What Josiah Saw (2022) – Movie Review

What Josiah Noticed, 2022.

Directed by Vincent Grashaw.
Starring Kelli Garner, Scott Haze, Robert Patrick, Nick Stahl, Jake Weber, and Tony Hale.

SYNOPSIS:

Horrible secrets and techniques are revealed when an estranged household reunites at their childhood house.

In a shabby farmhouse, Josiah Graham (Robert Patrick, at all times glorious) lives in relative seclusion along with his mentally challenged grownup son Thomas (Scott Haze). Josiah spends his days skulking round, gazing balefully out the window, ingesting whiskey for breakfast, and tormenting the childlike and passive Thomas. In the meantime, males from an oil firm go to the city’s mayor to hunt his help in shopping for out the Grahams. The land is wealthy in oil and the Grahams are one of many final holdouts. However the mayor has his doubts. The Graham farm, he tells them, is haunted. Thomas was by no means the identical when he found his mom hanging from a tree in entrance of the home, and Mary and Eli, the opposite two Graham kids, left house as quickly as they might. The household is cursed, he warns, and no good will come from getting concerned.

Coming to Shudder this week, filmmaker Vincent Grashaw’s unusual, sprawling, and compulsively entertaining What Josiah Noticed is a scrumptious slice of Southern Gothic household dysfunction and excellent for the canine days of summer time. Earlier than the film sputters in its ultimate stretch, watching What Josiah Noticed appears like sitting at a campfire and being handled to an icky, creepy (and okay, lengthy) story of a singularly doomed household line. What introduced this clan to such misfortune and exhausting occasions? The place are the opposite two Graham kids? And what are Josiah and Thomas doing in that home?

What Josiah Noticed offers every Graham sibling their very own chapter, providing perception into their depressing lives earlier than bringing the household collectively for a ultimate reckoning. In chapter one, Thomas is shaken from his lonely, tortured existence when his father receives a imaginative and prescient. Josiah has seen a ghost. Thomas’s useless mom is in hell, Josiah tells him, and it’s as much as them to rescue her from damnation. Eli and Mary will probably be paying them a go to quickly, and Josiah wants Thomas’s assist in fixing up the place to welcome them house earlier than they’ll lastly proper the household’s wrongs.

In chapter two, eldest Graham son Eli (Nick Stahl) is an ex-con who is just not doing an excellent job at staying out of bother. He’s been branded a intercourse offender after a dalliance with an underage lady, and when a toddler goes lacking, the city sheriff makes it clear to Eli that he’s primary on his shit record. To make issues worse, Eli is deeply in hock to native crime boss Boone (Jake Weber). When Boone gives to forgive the debt in change for a job, Eli has no selection however to just accept. The job in query is (what else?) to steal a chest of gold treasure from a touring gypsy circus. Leaving apart the extremely questionable othering of a marginalized ethnic group, this chapter is the excessive level of the film and a showcase of Grashaw’s filmmaking talents. It takes numerous confidence to open a film with a ghost and swerve right into a white-knuckle felony escapade, and I used to be completely satisfied to be taken alongside for the trip. A sequence with Eli fleeing a crowd of howling, enraged gypsies is undeniably eerie and fantastically shot. David Lynch could be proud.

If Thomas’s chapter is a gothic ghost story and Eli’s a Lynchian caper, the story of Eli’s twin sister Mary (Kelli Garner) is a story of shrieking desperation within the suburbs. Garner performs Mary as a tightly-wound wreck who appears able to actually explode at any second. She’s having violent nightmares and interesting in traditional depressed particular person hobbies like pictures and CrossFit. Regardless of her apparent emotional misery, Mary and her husband (Tony Hale, former star of Arrested Growth, one other nice epic of household dysfunction) are set on adopting a toddler, and they’re on the verge of reaching this purpose when Eli reveals up at their door. He’s acquired a suggestion from the oil firm. He desires to go house and persuade his household to promote, and he wants Mary’s assist.

Like several good Southern Gothic story, What Josiah Noticed revels in heightened depictions of upsetting and delicate topics for dramatic worth. The film has among the traditional Southern Gothic mushy targets (suicide, Jesus, cognitive disabilities) however contains some I had by no means earlier than thought-about (individuals of Romani descent, girls who get their tubes tied). However above all else, What Josiah Noticed is a narrative in regards to the lasting ramifications of childhood sexual abuse. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the movie’s whole raison d’être. If it is a topic you attempt to keep away from, What Josiah Noticed is just not the film for you.

When Mary and Eli arrive at their childhood house to ask Thomas for his assist, their presence unleashes a ghastly confrontation and the airing of some actually loathsome and stunning household secrets and techniques. Finally, the ultimate twist doesn’t really feel fairly as impactful because it ought to. We already know one thing is extremely fallacious with the Graham household, and the particulars really feel much less like disturbing bombshells and extra like a severe bummer. However one doesn’t watch a film like What Josiah Noticed to have fun humanity’s potential for redemption. Generally, you simply wish to end up the lights and watch a sick story about sad individuals, and also you gained’t discover yet one more compelling than this.

Flickering Delusion Score – Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Film: ★ ★ ★ ★

Caitlin Crowley

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