and you grow to learn that something can be dear to your heart, and also roundly mocked. People without a sense of humour creep me out. They have a crucial element of their psychological make-up missing.

ANNIE: Do you think the public should take that advice when it comes to this film?

GAVIN: I'd say so. If you're confident in what you believe, you aren't paranoid about it being subject to scrutiny or even satire. If you can't bear anyone blaspheming your holy myth, than that says to me that you secretly suspect that it's bullshit.

ANNIE: See, this is why I love you.

GAVIN: And why everybody else hates me. I got sent a copy of a new Alice Cooper book recently. Whenever the author wanted a quote saying something shitty about someone or something, he'd wheel out a quote from yours truly. I just have to ruin everything.

ANNIE: Some things need to be ruined. Everybody takes things too fucking seriously.

GAVIN: 'Everything Needs to be Ruined' is a great title. I remember I sold a version of the Aarseth/Vikernes interview to a Dutch magazine, and they titled it 'We Hate Fun'. A fine philosophy!

Hagazussa

Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse (2018)

Starring: some German people, some goats and a mushroom. Sadly, no badgers.

Synopsis: Never do shrooms. Also, do not attempt to eat soup whilst watching this movie. 

Man, this fucking movie. I watched it like two weeks ago and it took me that long to talk myself into writing a review for it. But how could I not? It has the word HAG right in the fucking title! And it’s German! But man… ugh. 

Set in, what - like, 1400 somethingorother in a tiny little flyspeck village way up in the mountains of Northern Bumblefuckistanberg, this film couldn’t possibly be bleaker, colder or more depressing if you took away its Zoloft, tied it to a chair in a cellar, taped its eyelids to its forehead and forced it to read the entire unabridged Jean Paul Sartre collection. There are black metal bands in the asscracks of Norway who only dream of achieving this level of ruination and grim, frostbitten despair. I was so catastrophically hollowed by this film that I had to listen to six straight hours of Gorgoroth to cheer myself the fuck up. This is the cinematic equivalent of tossing kittens into a stump grinder. 

You know the old song about The Lonely Goatherd? Yeah, that’s pretty much little Albrun and her mother, who live all alone, high on a hill, with their goat herd. Yo-dah-lay-hee-hoo. Life is pretty simple and straightforward: chop firewood, milk goats, get warned to be home before dark or a witch will kill you, etc. Albrun’s father is never seen nor mentioned, and her mother soon becomes deathly ill, bedridden and not expected to recover. Except she does, weirdly. Just long enough to lure little Albrun into bed and either attempt to molest her or eat her, take your pick. Albrun escapes, mother runs screaming off into the wintry night and dies, and fast forward twenty years.

Albrun is now a young woman with an infant daughter of her own. She lives in the same cabin and seems to be milking the same goats, whose milk she tries to sell to the villagers, without much success. Rumor has it she’s a witch, and those who don’t taunt her tend to ignore her completely. Well, except for Swinda, a busty little wench with an easy smile who strikes up a friendship with the solemn, solitary Albrun. Swinda’s initial attempts at chit-chat go unanswered, but she doesn’t seem to notice or care. For almost an hour, I thought maybe Albrun was mute because she doesn’t even respond to polite inquiries. She doesn’t answer when Swinda asks who her daughter’s father is/was. She doesn’t say “boo” when the village priest presents her with the preserved and painted skull of her long deceased mother. She just returns to her cabin and sets the skull up on an altar, where it stares gloomily for the rest of the film. 

Swinda visits Albrun’s cabin with an allegorical apple in hand and lures Albrun away to meet a friend of hers. Albrun, apparently tired of masturbating while fondling her goats udders (no I did NOT make that up) follows Swinda dutifully into the woods and learns too late that her new friend had ulterior motives all along. Raped, betrayed and abandoned, Albrun swiftly loses touch with reality. As the sun begins to set, so does Albrun’s grip on her already tremulous sanity. Does the darkness swallow Albrun whole, or does she willingly descend into it? Is she a witch, or has she been cursed by one? 

