WOUNDS (2019)

Studio:      Hulu
Director:    Babak Anvari
Writer:      Babak Anvari
Producer:  Lucan Toh, Babak Anvari, Christopher Kopp
Stars:     Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Brad William Henke, Karl Glusman

Review Score:

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Summary:

A bartender’s mind and entire life begin unraveling after he recovers a dropped phone connected to otherworldly occultism.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Will, a bartender at Rosie’s in New Orleans, serves regular patrons Eric and Alicia. Will openly flirts with Alicia in front of her new boyfriend Jeffrey.

Will swats at a cockroach. College kids Jason and Garrett enter the bar with two girlfriends.

Eric gets into a fight with his friend Marvin while drunkenly playing pool. Marvin viciously gouges Eric’s face with a broken beer bottle. Everyone leaves due to the commotion. Eric refuses medical attention. Will recovers a cellphone dropped by one of the college kids.

Will goes home to his girlfriend Carrie Lynch. Garrett texts messages to the phone that say, “I think something’s here with me!! We shouldn’t have messed with those books! I’m scared! It’s that thing from the tunnel. Help me!” Will starts seeing cockroaches at home.

Suspicious that Will may be cheating on her, Carrie examines the phone. She finds a disturbing photo of teeth in a pool of blood. Will drops off Carrie at Tulane University and becomes suspicious himself when he sees Carrie hug her professor.

The college kids secretly stalk Will. Will invites Alicia to day drink with him, but she declines. Will checks on Eric, who asks Will to sit with him because he is having nightmares.

Texts from Jason prompt Will to reexamine the phone. Will finds disturbing photos of a dead man. In a video, a severed head moves on a table full of cockroaches before a hand suddenly emerges from an open wound in the skull.

Carrie also looks at the phone again. Carrie wonders if the dead man is Garrett since he asked for help the night before. She also notices a red book titled “The Translation of Wounds” in one of the photos.

Will calls Garrett only to experience intense pain when he hears strange sounds on the other end. Will weirdly refuses to let Carrie call the cops.

Will instead decides to take the phone to his police officer friend Duane. On the drive, Will receives a text from Jason that says, “Thanks for calling. You’ve been chosen.” Will throws the phone out the window when he hallucinates it morphing into a large roach. The college kids recover the phone and drive away. Without the phone, Duane tells Will there is nothing for him to investigate.

Will spends the night drinking and doing cocaine with Alicia. The two of them start getting intimate, but Alicia backs off when Will becomes aggressive. Will takes Alicia home.

Will returns home after receiving a strange photo from Carrie. Will finds Carrie staring at an image of a tunnel on her laptop. Carrie claims she feels foggy and has no memory of texting Will.

Will experiences a vision of Garrett spitting his teeth onto the kitchen table. Garrett says, “There was a ritual. We opened a portal. Something came and possessed us. You called it into your home. Now it sees you are the perfect vessel for more. It is in your bedroom right now staring at you as you sleep.”

Will wakes from a nightmare to find a rash under his arm. Will hallucinates a cockroach crawling out of a gash in his armpit.

With Carrie continuing to behave oddly, Will hacks into her laptop. Carrie’s online research reveals she was investigating “The Translation of Wounds,” a three volume set of occult tomes containing “alleged teachings on the use of a wound to transcend physical boundaries and connect with higher beings for power and enlightenment.” Someone in a forum additionally directed Garrett to a resource on Gnostic rituals for human sacrifice. Another forum member complained of seeing a tunnel after studying the books.

Growing increasingly irritable and mentally unstable, Will ignores imaginary cockroaches during his next shift at the bar. Having learned about Will and Alicia’s night together, Jeffrey drunken confronts Will, leading to a brief fight. Will goes into a momentary trance where he envisions a tunnel.

Carrie texts Will, “I think something’s here with me.” An accompanying photo of a person seated on their bed compels Will to rush home. Will finds Carrie sitting entranced at her computer. Will finds no one else in the house, but sits on the bed in the same position as the figure in Carrie’s photo. A disturbing call to Will’s phone causes more hallucinations.

Will puts Carrie in the bathtub. Carrie sinks into black water, but emerges fully recovered. Carrie has no recollection of what happened. The person is now missing from her photo.

Will’s coworker Doug relays a message that Eric asked to see Will because he has a present for him. Will stares at the tunnel on Carrie’s laptop.

The next morning, Will proposes that he and Carrie break up. Will becomes upset when Carrie quickly and coldly agrees, creating a terse confrontation.

Will throws a tantrum at the bar before quitting his job. Will calls Alicia to tell her he left Carrie, but Alicia explains she is with Jeffrey and doesn’t want Will to call her anymore.

Will finds Eric’s apartment above the bar infested with flies and roaches. Will asks if he can stay with Eric, but Eric refuses. Will angrily demands to know why Eric tried contacting him the night before. With his face wound pulsating, Eric says “they” made him do it. Will asks about the “present.” Eric gives Will the college kids’ phone.

A text from Jason reveals Will’s present is “wrapped in flesh.” Concluding the gift is inside Eric, Will calls Garrett’s phone. Strange sounds are heard as Eric writhes in pain. Cockroaches swarm the apartment. Staring into Eric’s face wound, Will says, “fix me, make me whole.” A tunnel opens in Eric’s wound. A being emerges and begins crawling into Will’s open mouth.

