First-person cinema – where the camera only sees the viewpoint of a main character – has been around for a long time. Orson Welles wanted to make a version of Heart of Darkness like that and Robert Montgomery filmed Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake with the audience in Philip Marlowe’s shoes in 1947. Advances in miniaturised mobile cameras and the cultural impact of first-person shooter video games have opened the field up – and one or two horror pictures have played clever games with the format (Grace: The Possession, told from the POV of the demon, and the remake of Maniac come to mind). Australian writer-director Richard E. Williams gives the audience a thrill ride, seeing through the eyes of protagonist Sean (Rijen Laine), but also stretches the definition of subjective camera to include dreams, hallucinations, blackouts and a long stretch on shrooms where everything looks fuzzy. It also has a solid mad scientist plot and a disturbing set of creatures, though some of the dialogue sequences feel a little theatrical – as if all the characters thought first before speaking to the point, even the motormouth asshole whose impulses get everyone into horrible danger.
Sean and his nurse fiancee Grace (Ana Thu Nguyen, from Primitive War) go on a camping trip with Sean’s longtime best friend Eric (Charles Cottier), a relentlessly irritating party guy, and Eric’s new girlfriend Kate (Alea O’Shea), a blonde who turns out not to be the stereotype plus one (Grace is taken aback when Kate says she’s in med school on track to become a doctor). In the first moments, Sean suffers an apparent concussion – in the dark, he sees fairies which are never mentioned – and is disoriented. Grace, who has to reflect the protagonist’s feelings back at him (a neat acting trick by Nguyen), knows a little of Sean’s backstory, which runs to drowned little sister Lilly (Mischa Heywood) and missing ‘unethical’ geneticist father Paul (Stephen Phillips). She’s not exactly delighted when she finds out that they’re camping next to the lake where Lily drowned and that Paul’s mad laboratory might be under a derelict shack in these remote woods. She’s appalled when Eric’s idea of Sean getting past his many traumas is to take ‘a hero dose’ of shrooms – and on the point of quitting when he goes along with the obviously terrible idea to get high. During his trip, Sean glimpses various more-or-less mutated versions of his sister – some spliced with shark DNA, apparently – he takes to be drug phantasms but which turn out to be physical entities. Paul has been trying to clone his lost daughter, though it takes a lot of near misses to get there and he’s not sure if he’s managed to find the right soul.
The later stages include some extremely gruesome, explicit horrors which evoke the Cronenberg of The Brood or the Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator … but with the possibility that the basement of mutation is a sub-set of Sean’s own mind. Some developments seem to contradict each other and we learn – and by now the audience and Sean have melded the way Lily and the alien DNA of the clones have melded – that the experiments have been going on for a long time … leading to a finale which seems to take a new direction but makes explicit a question that should have been nagging us all along. What does Sean look like? In Lady in the Lake and Maniac, we are sure to get mirror shots to establish that ‘we’ are a recognisable actor; here, those are withheld, so we’re in the dark.