Skew: Sevé Schelenz's Subliminally Haunting Debut Horror (2011)

Feb 1, 2012
Hari Navarro

Skew – Dir. Sevé Schelenz (2011) - © Sleep Apnea Productions Inc.

Ever ambiguous, Skew is viewed through a smeared and soothsaying lens, one perpetually obsessed with the need to capture all.

Canadian Director Sevé Schelenz opens his complex – this one will have your brain itching for days – debut horror “Skew” with a quote by French novelist, playwright and Ron Jeremy body-double, Honoré de Balzac. Dispensing entirely with such superfluous padding as an opening credit sequence, or any mention of the film’s title at all for that matter, we are instead tempted by what may or may not have been the first of many veiled clues to come:

“All physical bodies are made up entirely of an infinite number of ghostlike skins, one on top of another. Photography has the power to peel away the top most of these layers. Exposing to the camera actually diminishes the self.” – Honore de Balzac (1799 – 1850)

Skew had me at ‘… ghostlike skins’, but then, as the film launches abruptly into gear, you may be inclined to hear voices (yes in the biblical sense). Slow and whispering at first, they will soon split the air with their dire fever-pitch warning – ‘Found Footage! Run! Save yourself…’.

Life Through a Skewed Lens

“Found Footage”, a lazy catchphrase of sub-genre labeling that now stretches outward to encompass anything that even remotely features crackling camcorder imagery or faux documentary style narrative. But stay in your seats people, for this is no REC (2007), Paranormal Activity (2007), Cloverfield (2008) or, god forbid, Apollo 18 (2011) production-line clone. In fact, it is a film that could arguably be considered one of the founding pioneers of this now shamelessly uninspired storytelling technique.

Filmed back in 2005 and produced at what must have been an infuriating lethargic pace, fueled no doubt by its total reliance on independent finance, the film would eventually take five years to fully complete. At the time there were relatively few similarly structured films from which to take inspiration: Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), bloody Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992) and the film that Schelenz does admit to drawing influence from, 1999’s polarizing hit The Blair Witch Project, all being notable exceptions that predated Skews final release.

The main gripe that many have with this particular style of film-making is that to use real-time videotape as a sole point of visual reference obviously requires that someone, or something, is constantly filming. It is a stumbling block that has pushed many other attempts far into the ridiculous and the lazily contrived. But Skew, though still employing many of these same tricks of the “found-footage” trade, manages to inject plausible reason and purpose into the mountains of video tape that our troubled camcorder is here so compelled to produce.

On July 19, 2005 Three Friends Went On A Road Trip… They Never Came Back

Skew again skims the mainstream as it toys with, and contorts, that other mainstay of horror lore; the ill-fated road trip. To be sure, and to the uninitiated, the first third of this decent into deep-seated obsession will be a decidedly uphill battle. But be warned, the drawn out simplicity and mundane feel of the trip, not unlike the harbinger smears that blotch our camera lens, do fog a multitude of layers that skulk just beneath the obvious.

As such the storyline itself is deceptively linear: Rich (Richard Olak), his girlfriend Eva (Amber Lewis) and reclusive home-video enthusiast Simon (Robert Scattergood) set out on a long distance road journey and it is this trip alone that becomes the entire body of the work. One that proves an exercise in slow-drip storytelling, within which ambiguity, diversion and multiple interpretation reign supreme.

Though it is not all clear sailing as some of Skews secrets within secrets convolute and congeal into impenetrable contradiction and implausibility. This is a trip, in more ways than one, and far from an easy or comfortable ride.

The constant camera-eye-view is by no means a perfect narrative device, nor is it one that is here executed perfectly, but through it we are lured into a world in which it is entirely believable that these three disjointed friends do actually exist. This unencumbered sense of fractured reality is further underpinned by the films eclectic editing, some scenes more than outstay their welcome, while others, such as the wonderfully framed phone booth scene in which Eva pleads with Simon as she floats in and out of shot, are wonderfully realized and packed with anticipative tension.

Caught in the irretractable gaze of Simon’s constantly zooming viewfinder this intentionally unpolished film ends as infuriatingly divisively as it begins. Some will balk at just how blatantly inconclusive it actually is, but stay with it, there is far more here than the camera will ever easily allow you to see.