If you haven’t already, meet the Adams Family: father, John Adams, wife, Toby Poser, and daughter, Zelda Adams. They are a filmmaking outfit, aided in many fashions by another daughter, Lulu, who act in as well as write, direct, and produce spartanly budgeted horror films that are driven by metaphors for the forces that splinter, well, families. “The Deeper You Dig” and “Hellbender” suggested that the Adams Family had potential, and their newest, “Where the Devil Roams,” finds them fulfilling it.
The Adams Family possesses an intrinsic understanding of how low budgets can benefit cinema, especially in the horror genre. Expensive films tend toward lushness. The smooth, creamy images invite audiences to soak in the bath of the production values and relax, recognizing that they’re in the hands of professionals. Raw, jagged, grainy images stolen on the fly from a street curb or fashioned from a homemade dolly—a wheelchair, perhaps—in someone’s backyard don’t offer that assurance. There’s a subconscious friction to low-budget images, as they underscore the difficulty, or at least the ingenuity, inherent in their creation. You can almost feel the filmmakers willing themselves to bring an illusion off, and this willfulness can intensify your complicity with them. I’m not saying that expensive Hollywood films are easy to make, but they don’t invite this sense of collaboration from the audience, and their illusions often seem to fall off the production wagon carelessly, especially in this age of forgettable digital FX.
“Where the Devil Roams” is set among the fading carnival circuits of the 1930s, a milieu very close to what Guillermo del Toro was trying to conjure in his 2021 “Nightmare Alley.” Del Toro, who hasn’t made a good movie in ages, predictably bathed his film in a nostalgic gauze, fashioning intricate, impressive sets that have little to do with the sleaziness of the haunting 1947 Tyrone Power film that was he remaking. Del Toro offered up a carnival studio-style, which is to say theme park style. The carnival that the Adams Family offers, meanwhile, is created by the use of a few select props and handmade sets, and is shot on what appears to be private property, with a few select extras suggesting crowds. The Adams’ communicate what Del Toro, with his sentimentality and endless derivative resources, cannot: the desperation and seaminess of the carnival scene. The Adams’ closely framed and underpopulated images connote a grimy claustrophobia. We do not need to be told via dialogue of the central family’s Depression-era desperation. We feel it.
“The Deeper You Dig” and “Hellbender” were spunky enough to make you root for them, to, okay, grade them on a bell curve. “Where the Devil Roams” shows considerable artistic development, suggesting a deepening vision. This is a defiantly eccentric movie, and the carnival motif seems to speak to the Adams, coaxing out an autobiographical identification that was already nascently present in the earlier movies. Or simply: it’s impossible not to assume that an independent filmmaking family doesn’t mean the story of a family of traveling carnival performers as a metaphor for itself. Mixing film stocks, fashioning their own unnerving soundscapes, the Adams’ create a mood—call it folk horror, heavy metal style—that suggests a fusion of Tod Browning and Rob Zombie and Larry Fessenden. That’s not a bad place for a horror filmmaker to land. The plotting is borderline irrational, the images poetically harsh and hard and beautiful.
There’s also a lack of sentimentality here that recalls the pulp novels of Jim Thompson, among others, and horror indie landmarks like “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” John, Toby, and Zelda play traveling serial killers who call themselves musicians on the carnival circuit, with an act that no one cares about. That is until they steal a supernatural heart from another performer, Mr. Tipps (Samuel Rodd), that grants them the ability to hack off and regenerate their own limbs for the audience’s delectation. That’s a clever allusion to what artists feel that they have to do for success, and for what everyone feels they must do in times of recession. However audacious, such allusions can feel self-pitying, but the Adams are so matter of fact about their characters’ ruthlessness as to skirt easy moralizing. The Adams’ don’t distance themselves from their killers; they empathize, crawling all the way into the skins of monsters, inviting our complicity. We see in their madness an extreme version of the love that drives a functional nuclear family. We see them on their own terms, as outcasts, as a pack of wolves spit out by the World War and left ragged and passionate and tormented and deranged. This is a potent piece of work.
By contrast, “Good Grief” is awash in money and opportunity and ease. It’s a travel movie made by someone born into money, and that ease can offer its own pleasures. It’s the directorial debut of Dan Levy, one of the actors and co-creators, along with father Eugene, of the TV show “Schitt’s Creek.” Which is to say that Levy not only has to prove that he’s more than a TV show, but more than a ‘nepo baby’ as well. “Good Grief” is good enough to clear those hurdles. I’m curious to see what Levy does next, but that’s about as far as it goes this time out.
In Levy’s defense, he’s tackling perhaps the most difficult subject for the cinematic medium: grief. It’s almost impossible for movies not to trivialize the emotions that engulf us in the midst of loss. Movies either go too grim or too therapeutic, or, even worse, glibly reduce grief to a momentary plot device in the service of another subject entirely. Levy is conscious of these issues and tries to skirt them. He avoids grimness and callousness, but, per his generation, can’t help but land on therapeutic.
Levy is Marc, a book illustrator married to a wealthy, attractive, maddeningly smug children’s book author, Oliver (Luke Evans), who dies five minutes into the movie. Marc must process this loss with a trip to Paris with his friends, Thomas (Himesh Patel) and Sophie (Ruth Negga), unearthing secrets along the way. The friends are chick lit stereotypes: Thomas is Marc’s supportive ex, and Sophie is a woman nearing middle-age who’s terrified of people not constantly noticing her attractiveness and sass, which she medicates with alcohol and rash decisions. Patel is fairly easy to take, while Negga plays Sophie in all-caps, obviously emphasizing her character’s performative confidence. It’s difficult parsing Sophie’s insufferableness from Negga’s.
Meanwhile, Levy gives an understated performance that evinces considerable understanding of actual grief, particularly in terms of lack of reactions. Marc doesn’t emote but he doesn’t theatrically withdraw either. He’s right there, vaguely normal, phoning things in until the numbness of Oliver’s death wears off. If only Levy, the writer and director, had more confidence in what Levy the actor was doing. Rather than allowing this performance to speak for itself, he has to crowd it with self-help gobbledygook. We’ve already got the trip to Paris and the besties, and so of course there’s eventually a hunk with no complications of his own who understands everything about Marc instantly. Which leads, of course, to speeches. Lots of them. Every significant character gets at least one. And those speeches beget self-actualizations …
If you’re looking for a winter time-killer, “Good Grief” goes down easy enough—Levy’s talented enough to pull that much off. But here’s hoping that he learns from his own character and comes to greater trust his own gifts.
“Where the Devil Roams” can be seen on Tubi, while “Good Grief” is now available on Netflix.
