Drive-By Review: A Dark Song (SPOILERS ABOUND)
As a person who spent her teenage years studying books by William Seabrook, Colin Wilson and Aleister Crowley, one of the things I've observed is that while there are a lot of movies out there about witchcraft and black magic of almost every stamp out there, very few take on the challenge of depicting ritual, heirarchical magic--what practitioners sometimes call "la haute magie," an almost mathematical mixture of sigils, invocations and sacrifices done inside a series of closed magic circles, aimed at bending angels or demons to the power of the magician's will. Sympathetic magic, witchcraft's backbone, involves the simple identification of target with object, so that (for example) a human being can be affected by whatever is done to a doll, or what have you. In ritual magic, however, the magician supposedly thrusts themselves out of their fleshly comfort zone and out into the magical universe, where--providing they follow all the rules--they will eventually be able to treat with supernatural beings face to face, armed only with their own force of personality and the various holy names they've worked into their ritual. It's a lot like weaponized meditation, or even weaponized prayer.
A Dark Song, written and directed by Irish filmmaker Liam Gavin, takes on the challenge of admitting both its characters and potential audience members into the hermetic, super-concentrated world of ritual magic. We begin with Sophia Howard (Catherine Walker), a brittle, upper-class woman who we first meet shoving a wad of money at her realtor, ordering him to make sure her year's lease on a drafty old mansion located deep in the Welsh countryside goes through quickly and quietly, with no interference. A day or so later she's down at the train station meeting career magician Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram), the man she hopes will guide her through a ritual described in the grimoire of Abramelin the Mage, designed to invoke her personal guardian angel. When--or if, more accurately--the angel appears, both Sophia and Solomon will be able to ask it to grant them a single wish. Solomon eventually admits he wants the power of invisibility, so he can fade out of the public eye and escape petitioners like her, gaining himself some peace and quiet "before the screaming." Sophia at first says she wants a person who doesn't love her anymore to love her again, then that she wants to hear her dead son's voice one last time. What she really wants, however, is vengeance against her son's murderers.
Like any good brainwashing campaign, the Abramelin ritual requires isolation, submission and constant, repetitive activity, a paring away of the surface ego to expose a far deeper core of willpower. Solomon refuses to be treated as an employee just because Sophia's offered him her life savings--to him, he's the master adept and she's his student, his servant. He wakes her at all hours, makes her commit to doing all the cooking and cleaning, douses her in icy water while she prays to be made fresh and clean, forgiven her sins, made worthy of an angel's attention. When she refuses to forgive those who've trespassed against her because she "doesn't do forgiveness," he makes her drink an entire glass of his own blood in order to skip that step of the process, then makes her shave off all his body-hair and uses her as a masturbational aid in a joyless session of "ritual sex." It's all a bit dicey to say the least, especially since she's effectively trapped inside the house with him once he's closed the circle around it, laying down a trail of salt he claims would kill either of them if they step over if before the ritual is completed.
But then the ritual IS completed, yet nothing happens. Solomon claims this isn't unheard of--they'll just have to start over, and keep doing it until they get results. And Sophia's doubtful but her hunger for revenge drives her on, a sort of black act of anti-faith, rewarded at last when things do seem to begin to occur: a knocking under the floor, whispers through the walls, her son's favourite toy disappearing, then re-appearing. At the end of one particularly gruelling meditation, she opens her eyes to see flakes of gold falling from the ceiling and starts to laugh in delight. "Now it's happening," Solomon claims, but viewers can't help remembering those magic mushrooms he's been slipping her. Is this folie a deux, or is it the numinous seeping through a dimensional wall worn thin by longing?
I like it either way, personally, or both. But part of A Dark Song's power lies in the fact that it could very easily be read as an intensive look at the world's most fucked-up therapy retreat--Sophia's hind-brain giving her the closure her soul sorely needs, as Solomon works out his own issues until he can't anymore. He claims it's Sophia's initial and continuing dishonesty that makes the ritual not work the first few times, once she finally admits what she actually wants is for the teenagers who killed her son as part of their own investigation into the occult to suffer and die; "I don't need you to be virtuous," he yells, "I just need you to not lie to me, you fuckin' cunt!" If you believe what he believes, it's easy enough to make the leap and assume that that's why he's later unable to heal himself after getting accidentally stabbed, and ends up dying of sepsis. But certainly, things take a turn after that--Sophia tries to leave the house while Solomon sleeps but soon finds she can't drive or walk anywhere but in a huge circle, constantly returning to the house; she starts to see "the dead and the damned," then does hear her son's voice once again, but just as a cruel trick ("You know it's just one of them using my voice to get you to open the door, Mummy." "I know.").
