Satan in the swamps, God in the Alps

My DVD viewing this week consisted of two wildly different films:

1) The Reaping (2007)--I grabbed this at the library on impulse, knowing almost nothing about it except it was one of Hilary Swank's "gotta pay the rent on my vacation house" B-movies. I figured it for a fun campy horror flick to swill beer and eat pretzels by. It was actually a little better than that, with almost no campiness, but it's ultimately a little too pretentious to take to heart. Swank is an ex-missionary who lost her faith and is now a college professor who goes about debunking claims of religious miracles. A somewhat hunky schoolteacher (David Morrissey) asks her to come to his small town in Louisiana to investigate what appears to be a visitation of Biblical plagues. The townies believe that a young girl and her mother who live in the swamp are devil-worshipers who have brought on blood in the waters, frogs from the sky, and lice in everyone's hair. Swank offers scientific explanations for all the Bible plagues, but soon realizes that things are not quite what they seem in the town, and that science can't explain everything that's happening.

This is a deadly serious flick with no sense of humor, but there is fun in finding the many references (in plot and visuals) to other films, most obviously The Omen, The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby, but also The Blair Witch Project, The Birds, Carrie, The Ten Commandments, and in its ridiculously overdone climax, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Swank and Morrissey work well together, and 13-year-old AnnaSophia Robb is very good at being creepily enigmatic for most of the movie. An odd little subplot with Stephen Rea, which feels like it was almost literally dropped in at the last minute for the sake of exposition, doesn't work, but the plague effects do work quite well, with the best saved for next-to-last, a hellish swarm of locusts that quite creeped me out. Some critics have said this movie was intended for the "God" market, but I don't see the pious faithful going for this; it's directly in line with religion-tinged horror films like The Exorcist.

2) Into Great Silence (2005)--This is usually described in summaries as a documentary about life in a monastery in France, and might, like The Reaping, be taken as "God market" bait. But this isn't really a documentary, and with a slow deliberate pace, a running time of 160 minutes, and no narration or explanation of what we're seeing, this is most assuredly not for the folks who ate up The Passion of the Christ. The director, Philip Groning, spent six months living in the Grande Chartreuse monastery with some 30 Carthusian monks who live in austerity and silence. Though we do get a sense of time passing, both in the larger sense (a snowy winter becoming a warm spring) and the smaller (the daily rituals of the monks), this is more an impressionistic take on the lives and circumstances of the monks.

The experience of watching this film is more like looking at a work of art; the visuals are always stunning, and often we're looking at men in robes and cowls not moving (in prayer or meditation, napping, sitting for hair cuts, studying) for long periods of time. The camera gets in remarkably close to the men's faces so we have an unusual sense of physical closeness to many of the monks. There is no music except for the monks' chants, and almost no dialogue except for occasional snippets of talk during the monks' weekly outdoor walks. The movie has an odd rhythm, with lots of lots of long, mostly immobile takes, interspersed with some choppy shots of candles and water. Though the look of most of the film (as I saw it on DVD on a hi-def TV) is absolutely sharp and crystal clear, there are some sequences with heavy film grain, which gives those scenes an evocative antique look. There is one beautiful shot I will remember forever: a time-lapse scene of stars and clouds moving across the sky over the monastery during one 24-hour period. This takes patience to get through--I wound up watching it over two nights, though I suspect it's more effective in one sitting--but for a unique experience, I would recommend it.