Creep

Director: Patrick Brice
Screenplay: Patrick Brice & Mark Duplass
Stars: Patrick Brice (Aaron), Mark Duplass (Josef)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
Creep
CreepEssentially a two-man production, Creep, which debuted over a year ago at South by Southwest, is a just-clever-enough found-footage horror film whose primary asset is not its jump scares or even its mounting sense of dread, but rather its macabre sense of black humor, which keeps you constantly ill at ease. Is this supposed to be funny? Scary? Unnerving? Silly? All of the above? Maybe, maybe not. Directed by first-timer Patrick Brice, who also stars and co-wrote/improvised the film with its other star, mumblecore vet Mark Duplass, Creep certainly lives up to its title, and what you think of the film will rest largely on whether you thinks its shocker ending was worth the slight narrative needed to get there.

The setup is simple. A naïve young man named Aaron (Brice) responds to a Craigslist ad from Josef (Duplass), a man who is looking for a videographer for the day. Josef is willing to pay $1,000, but he never says what Aaron will be videoing until Aaron arrives at his remote vacation home in the mountains. There, Josef tells Aaron that he is dying of inoperable brain cancer and wants him to record him for a day as a record of his life to be left for his unborn son, who he refers to as Buddy. We see everything through the lens of Aaron’s videocamera, hence we are fully aligned with his experience and assessment of Josef, who is certainly odd, although not necessarily creepy—yet. Duplass’s performance is impressively nuanced, as he acts out various behaviors that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time with a certain kind of guy who likes to say strange things for effect, pull pranks that probably only he will find funny, and disguise his true intentions just to make others squirm. Josef’s behavior could be old-fashioned alpha-male jocularity or it could be the bubbling of some pretty deep-seated psychosis, and it acts as an amusing on-screen incarnation of Duplass’s modus operandi as a filmmaker, which is to make the audience uncomfortable (see Baghead, Cyrus, Jeff, Who Lives at Home).

Aaron follows Josef around for the day, recording him hiking through the woods in search of a fabled spring with healing powers, re-enacting his idea of father-son bathtime, and explaining his thoughts and feelings to Buddy. Every time we start thinking that maybe Josef is just a normal guy thrown off by his impending death, he does something that gives us a jolt. His normality starts to seem like a performance, and the little consistencies and oddities start to add up to the point that even the well-meaning Aaron, who clearly wants to find the good in everything, wants to get the hell out of there. To reveal too much more would risk undercutting the film’s more surprising twists, none of which are particularly “out there,” but all of which make their own kind of sense. I do have a bone to pick with the big reveal in the film’s final moments, which strike me as too brazen in its patent unreality. Let’s just say that one of the characters’ prolific past activities would have surely drawn police attention by this time, rendering the entire film’s scenario absurd.

Yet, Creep is good enough in its evocation of unease and distrust that we aren’t really thinking about the plot holes or incongruities. Josef is a master manipulator of sorts, and Aaron appears to be the best kind of victim: willing and forgiving. Aaron isn’t much a character, but we identify with him anyway, if only because the only other person on screen is Josef, and we sure don’t want to identify with him. Of course, how we identify with the characters and what we expect of them is part of the film’s game, and Brice and Duplass undercut some of the more obvious clichés of the genre in the ways that will surely make the film even more interesting on second viewing. It doesn’t always work and its premise is really pretty thin, but Creep generates enough tension and suspense laced with black humor to make it a worthwhile diversion for even those who feel that the found-footage genre wore itself out years ago.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3)




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