It’s hard to tell, and the movie doesn’t really seem to care one way or another. Cinematically, Hagazussa is stunning, stuffed to bursting with beautiful shots of snow frosted pines, green mountains and eerie bogs. The camera lingers long and lovingly on water, bones and shadows. But it doesn’t seem to have any real use for its characters. It has a fairy tale to tell, and like any good collection of Grimms’, it has plenty of full color illustrations and gilt-edged pages, but no real substance. Here’s what happened, it seems to blankly state. This, and this, and then this. The end. And you’re left staring at the screen, wondering what the fuck you just watched, and why you did so. What the hell just happened? 

Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself. Was this a mind-blowing, surrealistic work of art, or a nonsensical and unnecessarily depraved ritual which justifies its sickness with a pretty backdrop? Or both? I still don’t know. And honestly, this. movie. moves. sooooooo. very. very. slowly. That I doubt many will have the patience to see it through to the end

Lords Of Chaos

Lords Of Chaos

Directed by Jonas Åkerlund

Starring: Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen, Valter Skarsgaard, Jack Kilmer, Sky Ferreira.

Synopsis: Ist Krieg in Norway. 

You know what film I really liked and actually own on DVD? The Untouchables, Brian De Palma’s 1987 homage to Capone’s Chicago, circa 1930something. Which I myself find weird because I’m not the world’s biggest De Palma fan. And I hate Kevin Costner with a passion. Not really all that fond of Sean Connery either, truth be told. But man I loved The Untouchables. Despite the fact that its only brush with historical accuracy might have been when a history professor sneezed in the theater once whilst it was playing. Man, The Untouchables is technically a terrible movie. But I love it, and you know why? Because it’s a fucking movie, not a historical lecture. 

I was not in Norway in the early 1990s. I’ve never been to Norway. I have no way of knowing what truly transpired between Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth and Kristian “Varg” Vikernes. But here’s the thing: you probably weren’t there either. The only people who do know are either dead, crazy or not talking about it. The ones who are not dead or crazy have every right to condemn and avoid this movie - they’ve already lived through it once. I can, believe it or not, understand how they feel. I lost a friend to murder once. The murder was documented on a true crime show. The show itself didn’t bother me, but the ignorant comments left by the YouTube trolls did. Nobody who was a part of a terrible thing wants that thing to be critiqued by people who don’t know shit about that thing, but who arrogantly consider themselves an authority on the subject nonetheless. 

So yeah, I watched Lords Of Chaos. Not as a documentary or even a biopic. I watched it as a movie. And I will be reviewing it as a movie. Because that’s all it ever can be for me. And that’s as much justifying as I’m willing to do. Because fuck you, I will watch whatever I want and I owe you no explanations.

Now, onto the review, you fuckers.

Øystein Aarseth is a pretty typical teenage boy: bored, disdainful of the society he benefits from, determined to rebel against as many norms as possible. He starts up a band in mom’s basement, but he’s not content to be just another metal band in a sea of cacophony. He’s going to stand out, metal heads and armored shoulders above the rest. He invents his own riff, a sound never before exploited to its full potential. Øystein has founded black metal. Now he just needs the perfect singer for his band. 

The perfect singer comes along in the form of a Swedish kid named Per Ohlin, an angelic blond boy with a blistering demo tape and a penchant for killing small animals. His vocals are exactly what Øystein has been looking for and he hires the weirdo before the stench of dead, crucified rat can be aired out of his car. Their band, Mayhem, quickly becomes the absolute definition of Extreme. Their music is brutal, their lyrics cold enough to kill, and their lead singer is just…well, fucking insane. Per, who goes by the stage name Dead, lives in a constant state of morbid despair. He buries his clothes before a performance to ensure that he will reek of the open grave. He smears his already pale face with corpsepaint. He eschews glue fumes, preferring instead to huff on the stench of a birds rotting remains in a brown paper bag. He cuts himself open on stage, splattering the frenzied audience with his blood. There is no pretending with Dead, it’s all or nothing. Which makes his suicide in early 1991 a real pisser. Now short one amazing vocalist, Øystein turns his loss into an opportunity. 

He photographs Per’s corpse. He fashions necklaces from pieces of the kids shotgun shattered skull. He cements his own reputation for being the ultimate badass mutherfucker, leader of The Black Circle, numero uno head honcho of the black metal community. He also loses his bassist, who disgustedly refuses to accept the skull fragment Øystein demands he wear as a member of Mayhem. Pissed, and determined to stand his dark, frozen ground, Øystein opens a record store called Helvete and begins signing other bands to his own label, Deathlike Silence. 

