Cabin in the Woods

I’m coming to this review with a little bit of trepidation.  Most of my reviews thusfar have been pretty casual about spoilers – kind of the point of the exercise is to let me draw comparisons and work out my thoughts on the films that I’ve seen (which is why I’m acutely aware that it might read a little like a lot of narcissistic name-dropping at times), rather than particularly about giving people insights about whether to go see a film or not like a film critic in a newspaper might.  The fact that I’ve suddenly developed a compunction about it now is probably down to two things: first, while I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to rate it as highly as Tideland, this is certainly the film that I would most highly recommend of all those reviewed so far.  Second, this type of film – a witty and clever horror film – will benefit from a viewing with the barest minimum preconceptions.  So if you think you’re likely to watch this film, please stop reading, and go see it now!

“Don’t you know the rules?”  blurts Jamie Kennedy, in one of the most definitive horror films of the nineties (barring the Blair Witch Project).  “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie!”  Wes Craven’s Scream wasn’t the metafiction landmark that I want to remember it as (arthouse metafiction goes back at least as far as Fellini’s 8½, there’s precedent in mainstream cinema from Last Action Hero, and Craven himself used metafiction extensively in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), but the scene where Kennedy’s character rants at a room of boozing, promiscuous teenagers that if they find themselves in a horror movie, they should never have sex, never drink or do drugs, and never say “I’ll be right back” has somehow been marked as a key point in horror metafiction.

According to Wikipedia, metafiction is ” a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion.”  Almost any genre can be subjected to metafiction, but horror in particular is defined by a set of surprisingly rigid tropes that define what is acceptable and what is not, which make it particularly susceptible to metafiction.  Based on ghost stories and urban legends, horror stories are usually a form of cautionary tale with a strong moral element – hence Randy’s “sin factor” from Scream, or the fact that being the “virgin” gives you the power to escape the bad guy in the final chase scene.  On a related note, since every generation since time immemorial has believed that the next one is going to hell in a handbasket, there’s a tendency to present stories based on the hubris and rebelliousness of youth.  Cabin in the Woods goes a step further from Scream, and no only acknowledges the tropes of the horror genre, but builds a giant plot MacGuffin to explain them: ancient, world-destroying Gods in a Cthulhu-like slumber at the centre of the Earth require horror film plots to be enacted every year as a form of ritual sacrifice, or they will rise and destroy humanity.

The film is split from the outset between the secret puppetmasters in an Aperture Laboratories-style high tech underground complex, and the hapless victims of their manipulations – a variation on the classic five man band trope.  This has been a somewhat controversial decision, and most of the films detractors cite this as it’s major failing – by revealing the manipulators from the outset, any sense of tension or suspense is largely destroyed for the first two acts of the film.  While this is a valid narrative decision, it does mean that the film doesn’t quite work as a horror film in it’s own right – it’s well into satire territory.  While I think they have something of a point, I think it’s fair to say that the horror is only deferred a level; the suspense is re-applied at the level of the scientists, who are being terrorised by a the Old Ones.  It’s a bit of a MacGuffin, and some say plagued by fridge logic, but I’m satisfied that it does it’s job.  I’m also bothered by the assertion that because it departs from the standard narrative structure of a horror film, that means that it “doesn’t work” as a horror film.  Maybe I’m not as much of a horror afficionado as some.

Performance-wise, there’s not really much to say – aside from Chris Hemsworth (who recently scored a lead in Thor) and Fran Kanz (a graduate of Whedon’s Dollhouse), the cast is made up of an assortment of bit players – which is about normal for a horror film of this type.  I’d like to give special note to Bradley Whitford, who managed to bring just the right combination of pathos and hubris to his half of the puppetmaster duo, but apart from that, nobody really shines or stinks.  That’s by no means a bad thing, but kind of throws into relief the fact that this film really is a vehicle for it’s writer/director team rather than the performances themselves.

On that note, one of the things that kind of makes me twitch a bit about a lot of the buzz around the film is how much Drew Goddard is being sidelined in favour of Joss Whedon.  Granted, as creator of the Buffy TV series and it’s spinoff Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, Whedon is much more of a known quantity than Goddard – who has been a writer for Lost and Angel, and wrote the brilliant found-footage sci-fi horror Cloverfield.  It’s also clear that as joint writer and second unit director for Cabin in the Woods, Whedon’s fingerprints are all over this film.  But still, this is Goddard’s directorial debut, and it seems a little sad that he’s being more or less ignored in all the fervour over the film.  Maybe come his next film we’ll start to identify him as an auteur in his own right.

One of the core themes that the film explores is the arbitrariness of the archetypes the characters are forced into: Slut, Athlete, Scholar, Fool, and Virgin.  The film deliberately blurs the boundaries between these ventures in real life – we are shown that Hemsworth’s Athlete (who also aces all his classes) and Jesse Williams’ Scholar (who is the new star of the college football team) could easily have switched places, and Kanz’s Fool could quite easily have been the Virgin instead of Kirsten Connolly’s character.  In fact, some people (okay, Shattersnipe – since I’m going to respectfully disagree with her a few times in this review, I might as well mention her blog by name) found this quite unsatisfying at the climax, being the aforementioned fridge logic moment – if they were flexible enough to accept a non-virginal Virgin archetype, why couldn’t they have changed other things?  Granted, the explanation from the Sigourney Weaver cameo director character (does anyone else find it ironic that Weaver’s defining moment in her early career was as the pawn who rebelled against the nefarious corporate suits, and now the machiavellian director is all she ever seems to play?) doesn’t help, but since the precise guidelines that the ritual is supposed to follow remain obscure, it’s not hard to think that they constrain how much flexibility can be used.  Perhaps once the narrative is underways, you can’t switch archetypes.  I realise I’m kind of making excuses for the film at this point, though, and if this is the case it would have been more satisfying for Weaver to have actually said that rather than just “we work with what we’ve got”.  Foz at Shattersnipe was also dissatisfied with the fact that in the final scene, Connolly and Franz sit back with a joint and wait for the end, saying that it is  “out of keeping with their characters – Dana’s will to survive, Marty’s intelligent self-analysis – and seemingly exists for no better reason than that it makes a good punchline”.  I’m citing this specifically, because without Foz’s commentary, I wouldn’t have noticed that this is deliberately included as part of the same theme – it is precisely at this moment that they escape from the tropes that the film has placed on them.  Whether or not that’s a satisfying denouement is up to personal preference, I think, but combined with their conversation topic (reflecting that they’d have liked to see the imminent end of the world, and how awesome that would have been – further deconstructing the voyeurism of the horror genre) at least I think it’s more than just a punchline for the film.

At my core, I’m actually kind of sympathetic to the naysayers.  As the opening paragraph of a Guardian Film Blog (my favourite go-to source for opinions about cinema which I disagree with) points out, some of the claims made about the significance of this film are a little bit out there.  I’m reminded of my own reaction to Chris Nolan’s Inception – which was to thoroughly enjoy the film and then immediately go off on an extended huff about the fanboy wankery that seemed to follow the film (having been a fan of Nolan pretty much since seeing Memento in 2001, this was probably precipitated by having something of a Hipster moment – I liked him better before you’d ever heard of him, dammit).  Inception wasn’t God’s gift to cinema – and neither is Cabin in the Woods.  It was interesting, well put together and a welcome break from the pedestrian hollywood fare.  It wasn’t perfect, but no film ever is.

My Rating: 8.5 out of 10

IMDb
Rotten Tomatoes
Metacritic
Bechdel Test: Scrapes a dubious pass – disappointing, but understandable given the films meta-horror status.