https://youtu.be/JjYhqYvRJx4?si=u7gRiZYIjJhrb56B
The little known but magnificent 2015 horror film "The Blackcoat's Daughter", AKA "February" in the USA (available on Youtube, as "February", for free for now, so get it while you can) directed by Osgood Perkins, son of "Psycho" star Anthony Perkins is, if scrutinised in the blinding white light of plausibility, wholly unlikely to survive as watchable for more than half an hour. Yet, and here's the important point, who should care for cinematic plausibility? Absolutely no-one, should be your considered answer. All truly great filmmakers have scorned the notion of plausibility, from the great Anglo American director Alfred Hitchcock, to the several makers of the Marx Brothers farces, to the vivid dreamscapes created by Daavid Lynch. Hitchcock in fact even went so far as to verbally articulate the anti-plausible aesthetic, formulating his disdain for the plausibility-obsessed in the well documented series of interviews conducted by Francois Truffaut at the butt end of the 60s.
Would any of the events depicted in the masterpiece Vertigo really have happened in a universe governed by the laws of plausibility? Of course not. Jimmy Stewart would never even have got down from that precarious position he's left in after the delirious opening rooftop chase. How, plausibly, could he have done so? There's a school of thought, in fact, that he doesn't escape, and that the entire film after that point is Scottie's Near Death Experience articulated in vivid, hallucinatory, technicolour greens, reds and by gauzy lens filters. But there's no need to go that far. It's actually preposterous, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium of film, to even consider that the events that follow need to follow the logic of plausibility. In the diegetic universe of film logic, closely aligned with the logic of the unresolved dreamscape, everything that happens in Vertigo not only should happen but cannot do anything other than happen. The events speak of that deeply cliched notion, a deeper truth, but cliches getting to be that way by virtue of their being, well, true, that needn't put us off acknowledging that there really is a deeper truth than that revealed by the laws of plausibility. I dislike, as who doesn't, sentences that contain the words "of course", speaking as they do of an innate pomposity on the part of the writer/speaker, but of course this cliche is true of any great work of art, and is specifically relevant and true in the essentially hallucinatory nature of the film medium.
Consider the fever-dream that is Charles Laughton's 1955 masterpiece Night Of The Hunter and wonder at how this might have played out if constructed according to the strictures of the plausible. It would have turned into a piece of dreary social-realist agitprop, highlighting to tedious effect the plight of the downtrodden and the disadvantaged in depression-era dust bowl America. And Preacher Harry Powell reduced to an underwhelming, psychologically explicable caricature of a villain, as opposed to the grandiose avatar of evil he is in the film as it stands. Or F F Coppola's delirious 1983 masterpiece of teen-dream violence and existential anomie Rumblefish, which would have been a less than riveting examination of gang culture in small town America without the expressionistic directorial flourishes, the balletic depictions of violence, the mythopoetic characterisations or the dream-like musical leitmotifs that render it both hallucinatory and hypnotic. Reams and books have been written on this subject, of course, but I take it as a self-evident truth that needs no specific citation or reference. Sound good? Yet still, plausibility cheerleaders are all around, demanding that things "make sense", that the narratives of movies are seen to be "consistent", that psychological coherence is adhered to. A pox on such spoilsport, nit-picking tommyrot.
So, having established that, and without unnecessarily or preemptively spoiling the thing, there's a moment roughly 20 minutes into The Blackcoat's Daughter, a brooding, melancholy, slow burn and eventually horrific metaphysical meditation on the nature of loneliness and of existential desperation when the viewer is presented with a catalytic situation that, in the realm of the plausible, would almost certainly never happen. To the extent that one is temporarily almost (but not quite) lifted out of the oneiric (wa-hey!) trance into which one has fallen through the dream-like mis en scene, and is tempted to guffaw and think, ffs, that would *never* happen. To say nothing of the potentially belief-suspension capsizing glimpsed, out of focus renderings of the horned demon itself, which fleetingly appear in the corners of frames at moments in the narrative. But does one in fact guffaw and think, ffs, that would *never* happen? No, one does not, because such is the inherent power of the slow burn, the image and the soundscape, of the magical alchemy that occurs as a result of the dream-inducing build of tension and unease, that even the highly implausible seems, in the end, not only compelling but inevitable. As I've said above, but feel no compunction in repeating - such is its importance - this is the logical realm in which all great film makers operate. The entire career of perhaps the greatest film maker of the last 50 years, David Lynch, has unfurled specifically on this principle. As equally have the careers of those masters of the art who preceded him - Kubrick, Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Fellini, Bunuel etc etc.
The moment in The Blackcoat's Daughter to which I refer, for the benefit of those who have seen the film and to the slight spoilery detriment of those who have not but who have, on the strength of this quasi-review decided to check it out, is as follows. [If you do indeed intend to check it out, which you definitely should, consider this a spoiler alert and skip the next paragraph]
The possessed girl, Kat, incarcerated in a high security institution after having been exorcised (against her will), on account of her having murdered and decapitated no less than three people, including her classmate Rose (decapitation now having become a favourite trope in horror movies - see the equally excellent and also highly implausible Hereditary, decapitation in this particular instance revealed to be a sort of grisly tribute to the demonic entity by whom Kat wishes fervently to be repossessed when she can get around to it, or her ducks - or decapitated heads - in a row now) now proceeds not only to escape from said high security institution by murdering one of the institution's female guards, but also to assume the identity of said guard, whose disappearance her family and friends for some reason never get around to bringing to the attention of the authorities. Kat (or Joan, as she is now known, Joan being the name of the guard she has murdered and whose identity she has stolen) then murders and decapitates the parents of Rose, having met them by implausible chance at a frozen bus stop, and revisits the scene of her earlier grisly decapitating crimes. Here she attempts literally, though unsuccessfully, to re-light the old demon flame. And is bereft, as the demon shows no sign of showing up, having presumably given Kat up as a lost cause. Shame.
Sounds preposterous, does it not? The escape and impersonation ridiculously implausible. And it surely is, by the pure logic of plausibility. Yet, by the far stronger and more deeply affecting dream-logic of pure cinema these events seem, as noted above, to be not only compellingly real, but also inevitable. Brilliant. And affecting.
Mind how you go. Especially at frozen bus stops. And don't lose your head.
It's no Rumblefish, but then again, what is? Fun fact for cineastes: Osgood Perkins is NOT one of the two orthopaedists after whom is named Osgood Schlatter Disease, which causes pain and swelling below the knee joint where the patellar tendon attaches to the top of the shinbone (tibia) at a spot called the tibial tuberosity. I have been called many things in my day, but a tibial tuberosity hasn't been one of them.
Further, without plausibility, there is often no feasibility, and I, for one, have no wish to live in a society lacking feasibility.
Unless I’m mistaken, “February” isn’t available on YouTube here. (unless I simply can’t find it.)