From Within

Here's a tip for the blokes: If you're out on a hot date with a girl and she lets you make out with her and starts suggesting you take things further, don't pull out a gun and blow your own head off. For a start, it might give her a complex. It'll also decrease your chances of getting a blowjob by about 87%.

If only Sean had realised this at the start of From Within he could have saved a huge amount of trouble for the rest of the townsfolk. His suicide sets in motion a series of dark and terrible events that could shatter the heart of this hardline Evangelical Christian community. With his killing bullet Sean cracks the shell of morality covering the fundamentalists, exposing the society as something of a curate's egg. What's more, Sean isn't the only one to die. More and more bodies pile up, seemingly killed by their own hands, often having shown no suicidal inclination before.

With its depiction of a religious community struggling to deal with inexplicable events, From Within lurks on the outskirts of the subgenre known as Theological Horror. Only on the outskirts, mind. The film is more concerned with the way the townsfolk close ranks and turn on perceived outsiders than the hardline ecumenical debates of, say, The Prophecy, The Rapture or Frailty. In some ways, this movie is more reminiscent of The Mist's portrayal of religious intolerance and zealous bigotry.

As in Darabont's film, the darker the situation becomes, the more the townsfolk cling to what is familiar and seek to place the blame on the outsiders. In this case, it's Aiden (Thomas Dekker), the teen heartthrob local Pagan and brother of Sean. A whipping boy for the preacher's violent and bigoted son Dylan (Kelly Blatz) even before the tragedies start, things get even worse for him when it's suggested that the suicides are being caused by witchcraft. Caught in the middle is Lindsay (Elizabeth Rice), who refuses to see Dylan's aggression towards Aiden as being Christian and instead attempts to befriend the Pagan.

Bad move. Lindsay is Dylan's intended, and he perceives this as Aiden corrupting a good soul and leading her to Satan. The closer Lindsay becomes to Aiden, the more Dylan seethes with "righteous" anger, fuelling his vendetta against the boy. Lindsay finds herself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea as family and friends turn against her for consorting with witches, while Aiden makes some pretty startling claims about the true nature of the religious leaders leading the crusade.

From Within is a potentially very interesting film. Despite a fairly low budget, the movie looks very good for the most part and makes excellent use of a fairly minimalist score, refusing to fill every available space with noise. Music is mainly saved for the fright scenes, although special mention must go to the superb choice of opening song and the piece that plays over the closing montage. Both are highly effective and add huge amounts of atmosphere to the movie.

Despite comments by some other reviewers, I had very few problems with the quality of acting from any of the cast members. For the most part performances were understated, lending the film a sense of naturalism that's uncommon in films of this type. The real problem here is that there's very little character development throughout the film. Nobody changes in any major way. Dylan starts and ends as a violent psychopath. Aiden starts and ends as an enigmatic and world-weary loner. Lindsay's Mum and her boyfriend start and end as inconsiderate hypocrites. Even Lindsay herself doesn't really develop beyond a very sudden rejection of her community in favour of the hunky underdog. That's not to say the characters are badly written, just underwritten. Sadly, the most interesting role in the film is woefully underused. Sadie (Margo Harshman), Aiden's obstinate cousin, enhances every scene she appears in with her perverse sense of humour and displays a depth missing from some of the other characters. Her sinister tinkling on the piano as a distressed Lindsay tells Aiden she feels she's being stalked by some supernatural entity is a great moment that reveals a deft touch that may be missing on some other parts of the film.

Sadly, it's the stagnant characters that are one of the two major flaws in the film. You rarely get the feeling that these are real people whose actions shape the world around them. Indeed, the central role of Lindsay is almost entirely reactive. She seems to exist purely to be a witness to a series of horrible events happening around her, never learning anything but simply moving along until the next thing hits her. Even when she's forcibly abducted by her family and friends and made to suffer an attempted exorcism, she simply trots up to bed with a look of mild annoyance on her face. Her change of heart about her faith and sudden identification with a member of society her entire community views as evil doesn't really convince. It's made pretty clear that she's been raised entirely within this fundamentalist worldview, and running from her comfort zone into the arms of someone potentially in league with the devil at the first sign of trouble just isn't realistic. More likely, she'd embed herself deeper within her own safety blanket of friends and family rather than totally alienating herself.

The second major flaw is the introduction of supernatural elements into the story. Although they're present from the start, with one victim stating she's being pursued by a shadowy and frightening female figure shortly before she kills herself, the film does a good job of keeping such suggestions implicit to begin with. From Within is pretty effective at this point, suggesting that the deaths are coincidental and the church's accusations of witchcraft are paranoid rantings. This section feels pretty fresh, an examination of the negative effects that collective hysteria can have on a community. Things change about one third of the way in with a death scene that makes it fairly explicit that there's more going on than coincidence, although it's not really until the latter half of the film that it all starts to fall apart. Here, the plot takes a much more convention turn down horror cliché lane, relying on dusty old tomes and the sins of the fathers to build towards a fairly standard climax.

Despite these gripes, the film almost manages to redeem itself with an unexpected and powerful final series of images. This montage's effectiveness is sadly undercut as the credits start to roll over it and ends far too soon. It's a shame, as what's put up on screen is quite unusual in many ways, and the deliberate choice to take the emphasis away from what's being said reveals a certain hesitancy and uncertainty by the director (Phedon Papamichael). There's a sense that the filmmakers were split in their intentions, wanting to create something intelligent and relevant, but also bowing to convention to gain financial success to expand the movie to a proposed trilogy. A movie about teens rather than a teen movie, From Within often feels too much like its own heroine; caught between the established church of convention and the potentially dangerous and innovative new path. In the end, it sits on the fence - not quite able to satisfy the formal order of service on one side, and not quite rebellious enough to light the spark of magick on the other.

Review by Paul Bird