Every now and then, it seems, a genre film with an especially topical message enters the discursive fray to stimulate debate, provoke reaction, and tick a few boxes on some survey of cinematic miscellany. This rings true especially for horror, for which there have increasingly been two diverging camps: elevated horror and elevated horror’s wannabes. Elevated horror wrestles with pre-packaged themes and ideas including but not limited to fear, prejudice, and bodily autonomy, although most end up harking back to the tried-and-tested routines of impossible grief and indelible trauma. Its wannabes, not as sophisticated in their sophistry and deceit, that aim for the lower-hanging versions of these themes, sometimes yielding unintentionally sincere if dreadfully deadpan results. Who would fault, say, Lorcan Finnegan’s clunky and tepid Nocebo for its heavy-handed metaphors on racism and capitalist exploitation when the strictures are written into its screenplay? In contrast, who would not have something snarky to say about Brandon Cronenberg’s big nothing-burger Infinity Pool for squandering genuine philosophical anxiety for cheap money-shots and titillation? Either way, there’s a lackluster quality to the film factories’ output, possibly incentivized by algorithmic cues and branding considerations: be bold, but not overly so.
At last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, Pascal Plante made waves with Red Rooms, a cyber thriller “teeming with the equal promise and peril of forbidden fruit” in its exploration of the eponymous urban legend. Red Rooms stood out with respect to its garden-variety ilk in both its premise and execution: it crossed into taboo territory very quickly, dispensing with the pleasantries of caricature and going straight for the jugular with depictions — thankfully offscreen — of snuff videos and child sexual abuse. Eschewing graphic representation for psychological interiority, the film relegated both victims and perpetrator of a heinous crime to the backdrop of legal wrangling, highlighting instead the spectacular potential of violence through the mysterious persona of a young woman observer. This year’s Fantasia, similarly, brings us a film of equally disturbing import, slightly less tacit in its themes but consequently more visceral in its brutality. Black Eyed Susan, the third feature from underground filmmaker Scooter McCrae, carries with it a troubling air of portentous realism; unlike Red Rooms, whose findings still have some plausible deniability, the subject of Black Eyed Susan is a disarmingly factual one.
Robots, the successors of simple automatons, are imagined to have built-in functions surpassing the latter. They perform tasks and meet expectations at a rate and level far above the average human. What they cannot quite do is be human, although what they have increasingly been programmed to do is act as if they were. The premise of Black Eyed Susan is simply the taking of robotic mimesis to its logical, libertarian conclusions: could a robot be designed with the express purpose of being debased and destroyed? Derek (Damien Maffei), a cab driver down on his luck, has the luxury of answering this question when he’s enlisted by Gilbert (Marc Romeo), an old friend, to work quality control for a curious business venture. The goals of the venture are variegated, but their end product lies in a female, if somewhat androgynous-looking, sex doll named Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker). Susan, we learn, is to stand in for the many recipients — consensual or otherwise — of hard physical abuse, and the justification espoused by Gilbert remains rooted in pragmatism: better a human housewife suffering domestic violence, or a non-sentient fembot programmed to take, even purport to desire, such violence?
The stakes of McCrae’s films have always been deceptively conceived. Shatter Dead, his lo-fi 1994 debut, conjectured a world in which living and dying lost most of their distinction in the figure of the still-functioning zombie. Sixteen Tongues, his 1999 follow-up, concealed in its madcap narrative a prescient thesis of surveillance and cybercrime, more in common with Abel Ferrara’s similarly baffling New Rose Hotel than with Richard Kelly’s post-9/11 dystopian opera Southland Tales. With Black Eyed Susan, however, a more grounded sensibility takes center stage, reflecting perhaps the satirical face of reality right back at us. “One small slap for man,” Gilbert describes his project in partial jest, likening himself to the “Neil Armstrong of doll-fucking.” As Derek is enjoined to perform more sordid actions, striking and castigating Susan verbally and in the flesh, the veneer of superego respectability soon comes apart and tears, predictably, into both his conscience and his paranoia. For wired into Susan’s programming is an artificial intelligence capable of assessing her clients’ profiles — and iterating itself — with uncanny accuracy.
Given such topicality, Black Eyed Susan excels, on the whole, in its balancing of realism and speculative investigation. There’s hardly any scarcity of existing scenarios, whether in pornographic fantasies of domination and control (one thinks of the Pure Taboo series) or in the actualized wet dreams of tech bros (just recall the A.I.-powered pendant “Friend” launched days before the film’s premiere), to remit a matter-of-fact, almost didactic exposition of its terms. Relinquishing the freneticism and explicit detail of Sixteen Tongues, McCrae’s latest work evinces greater maturity and restraint in patiently unveiling our queasiness and resistance toward the proposed solution. Its characters are dutifully staged: Maffei and Romeo convey, through their expressions alone, a cat-and-mouse game of entrapment, although it’s Thälker ultimately who embodies their role with a most eerie visage of unknowability. Is anyone home? Whereas Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, in Poor Things, decidedly affixed indomitable consciousness to her child-like demeanor, the question is purposefully open here. And for all its graphic and sometimes vaguely erotic sequences, Black Eyed Susan concludes with the sobering realization that we always underestimate the reach of our conclusions. If one treats only the symptom, expect the cause to metastasize.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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