HOUSEWIFE (2017)

Studio:      RLJE Films
Director:    Can Evrenol
Writer:      Can Evrenol, Cem Ozuduru
Producer:  Metin Anter, Erhan Ozogul, Muge Buyuktalas
Stars:     Clementine Poidatz, David Sakurai, Alicia Kapudag, Ali Aksoz, Defne Halman, Zuri Sen, Elif Gulalp, Gunes Galava, Brandon Patton, Muge Buyuktalas

Review Score:

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Summary:

A troubled woman’s traumatic past haunts her when she encounters an enigmatic cult leader capable of walking between dreams.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

As young girls, Holly and her sister discuss the invisible “visitors” that can only be seen by their mentally disturbed mother, who meditates with an amulet in front of a portrait of the sisters’ grandmother. Later that night, Holly witnesses her mother drowning Hazel in a toilet and stabbing her father to death in the family’s mansion.

As an adult, Holly suppresses her trauma in a passionless marriage with author, artist, and esoteric researcher Dr. Timucin ‘Tim’ Erguvan. Fearful of becoming a mother herself, Holly secretly takes birth control pills.

Tim makes Holly uncomfortable when, while celebrating their third anniversary with friends Rich and Asuman, Tim announces that they are trying to have children. Rich mentions an upcoming seminar being held by ‘Umbrella of Love and Mind,’ an apocalypse cult whose leader, Bruce O’Hare, claims to be able to walk through dreams. Holly mentions that their old friend Valerie belongs to ULM, but she hasn’t been seen in two years.

While remembering the family massacre, Holly has a dreamlike vision of Valerie. Surprisingly, Valerie then drops by Tim and Holly’s house to invite them to Bruce O’Hare’s ULM seminar.

Valerie, Tim, Holly, Rich, and Asuman attend the seminar together. During the presentation, Bruce singles out Holly as a woman he prophetically dreamed about. Bruce puts his hand on Holly’s head, causing her to experience a vision of a toilet overflowing with blood. When the vision ends, Holly feels transformed, Bruce bleeds, and the crowd erupts with applause.

Back at the house, Tim argues with Valerie that Bruce is a conman. Holly confesses to Tim that she had been taking birth control because she was fearful of motherhood, but now believes she is ready because Bruce freed her mind. The discussion about what happened at the seminar evolves into a threesome between Tim, Holly, and Valerie, during which Holly sees Bruce.

Holly later follows a vision to an outside shed where she sees her mother covered in blood. Holly’s scream summons Tim and Valerie, who find the shed empty. Holly claims her mother took her heirloom amulet.

Holly has another dreamlike encounter with Bruce during a vision that flashes back to the ULM seminar. Bruce compels Holly to relive her childhood trauma. Holly becomes the “visitor” that only her mother sees on the night of the murders. Holly also sees Hazel survive her toilet drowning. Thinking it is her mother coming after her, young Holly inadvertently kills her sister out of fright. Adult Holly angrily dismisses the suppressed memory as untrue and recoils from Bruce. Bruce warns that Holly might become trapped in a maze of dreams if she leaves, but she does anyway. Bruce speaks to an unseen presence about “The Master Visitor.”

Holly has another vision where Hazel lunges at her while covered in blood. Valerie wakes Holly from the dream.

Tim dreams of being forcibly escorted out of the ULM seminar. Tim wakes outside his house clutching Holly’s amulet.

Bruce joins Holly and Valerie inside the house. Bruce tells Holly she is lost in a maze and he is her only way out.

After seeing robed cultists approaching from the surrounding woods, Tim enters the house to confront Bruce. Bruce entrances Tim and takes the amulet.

Bruce puts the amulet on Holly. Cult members, whom Bruce refers to as “visitors,” enter the house to lay Holly on the floor. Valerie pleads for Bruce to stop what he doing, but he murders Valerie as she has a vision of dying onstage at the ULM seminar.

Bruce announces, “The Master is here.” Hazel rises from the toilet as a ghostly figure and approaches Holly.

Cultists escort Holly’s mother into the room. While other cultists hold down Holly, Bruce cuts off her mother’s face and subsequently wears it over his own.

Cultists strip Holly naked. Bruce puts his hand on Holly’s stomach, which balloons with sudden pregnancy. While Tim paints in another room in a feverish trance, Bruce delivers a bloody pod that he gives to Holly. Holly tears away clumps to reveal the baby underneath. Bruce cuts more flesh from Holly’s mother that Holly uses to swaddle her child. Hazel caresses Holly’s face before transforming into their grandmother.

Still naked, Holly takes the baby to an upstairs balcony where she presents it to hundreds of cultists assembling outside the house. Tim is seen dead on the floor of his studio in front of another ominous painting. Bruce sounds a horn. Enormous tentacles appear in the sky.

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Review:

Many moons ago, when I first visited Hollywood as a teenage tourist, I participated in a focus group that solicited volunteers outside of Grauman’s Chinese. We screened an unfinished pilot for a scripted TV series starring Montel Williams called “Matt Waters.” Despite our test audience’s assertion that the show was pretty poor, CBS still aired it two years later as a midseason replacement that ran, predictably, for only six episodes.

