The Unkindness of Ravens (2016)

[alexxkay]

Kestrell and I watched this yesterday. It didn't really work for us, but it was interesting. It's about a Scottish veteran of the Iraq War who is convinced that evil corvids are coming after him.

Now, part of why we were disappointed is that we were first intrigued about this due to a mention in the (generally excellent) documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. But to paraphrase someone else, "Just because parts of it have woods, doesn't make it Folk Horror." While The Unkindness of Ravens is definitely horror, it doesn't have any folk in it. Yes, it's largely set in an isolated cottage – but the cottage is too isolated. Not a single creepy neighbor appears, nor are there any mysterious diaries to transmit folk beliefs. Folk Horror is one of those fuzzy genres which is futile to define as other than a loose aggregation of qualities (see also "Superhero"), but for neither Kes nor I did this movie qualify.

Now, to be fair, it is not the fault of the film that we saw it under false pretences. So let's evaluate Ravens on its own merits.

Overall, I thought this would be a good companion piece to A Field in England (which also got a mention in WDaDB, and which I also don't think qualifies as FH). Both are surreal, deeply uncomfortable movies about the horrors of war, which get some of their emotional effects by taking a simple idea and going so far over the top with it that you can't even see "the top" beneath you anymore. Also, both films are extremely dour, with only rare flashes of humor, and those coal-black.

Ravens is beautifully shot, with a fair amount of scenery-porn. I also want to give special mention to a trivial detail that so many films don't bother to get right: The moon changes! Over the ~3 nights of the film, the moon goes from not-quite-full, to full, to just-past-full. It's just so rare for a horror movie (or really any kind of story) to bother getting this kind of detail right.

The lead character really gets to show off his acting chops, as he spends 90% of the film alone, or reacting to his demons. The demons themselves were incredibly creepy, excellent masks, costumes, and props. Plus good direction on gradually revealing them over the course of the film.

The plot occasionally flirts with ambiguity, but it never made any successful attempt to convince us that the "supernatural" stuff was anything other than hallucinations. That said, the supernatural elements were 100% real to the protagonist, without which the film wouldn't have worked at all.

Ravens suffers notably in its final act. It reaches what seems like a decent, bittersweet-but-calm conclusion. And then, instead of rolling credits, it turns into a splatterpunk zombie movie for a further half hour. After which, it goes back to essentially the exact same place it had been half an hour earlier to conclude. But the ending, which felt bittersweet the first time through, just felt false and toxic the second time. Our protagonist basically "gets over" his PTSD, with the narrative implication that it won't ever bother him again. Which, ew. Especially after he's just had a half-hour vision of splatterpunk zombies while calmly walking down a path. Yes, he "beat" the evil crow-demons in that final vision – but it feels like an unearned happy ending.

Finally, one cannot discuss this film without mentioning "the injury to eye motif", an old "favorite" of myself and Kestrell. I have never seen a film which had more eye-threatening and actual eye trauma than this one. By a LOT. And that was before the aforementioned final section, which, by the end of it, featured a literal jar of severed eyeballs. You could make a drinking game out of the eye trauma, but only if you wanted to die of alcohol poisoning.

 

Comments

[sovay]

I have never seen a film which had more eye-threatening and actual eye trauma than this one.

To be fair, in a film with corvids, I would expect a lot of harm to eyes.

I'm sorry about the double-ending fakeout, though.

[alexxkay]

I did expect a lot of harm to eyes. But I didn't expect remotely as much as there *was*. (To be fair, all but a single incident were clearly hallucinations.)