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Maverick Life Movie Review

‘Rage’ – uncertainty is our greatest source of fear

‘Rage’ – uncertainty is our greatest source of fear
Cast of 'Rage' (Image courtesy of Showmax)

Watching South African horror movie ‘Rage’ is a whole lot more fun than the reality of the current lockdown. And, if you’re looking for an escape, it might be the perfect movie for you, says Keith Bain.

Among a few hilariously twisted moments in Rage, there’s one that unwittingly taps right into the prevailing zeitgeist. In it, a few of the teenagers who are being picked off in seemingly random order by some sinister evil pause to take stock of their situation. They’re in the holiday house they probably shouldn’t have chosen as a base for their post-matric debauchery, and temporarily safe from whomever or whatever wants to have its way with them.

In a frenzy, they argue over what to do next:

“Guys, they know where we are, we can’t sit here and wait to be killed off one by one,” says Sihle.

“No, we should all go out and get killed off all at once,” argues Tamsyn.

“That kind of sounds better right now,” pipes up Leon.

If this sounds prophetic, keep in mind that these lines were written pre-pandemic and way before lockdown became part of our new normal. (I’ll leave you to draw your own parallels with whatever attitude you might have to being cooped up at home right. Yes, the real danger is out there, somewhere, but if you’re struggling to put up with your loved ones or housemates, you might also have considered running out onto the streets screaming with nothing but a mask for protection. Either way, oopsie!)

Then again, if you know anything about horror movies, you’ll have figured out that – either way – these youngsters are screwed. And no matter which option they pick, it’ll be the wrong one. As terrifying as the inevitably of the film’s blood-spattered endgame might sound, watching Rage is a whole lot more fun than the reality of the current lockdown. And, if you’re looking for an escape, it has the added bonus that it will not only scare the living daylights out of you, but in all likelihood will keep you arguing (with yourself or with whomever you see it with) over what in fact just happened.

The film has just dropped on Showmax and is the platform’s first original feature, a wholeheartedly home-grown teen horror movie directed by Jaco Bouwer. Over the last 15 years, Bouwer has been responsible for some of South Africa’s best live theatre and it’s a joy watching him transfer his talent for making deeply cerebral stage dramas into a film genre that relies on scare tactics,  derivative tropes, unrealism and the planting of sensory stimuli in order to meddle with the viewer’s fight-or-flight response system.

Have no doubt: This film is full of very visceral emotional triggers. And, significantly, no guns. Instead, it is charged with knives and axes, tools and needles and garden implements, machetes and horrid-looking homemade medical instruments designed to kill. It plays out in the realms of both classic horror – menacing shadows, rattling windows and doors, pagan rituals, blades being sharpened and knives slashing through the air – and in the navel-gazing terrain of postmodern meta-cognition. You can’t help sensing that the characters know full well that they’re trapped in a horror film. In other words, resistance is futile, so they might as well entertain us with their efforts to outwit whatever irrational monster stalks them.

In one scene, where everyone is still scratching their heads trying to figure out what in the hell is going on, Leon (the virgin, aka “wannabe fuck boy,” wonderfully played by David Viviers) says what we’re all thinking: “Guys, this is fucking insane. How is she still alive?” Because, yes, Rage draws on zombie movies, too, and you will also be at a loss trying to figure out what force is keeping Roxy (played by Jane de Wet) in her animated state.

Between Bouwer and screenwriter Tertius Kapp, the allusions to the universe of horror movies are seemingly endless. There are moments that feel like the madness-induced terrors in The Shining, and others that tap into the senselessness of countless unapologetic torture-for-the-sake-of-torture movies that seem obsessed with close-ups of wounds and blood.

And yet Bouwer spares us the excess. Instead of prolonging the tortures and abject horrors, he moves relentlessly forward, perpetually carving out new directions for the story to evolve into. There are the flesh masks made famous by Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and fertility figures and birthing rituals that conjure up associations with countless pagan rite-inspired flicks from The Wicker Man to Midsommar. The film is riddled with such intertextual allusions, all reconfigured into some unnamed sleepy hollow South African village that anyone who has ever spent time in a beach house on the Cape Coast will feel they recognise.

It is a film for horror junkies who will doubtless rip this to shreds in their determination to profit from all the threads it offers – this is the source of the film’s interactivity. And also why it’s so much fun.