Humorously, that particular focus group experience was almost identical to the one depicted in the episode of “The Simpsons” that introduces Poochie. Remember the scene where Roger Meyers, Jr. wrangles the kids to watch “Itchy & Scratchy” in front of knobs that they turn to green or red to indicate what they like and don’t like? (“One kid seems to LOVE the Speedo Man!”) It was exactly like that except we had red and green buttons instead of a knob.

“Housewife” brings that memory to mind because its inconsistent appeal fluctuates so drastically and so frequently, I envisioned needing a meter to track mood swings. Certain scenes astound with wild weirdness. Others confound with abstract ambiguity. Picture a knob rhythmically alternating like a pendulum between “intriguing” and “irritating” as personal preference changes in tandem. Not unlike what happens when focus group input chops up a film or show based on subjective ideas in conflict, “Housewife” contains “good” and “bad” bits, adding up to an overall hodge-podge that’s neither and both at the same time.

“Housewife” follows a loose plot, though really, it’s more of an outline acting as connective tissue for visual vignettes of varying value. As with his previous feature “Baskin” (review here), writer/director Can Evrenol emphasizes, and clearly appears invested almost entirely in, dream logic imagery over traditional storytelling.

Nevertheless, the skeletal story chronicles housewife Holly at two turning points in her troubled life. As a little girl, Holly witnesses two horrible murders committed by her mentally disturbed mother. As an adult, Holly suppresses that trauma by figuratively sleepwalking through a middling marriage to esoteric artist Tim.

Holly’s sleepwalking becomes literal when former friend Valerie turns up after a two-year disappearance to take Holly and Tim to a strange seminar. The Umbrella of Love and Mind, or ULM for short, is a hip and hot topic as far as trendy cults go. Its growing popularity traces directly to enigmatic leader Bruce O’Hare, a mysterious man who claims he and his followers can walk between dreams.

ULM hails Bruce as a sort of supernatural savior. Tim thinks he is merely a common conman. The debate over Bruce practically provides a parallel for Can Evrenol’s creative identity. Evrenol may be a misunderstood genius whose nonconformist ideas are too unique for broad cinematic articulation. Or he could be having a laugh at any chin-stroking intellectualism applied to carelessly random oddness. Either way, it wouldn’t be wrong to call Can Evrenol horror’s Jackson Pollock in that regard.

Bruce unblocks Holly’s memories and mentality, in turn unlocking her own dream-walking abilities. With that, “Housewife” stamps the audience’s passport for nonlinear travel through Holly’s conscious, unconscious, and subconscious minds on a jolting journey through the wonderfully macabre yet gratingly incongruous moments mentioned earlier.

“Housewife’s” sensationalism escalates over a wide range of shocks engineered to captivate those open to its hypnotizing obtuseness while reviling anyone understandably opposed to its disturbing visceral sights. Elements less likely to offend feature a swinger’s threesome, female masturbation, and a woman peeing in a public restroom sink for no noticeable reason. More polarizing pieces include a mother sobbing into her daughter’s panties soiled with menstrual blood, that same mother drowning that same daughter in a toilet, and a baby swaddled in a bloody blanket made from flayed human flesh.

Can Evrenol crafts “Housewife” much like Dario Argento crafts his films. By that I mean artistry often overshadows narrative while being extensively employed to pave over gaps in plotting. Also like Argento, Evrenol gets heavy-handed with that artistry. “Housewife” declares war on all five senses using an arsenal of deeply colored lighting schemes, an unrelenting score, and an excessive string of genre chestnuts such as creepy dolls, creaking floors, lightning flashes, and thunder peals.

To the Argento point, it’s worth wondering if “Housewife” would be considered a classic had it come out of the same 70s/80s era when Italian horror and giallo experienced its peak. For better as well as for worse, the film hits many of the same nonsensical notes.

Examined instead with modern sensibilities, being an effective Argento/Fulci/Bava emulation amped up to Lynchian levels of surrealism doesn’t allow “Housewife” to skate by unscathed. Evrenol’s intentionally inserted peculiarities cut into his film’s personality as much as they highlight it. Accents of actors for whom English is not native make for awkward dialogue deliveries. A repeating pattern of abruptly aborting music at certain scene changes shakes viewers out of dreamy immersion into an immediate reminder that they are passive passengers on a train with an undefined destination.

Truth be told, I don’t entirely know what to make of the movie’s muddled mix of tones and timelines, which is why my rating doesn’t take a side. I am however certain that I’m not in the minority, and that an indecisive opinion is anyone’s most likely reaction to the consistently transforming texture.

“Housewife” comes to a point where everyone must choose where to point his or her dial. Green for willful surrender to its suggestive subtleties and sometimes silly outlandishness. Red for incessant annoyance at the same abstruse aesthetics that the green group finds conceptually fascinating.

Review Score: 50

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