PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Some things cling to you long after they should like the sweat of a hot day. You worry, even after a shower and enough time out of the sun, that it’ll never come off. Certain kinds of horror movies like Gerald Kargl’s Angst or JT Petty’s S&Man can stay with you like that. Tom Botchii Skowronski’s new film, Artik, has that kind of stench. It’s a tactile cigarette-butt stink of a movie that will reek in your brain long after the credits roll.
The plot follows a bearded monster of a man, Artik (Jerry G. Angelo: Texas Zombie Wars: Dallas 2020), who has three passions: comic books, his son, and serial murder. As he initiates the boy (Gavin White: 14 Cameras 2018) into his deadly vocation, the kid begins to sneak away to meet a mysterious stranger named Holton (Chase Williamson: John Dies At The End 2012, All The Creatures Were Stirring 2018 – read our review here). As the boy’s loyalties split between Artik and Holton, the tension threatens to boil into bloodshed.
Skowronski and Artik’s cinematographer, Martin Moody, succeed in creating a chokingly bleak world for their characters to live in… if you can call it living. The sky pushing in, a bully crouching over a crying child, and the washed-out color palette are reminiscent of drained livestock. Anything alive inside the world of Artik either died or left town years ago.
Even Artik’s comicbooks, culturally something colorful, vibrant and lively, are hermetically sealed, shining and grey like body bags. Everything feels hopeless and abandoned, including the people. The only colors spring from the film’s uncompromisingly brutal violence. In that respect, the use of harsh editing, punishing sound design, and visceral special effects do not hold back, creating painfully arresting sequences reminiscent of The Devil’s Rejects and early Wes Craven films.
The castmembers flesh out this concept brilliantly, acting almost as vessels of flickering hope in a darkening world. Gavin White delivers one of the best performances from a child actor I’ve seen this year (an achievement made only more significant considering this is the year Tigers Are Not Afraid (read our review here) hit theaters). His every scene pulses with a barely-under-the-surface rage and shame. Chase Williamson’s Holton roams through the haze of the movie, trying to do good in a world already in Hell. His reactions to the boy, his starvation and pain as he unself-consciously devours two whole candy bars in seconds, are hollow-eyed and heartbreaking.
The dark star at the grey, dead heart of the film, though, is Jerry Angelo’s Artik. When he kills, it is with the brutal savagery of a primeval man. He believes his murders are a kind of art. The film does quite a bit of work to juxtapose his mayhem with his son’s compulsive graffiti. Both the boy and Artik are trying to stain the world with their stories.
Angelo imbues the character with a strange kind of wounded narcissism, a man desperate to create his own mythology without the tools to do it. It feels like the greasy Yellow King of the first season of HBO’s True Detective or a villain from a Cormac McCarthy novel. He howls like an animal around a bonfire, rants about the futility of heroes, and consistently drags his son along his murderous path.
It’s an extraordinarily difficult task to create something uncompromisingly bleak and still compelling. Skowronski’s script and direction succeed thanks to their relentless pace and ease, and the actors bring his vision to starved, uncivil life, their sunken looks and stark humanity creating compassion even against the moral apocalypse of Artik’s world.
These factors make the film edge-of-your-seat watchable without sacrificing its tone. We’ve seen other filmmakers attempt this and fail, most notably in John Swab and Corey Asraf’s Let Me Make You a Martyr (2016) or William Monahan’s Mojave (2015). When films succeed, though, they become true classics, like Nicholas Bushman’s Union Furnace (2015 – read our review here), Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018 – read our review here), and now, in the firmament of these cold stars in a colder, black, sky, is Tom Botchii Skowronski’s Artik.
