Incident in a Ghostland (2018) [New World French Extremity]

New French Extremity darling Pascal Laugier’s 2018 film Incident in a Ghostland presents thematic  continuance of some elements introduced in his 2008 film Martyrs. Both films feature violent attacks on a family and focus heavily on the killing, torture and abuse of young females, including children and teenagers, and the long lasting effects trauma.

Martyrs is a grim and hard to watch movie. There are no happy endings or triumphs to celebrate. The characters are crushed by their experiences and ultimately destroyed by them. It is a very intense, in-your-face experience. So much so that I had to skip to the end and watch it backwards. 

At times Incident in a Ghostland was almost as hard to watch but I found myself re-watching it and putting it on my list of favorite films from the 2010s because there it has a lot to offer. One offering was a fresh perspective on what sometimes feel like overused horror tropes.  It was tempting dismiss it as torture porn, where the violence is presented for its own sake and the distress of its victims is tantalizing. I try to stay away from such films when the victims suffering is presented for titillation.  The voyeuristic thrills they offer are hard for me to digest. I will talk about what happens to Vera and Beth, the sisters of Incident in a Ghostland that makes it stand out later on.

The final jump scare of a false ending that reverses the outcome has gotten so overused. In this false ending, the surviving characters believe they have made to safety and their ordeal is over, but for a final appearance of the antagonist who has gained the upper hand. It is so common that many viewers wait for it. (Although I think this trend is reversing now where more and more often, the final image is the female victim with the upper hand, turning a gun on her attacker. But that is just my observation, there are a lot of movies I haven’t seen.)

Incident in a Ghostland doesn’t rely on a false ending to squeeze one more jump out of the viewer. Instead, the false ending happens early and is used to signal the beginning of grueling middle and end sections. Another trope Incident in a Ghostland can be seen in in how the sisters never give up or accept their fates. They may fall but then they get up and run or they attack. The last act is a brutal, extended fight-chase-fight sequence.

Both films centered around an attack on the family. In Incident in a Ghostland, the family is under siege by a pair of serial killers who together function like Freudian constructs. Even though one wears women’s garb, the candy truck driver (or the Witch as Vera calls him) is not truly transgender.  He is not trying to become a female but rather co-opt the symbols of their power to strengthen himself. He believes that women are more powerful (and therefore need to be feared) than he is.  These are manifestations of a damaged super ego. The Ogre, the other killer, is  primitive, inarticulate, impulsive, aggressive and searching only for immediate gratification.  He is a baby in a monster’s body, dominated by the id. 

The sisters are in liminal space, no longer children but not yet women. The Witch and the Ogre are trying to prevent them from completing that transition. The doll fetishism represent the ideals that girls are supposed to aspire to, beautiful creatures with no will or ability of their own.

Lucie, one of the lead characters from Martyrs, single-handedly destroys an entire family as an attempt to undo the damage she suffered as a child. When she realizes revenge will not heal her, she kills herself. Beth, the older sister from Incident in a Ghostland offers the opposite perspective, she is a victim of a similar attack. Her response, instead of trying to rewrite the past, is to flee to a fantasy future, leaving her sister Vera alone. In Beth’s dream logic, the trauma becomes subsumed and transformed into a success story where the perils of the present  supply the ingredients for her ideal dream life.  Drawn back into reality by Vera, Beth finds herself possessing a cunning and courage she did not have before. She is able to outsmart the killers and fight them with a ferocity that neither man was prepared for.

The sisters literally battle tooth-and-nail for their lives. Once Beth comes out of her fugue, she and Vera work together to stay alive by fighting back. They survive until they are rescued by the police. 

Given the choice, Vera and Beth would choose to not have their mother murdered and undergone their ordeal. While they have survived the physical attack, they  have another struggle ahead of them. Trauma survivors have the task of re imagining themselves because who they were has been obliterated. As Lucie illustrated in Martyrs, it is a process that not everyone survives.  

Oh hey, it is another Christmas movie!

IMDB | Trailer