Spiral (2019)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) I was bamboozled by the TV guide! The Spiral described as playing as a cable premiere was the 2021 horror film follow-up to the Saw series featuring Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson, but this Spiral is a 2019 low-budget Canadian horror film featuring a same-sex couple confronted with supernatural fear and loathing in their new house. It didn’t take me a long time to figure out that this was in no way a Saw series film, but still: not what I was expecting. At first, once the bamboozling abated, I thought the film I was watching had some potential — using the alienation of a same-sex couple in 1990s small-town setting is an effective melding of theme and narrative, and the low-budget of the film wasn’t much of an obstacle in the kind of slow-burning style the film was going for. But as Spiral advanced, I found myself less and less happy with the results. While the visual polish of Kurtis David Harder’s direction remains high, the story gets increasingly worse, with inexplicable character decisions, bemusing plotting, on-the-nose dialogue and increasingly senseless characterization. Spiral trivialized its plotting by giving too much space to dream sequences (making it harder than necessary to keep track) and ended on a needlessly gruesome scene that did not do justice to its slow build. (In addition to butchering the film’s most sympathetic character, and I don’t use that verb lightly.)  While the intentions of the film are at the right place, the execution gets increasingly wobbly as it goes on, and the result does not manage to meet the expectations set by Spiral’s first half. Too bad — there’s clearly something interesting here, but it’s just not executed properly.