INANIMATE CARBON GOD

I read on Wednesday night that Peter Medak had died, and since I was already thinking of watching his 1980 film The Changeling for my October viewing anyway, that news kind of settled what I’d be watching tonight. As I’ve said, I’ve been limiting myself this month to first-time watches, and trying to finally see some films I really should’ve seen years ago. This was one of those films; I REALLY should’ve seen this long before now. The Changeling tells the story of composer John Russell, who’s just lost his wife and child in an appalling accident, and he finds himself somewhere else to live. Unfortunately for him, one of the previous residents of the house hasn’t quite left it… or at least they didn’t leave it under normal circumstances. If the film has one major problem, it’s the music; not that it’s bad or anything (a lot of it is very good), it’s just that I felt the film leaned a little too heavily on it to announce “this is some spooky shit, folks”, as if it didn’t quite trust the audience to get it. Pacing could maybe have been tighter too, though it gets better in the second half and builds to a really great conclusion. But The Changeling is very much carried by George C. Scott in the lead role; it’s the sort of film that needs a really good main performance, and Scott delivers, alongside Trish Van Devere as the female co-lead, who was his wife at that time (so you’d hope there would be something between the two). Peter Medak’s career had almost been destroyed a few years earlier by Peter Sellers when the latter worked with him and Spike Milligan on a production that became a nightmare; I’m pleased that he eventually overcame that debacle to produce this very fine bit of work.

Another one from the Daiei Gothic collection. This story had recently been adapted by Masaki Kobayashi as an episode of his Kwaidan anthology four years earlier, but Daiei felt good to go with making its own standalone film of it, and I think they were right… One thing this has that Kwaidan doesn’t is a much stronger sense of naturalism (even though I don’t know how many of the exterior scenes were actual exteriors); the other film is more notable for its brazen stylisation and artifice. Our hero, Yosaku, is a sculptor’s apprentice, who is with him when the old man finds the tree he needs to carve into a statue of the goddess Kannon, and when the titular yokai finds them; she lets him live on condition that he never tell anyone what happened, but that just leaves him having to finish the old man’s work and deal with the odious local lord. What’s going to wind up being his biggest problem? The Snow Woman has a strong sense of sadness and tragedy to it, especially as the film goes on; Yosaku and his wife Yuki make appealing leads against the villainy of Lord Jito and his men, and things do not exactly end well for them, cos, well, Yuki’s true identity is not exactly hard to guess (nor concealed for long, admittedly). It’s all a bit slowly paced, and very much in the folk horror vein, so you’re not really going to get buckets of gore. But you are going to get a surprising amount of charm, and I’m satisfied with that.