BLOGTOBER 10/16/2022: GRIMCUTTY
N.B. This review is very spoilery.
***
I love internet scare movies. I watch them all. It makes no difference to me whether they're as sophisticated as Kiyoshi Kurasawa's PULSE, as ludicrous as FEAR DOT COM, or as repulsive and pretentious as David Schwimmer's TRUST; expressions of paranoia about the interweb are invariably interesting to me, and often funny. Part of the problem is just the basic unfilmability of the online experience—it almost always comes off as silly unless it's as worked up as THE MATRIX. But the luddite hysteria that underwrites so many of these movies always brings to mind the backwards farmers in GLEN OR GLENDA who gravely warn, "If God had wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings!" Truthfully, I do believe there are problems with social media and being chronically online, but my level of caution is nowhere near that which is evoked by the absolutely hilarious 2013 Canadian TV show Darknet, which I found utterly fascinating in its fantastical fearmongering. As a fairly online person myself, maybe there is something comforting about the outrage expressed by many of these productions, that is so hyperbolic as to be totally unreal.
I didn't mention Tate Moore (left) in this review because I just wasn't being that thorough, but she's really excellent and I hope she makes more horror movies.
GRIMCUTTY is satisfying to me because ultimately, it isn't really about what happens online—and it specifically does not accuse young people of being brainwashed, overstimulated potential victimizers and victims. Writer-director John Ross's movie clearly references Slender Man-style phenomena in which a meme metamorphoses into a real life threat, but his film is ultimately about parenting, and specifically about the dangers posed by not trusting one's children. Sara Wolfkind plays Asha, a teenager who sparks her parents' ire when she drops out of the track team. Although Asha is just not as interested in sports as her parents think she should be, they blame her choice on internet addiction, and begin implementing increasingly strict rules about device use and screen time. Unfortunately, this conflict corresponds with the growing popularity of a dark online game in which a monstrous entity called Grimcutty coerces kids into self-harm and violence against their parents. Grimcutty is real, but the gag is that it is actually feeding on the paranoia of controlling adults, and faith in it is spread not through antisocial web forums, but by a psychotic mommy blogger who is poisoning the minds of very online parents.
Asha's parents are played by the extremely funny Usman Ally in a great horror turn, and my secret girlfriend Shannyn Sossamon. Amusingly, Sossamon is in a 2005 internet scare movie called DEVOUR, in which a gang of misfit teens get hooked on an online game where they receive threatening phone calls from their own future selves that command them to do bad things. It's hard to describe because it's hard to understand, but it is an early reflection of meme-y internet challenges like the Blue Whale game, which is said to have driven young participants to suicide. GRIMCUTTY seems to refer most directly to the Momo challenge, which grew out of a decontextualized image of a sculpture by Keisuke Aiso, resembling an extremely scary chicken lady. This game takes the format of Blue Whale in that players are given increasingly dangerous dares that culminate in suicide. Of course, it's hard to parse the hoaxes and hype from the real damage done in at least some cases by these challenges, but an even bigger matter of curiosity is, why would anyone agree to participate in one of these games? The adults in GRIMCUTTY blithely remark that kids will do literally anything that becomes trendy, and it is exactly this condescending attitude that contributes to the ensuing horror.
The point there is salient: GRIMCUTTY becomes real not because kids are assholes, but because parents are willing to believe the worst about their own children. Oddly, the movie currently has its own entry on knowyourmeme.com, which the site notes is still being researched and evaluated. One of the pieces of information collected there is a negative review from Mashable that laments the movie's inability to "discover even deeper horrors within the depths of online culture." I think this completely misses the point of the movie, and I suspect maybe a lot of viewers are missing the point in a similar way. This is not about teen lemming mentality, nor is it about the dark bowels of the internet into which we should go only by the grace of god. It's about the threat young people face of being dehumanized and disempowered by adults who can't let them participate in the authorship of their own narratives. I'm not lauding it as a new masterpiece, but having seen a lot of movies in this subgenre, I can say that GRIMCUTTY takes an approach I find very refreshing.
