After all, a mother (Helene Udy) and daughter (Angela Barajas) go away for a private weekend to bond. Little do they know the dark history of the house they’re staying in, and the peculiar home as they sink deeper into madness.
It pains me to say this about Jeff Schneider’s EVIL UNDER THE SKIN, but the film is a bit convoluted in terms of tone. As for everything I review, I did want to appreciate this project, but Luc Bernier’s script felt excessively vague, which left the film dragging to get to the point. Instead of keeping the audience at the edge of their seats, the finished film actually ends up pushing them away.
To beef things up there’s numerous tracking shots of the film’s location, which is admittedly very picturesque, however I do mean numerous. I get location shots are meant to showcase the passing of time, and this does at one point, but there are so many accompanied by gentle twinkling piano, that I started to feel like I was witnessing footage for some peace-inducing video.
In other parts, it felt like I noticed far too many instances in which the daughter is required to expose her upper body. I understand that this was probably intended to arouse, but just like the tracking shots of the locations, it becomes mind numbingly overused and pointless. The actors are fine, but let down by the patchy sound mix and gapping dialogue, which may have suited the film’s slow pace, but feels jarring. This is distracting in the same way that a record being scratched snaps you out of the immersion.
It’s not only the speeches that lack something. Look at the part where Sophie, the mom, goes to stare at a knife in a kitchen for what seems like an eternity while we are shown series of flashback images of her life before she breaks into maniacal laughter. She does so when she is directly in front of her child and for some reason the child does not question such behavior which is rather bizarre.
In another part of the world, daughter Roselee wakes up at night and is spotted half-naked and glowing in green light, staring at her sleeping, yet restlessly fidgeting, mother. This moment would have been more impactful if there was some reasonable order in place before it. The writing and direction is somewhat unclear which, paradoxically, makes it seem like they know where they want the story to go.
EVIL UNDER THE SKIN, previously known as Fading Flowers, loses any semblance of plot coherence in the needless Lynchian homage which it pales in comparison to. We are left instead with a poorly crafted and very bizarre piece of independent cinema that tries to pull off a twist ending but delivers a conclusion that any observant viewer will see coming from miles away.
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To watch more movies like EVIL UNDER THE SKIN (2019) visit hurawatch.