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Aug. 20th, 2022 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Unborn
I tried to watch this film a few years ago and got bored after fifteen minutes. I made myself sit through the whole thing this time, or at least get to the Jewish part. It's not unwatchably terrible, but it's not great. The characters are shallow and underdeveloped, the horror elements are sometimes comically trite. But it has a few moments, and structurally it holds together.
The premise is a college student, Casey, whose mother committed suicide in a mental institution, starts having weird dreams and other hallucinatory episodes. Eventually Casey discovers that her grandmother, who put her mother up for adoption, was a Holocaust survivor who was a twin who was experimented on by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. When her brother died in the experiment, a dybbuk attracted to the pain brought him back to life, and the dybbuk has been haunting her family ever since then.
So just like The Vigil, it's a story about a Jewish survivor's life getting entangled with a demon as a result of the demonic actions of the Nazis; a story about generational trauma and the impossible monstrosity of the Nazis. And similarly to the Vigil as well, it's about this anxiety about loss of faith and its connection to the future of the Jewish people in a post-Holocaust world. The Reform Rabbi who guides Casey through the eventual exorcism does not, at the start of the film, believe in dybbuks, and he leads a congregation with a massive, church-like building that we only see empty. He is clearly an effective pastoral figure, but he has detached himself from some parts of the tradition that the appearance of the dybbuk forces him to confront, and he consequently forces Casey, raised by non-observant parents (and her father is probably not Jewish at all), to interrogate what parts of the faith she inherited have meaning to her. "You cannot do an exorcism of something you don't believe in," he tells her. When they finally defeat the dybbuk, it is by the two of them, doubters both, reciting Psalms together in an act of devotion and faith.
Notably, other than Casey's great-uncle, the only people the dybbuk possesses are non-Jews, most strikingly the Episcopalian priest and exorcism expert recruited by Rabbi Sendak to assist in the exorcism. Jews are haunted by the evil of non-Jews, is the theme of the story. And even supportive non-Jews, even Casey's closest friends, are susceptible to suddenly attacking her. This is a resonant story. Welcome to the tribe, Casey.
The Possession
A few years ago there were news stories about the discovery of a 'dybbuk box', a wooden cabinet apparently designed to hold a dybbuk. There's good evidence that the dybbuk box wasn't even a medieval Jewish artifact, just a modern art piece, but either way, it inspired some horror movies. So we have this movie inspired by a fake Jewish myth, which in turn is loosely inspired by real Jewish mythology.
As in The Unborn and Demon, it's the story of a non-Jewish family's life being disrupted by the appearance of this Jewish monster. (In The Unborn, it turns out that at least some of the apparently non-Jewish characters are actually Jewish, but that is not the case here.) The premise is that a young girl whose parents are undergoing a messy divorce discovers a dybbuk box at a yard sale and becomes possessed by the dybbuk. I think the primal idea of the movie is that something old and powerful is attractive as an anchor in the face of the new: One of the first scenes in the movie involves her father moving into a new home in a suburban subdivision that is still under construction, and the dybbuk box stands in defiance to that, an agent that resists change.
The silliest part of the film is the box itself, with an insulting mixture of backwards Hebrew and nonsense Hebrew carved on its sides. Written along the sides is Dybbuk in backwards Hebrew, of course. That which is Jewish in this movie is Other, it's an impossibly incomprehensible horror from another world that is infiltrating and threatening the safe world of white suburban Christendom, which is only at risk because the safe white Christian heterosexual family structure of marriage is under attack because of the family's divorce.
And then Matisyahu shows up, and I hardly know how to describe my feelings about that. There is something about his performance that straddles utter serious belief and profound absurdity, and I love it and I love the way he remains this total outsider, cracking jokes that they don't laugh at, while treating their problems seriously and showing kindness and respect for this family that will never understand him. I like, too, that his s'forim are Artscroll. Purely for reasons of aesthetics, they are not where I would go to find my guides to exorcism! Matisyahu's casting is just an inexplicable stroke of genius in an otherwise mediocre movie that does nothing original.
I tried to watch this film a few years ago and got bored after fifteen minutes. I made myself sit through the whole thing this time, or at least get to the Jewish part. It's not unwatchably terrible, but it's not great. The characters are shallow and underdeveloped, the horror elements are sometimes comically trite. But it has a few moments, and structurally it holds together.
