FrightFest review – Self-Help

FrightFest review – Self-Help

The prologue of Self-Help could almost be a checklist of contemporary horror clichés – a fairground on Halloween night, a squabbling family, a sinister clown, illicit sexual activity, gruesome death, a traumatised child.  Then we pick up on Olivia (Landry Bender), who had a very bad night when she was little, as a college student, who still seems to be making a lot of bad choices – like hooking up with a dolt in a terrible Hercules costume – while estranged from her mother Rebecca (Amy Hargreaves), who is probably the root of her general unhappiness.  Sophie (Madison Lintz), her best friend, nags her into going to a self-help weekend (over Halloween, of course) to support Rebecca, insisting that she’ll come to regret not taking a last chance at family healing.  Of course, this turns out to be terrible advice.

The girls arrive at an isolated house where masked people sit around listening to Curtis Clark (Jake Weber), an unconventional therapist who is blatantly running a cult which Olivia twigs at once is another in a series of scams Rebecca has bought into … though it turns out she’s even more entangled than usual, since she’s actually married Clark, who comes over as creepy and avuncular to his new ‘daughter’ even as the rest of the small congregation are expelled (another clown guy gets tossed out) or driven to acts of ‘if thine eye offend thee’ self-mortification in order to get over their problems.

Director Erik Bloomquist – who also co-writes with Carson Bloomquist and takes a key supporting role – has been racking up genre credits with admirable regularity, growing in ambition from Ten Minutes to Midnight and Night at the Eagle Inn to She Came From the Woods and Founders Day.  He’s worked often with Amy Hargreaves – from Blue Ruin and (a long time ago) Brainscan – and here gets a very funny, poignant, infuriating turn from her as the useless mother who literally buys into a cult and not only drinks the Kool-Aid but serves it at breakfast.  TV regulars Landry Bender (The Republic of Sarah) and Madison Lintz (Bosch) get meatier college girl roles than usual for the genre – there’s an edge to their friendship which sets off alarm bells, hinting that no matter how much Olivia might try to be different from her mother she’s just as likely to make bad decisions about who she gets close to.  Jake Weber, who’s been perfecting his ‘smooth but weaselly’ act for decades, gets a terrific role as the guru who seems so blatantly a charlatan that you have to wonder whether even that’s a cover for something darker.

Self-Help is as much a comic exploration of the American cult of cults – a perennial subject – as it is a Halloween slasher movie, though there’s an amusingly persistent evil-clown-with-a-chainsaw sub-plot.

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