And here's where we get to the truly divisive part of the movie, the ending, which prompted at least one Facebook commenter to rave about how it confirms "the slave mentality of religion": after Sophia descends further and further, surrounded by demons who harass and frighten her as darkness rains down in ashy clumps, knock her out, drag her to the basement and wound her before she breaks free, making her bloodied way back up the stairs from nigredo into albedo--she re-enters the magical chamber at last to find her guardian angel literally waiting there for her: representation, palpable, so huge it has to kneel, glory-blazing, androgynous in armor flecked with falling gold, wielding a sword. "So beautiful," she says, out loud. The angel asks her what she wants, its voice imperceptible to us, and she says what she wants is the power to forgive. Next thing we know, she's sinking Mr Solomon's body in the river outside and driving away, still missing the finger we saw the demons take from her. Something definitely happened, and now she can move on, no longer frozen inside her own grief and hatred.
All of which really does seem perfectly congruent with the rest of the film to me, though I understand why it might not to other people. I get that I'm biased; I am a mother, after all, as well as a horror author, so this is a scenario I've played through in my own mind, eventually being forced to admit that while I wouldn't necessarily want to survive my child, I might nevertheless have to--which is why forgiveness seems essentially healthier to me, in the end, whether it comes wrapped in religious imagery or not. I mean, even most pagans believe it's a bad idea to try to kill people with magic; "take what you want and pay for it" seems logical when you're still in the "You have two beautiful, live children, I have a fucking hole" stage of things, but it means a who lot less when paying for it becomes synonymous with "ruining my own ability to enjoy any fucking thing at all, including my revenge."
Sometimes I think people just want to be able to say: "Whatever you're gonna do, not that"--that any twist, in any direction, is unlikely to satisfy because no matter which it turns out to be, they'll still want to call it predictable. But this is a ritual, and rituals only go one of two ways--they work, or they don't. This works, in my opinion. Or, to put it another way...while there may indeed be some crimes that are humanly unforgivable, those crimes might be forgivable through grace, that annoying religious term. Yet when an angel of the Lord appears before you, when you ask for the power to forgive, you're asking for grace--the grace of God, the strength of God, the strength to not be human anymore for just one second, to step outside time and space and stop being a hating, vengeance-seeking animal long enough to get right with yourself, if no one else.
And if you flinch at the mention of Christianity in general then I guess that's likely to feel like a slap, so sorry for that--but I am not religious, yet I still feel guilty enough over my own many failures and transgressions to want grace, to crave it. I can't see how any of us wouldn't, considering it might help us balance things just enough so we can walk away, keep on living and enjoy that life, without feeling bad for doing so. As sovay says: "[E]ven if you don't believe in God, either you have to believe that humans are capable of that kind of turning away-or turning back-or what do you think happens, reprisal on reprisal, world without end, and that's okay? I feel like forgiveness has gone out of fashion because it has so often been used as a way of limiting the pursuit of justice, and I agree it shouldn't be a thing to hide behind, but I also feel that doesn't mean it's an inherently invalid concept any more than love should be thrown out because so many people are better at hatred."
In conclusion: the world is just getting really fucked up, these days, in my opinion--unbalanced and hard, on every side. This may well explain why I don't feel like quibbling vocabulary anymore.
This entry was originally posted at https://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/575694.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.
A Dark Song, written and directed by Irish filmmaker Liam Gavin, takes on the challenge of admitting both its characters and potential audience members into the hermetic, super-concentrated world of ritual magic. We begin with Sophia Howard (Catherine Walker), a brittle, upper-class woman who we first meet shoving a wad of money at her realtor, ordering him to make sure her year's lease on a drafty old mansion located deep in the Welsh countryside goes through quickly and quietly, with no interference. A day or so later she's down at the train station meeting career magician Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram), the man she hopes will guide her through a ritual described in the grimoire of Abramelin the Mage, designed to invoke her personal guardian angel. When--or if, more accurately--the angel appears, both Sophia and Solomon will be able to ask it to grant them a single wish. Solomon eventually admits he wants the power of invisibility, so he can fade out of the public eye and escape petitioners like her, gaining himself some peace and quiet "before the screaming." Sophia at first says she wants a person who doesn't love her anymore to love her again, then that she wants to hear her dead son's voice one last time. What she really wants, however, is vengeance against her son's murderers.
Like any good brainwashing campaign, the Abramelin ritual requires isolation, submission and constant, repetitive activity, a paring away of the surface ego to expose a far deeper core of willpower. Solomon refuses to be treated as an employee just because Sophia's offered him her life savings--to him, he's the master adept and she's his student, his servant. He wakes her at all hours, makes her commit to doing all the cooking and cleaning, douses her in icy water while she prays to be made fresh and clean, forgiven her sins, made worthy of an angel's attention. When she refuses to forgive those who've trespassed against her because she "doesn't do forgiveness," he makes her drink an entire glass of his own blood in order to skip that step of the process, then makes her shave off all his body-hair and uses her as a masturbational aid in a joyless session of "ritual sex." It's all a bit dicey to say the least, especially since she's effectively trapped inside the house with him once he's closed the circle around it, laying down a trail of salt he claims would kill either of them if they step over if before the ritual is completed.
