Sort of hard to contextualize my love for this movie when it’s centered around absence. The drudgery of the vacant tabula rasa of life itself that we paint with ceaselessly lost and self immolating decisions. Eventually you are slowly stripped of personhood, intimacy and sanity until you only have the memory of decision making. A point you turned right, but should have veered left; a curiosity or inclination that leads you nowhere; a hill climbed only to find a view of more hills. But you miss getting to make the choices. Getting out of it alive doesn’t mean that you survive.

Still one of the best, and most aberrant studio horror movies of the last decade. Continually impressed with the assurance of this movie to be about vacuous opacity (both literally and thematically) and engage in no hand holding. In fact, as you circle the hollow core of the film it intentionally because less discernible, denser and impenetrable. A frightening, fractured image of culture as a series of psychosis inducing stories we whisper into one another’s ears as we sleep. Frankly, miraculous that it made it out of a studio in such good shape.

For my money, on a literal minute-to-minute basis, this is a perfect movie. Sublime credits needle drop, everyone in my theater stayed until the lights came on.

To hold the beautiful and the profane in the same hand; and to hold them tenderly through pain and fear. He was our truest American filmmaker. Hope he’s smoking wherever he is.