PicoBlog

Wounds is not a subtle film. It opens with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness: “…it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception… and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed within him because he was hollow at the core.” I chuckled at this during my rewatch, knowing what I know now about the film. I hadn’t actually scrutinized the quote in relation to the resulting narrative when I watched it last year. But then, at one point in the film — another thing I hadn’t noticed before — we catch a glimpse of the essay that Carrie (Dakota Johnson) is writing for her college course, something on T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. And towards the film’s final act, Carrie, in the midst of her breakup from boyfriend, Will (Armie Hammer), tells Will that he’s a mock person. “You’re just a body,” she says dispassionately, before Will storms out of their New Orleans abode. Yeah, ok. We get it.

On my first watch of British-Iranian director Babak Anvari’s sophomore film, I hadn’t considered the clownishly ham-fisted articulation of its material: the surface-level approach to a goofy story that is as hollow as its lead character. As it often goes with horror films, I was mostly looking to watch something that would scare me, and I was also curious as to why this particular film had seemed to elicit such visceral reactions of displeasure from my peers when it released back in 2019. Since this first watch, I have watched Anvari’s far more critically praised debut feature, Under the Shadow: a supernatural horror film that takes place during the War of the Cities in 1980s Tehran. It’s more elegantly executed if equally obvious in its subtext. Wounds, on the other hand, has mixed critical reviews and a vilification from my Letterboxd friends that is particularly… angry. But I didn’t think it was that bad. I actually thought it was pretty good!

However, this takeaway has changed in some ways and hasn’t in others since I’ve revisited the film. But on this first watch, I was more intrigued by the approach the film took to its horror elements. I am very picky about horror now, and in recent years I prefer my horror films to be as ambiguous as possible. Overexposure and desensitization to most blood and guts and ghosts and ghouls has made me far more afraid of unanswered questions and the things that I don’t see. Films that actually leave blank spaces for an audience to fill in have become something of a delicacy.

Wounds provided this for me, a film about a bartender who finds the forgotten cellphone of a college student, makes a call on it, and then accidentally becomes a vessel for an unknown entity that the student and her friends allowed to enter the world. But everything surrounding this absurd circumstance is left largely shrouded in mystery. We only see the world of Wounds through the eyes of Will: a salt-of-the-earth New Orleans bartender, who harbors feelings for his ex Alicia (Zazie Beetz) and resents her current waifish, artsy writer boyfriend, Jeffrey (Karl Glusman). After a fight between patrons at Will’s shitty dive bar, one of the group of college kids Will serves despite being underage leaves their phone behind. Will confiscates the phone and, during Will’s first night with it, a brief text exchange ensues between him and someone named Garrett. Garrett texts the phone’s owner that he’s in trouble; that something the kids allowed to come into the world is now with him.

Will receives a photo from Garrett the next day of a pile of bloody teeth. In the photo library, he finds pictures of a dead man’s decapitated head and a video in which the head is lifted away by cockroaches crawling underneath it. Increasingly concerned, and with mounting pressure from Carrie, he tries calling the phone, but only hears inhuman screeching. On his way to trying (and failing) to deliver the phone to the police, Will receives a text message that he has been “chosen.” Meanwhile, Carrie — jealous and suspicious of Will, for entirely the wrong reasons — becomes obsessed with a book that she saw in the background of the video titled “The Translation of Wounds,” which leads her down an internet rabbit hole and to the mysterious, entrancing video of an endless tunnel.

A good way to describe the thematic handling of this film is “something something kids and their phones…. something something toxic masculinity equals…men being hollow on the inside?” I don’t really know. The movie sure doesn’t seem to either. It’s a mélange of half-formed ruminations that are never actually seen through to any sort of meaningful catharsis; an undaunted parade of men calling people “pussy” and making insensitive remarks about male femininity and things that go against a masculine norms, followed by something like a shot of a gay couple dejectedly exiting a bar. At every turn, Wounds wants to make sure you get the message without actually taking steps to say anything.

The same can be said of the film’s tackling of ookie spookie technology. It’s a topic that movies like The Ring and Pulse and Unfriended have already done, but with added, incompetent criticism of young people and their phones. “Fuckin’ millennials,” Will spits at one point, a hilariously outdated line of actual dialogue in the year 2019, when college kids like the ones in Wounds would be Gen Z, and the average millennial would already be in their thirties. It feels as if, because Anvari made a name for himself with the bold political commentary of his first film, he felt that he had to follow it up in his second. Instead, he stumbles over himself, turning his subtext into context and making social statements that ultimately don’t mean anything.

But besides (and also because of) the film’s thematic clumsiness, Wounds is both creepy and also very silly. It’s a fun, sort of schlocky good time. And the idea that Armie Hammer could be cast as a gruffy and grizzled everyman is laughable in and of itself. There is no five-o-clock shadow you can grow on that man’s face nor bottle of bourbon you can place in his hand that will make Hammer look like he shouldn’t be playing at minimum one of two identical Aryan twin brothers who come up with the idea for Facebook at Harvard University and have it stolen by Mark Zuckerberg. Armie Hammer looks like he was regularly dressed in a little sailor suit and handed a large lollipop as a young boy at his family’s estate — which he probably was. And considering the allegations against him, it’s just fun, at the very least, to watch a movie where the actor increasingly suffers for an hour and a half. A movie where his character is described as a “mock person.”

The main thing that drew me in on Wounds the first time around was how unconcerned it is with providing real clarity or closure, but in creating unease through a breadcrumb trail of sparse information. The circumstances of the ritual and the nature of the college students are left largely to the imagination, which allows the horror thrust of the film to remain vague aside for what’s being inflicted upon the lead character. The college students are just a group of underage kids who patron Will’s bar one night, and the camera focuses on them in a way that renders them inconsequential upon introduction.

We don’t think about them much, and then when they become pivotal to the story, we never see them again. They’re a hand that snatches a phone off the ground, a partial reflection in a car’s side mirror; blurry, obscured selfies on a screen. A faintly mutating head turned away from us, calmly whispering exposition to a plagued Armand Hammer. We know that the kids performed a gnostic ritual involving wounds, that wounds can be used to “transcend physical boundaries” and allow higher beings to enter the world. It’s something that Will realizes Carrie learned while researching on her computer. Because that’s the thing, Anvari is restraint — we only know as much as Will ever does.

This allows the horror of Wounds to be tastefully insular despite how otherwise ridiculous it is. The imagery of the darkened, winding tunnel is frightening in the absence of anything in it; in what could jump out of it at any moment, but doesn’t. In the possibilities inherent to the horrible unknown. And there’s other stuff, too, stuff that crawls under your skin. Like scuttling cockroaches and a bathtub full of black goo, and an infected gash that might have something wriggling around inside. And we can’t forget all the wonderfully stupid shit — like Carrie and Will thinking the decapitated head in the cellphone photos belongs to Garrett, despite the photos already being on the phone after Will confiscated it and texted Garrett…???

The film ends awkwardly and abruptly in a scene that feels like it should have been the climax. But I can’t help but respect the decision to have your film go out in a way that provides zero closure. Maybe I’m too lenient because of how jaded I am with modern horror movies’ insistence on explaining away everything that could make them scary, but I hold a soft spot for Wounds and its simultaneous ability to be stupid and demonstrate understanding of what can make for effective horror.*

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