Slamdance 2021 | The Slow Bleed of "A Black Rift Begins to Yawn"
5/12 ForReel Score | 2/5 Stars
A Black Rift Begins to Yawn, the sophomore feature from director and animator Matthew Wade, draws its title from an H.P. Lovecraft text and tries in earnest to adapt Lovecraftian, or “cosmic,” horror themes into a unique story. But cosmic horror has never been a genre that has lent itself too well to film. It deals with the ineffable—the dark and eternally vindictive plagues of conspirators beyond our accepted reality—and while these themes provide substantive matter for literary musing, they require a great deal of obfuscation on the part of the visual-minded filmmaker.
Wade’s film depicts old friends from college Laura (Sarah Lynch) and Lara (Saratops McDonald) reckoning with a horror that “distorts their memories of time, place, and identity.” Their college professor has passed (maybe due to a brain tumour), and the two women have taken it upon themselves to hole up in a cabin in Idaho to reexamine his research and personal writings, along with a set of recordings that apparently change in nature the more they are obsessed over. Of course, this all has perception-altering consequences for the duo.
Doing any more recounting of the “plot,” though, would almost do this film a disservice. This is a film that is more chemical and spiritual reaction than it is a narrative contraption. Wade strips away much of the dialogue and exposition, and over-saturates his frames with filters - thick applications of blues, reds, and purples, and the distorting effects of light. Images fold over one another in what are often very extended fades, and the film’s score of low hums, rumbles, and synths envelopes you in miasma. Everything sort of bleeds into the next, and it does so in a very gradual manner so as to lull you into a dreamlike state of foggy half-remembrance. Threads of intrigue in text surface and submerge throughout, but they are less a current through the work than strange frequencies, hymns left to drift out into the unknown.
Those excited to simmer in the abstraction will surely find something in this film, but those hoping to glean questions and situations worth pondering may be frustrated by just how short they come up in the end. This is relatively shallow filmmaking when you strip away the soupy atmosphere, with thinly-sketched characters and a hollow to non-existent myth building. There is also little to be said about the acting, with both Lynch and McDonald turning in very dull and listless performances. Aside from sit saturnine and flip pages, their dialogue is restricted to recitations of the long-winded, opaque passages left by their professor, and these usually just come off as indulgent and insubstantial. Wade has clearly put more time into the sound of his own prose than the story itself.
If you can go into this film unconcerned with story, more willing to give yourself up to the not-knowing, then the enigma at play here will surely captivate. But even the most obtuse depictions of dream logic will have something to say about the human condition, and A Black Rift Begins to Yawn is so fixated on concocting its own filmic identity that it forgets about the conflicts of identity that are allegedly supposed to be taking place between its characters. Cosmic horror deals with the unexplainable and the stupefying, yes, but it is a horror that is still uniquely human, and when the dayglo, super 8 aesthetics of this film wash away, what is the human struggle at play, exactly?
