The Dæmon
A first feature by the writer-director team of Matt Devino and David Michael Yoohe, this is another 2020s reclamation of the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, this climaxes with one of the most impressive depictions of a Lovecraftian entity – not squidehaded Cthulhu for a change, though it dwells in the deeps of a large lake, but Azathoth the Crawling Chaos, whose malign, transformative influence reaches out to the shore and warps several generations of vulnerable folk. For a low-budget movie which relies mostly on hints and shadows, the boat is well and truly pushed out in this manifestation – design by Joel Harlow, with effects supervision by Dan Rebert. The Dæmon – which follows that Doctor Who story ‘The Dæmons’ in forcing us to experiment with the symbol menu of the word processor, but has a few images which evoke ‘Fury From the Deep’ and ‘The Sea Devils’ – strips away a lot of the cult eschatology, though the protagonist finds some sketches under a bed which have the usual omens of imminent return from limbo to do terrible things, and plays out mostly as a four-person psychodrama as a knot of troubled souls are troubles further in a picturesque bad place accessible only by a very long set of outdoor stairs and a basket-on-a-wire contraption which will ominously hold only half the weight of a human being.
Shaven-headed Jess (Adriana Isabel) is trying to put her horrendous childhood behind her by counselling ex-convicts, which puts her in a room with recurring-nightmare-in-a-suit Mani (Mario Daggett) but her instinct to help is stretched even further when he property-flipping, always-on-his-phone boyfriend (Oscar Wilson) – you already hate him from that thumbnail, but compared to other men in the film he’s not such a bad guy – is dragged by his sister Kathy (Sara Fletcher) out to the lake where her brother Tom (Tyler Q Rosen, also the production designer) is holing up after the ruled-as-suicide prologue disappearance of their father (Nick Searcy) into the same lake that claimed their mother (Olivia Day) in later flashbacks. Something under the waters drives people mad, and they also undergo a sea change (or freshwater change) when mysteriously dragged over the sands into the waves (we’re told the lake is a small ocean) – coming back to dry land in weird forms (sometimes with disturbing scooped away faces) and with weirder purpose.
In this take on HPL, those due to fall under the spell of Azathoth are pretty gone in the first place – and a problem of this brand of cosmic horror is that the plotline inevitably segues from bad to worst to worst thing possible by gradations of hysteria, ominous one-sided conversations, hallucinatory visits from angry phantasms, gruesome special effects manglings and rumbles of an atmospheric doomy score by Michael Crane. The cast do their best – Isabel registers strongly enough to make her ordeal tragic – but the characters are conceived as puppets pulled to the depths by an extradimensional super-entity so it’s not easy to care much about their failing marriages or high-pressure jobs. It risks being heavy and ponderous, but there is a streak of welcome wryness – the payoff to the luggage basket set-up is blackly funny.
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