But then the ritual IS completed, yet nothing happens. Solomon claims this isn't unheard of--they'll just have to start over, and keep doing it until they get results. And Sophia's doubtful but her hunger for revenge drives her on, a sort of black act of anti-faith, rewarded at last when things do seem to begin to occur: a knocking under the floor, whispers through the walls, her son's favourite toy disappearing, then re-appearing. At the end of one particularly gruelling meditation, she opens her eyes to see flakes of gold falling from the ceiling and starts to laugh in delight. "Now it's happening," Solomon claims, but viewers can't help remembering those magic mushrooms he's been slipping her. Is this folie a deux, or is it the numinous seeping through a dimensional wall worn thin by longing?
I like it either way, personally, or both. But part of A Dark Song's power lies in the fact that it could very easily be read as an intensive look at the world's most fucked-up therapy retreat--Sophia's hind-brain giving her the closure her soul sorely needs, as Solomon works out his own issues until he can't anymore. He claims it's Sophia's initial and continuing dishonesty that makes the ritual not work the first few times, once she finally admits what she actually wants is for the teenagers who killed her son as part of their own investigation into the occult to suffer and die; "I don't need you to be virtuous," he yells, "I just need you to not lie to me, you fuckin' cunt!" If you believe what he believes, it's easy enough to make the leap and assume that that's why he's later unable to heal himself after getting accidentally stabbed, and ends up dying of sepsis. But certainly, things take a turn after that--Sophia tries to leave the house while Solomon sleeps but soon finds she can't drive or walk anywhere but in a huge circle, constantly returning to the house; she starts to see "the dead and the damned," then does hear her son's voice once again, but just as a cruel trick ("You know it's just one of them using my voice to get you to open the door, Mummy." "I know.").
And here's where we get to the truly divisive part of the movie, the ending, which prompted at least one Facebook commenter to rave about how it confirms "the slave mentality of religion": after Sophia descends further and further, surrounded by demons who harass and frighten her as darkness rains down in ashy clumps, knock her out, drag her to the basement and wound her before she breaks free, making her bloodied way back up the stairs from nigredo into albedo--she re-enters the magical chamber at last to find her guardian angel literally waiting there for her: representation, palpable, so huge it has to kneel, glory-blazing, androgynous in armor flecked with falling gold, wielding a sword. "So beautiful," she says, out loud. The angel asks her what she wants, its voice imperceptible to us, and she says what she wants is the power to forgive. Next thing we know, she's sinking Mr Solomon's body in the river outside and driving away, still missing the finger we saw the demons take from her. Something definitely happened, and now she can move on, no longer frozen inside her own grief and hatred.
All of which really does seem perfectly congruent with the rest of the film to me, though I understand why it might not to other people. I get that I'm biased; I am a mother, after all, as well as a horror author, so this is a scenario I've played through in my own mind, eventually being forced to admit that while I wouldn't necessarily want to survive my child, I might nevertheless have to--which is why forgiveness seems essentially healthier to me, in the end, whether it comes wrapped in religious imagery or not. I mean, even most pagans believe it's a bad idea to try to kill people with magic; "take what you want and pay for it" seems logical when you're still in the "You have two beautiful, live children, I have a fucking hole" stage of things, but it means a who lot less when paying for it becomes synonymous with "ruining my own ability to enjoy any fucking thing at all, including my revenge."
Sometimes I think people just want to be able to say: "Whatever you're gonna do, not that"--that any twist, in any direction, is unlikely to satisfy because no matter which it turns out to be, they'll still want to call it predictable. But this is a ritual, and rituals only go one of two ways--they work, or they don't. This works, in my opinion. Or, to put it another way...while there may indeed be some crimes that are humanly unforgivable, those crimes might be forgivable through grace, that annoying religious term. Yet when an angel of the Lord appears before you, when you ask for the power to forgive, you're asking for grace--the grace of God, the strength of God, the strength to not be human anymore for just one second, to step outside time and space and stop being a hating, vengeance-seeking animal long enough to get right with yourself, if no one else.
And if you flinch at the mention of Christianity in general then I guess that's likely to feel like a slap, so sorry for that--but I am not religious, yet I still feel guilty enough over my own many failures and transgressions to want grace, to crave it. I can't see how any of us wouldn't, considering it might help us balance things just enough so we can walk away, keep on living and enjoy that life, without feeling bad for doing so. As sovay says: "[E]ven if you don't believe in God, either you have to believe that humans are capable of that kind of turning away-or turning back-or what do you think happens, reprisal on reprisal, world without end, and that's okay? I feel like forgiveness has gone out of fashion because it has so often been used as a way of limiting the pursuit of justice, and I agree it shouldn't be a thing to hide behind, but I also feel that doesn't mean it's an inherently invalid concept any more than love should be thrown out because so many people are better at hatred."
In conclusion: the world is just getting really fucked up, these days, in my opinion--unbalanced and hard, on every side. This may well explain why I don't feel like quibbling vocabulary anymore.
This entry was originally posted at https://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/575694.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.