The premise is a college student, Casey, whose mother committed suicide in a mental institution, starts having weird dreams and other hallucinatory episodes. Eventually Casey discovers that her grandmother, who put her mother up for adoption, was a Holocaust survivor who was a twin who was experimented on by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. When her brother died in the experiment, a dybbuk attracted to the pain brought him back to life, and the dybbuk has been haunting her family ever since then.
So just like The Vigil, it's a story about a Jewish survivor's life getting entangled with a demon as a result of the demonic actions of the Nazis; a story about generational trauma and the impossible monstrosity of the Nazis. And similarly to the Vigil as well, it's about this anxiety about loss of faith and its connection to the future of the Jewish people in a post-Holocaust world. The Reform Rabbi who guides Casey through the eventual exorcism does not, at the start of the film, believe in dybbuks, and he leads a congregation with a massive, church-like building that we only see empty. He is clearly an effective pastoral figure, but he has detached himself from some parts of the tradition that the appearance of the dybbuk forces him to confront, and he consequently forces Casey, raised by non-observant parents (and her father is probably not Jewish at all), to interrogate what parts of the faith she inherited have meaning to her. "You cannot do an exorcism of something you don't believe in," he tells her. When they finally defeat the dybbuk, it is by the two of them, doubters both, reciting Psalms together in an act of devotion and faith.
Notably, other than Casey's great-uncle, the only people the dybbuk possesses are non-Jews, most strikingly the Episcopalian priest and exorcism expert recruited by Rabbi Sendak to assist in the exorcism. Jews are haunted by the evil of non-Jews, is the theme of the story. And even supportive non-Jews, even Casey's closest friends, are susceptible to suddenly attacking her. This is a resonant story. Welcome to the tribe, Casey.
The Possession
A few years ago there were news stories about the discovery of a 'dybbuk box', a wooden cabinet apparently designed to hold a dybbuk. There's good evidence that the dybbuk box wasn't even a medieval Jewish artifact, just a modern art piece, but either way, it inspired some horror movies. So we have this movie inspired by a fake Jewish myth, which in turn is loosely inspired by real Jewish mythology.
As in The Unborn and Demon, it's the story of a non-Jewish family's life being disrupted by the appearance of this Jewish monster. (In The Unborn, it turns out that at least some of the apparently non-Jewish characters are actually Jewish, but that is not the case here.) The premise is that a young girl whose parents are undergoing a messy divorce discovers a dybbuk box at a yard sale and becomes possessed by the dybbuk. I think the primal idea of the movie is that something old and powerful is attractive as an anchor in the face of the new: One of the first scenes in the movie involves her father moving into a new home in a suburban subdivision that is still under construction, and the dybbuk box stands in defiance to that, an agent that resists change.
The silliest part of the film is the box itself, with an insulting mixture of backwards Hebrew and nonsense Hebrew carved on its sides. Written along the sides is Dybbuk in backwards Hebrew, of course. That which is Jewish in this movie is Other, it's an impossibly incomprehensible horror from another world that is infiltrating and threatening the safe world of white suburban Christendom, which is only at risk because the safe white Christian heterosexual family structure of marriage is under attack because of the family's divorce.
And then Matisyahu shows up, and I hardly know how to describe my feelings about that. There is something about his performance that straddles utter serious belief and profound absurdity, and I love it and I love the way he remains this total outsider, cracking jokes that they don't laugh at, while treating their problems seriously and showing kindness and respect for this family that will never understand him. I like, too, that his s'forim are Artscroll. Purely for reasons of aesthetics, they are not where I would go to find my guides to exorcism! Matisyahu's casting is just an inexplicable stroke of genius in an otherwise mediocre movie that does nothing original.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-21 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-21 07:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-22 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-22 02:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-22 02:26 pm (UTC)oh my god that would be amazing. Kinda tempted to write it.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-26 06:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-25 12:30 am (UTC)I'm sad to hear the first film wasn't great -- parts of it certainly sound interesting based on your description, though I'd probably find the parts about her mom being institutionalized tough to watch.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-26 06:38 pm (UTC)Yeah, there are definitely some particularly interesting things in The Unborn relative to the other movies, but the overall package didn't quite work for me.