Saw Livid, a horror movie which opens with Lucie, a nurse in training, being shown the rounds of her housebound patients. One of them is this old lady in a coma who lives in a giant mansion. The experienced nurse who Lucie is shadowing explains that this women is rumored to have a giant fortune stashed away somewhere in the house. Lucie then meets up with her dock-worker boyfriend and waiter brother and tells them about the rich coma lady. Do they decide to break in to the spooky old mansion and search for the treasure? Yes, almost instantly.
Once at the mansion, things start getting weird fast and not weird as in ghosts and monsters, but in a kind of whimsical, magical, kind of clumsy way. Lucie sees a flickering blue flame on the lawn. She picks it up and gazes at it before it winks out. What this blue flame is is unexplained. At one point one of the protagonists gets stuck behind a mirror. Is the old woman a witch, or is this a haunting or in their minds or something? It's never clear. We start getting some exposition and mythos-building later in the film, but much happens without explanation. The effect is certainly creepy although not exactly terrifying.
I was very relieved once it became clear that this was not a gore-and-jump-fest, that this was more fairy-tale-like and evocative. The film is sold like a regular horror flick however, so I imagine it annoyed some more serious horror fans. This film is high on imagery and light on explanation. Some excellent stuff involving ballerinas and dolls with animal heads. I enjoyed it more or less, but I did want some explanation of the nature of the stakes here. Why are they doing what they're doing? Why are they sewing their eyes shut? What was that blue flame? Mysteries without explanations, alas.
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