Adam Wingard
Pop Skull

The web is a great thing. Especially when you're looking for something and through a kind of "e-serendipity" you find something completely different. The latest case was just like that: I was reading the amusing slanders on 400colpi.it, came across a mini-special on Adam Wingard and his films, and decided to watch a few of them.

Wingard (born in 1983) is a worthy representative of that generation of filmmakers who manage to experiment and innovate without having astronomical budgets at their disposal (quite the contrary), but by using their visionary "madness".

After his debut ("Home Sick") and some shorts (very disturbing, no doubt), in 2007, together with trusted screenwriters E.L. Katz and Lane Hughes (also in the role of the lead actor here), he creates with just a few thousand dollars this "Pop Skull". Wingard throws all the themes of his sick poetics into the film, already highlighted in previous works, but here taken to an extreme, producing an atypical horror film, very slow, hallucinatory, revolting and ultraviolent, yet maintaining an almost "authorial" approach that sets the film apart from the genre's canons.

The plot is simple and standardized (it seems like one of those usual teen-scream movies): it tells the story of a young man, Daniel (played by co-screenwriter Hughes), who is depressed over being abandoned by his first significant girlfriend and spends his time overdosing on drugs to forget the incident and eliminate the pain. Daniel poisons himself with pills alone in his home, which he soon discovers to be haunted by ghosts (but is it really haunted? Or is it all a product of Daniel's trips?) of people massacred there some time ago, and as the film delves into Daniel's devastated psyche, the distinction between reality and imagination fades.

On this rather predictable plot, Wingard builds a visually and conceptually powerful film. The direction is "intoxicated", the film is a succession of stylistic inventions that lead the viewer to "sit next to" the protagonist, sharing his hallucinatory visions, through a schizoid editing that makes the interpolation between "normal" scenes and effects like loops, flashes and strobe, psychedelic colors, sudden accelerations, close-ups on gore details, distorted image inserts, and a highly grainy photography the true stylistic hallmark of the film. 

This form of integration is completely functional to the content: conceptually, "Pop Skull" represents a (dreamlike?) descent into the destruction of emotion for young people in their twenties or so, exposing both Daniel's psychic and physical pain, with his load of late-adolescent jealousy and insecurity (who hasn't been through it?), amplified by what appears to the boy as a remedy (the escape into the artificial paradise of drugs), but which manifests as a veritable hell that amplifies the traumas suffered, responding to external stimuli with an explosion of senseless and bloody violence.

Hughes offers a deeply anguished performance of his character, struggling between moments of intense emotion and others of hallucinatory impulse, gradually deconstructing Daniel's mind, also showing on his own body the effects of this hallucinatory "trip". Exemplary is the protagonist's monologue, where he makes it clear not only that he can no longer distinguish reality from hallucinations, but precisely that for Daniel (and, consequently, for the viewer), no such distinction exists anymore and "reality" is simply what the subject directly experiences (whether or not it is shared with others is no longer important).
To make some silly, but sometimes useful, comparisons, try thinking of a crossbreed between David Lynch, "Requiem for a Dream," and Rob Zombie (without, however, the amused "silliness" of the latter) and you'll have an idea of what it's about.

Obviously, the film is not without its negative sides (perhaps the opening is a bit long and dispersive, for some it may be an inconclusive and empty film), but I liked it a lot, precisely because it seeks a path to horror different from today's prevailing canon.