THE TRANSFIGURATION (2016)

Studio:       Strand Releasing
Director:    Michael O’Shea
Writer:       Michael O’Shea
Producer:  Susan Leber
Stars:     Eric Ruffin, Chloe Levine, Aaron Clifton Moten, Carter Redwood, Danny Flaherty

Review Score:

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Summary:

A troubled teen obsessed with vampires is challenged to assess his identity after meeting a similarly alienated young woman.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Fascinated by vampires to the point where he believes he is one, troubled teen Milo kills a man and drinks the blood from his neck in a movie theater restroom. Milo goes through the man’s wallet and hides the money he finds in a growing cash stash behind VHS tapes in the apartment he shares with his older brother Lewis. Milo later vomits.

Milo attends his regular session with the school psychologist, who asks if Milo has stopped hurting animals. Known in the neighborhood as an antisocial “freak,” Milo is chased by bullies who urinate on him.

Milo meets Sophie when she moves into his building to live with her grandfather. Milo next sees Sophie cutting herself in an open field after having sex with five boys. The two alienated teens begin bonding and eventually form a romantic relationship.

Sophie comes to Milo’s apartment and learns more about his fascination with vampires and drinking blood. Sophie leaves after becoming uncomfortable when Milo shows her a video of cows being slaughtered.

Milo sleeps on the street. He then murders a man who stoops down to check on him and drinks the man’s blood.

Milo and Sophie continue spending time together. Sophie confides in Milo that she dreams of going out on her own to escape her abusive grandfather. Milo and Sophie go to see “Nosferatu,” discuss vampire fiction, are briefly bullied by the gangbangers who hang outside their building, and visit the grave of Milo’s mother, who tragically committed suicide.

Milo lures a young man named Mike into the apartment building’s basement when Mike and his girlfriend come looking to buy drugs. While Milo hides, the gangbangers confront Mike and end up beating and killing him.

Milo is taken in for questioning by police. The police later drop off Milo in front of the gang to imply that Milo snitched, even though he didn’t.

Milo imagines coming home to find Lewis murdered and then drinking his blood. In reality, Lewis warns Milo to be wary of both the police and the gang, to which Lewis used to belong. Milo tells the gang that he didn’t say anything to the police.

With their relationship deepening, Milo and Sophie have sex. Sophie later comes over crying after being assaulted by her grandfather. Milo agrees to let Sophie stay with him.

While Milo is out, Sophie finds Milo’s journals about hunting and killing as a vampire, as well as a calendar marking regular feeding dates. Milo comes home to find Sophie gone and his notebooks out in the open.

With Sophie not returning his calls, Milo goes out in the city looking for her. Milo sees a drunk man accosting a woman on the street and follows the man home. Startled by activity in the man’s dark apartment, Milo inadvertently kills the man’s young son. Milo vomits at the sight of the bloody child. Milo then kills the drunk man in his bed and drinks his blood.

Milo comes home and has a conversation with Lewis about their mother and the horrors his brother saw while in the gang. Milo later runs into Sophie, who apologizes for unintentionally snooping and then disappearing. She asks if Milo is writing a book about vampires. Milo responds that his notes were for something that doesn’t matter anymore.

Milo gives the gang leader a bag of items stolen from previous victims as a gesture that he can be trusted. Milo then goes to the police and gives a statement implicating the gang for Mike’s murder as well as the drunk man and his son.

On his brother’s advice, Milo brings Sophie flowers. The two of them go on a date to Coney Island. Milo briefly fantasizes about stabbing Sophie in the neck and drinking her blood. At the end of the evening, Milo gives Sophie his stash of cash and tells her to use it to get away from her grandfather.

Police raid the building. A shootout is heard outside. Lewis tells Milo the next day about the gang being pinned with the recent murders.

Milo throws away all of his vampire journals. While out on the street, Milo leaves a voicemail for Sophie asking if she really left town. After ending the call, Milo is killed in a drive-by shooting. Sophie returns the call and leaves a message for Milo before getting on a bus.

