Film review: Red State

Kevin Smith’s first horror film, about a fundamendalist Christian cult, audaciously subverts expectations at every turn, particularly when it suddenly becomes an action flick

RED STATE (18)

Directed by: KEVIN SMITH

Starring: MICHAEL PARKS, JOHN GOODMAN, MELISSA LEO

****

In THE US, Kevin Smith’s decision to challenge traditional distribution models by taking his new film Red State out on tour, setting up special residences at select cinemas and launching the film on video-on-demand sites instead of wasting millions marketing a big nationwide release, has been met with a lot of curious, furious and largely spurious resistance.

Fear of change at a time of uncertainty often breeds contempt, though it seems somewhat unfair that Smith should be pilloried for attempting to reach his audience in the most economical, profitable way possible at a time when even successful blockbusters barely make a profit thanks to the prohibitively expensive cost of releasing them. That’s enough to make Red State, his tenth film as a director and his penultimate one before retirement (he’s said he’s doing one more two-part film and that’s it), an interesting test case. But with the film receiving a more traditional release in the UK, its cinematic merits are the only things that really count. Happily, though, Red State stands up as a film in its own right.

Eschewing the largely static, scrappy shooting style that served him well on his early, inventively profane, dialogue-heavy comedies like Clerks and Chasing Amy (but which stopped being endearing soon after), Smith has made a gnarly, down-and-dirty horror film that is not only visually dynamic and narratively streamlined, but deftly offsets its grindhouse excesses with an undercurrent of black humour, some adroit social satire and a string of strong performances that help Smith negotiate the unsettling plot developments he includes to keep audiences on their toes.

It’s not a “Kevin Smith” movie in the traditional sense, though this is perhaps down to the fact that he seems to have found a more cinematic way to express his usual preoccupations. This becomes apparent in the film’s opening salvo, in which a trio of horny high-school students is lured into the woods on the promise of a three-way with a woman (Melissa Leo) they’ve met over the internet. Where previously such a set-up would be an occasion for Smith’s characters to deliver elaborately scripted, sexually coarse monologues that rely on laughs to get us on their side, here he dials the dialogue down to a more naturalistic level and lets his actors (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) imbue their characters with enough humanity to make us care.

That’s important because Smith doesn’t waste much time hurtling them towards a nasty fate as they’re drugged and abducted. Torture porn set-up duly established, it’s here that Red State starts subtly subverting genre expectations by having the boys awake to find themselves prisoners of local religious zealot Aben Cooper, a hate-vomiting, homophobic nutjob with a penchant for dealing with sinners by wrapping them up in clingfilm and crucifying them. Aben is creepily and magnificently played by Michael Parks, who takes what could have been a cartoonish riff on Westboro Baptist Church publicity hound Fred Phelps (Smith’s initial inspiration for the character) and humanises him in a quietly chilling way.

His murmuring voice has a sweet, musical cadence to it that makes the heinous words Aben says oddly mesmerising and, in an audacious move, Smith has him deliver a lengthy, uninterrupted sermon early on that could have stopped the movie dead. But instead, thanks largely to the way Parks delivers it and the way Smith shoots it hand-held and mostly up-close, ends up being the kind of indulgent longueur that actually works by intensifying the dread: we know something awful is going to happen at the end of it, but the off-kilter rhythms of the scene prevent us anticipating just when Smith is going to pull the rug from under us.

Smith’s skill, though, is his ability to keep pulling the rug from under us. When the authorities are alerted to what Cooper is up to, for instance, the film morphs into an amped-up siege movie that effectively plays out like Waco filtered through a decade of War on Terror paranoia. Suddenly, all the satirical potshots fired at religious extremism are contrasted with a similar interrogation of the ideological danger posed by the State.

What’s great here is that Smith in action mode proves just as surprising and entertaining as Smith in horror mode. Again, it helps to have great actors. In John Goodman – cast here as an agent from the Bureau for Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – he has a worthy adversary for Parks, a performer who can root the sometimes nonsensical life and death calls his character is forced to make in something relatable. It all adds up to a slick, pleasingly strange, politically savvy genre mash-up that Smith tops off with a quite unexpected and extraordinary finale. Great stuff.