NewFest ’15: Sisters of the Plague

There is no shortage of locations for Jo’s haunted French Quarter tours. Unfortunately, she can’t stop bringing her work home each night. Lately, she has been beset by weird visions and feelings of dread. She suspects it all has something to do with her mother’s premature death. The circumstances surrounding the incident remain murky, but that is true of much that you will find in Jorge Torres-Torres’s Sisters of the Plague (trailer here), which screens as part of the inaugural Queer Horror Night at this year’s NewFest.

In retrospect, Jo was probably asking for trouble when she participated in staged “witchcraft” shows for her tour patrons. Rather than cheesy shtick for the tourists, they look pretty real, but perhaps that is a bad thing. Although her mother has been dead for a while now, Jo still has unanswered questions. She was hoping her formerly-estranged drunkard father Bob would have some answers when she let him move in, but they are still rather standoffish around each other.

For obvious reasons, Jo’s girlfriend Kate is less than thrilled to have the constantly hacking, hard drinking Bob in such close proximity. Jo’s increasingly erratic behavior gives her further reason to conclude this family just isn’t cute anymore. Yet, Jo is sufficiently lucid to recognize she has a problem. Proactively, she seeks help from an old school psychic in some of the film’s best sequences.

In Plague, Josephine Decker and her Butter on the Latch co-star Isolde Chae-Lawrence reunite under the direction of Torres-Torres, the editor and associate producer of Toad Road, so it is hardly surprising this outing feels like an unholy marriage of those two hipster films. At least Plague is long on atmosphere, as you would jolly well hope from a movie set in New Orleans. There are a handful of eerily suggestive scenes, but Jo’s connective drama gets downright laborious.

Despite her bold extremes, there is something oddly distancing about Decker’s performance. Chae-Lawrence gives viewers somewhat more accessible energy and attitude to work with, but it is still hard to fathom why she sticks around as long as she does. However, Thomas Francis Murphy deserves all kinds of credit for his uncomfortably gross work as Bob.

Of course, it is hard to go too far wrong when using New Orleans as the backdrop for a ghost story involving long buried secrets. In fact, there is something impressive about its rigid aesthetic, not unlike Sarah Adina Smith’s The Midnight Swim, but it wouldn’t have killed anyone to embrace a few more genre indulgences. It is an intriguing film to parse and dissect, but most cult film fans will prefer something a little more fun. Recommended almost exclusively for fans of Decker and producer-co-writer Jason Banker, Sisters of the Plague screens this Sunday (10/25) at the Chelsea Bowtie, as part of NewFest 2015.

2 By Decker: Butter on the Latch

Brooklyn hipsters always think communing with nature sounds great, but what if there is something sinister and uncanny out there in the woods? Frankly, it is unclear whether an emotionally agitated performance artist is running away from the malevolence or towards it. Either way, things are bound to end badly, but at least it will be underscored by some lively Balkan music in Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch (trailer here), one of her two pseudo-experimental features, which open this Friday at the IFP Made in New York Media Center.

After performing her latest theater piece, Sarah gets an alarming call from a friend who has been drugged and violated in a strange house, but perhaps that was actually Sarah. Regardless, after her empathic freak-out on the streets of Brooklyn, she suddenly decides to meet up with her friend Isolde at a Balkan Music Festival in the Northern California forests outside Mendocino.

At first, Isolde is surprised but happy to see Sarah. They laugh and catch-up, sharing some of the most sexually explicit anecdotes you will hear outside of a Zalman King movie. In fact, the energy and attitude of these sequences suggest Butter would have been a better film if it had been talkier. However, their friendship soon frays to the breaking point. On the surface level, the lunk-headed charm of a certain banjo player stirs up their jealousy, but there might also be a supernatural agency at work.

Even though Butter is just a tick longer than an hour, it is more about its atmospheric intangibles than conventional narrative. At times, it is flat-out pretentious and it is never slavishly hung-up on logic. Nevertheless, Decker conveys a powerful sensation of something messed up going on, just outside our field of vision. Although it is quite catchy, the Balkan music (dig those sideways trumpets) further reinforces the sense of otherness.

Butter is a film by performance artists, for performance artists, about performance artists. Yet, it is somewhat more watchable than it sounds. Sarah Small and Isolde Chae-Lawrence develop a nice bantering rhythm together, giving Butter a greater human dimension than most narrative-challenging experimental films. On the other hand, it has more than enough out-of-focus shots of characters’ backs as they silently walk through the woods.

Indeed, it displays all the excesses one might expect from Decker (who gained notoriety disrobing during Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present performance at MoMA). Despite creating a powerful mood of foreboding, she never really takes it anywhere. Odd and rather raggedy, Butter will receive plenty of knee-jerk praise and be unfairly dismissed out of hand, but it is really just a somewhat interesting but wildly uneven attempt at radical paganism. Only recommended for hearty fans of avant-garde cinema, Butter on the Latch opens this Friday (11/14) at the IFP’s MINY Media Center in Brooklyn.