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The Tall Man (Pascal Laugier, 2012)
To write more about the plot of
The Tall Man would be to risk
spoiling its craftily constructed narrative. Still, many of its pleasures are
tied up in the way that it unfolds. While this may not be a horror film so much
as a thriller, it nevertheless has a fair number of jump scares scattered
throughout its run time. The extended sequence in which Julia’s son is abducted
is extremely atmospheric and suspenseful. This portion of the film perhaps best
demonstrates Laugier’s skill as a horror film director, but really he seems to
be after a more psychological form of terror here. Contributing to that aim,
Beil gives a strong performance as the beleaguered Julia. Unfortunately, because
the film so completely shifts its aims midway through, one gets the impression
that neither half registers as strongly as it might. Laugier wants to make his
audience think about the welfare his of child victims in a way that would have
been doubly effective had we been given more of a sense of the dire state of
life in Cold Rock. A few more scenes of child abuse and neglect could have gone
a long way toward balancing the film’s goals. Nonetheless,
The Tall Man is a strong and original
genre film, crafted with skill by a filmmaker who seems well on his way to
becoming one of the best. 61 Jeremy Heilman 07.30.12 |
Director
Pascal Laugier follows up Martyrs,
one of the goriest and most through provoking horror films in recent memory with
his English-language debut The Tall Man,
an entirely more pedestrian effort that still offers him plenty of opportunities
to show off his talents, both as a screenwriter and behind the camera. In
The Tall Man, Jessica Biel plays
Julia Denning, a nurse who seems to be one of the last vestiges of dignity in
the Cold Rock, an economically depressed mining town in Washington state. The
town, not just beset by financial problems, is also the target of a rash of
child abductions, which the townsfolk attribute to a mythical boogeyman figure
called the Tall Man. Perhaps predictably, after seeing Julia play happily with
her son, The Tall Man sets us up for
his kidnapping. What follows after this point, however, is considerably less
predictable. The Tall Man is a
smarter, more complicated movie than it first appears to be. Almost to the same
degree as Laugier’s Martyrs, it
changes its game midway through and makes audiences radically shift sympathies
as its plot develops