Sep 302002
 
Directed by: John Coven. Written by: John Coven, Cornell Christianson. Cast: JoBeth Williams, Juliet Landau. 8 min.

This critique contains spoilers – if you have not seen the film yet, go to the Best Shorts page.

There is a basic ghost story.  This isn’t terribly surprising as a majority of sub-genres aren’t so much categories as they are the same story shot with varying perspectives or new twists.  Count how many zombie films have a mismatched group of survivors fortified in a building as an ever-growing horde of zombies gather to eat their brains.  For ghost stories—and I’m talking about horror-oriented haunting movies, not comedies or romances where helpful ghosts arrange dates for lonely widows—that basic plot is simple.  The protagonist enters a haunted location or meets a haunted person.  That hero, who appears to have nothing to do with the ghosts, discovers that someone is in great danger from the ghost and sets out to discover what event happened years earlier to cause the haunting.  Armed with that information, the hero can confront the ghostly forces, at which point the ghost either leaves (happily or unhappily, depending on what was discovered) or it’s now clear that the ghost will never leave, and the people need to run away forever.  The story has been told over and over in The Ghost Breakers, Ghost Story, The Uninvited, The Forgotten, and Poltergeist, to name just a few.  For these films, being good isn’t a matter of being original, as none have been completely original for a very long time, but rather telling the story precisely, in a way which engages the emotions of the viewer.  Something different and unexpected is a bonus and elevates films like The Ring and The Sixth Sense, but that new element must be added on to an accomplished telling of the basic tale, or it’s just a gimmick.

Repossessed doesn’t offer the viewer twists.  A realtor finds herself in a haunted house, though it doesn’t appear that way at first.  Everything is normal until the potential buyer begins to tell a story she’d heard about the house.  It is soon obvious that she’s telling a ghost story.  As the story reaches its most unsettling point, the realtor is surrounded by the bumps, creaks, and visions that indicate that somebody who’s dead isn’t laying still.  It’s a compressed version of the basic story, as the person in danger is the realtor, and she is fed the answers instead of having to search for them, but the results are the same.  And that is the wonder of Repossessed.  It gives us THE ghost story, with the mystery, the slow buildup, the creepy feeling that you don’t want to look behind you, the straightforward frights, and the emotional impact, and all in eights minutes.  What has been done in two hours, director John Coven fits into eight minutes, without missing a thing.  The economy is breathtaking.  That he manages character development is closing in on bizarre as few films manage actual character development in under thirty minutes.

All stories, in any form, including novels, plays, ballets, operas, or of course, movies, should be told in as brief a time as possible.  It is one of the defining characteristics of a good story, that there be no empty moments.  Now that doesn’t mean that all films should be short.  If it takes four hours to reveal the plot and to state the theme, then four hours is how long the film should be.  But if it could have been done in three hours, then there is an hour where no additional information is given, no insightful concepts are expressed, and no character development happens—that’s an hour that could be cut out.  If the viewer needs to watch a character’s face, see it move ever so slightly, see the shadow and study the eyes, and do so for ten minutes to care about the character, to feel what that character is feeling, then ten minutes is perfect.  But what if it could be done in eight minutes?  If so, we’ve spent an extra two minutes gaining nothing of the emotional state of the character, and the impact has been diluted.  Great film doesn’t make that mistake.  Every second of the film is valuable.  Repossessed takes it to a whole new level.  The ghost story has somehow been placed in eight minutes.  That means all those other films have an hour of unnecessary film stock clicking through the projector.  That makes this one hell of a well constructed eight minutes.

Several things are responsible for the supersaturated nature of Repossessed.  The efficient cinematography of Coven and D.P. Philip D. Schwartz are a big part.  Each shot showed me something I needed to see and added to the story.  The ominous music by Erik Godal placed me squarely in the lands of mystery and I can’t imagine the film working without his score.  But it is the acting that really sells the piece.  JoBeth Williams plays the realtor, and I can’t argue with the casting of the star of Poltergeist, one of the near-iconic ghost stories, in this concentrated version.  As good as she is, it is Juliet Landau as Alison Labatte who is the biggest piece in the puzzle.  The daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (does anyone remember Space 1999 or the first three seasons of Mission Impossible?), she is best known as Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and as Loretta King in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.  She’s an amazing actress who can convey joy, hesitation, pain, and anger at a level that crawls into my spine.  I don’t have to think about her performance; I can feel it.  But more than that, Landau projects something foreign, something not quite right and impossible to grasp.  That makes it easy to accept her as something other than a living human.  When I am confronted with the notion that she is a ghost, I just nod, as her alien nature was already well anchored in my brain.  Yet I still cared about Alison Labatte.  All the misery that created the ghost is on screen, as well as a vision of someone exotic enough to be a ghost.  And with that, the story is told, and Repossessed does it all in a scant eight minutes.

This film is available for free viewing at Atomfilms.