Incubus claws a star and a half out of my hands for the cinematography. This film is gorgeous, I won't fight anyone on that. The high-key lighting gives the settings, simple little locations in some woodsy area of California, the almost mythical appeal that the film strives for; internal sets are shadowy with flickers
of that same light, conveying menace where everything else here fails to. The acting, for one thing, is utterly ridiculous. How are you supposed to take these people seriously when they don't even know what they're saying? You may as well be watching a bunch of fools babble for 80 minutes and then superimpose a set of improvised subtitles of your own choosing. Unless you speak Esperanto (and who the fuck does?) what you're hearing and seeing essentially is meaningless. But if you play along with the script, then all you really get is a ludicrously over-the-top war of purity and temptation, senseless and unsatisfying and culminating with a really aggressive goat. If it weren't so pretty and so boring, it could almost pass as camp, what with its profoundly wrongheaded hook and the subsequent commercial disaster it left in its wake. Unfortunately, I fell victim to appearances - Incubus is nowhere near as interesting or as bizarre as it sounds.
December 3, 2010
