Re-reading Batman: The Long Halloween and re-watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight helped clarify what the rogues’ gallery antagonist, Two-Face, represents, not just through his two-faceted coin but also transcending the concept of “two faces.” A myriad of media—including but not limited to the horror genre—has shown modern audiences what monsters look like, and Blake Simon’s horror film Faces takes inspiration from this trope of duality. The fourteen-minute short, while deserving of a much larger and fleshed-out narrative, navigates the spectrum of sexual identity through its unnamed entity.
Following the disappearance of a local girl on a dark October evening, Judy, a college student visiting for the weekend, is invited to a fraternity party. For Judy, what could have been a night of fun and drinking spirals out of control when she encounters a mysterious, deadly entity. As the night unfolds, the entity’s uncanny quest brings violent consequences to those who cross its path.
Screening at this month’s annual Fantastic Fest, Simon writes and directs a horror short that I found to be about as alluring as this past June’s Original Skin, a short film from New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Cailyn Rice and Ethan Daniel Corbett lead this film as Judy Martina Addy and Bradley “Brad” Clark Scott, respective victims who showcase the disparity of transformation and transition.
An Unsteady Situation
Given that Faces also serves as a proof of concept film, it would be intriguing to see how Simon’s short leads to a feature-length piece. Faces takes on an uncertain appearance in Director of Photography Andrew Fronczak’s camera work in a few areas, including the entity’s twists and turns in a room inundated with a red filter. Otherwise, his shots present sweet imagery, such as Judy dancing alone to music or Brad dressing up in the mirror. The exhibition of sexual interactions could not have come about without the aid of intimacy coordinator Allison Bibicoff (also intimacy coordinator of another Fantastic Fest short, Stuck).
Music composer Daniel Ciurlizza lends a tantalizing score, e.g. when the entity—taking on the physical form of Judy—inhales and exhales, chest undulating, limbs twisting and turning.
The Binary
Simon establishes that Faces focuses on the binary from the opening scene alone. He has college girls Margaret (Hanna Eisenbath), Samantha (Natalie De Vincentiis), and Jess (Olivia Lee) speak of a missing girl, Bridget Kara Henson (Emily Gateley), whom Margaret describes as “sweet.” Margaret introduces the girls to her cousin, Judy, from out of town, and Samantha and Jess compliment Judy’s physical appearance as “cute.” This sort of points to the idea that femininity consists of “sugar, spice, and everything nice.” Brad’s arrival, then, looks to be the opposite: booze, beer pong, and everything wrong.
Simon’s examination of the binary makes an interesting feat. The filmmaker offers lenses on concentration and confusion, femininity and masculinity, truth and pretense, life and death, questioning via observation and results, etc. These allow viewers to assume two sides to the story: ignorance is bliss, and knowledge is power. However, the idea of binaries is more of the tip of the iceberg for Faces.
Liminality
The opening scene’s location setting of Bev & Elly’s Donuts shop also very subtly points to the theme of binaries and what it conveys. The traditional donut, in its circular shape, has no sides, and like Faces, inside or under the surface, could be nothing. This unseen metaphor of the donut implies the emptiness of the donut hole that would otherwise complete the donut’s hole (thank you, Rian Johnson), and even under that layer of sugar, the donut is essentially dough.
On the one hand, Simon illustrates the binary. However, on the other hand, there is a non-binary to be noted. Production designer Brent Mason places the viewer into a few rooms at Brad’s fraternity party to make proper sense of how we understand the binary. A beer pong table displays one group of red solo cups and another group of red solo cups, but we never think of the ping-pong ball’s oscillation to and fro over the little net.
Likewise, the Fantastic Fest short demonstrates Judy and Brad having drunken sex in bed. The bed, as an object, suggests the idea of sleeping and waking on the right or wrong side of the bed. That, too, points to the idea of having a sleeping position on one’s back, stomach, or sides.
Transcending the Binary
Seldom is transparent about Simon’s theme of the binary, but the lack of answers compels. Faces isn’t necessarily about sexual transitions from one identity to another. Its synopsis highlights another trope: the spiral and the uncanny. Brad’s party is full of young people who wear masks…literally. The concept of masks is one example of duality as a horror trope. It’s a technique that displays physiognomy and physicality but also captures them to reveal a new identity.
In her book of micrographia, In Praise of Risk, the late French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle cites Sigmund Freud’s definition of the uncanny as “the return in [a] foreign guise of something known and familiar.” The uncanny is the return itself, and the spiral is a metamorphosis, a transport of oneself, one thing, or one entity to break through risk and move from one point to the next; the result is new meaning. For instance, a nice little case of this is when Brad tries to drunkenly recall Judy’s name, “Julie, Jenny…?”
The Monster and the Metaphor
Hi, Brad. Don’t you recognize me?
The entity in Blake Simon’s ‘Faces’
Simon’s entity ultimately represents what has not quite been accepted by today’s standards: change. It’s the struggle to break through discomfort and reach contentment. As Dufourmantelle states, taking risks is “to make room for yourself for a vanishing point, a point of unconsciousness, of pure metaphor.” The entity echoes its victims in such a manner that expresses empathy, and it’s also unclear as to how the entity takes the form of those victims.
Moreover, it’s also intriguing to me that there are no conversations about Simon’s entity because no one is alive to tell their story. As viewers, it would be quick to assume the pronouns “he/him” or “she/him.” I believe there is more to it than that.
Performances and Character Developments
Rice’s performance as Judy is teasing. She doesn’t show too much of Judy as a character, but she also does not occupy the monstrous role of the entity as much as I would like. The unnamed character’s movements through Judy help confirm that the entity embodies the spiral, motions that feel self-destructive so as to serve what it means to spiral. Rice acts “cute” at the beginning of this Fantastic Fest short, but then she ends her part of the film with a hot and seductive look.
More so, Brad gives off the impression that Pennywise occupied the body (and adopted the personality) of Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill. It’s the most uncanny image in the short and is what sells me on Simon as a storyteller. Corbett’s island-print button-up shirt, along with hair and makeup artists Megan Lauchner and Danielle Beyea’s blush and eyeliner on Brad’s face, mirror how Levine looked his The Silence of the Lambs antagonist. Corbett steals the spotlight as Brad in the dress, brunette wig, and pearl necklace. Here, the entity embodies beauty in a way that beauty is slowly being talked about today.
The entity reminds me of Pennywise in Stephen King’s novel It in a way that neither the 1990s miniseries nor Andy Muschietti got right. Pennywise is at first seen by the protagonists as a “he.” However, as the story progresses, the character is referred to as “it”. The protagonists then learn of its origins as an extraterrestrial spider entity from outer space, and the story ends with Pennywise laying its eggs, pointing to its true pronouns: she/her. What I appreciate about Simon’s entity is that identity is an issue and kills at every cost to own one. Whereas Corbett, as Brad, looks old, his role as the entity maintains youth.
Final Thoughts on Blake Simon’s Faces
By no means is Faces a perfect horror short, but when broken down scene by scene, moment to moment, there is a substantial amount to say about it. There is no costume designer credited here, but I have to note my love for how Judy and Brad are illustrated throughout the film. It’s about the uncertainty in one’s ability to manifest beauty. The entity itself isn’t an antagonist but a character to feel for. It’s emblematic of people who question who they are because the world around them already set that in stone… Nothing is as unnerving as a society of two faces.
You can watch Faces at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles, CA, from September 25th — to October 9.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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[…] are in the shoes of an Other. This theme is universally applicable, which I noted not too long ago at Fantastic Fest. In the late French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Praise of Risk, spiraling is […]