At the same time Milo’s body is later buried, Sophie reflects on a message Milo left her with the cash. A journal entry read in voiceover details how Milo believed a vampire could die by plotting a way to be intentionally murdered.

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Review:

Milo’s fascination with Dracula, Nosferatu, and other imaginary creatures of the night doesn’t end with movies.  It goes far enough that Milo considers himself to be an authentic vampire in the making.  So much so that the troubled teen has taken to murdering men and drinking blood from their throats.

When not following his feeding schedule, Milo’s days are otherwise dull, albeit burdensome.  Routine activities include dissuading a school psychologist about his desire to harm animals, running from bullies regularly punishing him with beatdowns, and arguing with his older brother over who should be paying their bills.

Orphaned and effectively alone, Milo is resigned to wearing the alienated outcast hat that society and his situation has knit for him.  Then he meets Sophie, who moves into Milo’s apartment building to live with her abusive grandfather.

Sophie’s desperation to find feeling has the young girl engaging in undesirable group sex and cutting her arms afterward to cope.  In each other, Milo and Sophie see their fumbling, fractured youths reflected.  Mutual despair draws them together, with Sophie consciously and Milo unconsciously struggling for any kind of connection.  What Milo doesn’t yet realize is that his tether to Sophie pulls him further from fantasy, and challenges Milo to confront his skewed perception of the person he is, as well as the person he may ultimately become.

Imagery and descriptions associated with “The Transfiguration” possibly paint the production inaccurately.  The ‘horror’ hook and Milo’s unhealthy obsession with fanged fiction should not be first factors influencing preconceptions.  Nor should they sway anyone into assuming the film is something it is not.

Something “The Transfiguration” is not is a traditionally thought of thriller replete with vampire violence befitting genre classification.  Something it is, is an often quiet, often bleak, introspective examination of overcoming hopelessness through humanity.

A wordily reductive “it’s like” pegs “The Transfiguration” as being something like the premise of “Martin” meets the dynamic of “Let the Right One In” by way of “Moonlight’s” meditative mood in a mumblecore character study.  The film’s New York indie DNA is deeply designed in reality, cutting out a slice of low-income life with a handheld camera constantly capturing candid moments in guerrilla grit.

Writer/director Michael O’Shea presents Milo’s world using wordless sequences of walking down streets, waiting at bus stops, riding subways, cashing a check, doing laundry, or vacuuming.  It’s meant to be mundane to mirror an average existence.  Though another takeaway is fair warning for the impatient that “The Transfiguration” is never in a hurry, and atmosphere is thick with its ordinary ambling.

A more immediate obstacle to engagement is Milo’s exploratory enigma.  Eric Ruffin and Chloe Levine are organically exceptional as Milo and Sophie.  O’Shea puts these marginalized teens front and center with clear confidence in pitched performances, painting a portrait of how aimless ennui can warp a marginalized mind into sociopathy when stranded in a harshly uncaring environment.

The vampire frame plays as a parallel.  Milo’s outlet for escape from the everyday pain of poverty and plainness transports him to an impossibly darker world.  Here he is empowered, at last in control, but the price for that freedom is his capacity to be an empathic person.  However, as tragically transfixing as Milo’s cold characterization becomes, the viewer can’t forge a full bond with the boy because he has no emotions to connect to.

That’s the core catch-22 of “The Transfiguration” being the dour drama it is.  From the music to the color palette, everything adds a hollow hum to its hypnotic tone of heartbreaking depression.  Concurrently, those essential vacancies in Milo’s personality and the surroundings he inhabits keep the complete movie at arm’s length, booking an audience as passive voyagers on a cruise that can be as immaterial as it is poignant.

Relate to the characters’ conditions through outstanding acting or the downplayed direction and “The Transfiguration” provokes thought via its conception and convictions.  Should its meaning become muddied when the meandering loses magnetism, the movie is more likely to miss a personal mark and only inspire apathy.

Review Score:  60

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