Since the undeniable precedent set by "Rosemary's Baby" in 1968 (terribly translated into our native language, losing all its intended magic), a countless cohort of filmmakers and/or producers has, over the past 54 years, delved into the themes of childbirth, babies, pregnant women, and everything related to this wonderful experience of the human life cycle to inspire unease, tension, anguish... in short, terror, among the communities of consumers of this type of film.
"Siembamba" (2017) does so in capital letters and represents a real "coup de force." Not only because it joins the recent trend of focusing on the tension between supposed supernatural presences and the mental state of the protagonists of each story, but also because, in this case, we step away from a product of the omnipresent North American industry to witness an equally valid creation from South Africa.
There are several reasons why different groups of audiences might have had their noble expectations dashed when viewing a film that barely grossed a quarter of a million dollars, a very modest and surely deficit amount, no matter how low its initial budget was. Whether it's those who expected a formidable display of special effects; those who anticipated a string of cheap scares in a thrilling succession of non-stop action; those who awaited a spectacular appearance of the Devil in the style of the controversial Roman Polanski... any of these or many other possible scenarios led, both then and now, to a series of vilifications. "Siembamba" is quite misunderstood by a considerable spectrum of those who have seen it. Even the poster with the pram represents a significant aspect to consider, in the degree of dissonance between what one might expect from the film and what is finally found in it.
Directed by Darrell James Roodt, whose resume includes some prior forays into horror, such as "Dracula 3000" (2004), and various others of a dramatic nature, an area where the Johannesburg director has always shown more interest and talent (Little One, 2012; Winnie, 2011; Yesterday, 2004; Cry, the Beloved Country, 1995; or Sarafina, 1992), "Siembamba", also known as "The Lullaby," is like a diamond. Coming from southern Africa, not everyone has been able to enjoy it: not only due to the scarce predisposition to distribute it to the Yankee and European markets, but also because it is not particularly designed for popcorn-munchers. On the other hand, intellectuals and critics might look down on it due to an uneven comparison with other cult classics.
One of the main and most recurrent complaints from both local and Anglo-Saxon commentators is that both Roodt's direction and Tarryn-Tanille Prinsloo's script do not sufficiently develop or explain the backgrounds of the different characters (except for Chloe, the protagonist, played by the gorgeous and talented Raine Swart) or the story being told during the film's brief 90-minute duration.
Personally, I don't entirely agree with this hypothesis, because what the director and the screenwriter do is leave breadcrumbs in the forest, like Hansel and Gretel, to avoid getting lost along the way.
Even from the prologue, we can get an idea of the psychic and spiritual narrative substrate: the symbolic vision of everything the characters live and represent in what, to all appearances, seems like an ancient tragedy. That, rather than the horror cliché, is the model or template used to build the plot.
I often like to cite Carl Gustav Jung; not for the mistaken connection the common folk attribute to him with the esoteric, although here it is precisely one of the double-edged swords wielded by Roodt, but for all he enlightens us about the presence and terrible influence of the collective unconscious. Its sociocultural roots weigh like a marble slab on the corpus of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral experiences of every human being. More so in the possibly vulnerable psychic state of someone becoming a mother for the first time, especially Chloe, who at 19 is just entering this role.
The suffocating atmosphere, scenically centered almost entirely around her mother's house to which she returns pregnant by someone unknown, after trying to break free from that imprisoning circle; the wild and somewhat ruthless environment represented by the town of Eden Rock, is perfectly depicted in the prologue: the capture situation in a British concentration camp, where the Boer prisoners, in addition, have to endure the suffocating pressure of religious fanaticism. This, despite the apparent secularization of a transformed society (Dr. Timothy Reed's butterfly collection, which they will have the protagonist attend, tries in vain to represent a metamorphosis process), leaves a mark and remains ingrained in a community's psychosocial substrate, which instead of helping the tormented mind, only contributes more to its decline.
Both this preludial photograph of the setting and the clues left by the action, both in terms of image (the recurring flashbacks that will appear towards the third act) and dialogue cues (in the words of the mysterious psychiatrist to Chloe's mother: "we've been more than just therapist and patient"), hint at what is happening and what is most likely to happen in terms of predictability.
In Roman Polanski's mythical 1968 film, nothing is revealed, in favor of true intuitive delirium.
Much more effective, since it appeals to emotions, compared to the play of reason or cognitive skill to which Roodt invites us with the pieces of his puzzle.
The lack of a paternal element is a recurring constant in Chloe's reality, and the male characters, such as the Doctor and Chloe's ex-boyfriend (so handsome and tender, yet laconic in his actions), who still harbors illusions of being reciprocated with the girl's return, do not fit into a genuine adaptive psychological function of the gender. The mother (Thandi Puren) assumes this role, in the absence of a father who committed suicide in the past (for reasons not clarified in the script, it must be said). Therefore, in Chloe, the male figure is synonymous with something absent, castrated... nevertheless, she is capable of empowering herself, taking the knife (the symbol of the phallic, the patriarch's role), and removing from her path what prevents her from achieving full personhood and motherhood; those who stand in her way: a resentful boyfriend who tries to rape her, whom she stabs repeatedly; and, finally, her own mother, in whom she sees the danger, the monster... what wants to hurt her and her baby.
She then wanders, knife in hand, covered in blood like all of her (an excess of effect that makes her look more like she bathed in a mud pit than having killed her former love and then her mom). A chilling image of Nietzsche himself when he speaks of humans who, "after having killed God," that is, after eliminating that superegoic limiting, oppressive figure..., wander aimlessly, prey to madness, incapable of making the leap to the new stage of transformation (the butterflies?) towards the so-called "superman"... in this case, "supermom" or "superwoman." Just as happened to Nietzsche himself, the fate of the brave ends up being the cell of an asylum, haunted or haunting the "obvious" external dangers.
It's true that Roodt, especially his script, neglects to do a more thorough job of dropping hints that allow us to understand Chloe's descent, keeping us teetering between the debate of paranormal phenomena (bloody apples, demonic dolls that turn their heads by themselves... a puppet, more than a ghost, of one of the women who supposedly participated in the ritual killing of babies born to Boer women forced in concentration camps...) and the realization of the protagonist's madness, which is clarified, no doubt, with the final revealing and explicit "flashback," where it is discovered that the young woman, at the beginning of her "escape" from home, after walking only a few meters, is raped by a very ill-tempered passerby who puts her in his truck to "take" her somewhere.
Roodt does engage in the game of keeping the viewer's attention with the resource of the dialectic between the "evil spirits" who want to take over and destroy Chloe's child (the fruit of a dishonored womb is synonymous with a diabolic spawn) and the morbid deterioration of a girl who is nothing but a victim of her own references and is ready to be locked up in a padded room, in a straitjacket. Neither postpartum depression nor that "baby blues" (which sounds more like a crappy cocktail than anything else), nor anything. It goes beyond all that: a full-blown psychosis, exacerbated by the sadism and cruelty of those around the protagonist.
"Siembamba" is, ultimately, a brave and punchy product, but it lacks the finesse and grace to tell the ancestral human longing to rid oneself of Original Sin.
A curious moral that one can learn from "Siembamba," for which it scores several points, is that in something, abortionists and old-time religious fanatics or puritans agree: what is conceived by deflowering must be eliminated; whether in the womb or once out of it. I leave it at that.
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