Era$e/Rew]nd ~ Film Reviews ~ "Reverb" (Guerilla
Films - 2008/88 mins)
The Ghost in the Machine - Irfan Shah takes a 'memento'
style look at films they either didn't want you to see
or didn't want you to remember. This week it's 'Reverb'
- a low-budget horror flick from British director, Eitan
Arussi. Don't believe their lies.
Release 27.07.09
Atmospheric low-budget horror flick with exclusive
tracks by The Prodigy and Tunng. Now available on DVD.
Alex (Leo Gregory) is given the chance to provide a
track for an upcoming compilation album. His friend
Maddy (Eva Birthistle) gets him two nights in a state
of the art recording studio on the condition that they
are locked in for the duration. During the recording
sessions they discover cries for help hidden in a sample
of a song by enigmatic sixties rocker Mark Griffin and
delving deeper into the track, Leo finds himself slowly
becoming possessed by the malevolent spirit of the dead
musician.
Admittedly, it’s a bit hokey. The dialogue is thin and
the conceit of a haunted lock-in is straight out of
Scooby-Doo, however, the novelty of the setting and
the general care with which the film seems put together
makes this an easy film to recommend to fans of atmospheric
and mildly gory horror movies. Think of Dr. Frankenstein’s
laboratory with its buttons and electrodes, its sense
of barely controlled chaos and uncontrollable ambition.
His smart move is to make the sounds the main characters
and to populate his film with echoes and distortion
and even the one sex scene is a more aural than visual
experience. And then, at one point as a camera pans
lovingly over a mixing desk the scene is transformed
into a twenty-first century mad professor’s lab, with
dials and flickering needles, bristles of wire and flashing
lights all reminiscent of the electricity conductors
and Tesla machines of the old black and white classics.
It’s been criticised for looking cheap. I don’t agree,
and anyway, the glossier a film is the more it is dragged
away from real horror and towards a stilted pornography
of violence that I just don’t enjoy or believe in. I
liked the look of the film and thought its dull, rain-washed
colours, dirty yellows and exhausted greens suited it.
‘Reverb’s’ triumph is its setting and in the way it
luxuriates in sound and the possibilities of sound.
What, for instance, is more forlorn and creepy than
music playing in an empty room? A studio is a place
of alchemy and also a place where egos inflate and push
aside lovers, friends and common sense.
The film has been criticised for poor editing and again
I think the film’s got the arse end of some poor reviewing.
The jerking cuts seem obviously deliberate with images
spliced together to create near-subliminal jumps in
mood, creating a sense of jarring and becoming a commentary
on the characters’ disintegration. Again, I enjoyed
it. But even the geeks are kicking sand in the film’s
face. Some uber-nerd complained that footage played
on a Mac application in the film did things a Mac just
wouldn’t do as if the idea of possession by the evil
spirit of a dead sixties rock musician would have been
completely believable if only they had used the right
software!
)
