"Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." - Nietzsche
"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." - Kubrick
Brad Anderson directs "Vanishing on 7th Street". The plot? An "event" occurs in which the whole world is blanketed by "shadow". This "shadow", a seemingly living, moving, sentient "creature", swiftly eradicates everyone and anyone it touches. All those who happened to have been bathed in light when this "event" occurred, remain alive. The film focuses on four such survivors.
For most of its running time, "Vanishing" functions as a conventional horror movie, content to simply watch as our heroes struggle to avoid shadows and stay within Earth's last few dwindling pockets of light. As the film's "monster" is essentially "nothingness", the film generates a unique form of horror. Special-effect monsters/creatures often age terribly, often signify a limited imagination. In contrast, there is nothing more frightening than the inconceivable, the incomprehensible and the unrepresentable. Compare, for example, the countless rubber suit and CGI aliens found in bad movies to the invisible, unseen "concept" of the Unknown in something like "2001: A Space Odyssey". In a similar regard, the "monster" in "Vanishing" remains at a seductive distance. It is never explained, and takes the shape of simple, inky pools of black. At times this approach doesn't work, it's kitschy, especially when Anderson utilises moving puddles of CGI blackness (better to use banal, real-life shadows), but at other points he cooks up some unique scares, most notably when he creates humanoid shadows, which are often beautifully mysterious, chilling and abstract (they recall brief "shadow" moments in "Monster's House" and "Knowing", two otherwise ordinary films).
Anderson describes his film as an "existential horror movie". It's along such lines which the film works best, Anderson channelling a little Sartre, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Lovecraft. His "shadows" represent an existential dread, the threat of nothingness, the fear of absence and the utter extinguishing of all consciousness. In this regard our heroes osculate between ascribing meaning to the darkness or accepting both it and their existence as sheer quantum capriciousness. Significantly, all the survivors yearn for reconnection, one severed from his ex wife, one from her son, one from his mother and one, seemingly, from everyone. Everyone is dealing with the threat of, not only annihilation, but loneliness. Of course this is textbook existentialism, philosophy 101, perhaps offencive in its obviousness, but such things are not common in popcorn horror movies.
So the film is about a very specific type of existential anxiety; the horror of the unknown, and the total, horrific absence of meaning (the word "Croatoan" appears several times, a reference to a famous "unknown, unexplainable historical event"). Ironically, the film has been criticised for "lacking explanations" and "meaning". But this is the point. From an existential perspective, the individual seeks to grasp meaning in the face of impermanence. Loneliness, in this regard, is not something that someone experiences, but which everyone is. In a culture entrenched in the rhetoric of autonomy, rights and agency, such "terror" often goes unvoiced and unheeded, though only consciously. Unconciously, we expend extraordinary power conquering or denying death.
There are other nice touches. Some characters grasp for scientific explanations and dismiss them, whilst others find solace in Christianity. I am unsure of Anderson's religion, but the film is bathed in Christian allusions, its heroes named Paul, Luke, Mary and James (Christ's disciples), the (holy) number 7 appearing frequently and the plot hinging on an event which resembles the Christian Rapture. One can read a Christian slant into the movie (the light of Christ saving a chosen few?), but a cosmic ambivalence seems to be Anderson's point. Our survivors, for example, survive in a church, but their survival (and the location) seems incidental, haphazardous, rather than predetermined. Beyond this, there are several references to Bergman – the film plays like a B-movie version of Berman's existential masterpiece, "Cries and Whispers" - the most obvious one being the central location of the film (a diner on 7th and Seal, a reference to Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", itself a reference to the Book of Revelations). A lead character is also played by Hayden Christensen, an actor most famous for struggling to avoid "the dark side". Another character called Rosemary, who is frantically searching for a baby, recalls Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby".
The film has a number of excellent moments, most notably a powerful sequence in which a kid sits crouched in a candlelit church chanting "I Exist" while darkness threatens to engulf him (very Sartre). In its abstract implications, it's a powerful moment. Unfortunately, the film is packed with many horrible sections. For example, a brilliant shot of a plane silently crashing is undermined by a hokey CGI explosion. Better to omit the point of impact and cut to a different scene. It's also inexcusable that our heroes don't realise that they should be using fire instead of battery powered torches. The film is also unaware that (car) fuel is explosive and sports an atrocious final coda; better to end the film in the church, with the powerfully suggestive flicker of a candle. My suspicion is that Anderson was struggling to pad his meagre running time (the film barely qualifies as feature length). Still, there are several minutes of special cinema here.
8/10 - Worth one viewing.
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