independent horror cinema made in Brittain seems to have an idea in mind in recent months. An aesthetic idea – new nightmares subservient to the fantastic genre, tortured and haunted visions which spread – giving a particular consistency to the azimuted psyches of costumed protagonists, above all girls. This “consistency” is the whole purpose of films. It is up to the staging to make it its concern, soon its work. If the film is successful, we confuse them moreover, the consistency and the staging, what the heroine experiences and what we see of it, like the stuff from which dreams are woven. If it fails, one will only hear those noisy enthusiasms produced by the bluff of empty performances. The Power by Corinna Faith is to be ranked among the impressive successes. It follows, in this discreet breakthrough of first B films from the British Isles (like Hammer productions in the past), Caveat by Irishman Damian McCarthy and Censor from the Welsh Prano Bailey-Bond, two other surprises last year having only benefited from a VOD release. let’s add Saint-Maud of Rose Glass, more minor although it hits the mark in places.
Oil lamp
Valerie, known as Val, takes her first night shift as a recruited nurse in a London hospital, a lugubrious panoptic setting: 1974, the year of strikes by miners in arm wrestling with a pre-Thatcherian Prime Minister, power cuts due to the no – transport of coal follow one another. The camera unfolds, nocturnal. The Power is almost a film with a kerosene lamp: Val finds herself in the night of the corridors given over to carpet ghosts – spirits of the place and specters of her young life –, observed by a terrified young Bangladeshi patient.
Amazed psyche, they said. The origin of the stigmata is clearer today, at the same time as what presides over the hold, over the said hysteria of women, humiliations, psychoses and possessions (Carrie, the book, is cited here), whose cinema already has a long tradition, dismantled and bulging bodies from Lillian Gish to Isabelle Adjani, from Tippi Hedren to Zoë Lund. Things are clearer, that is, women less crazy, with the admission finally that they have been abused by fathers, since Laura Palmer and Twin Peaks. And that’s exactly what it says The Power, that Val is not mad: the first seconds leave no doubt, the nightmare nurse, but this nightmare, these visions, as a result of the terrible stasis of the disease which “possesses” her, are real memories resurfacing, not delirium, a reality that the rest of the film will spend somatizing. To somatize is still to make consist, to stage.
conductive body
On the contrary, we are witnessing an exorcism, a dominated fear of the dark. Val is neck-deep in her nightmare, fierce, to the point where what possesses her (the little girl inside her) takes revenge through her – and physically, through her. Electricity cut, Val becomes a pure, vengeful and dislocated “conductive body”. We discover with astonishment a film slowly seized with frenzy, picked up in its unity of place, action, time. The most frightening is the certainty that the filmmaker knows what she is talking regarding, what she is showing. The horrific rise, the terrors, the precision of a constantly beautiful cutting and editing attest to the veracity of the experience recounted by insinuating themselves. This rape-revenge of a new kind, let’s call it “psychic autofiction”, a mental journey to the end of neurosis. Corinna Faith has a painful and liberated gift for cinema, that of the possessed who recount what they overcome, equip themselves with images to make them right. Pleasure and dread of the eye struggling with the torture presented, the staging opposes the sexual abuse that rises and twists with its simple, splendid meticulousness, torn from the darkness. In The Power, it’s regarding that power, that gift.