DON'T SAY ITS NAME (2021)

Studio:      101 Films
Director:    Rueben Martell
Writer:      Gerald Wexler, Rueben Martell
Producer:  Carolyn McMaster, Rene Collins
Stars:     Sera-Lys McArthur, Madison Walsh, Catherine Gell, Tom Carey, Samuel Marty, Justin Lewis, Sheena Kaine, Carla Fox, Julian Black Antelope

Review Score:

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Summary:

A vengeful ghost connected to a controversial mining operation creates a wave of fear across an indigenous people reservation.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Donny, a trucker for W.E.C. Coal, runs over and kills Kharis Redwater, an anti-mining activist, while Kharis walks alone at night on an indigenous people reservation. Tribal police officer Betty Stonechild consoles Kharis’ mother Mary Lynne while investigating the case with mountie Andy Evanshuk. Diner owner Frances helps manage the body.

WEC surveyor Beth brings her fiancé Ray Patel with her to help assess the land for a coal mining operation. Beth complains of a foul smell while a blackbird circles overhead. An invisible entity suddenly mauls Beth to death. Betty and Andy investigate, but question Ray’s unbelievable account of what supposedly happened.

Donny harasses game warden Stacey Cole, an Army veteran with PTSD, outside Frances’ diner. Stacey pistol-whips Donny in his face, which results in her suspension.

Gary, a poacher working for WEC, parks on the reservation to drink beer with his girlfriend Jessica. Gary complains of a foul smell while a blackbird circles overhead. The invisible entity suddenly kills Gary. Betty and Andy are stunned at the similarities between Gary and Beth’s unusual deaths.

Because Stacey is an expert tracker, Betty deputizes her to help with the search for whatever is stalking their reservation. Stacey enlists additional help from her uncle Carson Stonefeather, who is a respected tribal elder.

The invisible entity attacks Carson while he and Stacey hunt for it. Stacey rushes Carson to the hospital. Andy dismissively speculates that drug addiction or mass hysteria is responsible for what victims believe is happening. Betty defends her people as Stacey insists it was Kharis who attacked them. Carson cryptically asks, “Where is her heart?”

Betty’s online research reveals that Kharis was protesting against the tribal council for selling a mining license to WEC without proper approval. Additional research also connects Carson and Frances, the latter of whom appropriated native culture despite having a different heritage. Betty asks her 14-year-old nephew Ben, whom she raises, to see video interviews of Kharis and Carson he recorded for a class project. Carson’s interview implies he betrayed the reservation by allying with WEC on the profitable mining operation.

Betty discovers Kharis’ body is missing. Betty confronts Frances, who only says that Betty should ask Mary Lynne what happened to her daughter’s body. Betty then shows Stacey that her research revealed Kharis only attacked people affiliated with WEC, including Carson.

Andy arrests Donny for carelessly shooting an old woman he thought was the unknown entity. Frances tells Andy that Donny tried to date rape her on the night Kharis died. Although drugged at the time, Frances remembers being in Donny’s truck when he chased down and ran over Kharis.

Ben notices a blackbird circling overhead while practicing hockey with a friend. Ben later calls his aunt to tell her he is going to apply for an internship with WEC. Betty warns Ben to return home immediately. Kharis suddenly attacks the boy. Ben furiously pedals his bike back to the house.

Betty and Stacey rush to the house to protect Ben. Both women get into a violent confrontation with Kharis.

Swayed by a heart-to-heart conversation she had earlier with Stacey, Mary Lynne tearfully throws the heart from her daughter’s corpse into a fire. At the same time, Kharis drops to the ground outside Betty’s house. Stacey hacks off the vengeful ghost’s head.

Andy arrives at Betty’s house. Stacey, Betty, and Ben all lie about what really happened.

While watching the heart burn together, Mary Lynne tells Frances there is one more thing Kharis must do before finally resting. Handcuffed in the back of Andy’s patrol car at Betty’s house, Donny detects a strange odor. Kharis suddenly attacks him.

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Review:

It’s a small subgenre so far, with Jeff Barnaby’s “Blood Quantum” (review here) being one standout example springing immediately to mind. With any luck, we’ll continue to see a swell in fright films that are both about and made by indigenous people. No matter the nation, native histories are rife with terrifying tales based on cultural legends, but also on tragic truths regarding colonization and marginalization. At a time when entertainment aches for diversity to rejuvenate a clichéd corpse riddled with the worms of remakes and redundancies, we long to hear new stories that can only be told by distinctive voices. And in the centuries since Europeans arrived, few people have experienced horror quite like the first tribes have.

