The Harbinger (2022)

(This is about Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger, not the movie by Will Klipstine of the same title, from the same year).

It’s the height of the pandemic lockdown in the US. Monique (Gabby Beans) leaves the home where she is sheltering with her brother and father when her old friend Mavis (Emily Davis) asks for her help with some unspecified problems. They haven’t seen each other for years, but Mavis once saved Monique’s life during a hard run-in with mental illness, so even the pandemic is not going to get in the way of the woman repaying the favour.

Mavis’s problem is rather disturbing. As she tells it, she is plagued by nightmares, or more than nightmares but dream states which don’t end like normal dreams do, and can take days out of her life.

In these nightmares, Mavis regularly encounters a being dressed  like a plague doctor; she has started to believe it is this entity that attacks her through her dreams, with the end goal of completely erasing her from existence. She doesn’t believe she can take it any longer, so Monique’s support is supposed to be a life line for Mavis. Her supposed saviour is sceptical when it comes to the objective truth of what Mavis thinks is happening to her, but she has lived with her own mental illness long enough herself not to disbelief the truth of the experience. Unfortunately, her attempts of helping Mavis seem to infect her with the same entity her friend is fighting.

Andy Mitton is one of the more interesting directors working in the indie space right now. He is particularly good when it comes to portraying those states where dream and reality seem to drift into one another and the ground of reality turns into quicksand. So a dream horror film like this does certainly play to his strengths. There’s a strong sense of proper dream logic to the nightmares Monique will begin to suffer through (we never get into Mavis’s mind this way). The dreams are suffused with a sense of dread that feels very personal and individual to Monique, distorted echoes of a past Mitton never exposits at us, because is is always clear enough how to understand the reality through the nightmare – without things becoming bland.

How personal these dreams feel is rather typical of Mitton’s films (perhaps with YellowBrickRoad as an exception), where the supernatural is always very effectively connected to a protagonist’s inner life, in often subtly revealing ways. Consequently, the film at hand takes great care drawing Monique and her lockdown-reduced social world in meaningful ways.

The Harbinger doesn’t just want to tell a tale of personal horror taking place in a world of real global horror but also attempts to reproduce some of the psychological effects of the pandemic, all those little feelings of wrongness and the low-level dread many of us suffered under at its height. The titular monster isn’t a metaphor for the pandemic itself, exactly (because allegory is the lowest form of art), but embodies elements of how many of us felt about it.

It is also a very fine horror creation, a being that doesn’t just kill you unpleasantly like your run of the mill dream demon does, but rips people-shaped holes in the world, in memory and reality, holes whose existence you can only realize through the feeling of absence and loss caused by them. In The Harbinger, taking away lives is secondary to the titular entity taking away all the small kindnesses and gestures of human connection that now never have existed either, making the world a worse place little by little, absence by absence. Something which the film portrays chillingly despite its small scope.

The Witch in the Window (2018)

Warning: vague spoilers about the ending and more concrete ones about the film’s themes will be forthcoming!

Simon (Alex Draper) and his wife Beverly (Arija Bareikis) have been separated, though not divorced, for some time now. Simon’s going to take their twelve year-old son Finn (Charlie Tacker) for the summer. This isn’t just going to give father and son some of that quality time you hear about, but should also put a bit of distance between a mother who seems to be in full on “oh, these horrible modern times!” mode that’s bordering on the unhealthy right now and a kid who is twelve, and therefore bound to react badly towards overprotectiveness of this or any sort.

It’s not bound to be a boring vacation for Finn and his father, though, for Simon has bought an old farmhouse somewhere in rural Vermont, aiming to fix it up and flip it. It’s all well and good for a time, but there’s something very wrong about the house. It is haunted by the malevolent spirit of Lydia (Carol Stanzione), the former owner whose corpse was found looking out of an upstairs window. But what at first seems to be a conventional haunting and threat turns out to be stranger and perhaps less evil than it at first appears, at least in a sense.

Andy Mitton’s follow-up to the wonderful We Go On – produced for Shudder – is again a ghost story, and again an excellent film, even though I heartily disagree with some of the conclusions about the boundlessness of fatherly love it makes towards the end. But then, there’s clearly a cultural difference between the American insistence on protecting children from every little bit of knowledge about the world and my more laissez faire European attitudes standing between the film and me. However, while I disagree with the film’s ideas about protection and parental love, and find what is clearly meant to be a comparatively positive ending rather disagreeable (just imagine your father’s ghost lingering protectively over your teenage bed while you masturbate, and ask yourself if that’s really such a pleasant, cosy feeling; as a man whose father died when he was five, I hope his ghost has better things to do with his time), as I do the usual bourgeois cliché about the city being the place of all evil, which is particularly ironic in a film whose only actual evil takes place in the country. These things are not just some random musings sprinkled around the core of the film but part and parcel of what’s going on all of the time. At least, they do make psychological sense for the characters; my objection is that the film seems to agree with Simon’s reasoning so completely and so comes to underplay the horror of what is happening in the end rather terribly.

