In his last film, 2019’s “Vivarium,” Lorcan Finnegan gave the fantasy of homeownership a nightmarish makeover to mediocre results. Even at 97 minutes, that movie feels like an interminable slog. But worse still is its thuddingly literal premise, where Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots find themselves trapped in a planned neighborhood and forced to raise a child while they dig their own graves. As if moviegoers needed another film that suggests suburban domestic life is a trap of tedium and drudgery that bilks people of agency and fulfillment so the next generation may suffer the same fate. As sophomore slumps go, “Vivarium” is worse than just a bad time at the movies. It’s a redundant snoozefest, an episode of “The Twilight Zone” swollen to five times its necessary length, and smug to boot.
So, a pleasant surprise that “Nocebo,” Finnegan’s latest, is a lean, mean slice of folk horror with a home invasion twist. Finnegan and his screenwriter Garret Shanley craft a tale of supernatural vengeance here that’s aware of the zeitgeist (folk horror is big right now, thanks to Kier-La Janisse‘s stellar 2021 doc) but also gives the sub-genre a political twist. The result? One of 2022’s better horror movies, which despite another punny title from Finnegan, and an over-reliance on redemptive violence as a narrative device, takes folk horror in an exciting contemporary direction. This Filipino-Irish production (the first of its kind) simmers with a fiercely feminine rage, too. In “Nocebo,” hell hath no fury like a mother scorned, and expect one who’s also an ongo, an ancient shamanic spirit, to have the harshest flames of all.
Kid’s fashion designer Christine (Eva Green) has a seemingly perfect, if busy, life in Ireland. She runs a successful kidswear line and lives in a luxurious townhouse with her marketing strategist husband, Felix (Mark Strong), and her precocious daughter, Roberta, Bobs for short (Billie Gadson). But at her latest fashion show at the local mall, she receives a disturbing phone call, and when she refuses to take it, macabre happenings begin. A mangy, spectral dog appears out of nowhere, covered in swollen ticks, and shakes them all over Christine. Is this all in her head? That remains unclear, even after a tick champs Christine’s neck and plunges her into a severe illness. But psychosomatic or not, months later remains Christine hurting and bedridden, needing an oxygen mask at night to breathe.
And the symptoms are myriad: headaches, dizzy spells, cramps, nerve pain, hair loss, the occasional lapse in memory, etc. But Christine is determined to start work on a new line of clothes, with industry hotshot Liz (Cathy Belton) as a potential buyer, and, despite doubts, her work gets accepted (with a few adjustments). A change of fortune? Not so fast. A spoon clatters on the ground before Christine’s doorbell rings — an unexpected visitor. It’s Diana (Chai Fonacier), a Filipino maid Christine hired as extra help around the house. “I’m here to help you,” Diana announces brightly, but Christine can’t remember hiring her. No bother, just another memory lapse, and Christine invites Diana in, not realizing she also invites her and her family’s undoing in the process.
Like all great folk horror, “Nocebo” involves a culture clash where two ways of life confront each other and complicate their mutual definitions of normality. But the strength of Finnegan’s film lies in how cleverly he complicates this dynamic of a monstrous other. Who’s the real monster in “Nocebo” — the Filipino shaman who intrudes upon a family’s home or the neocolonial capitalist designer who exploits workers overseas? Finnegan reveals Christine and Diane’s fatal psychic bond through patient pacing and flashbacks but wisely provides no conclusive answer. That’s because these two women are each other’s monsters. From an ethnic, class, and cultural perspective, these two women could not be more different. On a more intimate level, though, they are mirror images of one another: two women, two households, two daughters (and two helpless, hapless husbands), with one shared tragic fate.
It’s rare for a horror film, or any film, to put women at the forefront of a story about possession, ownership, and cultural production like “Nocebo” does. It’s one of Shanley’s deft little touches in his sleek script. Christine and Diane embody their cultural heritage in the film, so each becomes the other’s parasite, feeding off the other in her specific way. Just as Christine exploits Diane for her labor as an outsourcing capitalist and a stay-at-home mom with hired help, Diane preys on Christine’s trust, belief, and desire for her illness’s cure. One exploits the world and its material conditions, while the other manipulates the mind and emotions through folk magic and occult practice. And through that mutual exploitation, each woman also disturbs the other’s worldview.
This clash reaches a delirious crescendo before the film’s climax when Diane sabotages a commercial for Christine’s latest line of kids’ clothes. In an instant, Diane plagues the glossy products of the culture industry, so they disclose to Christine the exploitation and cultural appropriation that produces them. An earlier triple fake-out scare with a giant tick may get more fanfare, but this scene shows folk tradition getting revenge on mass-mediated modernity through ritual enchantment. While it lacks the emotional payoff of Diane and Christine’s final role reversal, it’s a sharp take on a familiar possession dynamic. Plus, it’s a keen demonstration that Christine’s buried guilt is a cultural byproduct as much as a psychological affliction. Are her terror and symptoms all in Christine’s head, like Felix believes? Not quite. As Diana asks her husband Jomar (Anthony Falcon) at one point in a flashback, “what’s not in the mind?”
It’s rare for a film to so boldly depict shamanic experience as “Nocebo” does here, where ritual and sacrifice open up relations with enigmatic and powerful forces in unseen realms. But it’s the best thing about “Nocebo,” a film where, in a dark bit of wisdom, it’s the ultimate parasite that’s the victor. In the movie’s final moments, Bobs becomes the inheritor of Diana’s (or rather, the ongo’s) great “power to heal or destroy.” Diane condemns Christine as a bloodthirsty tick that took everything from her, but how else does the ongo survive to transmit its ancient culture? In “Nocebo,” it’s parasites all the way down. After all, in order to be somebody, you need blood. [B]
