Baghead

Baghead is a hard film to put in a slot: the one thing it's not is what it was marketed as: a horror film, though it does play with those conventions. It's kind of a romantic comedy, indie style and with very few laughs, and a meta-movie, or a movie about the making of movies. It's not quite a satire--that would cut too close to the filmmakers' skin--and according to Roger Ebert, it belongs to the genre known as "mumblecore," which is defined by Wikipedia as a film with "ultra-low budget production, focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors."

Four actors (2 guys and 2 gals) decide to get serious and make their own movie, so they go off to the woods for a weekend to isolate themselves and come up with a script. First they plan a romance movie, based perhaps on their own tangled romantic pasts, but eventually a startling vision of a man standing outside the cabin in the dark with a bag over his head gets stuck in their minds and they decide to use that as the basis for a horror film, Blair Witch style. The next day, however, the bagman vision seems to have become real and as tensions build (related not just to the mysterious figure but also to their personal relationships), they barricade themselves in the cabin that night, afraid that they have somehow conjured up a supernatural killer.

For a time, this works nicely, but it's clear all the way through that this will wind up not a horror movie, but a story about romantic relationships (and artistic creativity). The problem is that none of the four are particularly admirable; yes, I guess it's nice to have a movie with flawed characters rather than artificially nice and plastic people, but that leaves us no one to attach ourselves to or to care much about. The actors are fine: Ross Partridge (pictured) is the handsome guy with the girlfriend, as opposed to his buddy--Steve Zissis--the chunky guy desperate for a girlfriend. Elise Muller is the girl with whom Ross has had an on-again, off-again thing for some time, and Greta Gerwig is the woman who wants Ross but might settle for Steve. Many critics call this a spoof or parody, but it doesn't seem like that to me. Certainly the beginning and end feel like a string of in-jokes (poking fun at the indie film circuit) that I don't quite get, but as far as a Blair Witch spoof, while it uses that film as inspiration, it's never really making sport of it. Watchable and interesting, with at least a couple of creepy moments for an October night.