Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1181922
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 3 NOVEMBER 2019 FILM FILM IT'S heartening to see the work of American indie hor- ror author Nathan Ballingrud finally begin to receive the mainstream recognition that it well and truly deserves. Having emerged on the short fiction scene in the early noughties, he released a staggering collection in 2013: North American Lake Monsters, whose TV adapta- tion is also currently set for production. While his ties to the horror genre are both learned and passionately expressed, his work stands out for the liter- ary polish and finely tuned pathos that they are mari- nated in; to say nothing of the genuinely felt tapping into the vagaries of working class life that they also draw from. This marrying together of the grimy with the lyrically beautiful is also evident in his novella 'The Visible Filth', first published in 2015 by This is Horror in a now out-of-print edition, and subsequently in- cluded in his latest collection, titled 'Wounds' to go along with Under the Shadow di- rector Babak Anvari's title for his adaptation of the novella, which has now reached inter- national audiences through Netflix. With a script also penned by Anvari himself, Wounds cleaves very closely to the gross but pin-sharp shocker that is the source material, resulting in a hypnotic horror feature that eschews the jump scares in favour of deeper and queasier delights. Will (Armie Hammer) tends bar at Rosie's, a dive joint largely frequented by losers of every variety: from frustrated lovers to violent criminals, and the occasional group of trendy teenagers who drop in not knowing what to expect. One such group steps in on the night that Rosie's regular Eric (Brad William Henke) ends up getting his face slashed open with a broken bottle after a drunken fight, with one of their number leav- ing their mobile phone behind amidst the chaos. Will takes the phone home, awkwardly explaining its ori- gins to a mistrustful girlfriend, the literary grad student Car- rie (Dakota Johnson). Successfully unlocking the device, Will is both disturbed and intrigued by the panicked incoming messages. But his more immediate concern is bedding Alicia (Zazie Beetz), who regularly visits the bar with a new boyfriend, Jeffrey (Karl Glusman) whose naivete she acknowledges but whom she's very much eager to keep. So, we've got a fine set of hardly-likeable characters stacked against an ineffably sublime malevolent force that begins to manifest itself once the threat lurking behind the lost mobile phone grows un- ignorable for Will. It's a tight concept that is beautifully expounded upon in Ballingrud's novella, whose poetic descriptions of the cockroach-infested bar and the amoral weaving of Will's desire lines do lose something in what is an otherwise visu- ally too-sleek of a production. But what it loses in mundane atmosphere, it very much gains in clearly calculated dread. Expertly juggling both the domestic drama of Will and Carrie's disintegrating rela- tionship and the supernatural threat that lies right behind them, Anvari does good on the promise shown in Under British-Iranian director Babak Anvari makes good on the promise shown in his debut feature Under the Shadow with his finely crafted take on Nathan Ballingrud's novella The Visible Filth Teodor Reljic Crawling under the skin