On a more practical level, I find little that isn’t to admire about the film. There’s a lovely organic feeling about The Witch’s slow start that’s all about introducing the viewer to the characters, creating a father-son duo that feels likeable and taken from life. There’s an extraordinary warmth to Draper’s performance that sells Simon as a father, as well as a warm and suffering human being. Tacker isn’t quite as consistently great – no child actor is ever quite perfect but that’s okay – but his interactions with Draper always ring true. Mitton really takes his time in fleshing this central relationship out, and the later parts of the film work much better thanks to its careful and thoughtful treatment.

When it comes to the scary parts, at first The Witch in the Window seems to be a rather straightforward ghost story with the sort of scares you’d expect of it and its creepy ghost lady; very well realized scares, mind you. Further developments turn towards a weirder direction, playing very effectively with time, space and mind of Simon.


So, while I disagree with The Witch in the Window on many philosophical and ideological points, I still very much appreciate and recommend it. If nothing else, it’s a prime example of how to write a script whose elements are truly coming together to make a thematic whole; something quite a few filmmakers working on the more mainstream side of horror could learn from.

We Go On (2016)

Miles (Clark Freeman) is afraid of everything: cars, people, the outside, you name it, he’s afraid of it. His multitude of phobias is really the expression of one central fear: the fear of death that came upon him with the sudden death of his father.

Miles thinks the only way to lose this fear is to prove that we go on after death in one form or the other, so he puts out a bounty of $30,000 for the person who will prove an afterlife to him. Sifting through a huge number of propositions with the help of his mother Charlotte (Annette O’Toole), Miles finds a lot of obvious fakes, bad jokes, and attempts to sell him stuff, whittling his list down to three proposals actually worth investigating, and a mysterious phone call on his mail box. In the end, Miles will get the positive proof he seeks, but not surprisingly, it’ll not bring him much happiness.

Directing partners Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton made an interesting indie movie named YellowBrickRoad that a lot of people were really impressed by, but that never really won me over thanks to various technical issues I found highly distracting as well as a script that – for my taste – completely broke down for the film’s final third. We Go On is a mighty improvement in all regards, definitely still made on an indie budget but much slicker realized, never looking as cheap as it probably is, featuring performances that are at least decent – usually better – and some effective moments of horror. I was particularly fond of the scene in which Miles follows his last possible informant to a ruined house next to the LA airport and encounters something that may not be totally surprising to the genre-savvy audience but that still works wonderfully because it is so carefully shot and edited. In general, Holland and Mitton show themselves to be highly capable when called to create moments of slight disquiet; I wasn’t always as convinced by the more obvious shocks, but then, when am I ever?

For much of its running time, We Go On is a clearly observed character piece about Miles and the source of his anxieties as they are revealed by the things and people he encounters during his quest. This approach works as well as it does because it is always clear the writer-directors actually know what kind of story they want to tell and are very good at revealing Miles through the people he encounters while also telling us all we need to know about these people in very economic ways. Stand-outs here are certainly the medium Josephina (Giovanna Zacarías), who teeters on the edge of madness thanks to the way she has to live yet also shows surprising amounts of kindness where self-absorption would be absolutely understandable, as well as O’Toole’s tough and dignified portrayal of Charlotte, that feels highly authentic to a certain kind of mother with a damaged grown-up child.


So, the character work is generally very strong here, the mood is evocative, the filmmaking successful, and the film knows what it wants – yet still I can’t say I was wholly happy with the final act. The problem – though make no mistake, this is still a film very much worth watching – is that I never completely managed to buy into the film’s shift from something character-based into something plot-based. There’s an awkwardness to this approach that suggests an attempt to achieve a more conventional dramatic arc with a very pat ending because that’s how genre films are supposed to work, and not really because this particular film actually needed it, leaving me unsatisfied when We Go On suddenly appeared to care most about resolving a plot arc I wasn’t particularly invested in, while just finishing the character arc I was invested in as an afterthought.