Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

64th Kill

Oh, man, New Zealand is such a cosy place anyway, but this movie just made me want to put on a set of flannel pajamas with pictures of planes on them and curl up in front of the fire with a cup of warm hard liquor (can't stand cocoa). Not because I ever saw this as a kid, but it just has that atmosphere to it.

I sound condescending, but it really did give me a lift as soon as it started, so I was already predisposed to liking this. But this narrative is so clever and well constructed - all within a fairly televisual sort of experience, granted, but it lends itself well to that aesthetic.

Mig, I mean, Meg is a young lady who's just moved out of Mum and Ded's place and up to the bug smoke to become a career girl. Spotting a nice vintage Jag for sale at a bargain price, she picks it up and drives it down the coast to show it off to her family. On the way back, she experiences strange hallucinations involving a sad-eyed lady, one time slowing down to give her a lift on the night drive back, only to have a creepy-looking bloke in a mackintosh jump in beside her. Pretty soon, the sad eyed lady somehow disappears from her back seat, and she's left alone with this weird dude who starts putting out distinct incel vibes. Eventually, she manages to ditch him, but not before some very creepy moments, and on getting back to her job in an antique store, she recognises the sad eyed lady in a Missing Persons notice in an old newspaper. Yes, that's right, this is a haunted car story, but as we piece this situation together in the first twenty minutes or so, the question is where is all this going to lead.

Aside from the elegantly written mystery at the heart of this narrative, what really makes it sing dramatically is the dynamic it sets up of Meg as a lonely young single woman and the way society treats her. As her nervousness about the car grows, we see how she is further developing as a perceived "hysterical" type. Meanwhile, her life is filled with entitled, insensitive, sometimes predatory males. Disbelief of her experience is all wound up in notions of disbelief of the female, of the drama queen, of the hysterical woman. It heightens her sense of isolation - which accentuates the tension in the story while having something to say about society. It's really very well written stuff.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Well, we have a car haunted by a lost soul and an unsolved murder, so the only deaths come before and then again at the end of the story. All I will say is that the climax to this tale gets seriously frightening in a way which scared me out of my cute little airplane jimjams. Very nice!