We have a strong sense from the get-go that this film is about transgression. Initially, though, we suspect it may be the youngsters themselves who are the transgressors. They are six school-leavers on the cusp of adulthood. Full of promise, full of dreams, they are also full of themselves. Smart, but riddled with issues and each flawed in some way. The film opens in a dreamlike space that is in fact a dance club where a horde of young adults, presumably all wasted on recreational drugs, are dancing in that devil-may-care fashion, exchanging glances, whipping themselves into a frenzy fuelled by alcohol, illicit substances and raging hormones (yes, this film acknowledges that teenagers have sex).

But, through the haze of euphoria, premonitions of bad things to come set in very quickly. Apparition-like cuts to creepy adults and uncanny masked figures signal that everything is not copacetic. Never mind the hallucinations of your friends bleeding from their eyes or their sudden attempts to bite you. And, don’t worry, surely all the vomiting can be put down to bad drugs, too?

Through the opening sequence’s dark orgy of smoke and lasers, drugged-out bliss and thumping electronic music, it’s not all that easy to figure out who these six youngsters at the heart of the story really are. One of them even plays at being the narrator, giving us her take on her friends. She makes a point of dissing each of them, before introducing herself as the goodie-two-shoes who has just thrown up and is about to whip her soiled shirt off.

Of course, Roxy (played by Jane de Wet) – former head girl and future zombie – turns out to be a very unreliable narrator indeed.

Jane de Wet in ‘Rage’ (Image courtesy of Showmax)

It’s with these sorts of ironies that Bouwer and Kapp manage to add layers of complexity and hilarity in a universe where derivative plots and intertextual borrowing are essential to the genre.

In a pivotal scene, the youngsters go into the local store in the village where they’ve sequestered themselves during their post-school Rage. Inside, they find almost nothing they’re familiar with and then the ancient tannie who owns the store makes a point of offering them “n****rballs” which almost pauses the film for a moment as Sihle (played by Shalima Mkongi) does a second take and her white friends flinch. At that moment, everyone is suddenly scratching their heads trying to figure out what parallel universe these Born Free Gen Zs have found themselves in. This, of course, just moments after the creepy old shopkeeper tells them that, “We welcome fresh blood.” Despite earlier signals that some irrational horror is about to visit itself on them, it’s at the moment when “n****rballs” are mentioned that we know two fundamentally different worlds are on a collision course and we all know something is wrong. Very wrong.

Sihle Mnqwazana in ‘Rage’ (Image courtesy of Showmax)

Nicole Fortuin in ‘Rage’ (Image courtesy of Showmax)

Bouwer, who has always had a talent for visual design, does a magnificent job of balancing scenes shot on glaringly white beaches, the teens dressed in bright colours and cheerful patterns, with depictions of abject horror. Yes, you will see holes drilled into heads; knives wielded; severed body bits; and even a close-up shot of a toilet refusing to swallow those unwanted brown dregs.

Like many memorable horror films, Rage achieves its desired impact despite a limited budget and few resources. Aside from its exhilarating opening club scene, the film makes do with a small, contained cast and few locations. The skill of the filmmakers is that they create places in your mind – and they fill those spaces with sounds and images that are genuinely frightening. There are many points in the film where it’s unclear if we’re witnessing some disturbing ritual playing out around a fire on the beach, or if we’re sharing some uncanny hallucination being experienced by one of the youngsters being dragged into this spiralling nightmare.

That’s one of the pleasures of Rage – we never do quite know when it’s real and when it’s imagined, drug-induced, or the work of something supernatural.

I’m not going to lie and say that I think it’s a work of art or that it encodes a deep and meaningful significance that speaks to some social or political reality. What it does, however, is keep you wondering. It trades in narrative speculation. There’s a plot thread that offers an urban legend-inspired twist involving psychedelic drugs – that to make DMT (a powerful hallucinogenic substance also known as the “spirit molecule”), actual humans are harvested and their brain fluid drained.

There’s also the option of believing that this is a cautionary tale about taking folks in small communities for granted or assuming that they’re backward – as Kyle (played by Tristan de Beer) discovers, you call these people “cavemen” at your own peril.

Whatever Rage is really about, ultimately its greatest asset is the terrible thing it leaves you with at the end: Uncertainty. This film understands that uncertainty is our greatest source of fear, and it steps up and delivers that in abundance. Strap in, though, because the journey through it is wonderfully bumpy. Even in these uncertain times. DM/ ML

Rage stars Nicole Fortuin as Tamsyn, David Viviers as Leon, Shalima Mkongi as Sihle, Jane de Wet as Roxy, Sihle Mnqwazana as Neo, and Tristan de Beer as Kyle; apart from these six teenagers, there’s Carel Nel as Albert who turns out to be a lot more than the plumber. Directed by Jaco Bouwer, Rage premiered on Showmax on 31 March 2020.

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