No one expected the director of the profoundly silly ThanksKilling to create The Head Hunter, a profound meditation on grief and violence wrapped up inside a monster movie. In the intervening eight years since that shocking change of direction, filmmaker Jordan Downey added a particularly stomach-churning and weird installment for V/H/S: Beyond, and now returns with a film that is as innovative and bleak as his 2018 critical breakout.
Heartrending and flesh-ripping in equal measures, The Cycle centers around a character who chases monsters of a different kind. Dr. Meg Garland (Deborah Ann Woll, True Blood, Daredevil) is an expert in dead bodies and how they got there. She spends her time in mortuaries and the body farm, and is as at ease with corpses as she is with the living. One body breaks her serenity: that of her father, who disappeared 34 years earlier, abandoning her and her mother. After all this time, his unnaturally preserved cadaver is found near two other dead bodies, but their connection to each other and the exact nature of his death is a mystery.
Superficially, she is as blasé about his body as she is about any other. Called in as the expert that would be most qualified to help solve the forensic headscratcher of this triple crime scene, during dissections and investigations she’s the model of scientific detachment. Yet in quiet moments she’s left at breaking point from visions of her father in life and in death. Woll perfectly captures our ability to partition our emotions, especially when it comes to practicalities. Yet her desire to find out what happened to her father, to fill that void of unknowing, is about more than just intellectual curiosity, and Woll lets Meg get buried in the impossibility of the reality she finds. It’s a stunning performance, a modern horror great that resonates with Camille Sullivan’s soul-wrecking role in Hunter Hunter as Woll crafts a woman quietly at odds with herself – a theme that becomes more relevant the more that she understands about her father.
The Cycle isn’t about solving a crime in the standard piece-by-piece manner of the police procedural. It’s about expanding the possibilities of what is happening into the unscientific illogical – to quote Sherlock Holmes, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The truth also contains one of the most original twists in modern horror, as Downey slowly interweaves a piece of classic iconography of cinematic terror into his police procedural to create something utterly stunning and quite literally horrifying. It’s something so perfectly nightmarish that when he drags it into the light there’s no disappointment in the reveal.
After all, making the grisliness of The Cycle convincing is a necessity, since Meg spends all her time around corpses. Decay is a constant, and the practical effects by Patrick Magee (who rightly gets top billing in the credits) are quite astounding, paying homage to the film’s predecessors without feeling like a pallid imitation.
But at the heart of the film is a series of tragedies that revolve around parents and their offspring. Whether it be Meg reconsidering her relationship with the father that abandoned her and the mother, Joni (Gretchen Corbett), that raised her, or the father-and-son cops (Jeffrey Donovan and Will Hochman) who call her in to investigate the case, and even the one man that seemed to know her father (Carl. W. Crudup) and his son (Phillip Andre Botello) who does not believe his wild stories, familial connections are everything. Much like The Head Hunter, The Cycle shows Downey as a horror director of rare compassion, making the agonies that Meg faces as she exhumes her father’s secret so much weightier.
The Cycle
World Premiere
Thursday, Sept. 24, 11am
Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