“Don’t Say Its Name” isn’t all that different from what we’re used to though. Despite setting the story on a contemporary Canadian reservation and populating it with Blackfoot bands, co-writer/director Rueben Martell spins a fairly familiar vengeful ghost yarn. The movie still nips at frostbitten fingers with some wintry supernatural scares. Yet it also dips into as many tropes about putting violent spirits to rest as it does tropes about Indians struggling with depressive addiction while encroaching corporations carelessly exploit their land.

That’s “Don’t Say Its Name” in a pistachio shell. The movie gets a good deal of the way there, with “there” being a position where it can carve a unique niche for itself in snowbound chills from the Great White North. But several seams could use tighter stitching to firm up the film so it doesn’t seem quite so much like a made-for-TV spookshow.

Character introductions in particular could benefit from some smoothing. There’s no mistaking what’s going on with Betty. She’s a reservation police officer who also raises her 14-year-old nephew Ben by herself. The level head on her shoulders bridges the gap between sympathetic native and objective realist when it comes to dealing with the outside world. After an invisible entity starts ripping through victims linked to a controversial coal mining operation, which her white partner chalks up to drug-induced hysterics, it’s up to Betty to find out what’s really rampaging across her homeland.

Stacey doesn’t come with quite as much clarity. She looks a lot like Betty to begin with, in part because she wears a similar brown uniform since she’s a game warden. She’s also introduced with no context, angrily taking target practice in the woods while sounds of battle wage war in her head. It’s the first of a few quizzical technical choices. We’re supposed to take the hint that Stacey suffers from PTSD, and we do. It’s just that the blazing bullets in her brain sound like audio clips from “Call of Duty,” not the Section 8 stress of an Army veteran still readapting to civilized society.

We eventually come to understand Stacey’s role as a tracker in assisting Betty’s investigation. Frances is another story. I’m still not exactly sure who she is. Frances runs a local diner, yet she also apparently handles dead bodies for reservation police, even though it’s explicitly stated that she isn’t a coroner or a pathologist. I’ve confused faces in a film before. This may be the first time I’ve experienced it with three different ethnicities simultaneously. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize these were three separate women, except I chalk that up to the choppy way “Don’t Say Its Name” cuts between their threads at unnatural breaks in pacing.

Chronic hiccups come from odd editing in other ways. More than a few times, one may wonder, “Why are we checking in with this person right now?” Director Rueben Martell picks peculiar points for running parallel plotlines without substantially beefing up cliffhanger suspense or establishing spatial relationships. Even when he shows us something as simple as Betty’s nephew playing video games, there are three or four too many cutaways to the TV screen serving no narrative purpose.

This is what I mean about “Don’t Say Its Name” falling a smidge short of advancing one rung up the indie B-movie ladder. Details that were probably deemed unimportant during production undercut the atmosphere enough that the frightful fantasy isn’t as immersive as it could be.

Actors playing the main parts perform with a rhythm that’s right for the movie’s steadily maintained mood. Secondary players on the other hand, struggle with stiffness likely stemming from inexperience. When Ben and his buddy go outside to play hockey, they stand about five feet away from each other and slap at the puck like their arms are made of wet linguini. After Stacey rushes a severely wounded friend to the hospital, she sports one single streak of blood on her forehead even though her makeup and clothes are otherwise perfect. Apologies to the composer too, but generic music fit for licensed library tracks doesn’t do any favors to elevate the film to the next tier either. And the less said about the shaggy ghost FX that play a prominent part in the finale, the better.

I know I’ve primarily focused on negative niggles and here I am running out of room to balance pessimism with praise. I also know I’m restating the same sentiment for a third time, but to simply cut to the chase, “Don’t Say Its Name” is a decent little thriller unable to get all the way up to “pretty good” due to the disparities mentioned. If the “indigenous people horror” subgenre had bigger breadth, “Don’t Say Its Name” probably wouldn’t be a majorly memorable movie. Fortunately, a little flash of flair peeks through to get noticed, even though the film feels a lot like a standard SyFy movie without the cable staple’s usual order of cheese.

Review Score: 60

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