Eager to be accepted into the Black Circle is a bumbling clod named Kristian, whom Øystein initially dismisses as a poseur due to a Scorpions patch he spies on the dude’s jacket. But Kristian is every bit as determined as Øystein to be the coldest, darkest mutherfucker in metal Norway. Cue the inevitable dick-measuring as Kristian - now calling himself “Varg” - deliberately begins one-upping Øystein at every available opportunity. Soon, Norway is dotted with the smoldering remains of many a Christian church as Varg makes arson his chosen medium. Seeing Varg hailed as a hero by their peers, Øystein quickly takes credit for the burnings, citing himself as the inspiration for and the brains behind every fire. It’s a ridiculous pissing contest that gets less and less amusing as time goes on.

When mutual friend Bard Eithun (stage name Faust) brutally stabs a gay man to death, Varg challenges Øystein to at long last put up or fucking shut up. After somewhat reluctantly participating in a church burning with both Varg and Faust, Øystein goes back to business as usual, determined to keep quiet about the fires and the murder. Varg, however, has a bottomless ego demanding to be fed. He decides to leak it to the press that the Black Circle has committed the arsons, is behind the unsolved murder and are to be feared, respected and held in awe by all. But, you know, mostly him. Proclaiming himself Count Grishnackh, Varg blows everyone’s cover, his own included. Shit swiftly spirals out of control. The crazy is spreading faster than the clap. To say that Varg’s plan to crown himself as He Who Shall Not Be Fucked With backfires is akin to suggesting that most members of the family Ursidae prefer to defecate in heavily forested areas.

 

But the worst still hasn’t happened yet.

I found this film to be…okay. Not bad. Not brilliant, although it has its moments. Jack Kilmer (son of Val) in particular nails Per “Dead” Ohlin almost as hard as Per nailed rodents to popsicle stick crosses. For all that he was a depressing, deeply disturbed, cat-killing lunatic, his suicide scene is devastating to watch. I also wasn’t sure going in if I was going to be able to fully buy into a Culkin kid playing Øystein Aarseth, but I was impressed. I admit it, the kid can act. Less convincing was Emory Cohen as Varg. I never really bought all the way into his performance, but just knowing that the actor is Jewish made me admittedly very happy. I'm petty, sue me. And holy shit, how the fuck many kids does Stellan Skarsgaard have? Okay, I looked it up. Eight sons. EIGHT of those gangly mutherfuckers being all stretchy skinny scarecrow creepy wandering around all over the place. And Valter Skarsgaard (as Faust) looks so very much like his brother Billy that I kept expecting him to wave a paper boat in front of Varg’s face.

At times, this film is wickedly funny. Other scenes are so heavy handed that they fall flatter and heavier than a manhole cover on a pancake. Sometimes, none of it makes any sense whatsoever and attention drifts as it plods along.The murder scenes (two of them) are brutally endless. The camera does not cut away, or blink, or care about your discomfort. They are very difficult to sit through simply because they will not end until you’ve seen every last single second of the pain and agony. It’s not glamorous, it’s excruciating. And it should be. Much like black metal itself, murder should not be emulated, nor have an adoring audience. 

So yeah. There you go. A movie, just like a million other movies. It didn’t change any of my opinions or alter any of my beliefs. The world didn’t come to an end by my watching it, I have no feelings of guilt and I don’t feel like I betrayed anyone by watching it. It’s. Just. A. Movie. You may now proceed with your regularly scheduled lives.

Possum

Possum (2018)

Starring: Sean Harris, Alun Armstrong.

You know how when the bath tub drain gets clogged and you spend, like, a week standing in ankle deep water every time you shower until you finally break down and call the plumber, and the plumber comes out and sticks that long snake down into that dark drain hole where everything is eternally spongy and slimed with slick black goop, and when that snake comes back up, it’s got a big drippy snarl of rotting hair clinging to the end of it like a black octopus, dripping strings of fetid sewage. 

Now, imagine having to eat that. 

Cold. 

All of it. 

That’s as close as I can come to describing what it’s like to watch Possum.

And that IS a compliment. 

