Tag Archives: E. Elias Merhige

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CAPSULE: SUSPECT ZERO (2004)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Ben Kingsley, Carrie-Anne Moss

PLOT: A mysterious vigilante cursed with supernatural visions singles out disgraced FBI agent Tom Mackelway as the man to apprehend a prolific serial killer.

Still from "Suspect Zero" (2004)

COMMENTS: There’s a certain level of hubris, even for a cinematic interpretation of the FBI, in naming a secret program “Project Icarus.” Training agents in the gift of second sight to allow them to pursue elusive murderers, “Project Icarus” suggests unavoidable doom for the participants. All those involved end up dead or insane, except for one—who’s still kind of nuts. Ben Kingsley provides a stellar performance as Ben O’Ryan, the kind-of-nuts agent cursed with the sight; Aaron Eckhart provides a middling performance as Tom Mackelway, a migraine-prone lawman; and Carrie-Anne Moss is reduced to just kicking around as, perhaps, the audience’s conduit into the action. With the man behind Begotten and Shadow of the Vampire orchestrating what should be a hazy, unsettling outing in the world of serial killers, one has to wonder went gone wrong, and if hubris had anything to do with that.

Merhige has somehow managed to direct a ho-hum procedural here, which is a real pity. The stakes seem to be high—there are hundreds of dead and missing people, most of them children, and the killer(s) evade justice—but Eckhart’s FBI man just seems kind of addled and pissed off (explained at least in part by the fact that the poor guy suffers from constant headaches). There’s a bit of ambiguity, I suppose, vis-à-vis O’Ryan: no one that calm and smiling could possibly be an unalloyed goodie, right? Eh, maybe. Or not. Whenever Kingsley wasn’t on screen, it was a bit difficult to care.

Looking closely, one can see the missed opportunities here. Merhige unfortunately keeps his keen sense of visual on the stylistic periphery. The dark art of “Remote Viewing,” the technical term for the paranormal power of perception, is a treat to view, with visions of the crimes, and those involved, coming through the viewer’s pupil in the form of a sepia-’90s camcorder hybrid. There are also singularly creepy charcoal renderings, and the occasional shot of what I’ll call as the Wandering Merhige Eye (those familiar with Begotten may guess it’s an extreme close-up of a troubled, scanning eyeball).

My best guess is that main(ish)-stream filmmaking is beyond the reach of certain auteurs who are steeped in their own vision. (John Paisz is another of these, albeit in a manner quite different from Merhige.) Begotten is one of the most original films of the second half of the 20th century. It is something extreme, and different from just about any feature film. Shadow of the Vampire similarly explores mythical (and ocular) themes through a comedy-horror lens. Unfortunately, Suspect Zero is little more than wasted potential across the board. That’s not to say it isn’t “good enough,” but it is merely good enough—when it could have been a tantalizing vision of humanity’s darkest corners.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…perhaps there is another, more bizarre and involved explanation, and the killer is either hidden in plain view among the major characters or is never seen at all until the climax. I am not spoiling any secrets, but simply applying logic to plot that offers zero sum as well as zero suspects…. Merhige is a gifted director with a good visual sense and a way of creating tension where it should not exist. But Suspect Zero is too devised and elaborate to really engage us.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

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Canonically Weird (The List)

24. BEGOTTEN (1991)

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“In BEGOTTEN, a time is depicted that predates spoken language; communication is made on a sensory level.”–E. Elias Merhige

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DIRECTED BY: E. Elias Merhige

FEATURING: Actors from the experimental theater group Theater of Material

PLOT:  A man sitting in a chair disembowels himself with a straight razor.  A woman materializes from underneath his bloody robes, and impregnates herself with fluid taken from the dead body.  She gives birth to a convulsing, full grown man, and mother and son are then seized and tortured by four hooded figures bearing ceremonial implements.

Still from Begotten (1990)
BACKGROUND:

  • Each frame of film was painstakingly manipulated to create the distressed chiaroscuro universe of the movie.  According to the technical production notes, after the raw footage was shot, “…optimum exposure and filtration were determined, the footage was then re-photographed one frame at a time… it took over ten hours to re-photograph less than one minute of selected takes.”
  • It has been reported that the film was inspired by a near death experience the Merhige had after an automobile accident.
  • Critics from Time, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Newsday each named Begotten one of the ten best films of 1991.  Novelist and photographer Susan Sontag called it one of the ten best films of modern times.
  • After Begotten, Merhige went on to direct the music video “Cryptorchid” for Marilyn Manson (which reused footage from Begotten) before landing a major feature, Shadow of the Vampire (2000)–a horror film about the making of Nosferatu, starring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck and John Malkovich as Murnau.
  • Begotten is intended as part of a trilogy of films.  A second film, Din of Celestial Birds, which deals with the idea of evolution rather than creation, has been released in a 14 minute version that is intended as a prologue to the second installment.
  • After its brief run in specialty arts theaters, including stints at the Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian, Begotten received a very limited video release, first on VHS and then on DVD.  Merhige explains that this is because he does not believe that these formats are truly capable of reproducing the look he intended for the film:

    There are so many arcane, deeply intentional uses of grain, light and dark in that film that it is closer to Rosicrucian manuscript on the origin of matter than it is to being a “movie”…. When I finished the film I never allowed it to be screened on video because of how delicately layered and important the image is in conveying the deeper mystery of what the film is “about”… this is why it is no longer available on DVD until I find a digital format that is capable of capturing the soul and intent of the film.  My experiments in BluRay have been promising.

  • Nevertheless, a (bootleg?) Begotten showed up again on DVD in 2018.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The painfully graphic image of “God disemboweling Himself” with a straight razor–shot in the grainy, high-contrast black and white–is not easily forgotten.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  A minimalist, mythic narrative of grotesque, ritualized suffering enshrouded in astonishing abstract avant-garde visuals and a hypnotic ambient soundtrack.  Love it, hate it, or admire the technique while criticizing the intent—everyone admits there is nothing else quite like it in our cinematic universe.

Original trailer for Begotten

COMMENTS:  Begotten is a difficult film to rate.  It does not set out to entertain, and it does not Continue reading 24. BEGOTTEN (1991) →