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Review:

No matter how much I mull over “Wounds,” I’m no closer to concluding whether Armie Hammer’s performance is brilliantly bland by design or just boringly blah. Maybe it comes down to your perception of the actor as much as Hammer’s take on his character.

Hammer plays Will, an ordinary New Orleans bartender better described by naked facts than distinctive traits, only because there are more of one than the other. Unfortunately for Will, his status as a college dropout affords him enough intelligent awareness to recognize the rut where he resides. He and his girlfriend Carrie both know their passionless relationship runs on routine, but neither feels incentivized to do anything about it. Will instead gets his romantic kicks from openly flirting with regular customer Alicia, never mind the new boyfriend on the barstool beside her.

In between idle chitchat and swatting at cockroaches, Will breaks up a fight between barfly Eric and one of Eric’s drunken buddies. The commotion causes a couple of teens to head for the exit. One of the underage drinkers drops a phone in the rush.

Although he doesn’t know why, Will feels compelled to take the phone home. That night, Will receives a series of texts cryptically pleading for help. “I think something’s here with me! We shouldn’t have messed with those books! It’s that thing from the tunnel.” Will assumes he’s on the receiving end of a prank until he finds that the phone also contains photos of dead bodies. Then a startling video of a severed head crawling through cockroaches abruptly concludes with a hand emerging from a hole in the skull.

Whatever weirdness Will stumbled into, it’s only begun to mess with his mind. The deeper he burrows into the otherworldly mystery of bodily portals to alternate dimensions, the more Will becomes haunted by hallucinations that unravel his life while gradually driving him mad.

Pick your “-ian” for describing the story at the center of “Wounds,” which is based on author Nathan Ballingrud’s novella “The Visible Filth.” Lynchian, Lovecraftian, Cronenbergian, and Hitchcockian all apply in some fashion. Or rather, “Wounds” would feel Hitchcockian if Armie Hammer didn’t slather the Everyman archetype with a bright beige coat of lead paint.

I suppose someone could try arguing that Hammer’s Will embodies a modern equivalent of a Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart role in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, i.e. a common person unexpectedly caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except Will’s introductory scenes merely depict a character without truly constructing one. Outside of occult eeriness, Will’s dull days consist of playing video games with a bored expression on his face, disinterestedly joking with a cashier at a market, or popping a beer while watching a friend sleep. Superficially, mundane actions appear to operate as relatable activities establishing Will as average. Counterproductively, they contribute to a frustratingly hollow protagonist with nearly no personality an audience can hitch to.

Always outfitted in jeans and a t-shirt, Will’s blasé basicness is at least partly intentional. In order for his transformative arc to match the movie’s metaphors, “Wounds” requires Will to exist in a haze of nondescript complacency. Later in the film, Will’s girlfriend correctly observes, “There’s nothing there to satisfy. You are a mock person. You’re just a body.” Emptiness means to make up a majority of his eroded persona.

Which is why I’m unsure if I should commend Armie Hammer for flattening Will into two dimensions, possibly under specific directions to do so, or criticize him for being successful at it. For me, Hammer has always been just below Sam Worthington and right above Jai Courtney on the unremarkable list of interchangeable male leads who don’t possess half the charisma casting directors apparently believe they do. Nowhere is this vacancy more evident than during a lengthy opening scene of Will tending bar. Moving and speaking as though he’s in a stage play, there’s nothing natural about Hammer’s dialogue delivery. Rehearsed lines fall from an invisible page in his head and out of his mouth, without mental motivation breathing behind them.

Regardless of how purposefully pedestrian Hammer may make his performance, casual characterization causes detachment from muddled drama. Lulled into a fugue state by unvested stakes, the viewer becomes lost in a cloud of confused ideas while the fiction loses focus. Fighting to find what the movie might be “about,” I settled on a parallel of trust in relationships. Others identified alcoholism. Whatever wisdom “Wounds” wants to impart, its various threads never really weave into a poignantly identifiable theme.

The film’s confounding clarity doesn’t equate to a red pen write-off. Supernatural scenes supply a wealth of horrific content. Independent of context, a “Ringu”-like etherealness accompanies mesmeric creeps with nightmarish tones and textures. Filmmaker Babak Anvari unquestionably possesses a gift for crafting unsettling atmosphere through petrifying sights and intangible implications. Building on his impressive debut feature “Under the Shadow” (review here), Anvari could be a master of the macabre in the making.

“Wounds” has maybe 60% of the materials it needs to become a confidently compelling chiller. Talents like Dakota Johnson and Zazie Beetz have their work cut out trying to make memorable performances out of underutilized ancillary characters. With a script overhaul putting more purpose into secondary players and subplots, “Wounds” might find the gripping narrative constantly fleeing to new hiding spots whenever substance gets sidetracked.

In its current condition, the film can be filed under standard “descent into insanity” fare that’s mildly more cinematic in conception than most. Had story and subtext been as sorted as visual execution, we’d be discussing “Wounds” in decidedly more glowing terms.

Review Score: 60

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