I fucking love Sean Harris. I’ve loved him since 2004’s Creep, which wasn’t a great movie by any means, but which wasn’t all that bad either. Harris - as the scabrous, screeching, semi-aborted creep of the title, haunting the tube stations below London - turned a ho-hum slasher into every woman’s worst case scenario pelvic exam from Hell. As Stretch in 2009’s Harry Brown, Harris was an open sore on legs, oozing ice-cold ickiness from every festering scab. Totally wasted in the disappointing Prometheus and the abysmally shitty Deliver Us From Evil  (which also saw Eric Bana’s talents pissed away down the proverbial toilet, but that’s another article), Harris has finally found the perfect dark crack in the cellar floor in which to wedge himself in Possum, an incredibly upsetting and miserably icky film if ever there was one. 

Harris does not play the part of Philip in this film: he crawls inside the character’s hollowed out carcass, for Philip is surely the emptiest, coldest, grimmest man in England, a meat vehicle on autopilot, stiffly marching through life with no purpose, no love and no joy at all. Philip has mastered the art of turning his nearly nonexistent lips into a perfect upside-down U, a grimace which at times seems to be the only way to keep a huge and horrible scream locked inside of his mouth. Stuffed inside of the huge and heavy carpetbag he carries with him everywhere he goes is the personification of all his grief, rage and repressed fears: a hideous marionette named Possum.

With a white ceramic face void of expression and eight hairy dangling spider legs, Possum makes that fucking spider-legged kewpie doll from 2004’s Night Watch seem absolutely cuddly by comparison. For reasons unknown and unfathomable, Philip apparently thought it was a good idea to construct this thing and perform with it in public. In front of children, for fucks sake. But something went wrong. We’re never told exactly what, but I can only imagine the ghastly, agonized sobs of some traumatized preschoolers rising up over London like a hellish fog in the aftermath. Philip, shunned and shamed, returns home. Unfortunately, home is a squalid flat in some dismal little town. You can almost smell the mildew beneath the yellowed wallpaper, and imagine the horrifying thick black fuzz accumulating over the contents of the fridge. 

Waiting for Philip is his - stepfather? Uncle? I’ve read articles that suggested either/or - Maurice (the eternally amazing Alun Armstrong), a nasty, chain-smoking old bastard with bleary rats eyes and a mouthful of rotting teeth. If he’s not the author of Philip’s misery, he’s certainly the master puppeteer. The art of marionette making runs in the family, you see, and Maurice knows which strings to tug for maximum effect. His hard, rheumy stare and cruel laughter have worn Philip down to a bony stub. Maurice is cancer incarnate and he’s entrenched himself into Philip’s house and life like a big, rubbery tumor. We don’t know exactly what horrible things are lurking and squirming in Philip’s childhood and neither man is forthcoming with details. They skitter around the subject - a single word, a poisoned side eye, both men teetering on the brink of an enormous abyss. Hints come in the form of symbols tucked away in dreams: a jar of sickly green sweets, orange and yellow balloons consumed by tendrils of black smoke, a spidery tree. And ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what trauma(s) lie in Philips past. We all have a particular horror lurking in our childhood, a stark moment in time when we were suddenly made aware of pain and mortality. We all have a possum on its back somewhere in our subconscious, just waiting for the right catalyst to flip it over and start it scuttling towards us in a rabid frenzy. 

Meanwhile, buried beneath the wormy topsoil of Philip and Maurice’s ugly relationship, a fourteen year old boy has gone missing. And Philip is incapable of making himself look not totally suspicious at all: wandering around town, hanging out in empty playgrounds, staring moodily at school buildings, drawing stares and pointed fingers and shuddery recoils. No one ever comes right out and accuses him of having committed a crime, except perhaps for Philip himself. And Possum. Little Possum, black as sin. Staring accusingly from the corner, following Philip down dark hallways, around sunny corners, crawling into bed with him uninvited. Possum cannot be destroyed, try though Philip might. Beaten, burned, drowned and discarded, Possum always comes back. Possum never left. Our possums never do. And unless dealt with, they grow ever bigger, ever more fetid and obstructive…like a nasty snarl of gunk in the bath tub drain. 

Containing echoes of such films like Begotten, Magic, Babadook, It, and many others, Possum is strong enough to stand on its own eight legs as a uniquely devastating and wholly unpleasant experience in horror. It’s not a film you need or would even want to watch over and over again - once is enough, thanks to the perfect marriage of masterful acting by both Harris and Armstrong and a backdrop so bleak and cold it will haunt you long after it’s over. You won’t forget Possum, no matter how hard you try.