Maybe this is just a problem with trailers in particular, but the trailer for this movie didn’t really sell me on it. Sure, there’s a mystery, but the mystery didn’t seem very intriguing in the way it was presented. It felt like the movie would focus on a different thing, but after this got 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, I thought I have to see this. It did help that it’s directed by the guy who did Barbarian.

I have spoilers, but I’ll warn about them.

So, 17 kids just left their homes at the same exact minute in the night and disappeared without a trace. They all ran in the same weird manner and, what the movie focuses on early, they were all on the same class in their elementary school. Only one student was left in the class.

After this is set up, we get a chapter heading: Justine. Justine was the teacher of the class. We see her deal with her life now that the parents accuse her and it would appear her dormant alcoholism is back.

And this is how the movie is structured. There’s six of these people whose points of view we see. This is not a Rashomon thing. We see one story, but find out the complete picture non-chronologically one person at a time. This works well. It allows the movie to keep certain things hidden without feeling forced. In a way, some of these are flashbacks, but they flow nicely, where made differently, they may have felt like the director was being clever at our expense, when now he is clever while serving us well.

While two or maybe three of these POVs are pretty obvious, some are actually quite surprising. A character that I assumed was there just to underline Justine’s need to be able to hide, suddenly becomes the main character for a bit. I thought that was pretty cool.

The movie does give away certain things. A specific topic which come out of nowhere is mentioned twice in a way that you notice, which felt like the director being cute about the themes of the movie.

I found the movie compelling. The structure allowed the movie not to have slow points as the mystery is being uncovered.

The people we follow are all flawed and not necessarily in the most empathetic ways (I have a particular disdain for police brutality, no matter what the motivation). I don’t know if this was the purpose, but at no point did I feel like certain characters would have had something to do with what happened. However, it does give people in the movie a reason to be suspicious of them or at least their motivations of being suspicious about them is more justified.

I can see how an audience might see the second half of the movie as less satisfying then the first hour. We start with grief and how to handle it. You could easily see that part as a metaphor for something like a school shooting and how people live with that, but put into a more fantastical, almost fairy tale, context. Then, the second half is unraveling the mystery, which can understandably feel like a betrayal of sorts.

The cast is good. Some of them I didn’t even recognize under the makeup, but all in all, good work. I’ll get into this a little more in the spoilers. There’s some great shots. Especially one which is very unnerving.

Finally, before the spoilers, and this might be a very minor one: I have a soft spot for folk horror. While I’m apparently the only who is calling this movie that, there are definitely those strains here.

So, to the spoilers, because you can’t really talk about this movie without them.

So, the topic that comes up twice is parasites. The latter one is when we see Justine discuss them with her class, but the first one is more interesting: Justine’s boss (the headmaster of the school) is watching TV with his husband and they are watching a documentary about a specific kind of parasite that takes over ants to such a degree that they can actually control them.

If you pay attention, you know at that point that some kind of a parasite has taken over the family of the surviving kid. That parasite being the great-aunt of the kid, Gladys, who moves in with them and who happens to be a witch of some kind. We see glimpses of her way before we meet her, but in those brief glimpses she seems more like a clown of some kind than anything else. Turns out, this is her makeup and wig, which are pretty clown-like, but I’m not sure if that’s the intention.

Gladys is dying, so she attempts to revive herself with the help of her victims. This isn’t really explained, but she appears to have been draining energy in some way from the parents and probably intends to do the same with the missing kids, but it’s never explained fully, which is weird, since otherwise this movie goes pretty deep into how the magic works. We see her steal or have someone else steal things to get the real owners under her control and we see the full process. This is the folk horror part of the movie. I don’t know exactly if the magic follows specific traditions, but it is obviously inspired various beliefs.

The themes of the movie become more muddled here, so let’s just say late-stage capitalism. We have a person who externalizes her problems on others without any remorse. But this is pretty lazy way to analyze the movie. However, if the shoe fits…

I just want to mention that my favorite character is the fifth POV, Anthony. At least that’s the name listed on IMDb and Wikipedia, but I seem to remember that he was called James (NOTE: I was correct, the name has been changed on IMDb). Am I just completely misremembering this or is there a problem with reporting? I don’t know. It’s more likely it’s me. Anyhow, he is an unhoused drug addict, who lives in a tent outside of the city and does petty crimes to feed his habit. It is a small town, so we stumble upon him on multiple occasions, but in a sense he is kind of the hero of the movie. Almost.

EDIT: I forgot to explain why I liked the character.

It’s a great performance. There’s something very real about this character. You meet these kinds of people occasionally. People who are driven by their addiction and the are constantly trying to hustle to maintain their habit. Here in Finland it’s more commonly alcohol, but we also have a very high drug mortality rate by European standards (which is dwarfed by the US, which has well over four times as many drug deaths per capita). When you meet these people, you are kind of on your toes, because you think they are just trying to get something out of you (when actually, what often happens is that they just want someone to talk to), but you also know something went wrong somewhere to cause them to be in this situation, so they are in that sense sympathetic.

He is also kind of absurdly funny. When he finds the house with the possessed people, he does get startled when he sees them, but that doesn’t stop him, because they don’t move. When he finds the kids in the basement, he just leaves. He is not worried for the kids, he is just worried that he will be swindled for the reward. It is understandable that he doesn’t trust cops, as he has a bruise on his face after having been brutalized by one just the previous day.