The Water Man Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out There’s a thin line between horror and fairytale, a line The Water Man walks along but doesn’t confront or acknowledge. Based on a script by Emma Needell, the film is actor David Oyelowo’s directorial debut, and it follows tween graphic novelist Gunner Boone (Lonnie Chavis) as he ventures through the forest with his compatriot Jo (Amiah Miller) in search of a folkloric figure who he hopes will grant him the power to save his mother, Mary (Rosario Dawson), from leukemia. The premise has immense weight and thematic potential, but the story often scrambles to balance more than one idea at a time. The central contradiction of its filmmaking becomes apparent early into its 90-minute runtime: Gunner is incredibly imaginative, but the film around him is not. Oyelowo is a master dramatic storyteller in front of the camera — his role as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma is one for the ages — though when behind the camera, his intentions feel confused. He stars in the film as well, as Gunner’s father Amos, and while he’s committed to the on-screen part of a concerned husband and a father in search of his child, as a director, he can’t seem to commit to a single tone or narrative motif. When the film begins, the Boone family has just moved to an unfamiliar rural town, though apart from a few comments about the design of their home, this detail exists only to introduce young Gunner to the local urban legend of the Water Man, a mysterious, supposedly immortal being who lives out in the woods. Other than the Boones’ unfamiliarity with this tale, they don’t feel like outsiders at all, despite being the only nonwhite family for miles. They barely interact with anyone else long enough for the film to give us a sense of who they are, and how they fit into this world. Gunner suffers from a similar dramatic framing. The film imbues him with character traits that aid the plot, and the plot alone. From his early scenes, he’s obsessed with death. We first meet him as he observes a funeral from afar, and the comic he’s writing concerns a detective investigating his own murder. “Where do we go when we die?” he asks his mother, to which she can only offer platitudes. This preoccupation primes him for his journey into the woods, but his death anxiety also predates any knowledge of his mother’s cancer diagnosis. The sudden question of Mary’s mortality spurns him into physical action, but it doesn’t seem to affect his psychology. Lonnie Chavis is no stranger to complex material; as young Randall on This Is Us, he navigates the quiet, subdued realizations of a Black child growing up in a white family, and here, he deftly balances Gunner’s innocence with his morbid obsession. However, the character’s thoughts and feelings on death don’t really come up beyond the first act, once he sets out to find the Water Man. It’s still early in Chavis’ career, but years from now, it will probably feel like his immense talents were wasted by the film. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/3eqrzzY] The story, on paper, feels like a journey into the heart of darkness so Gunner can confront mortality head-on. But oddly enough, the film can’t seem to decide whether this is a fairytale with a childlike outlook, a morbid horror story, or something in between, like a coming-of-age genre picture that transitions from one to the next, as Gunner is forced into a more adult understanding of the world. It ends up being none of these, and yet too many of them at once, in ways that clash awkwardly. The film’s music, for instance, is often light and whimsical, but it’s used to score cramped, claustrophobic spaces shot in high contrast, with dark shadows and harsh lighting. Some spaces need to feel this way, like the creepy, taxidermy-littered home of a reclusive local, Jim (Alfred Molina), who regales Gunner with the gloomy legend of the Water Man trying to resurrect his wife. However, every space in the film ends up feeling this way, from the library where Gunner borrows research books, to the police station where Amos files a missing person’s report, to the Boones’ own home. Their chandelier is made of deer skulls. Every hallway in their house feels dark and mysterious, and scenes of an angry Amos breaking under the pressure of his wife’s illness are shot from low angles, with his eyes hidden in shadow. Does Gunner see his father as a monster and his home as a house of horrors? This doesn’t appear to be the intent, but it ends up being the result. This aesthetic clash is especially strange given the narrative that follows. For one thing, Gunner doesn’t run away to escape from this environment, but rather, he does so out of love for his family. For another, his guide through the forest, the aloof, blue-haired teenager Jo, lives alone in a tent and keeps showing off her fresh scars, which haphazardly hint at a home life that does, in fact, seem to be monstrous. The film, unfortunately, has no intention of really delving into this delicate subject matter, and it treats Jo as a non-character, despite her escape from a harsh reality mirroring Gunner’s escape into a fantastical story. The film has a few early stylistic flourishes which it never fully employs, like Gunner’s comics bursting to life, or Jim’s retelling of the Water Man tale playing out, in Gunner’s mind, like one of his hand-drawn stories. These disappear when the film seems to need them most when Gunner and Jo walk through the creeping woods, and the film flirts with magical realism for a few fleeting moments. Despite Gunner being the focus of this adventure, the film doesn’t seem interested in how he sees the world, and how this perspective changes as the film goes on. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=worst-reviewed-movies-of-2021&captions=true"] Dulling the story even further is its utilitarian editing, which moves the plot in a mechanical fashion. Shots rarely hold on images or ideas long enough for them to matter; the frame doesn’t linger on any feeling long enough for the film to feel like horror, or fantasy, or introspective drama. It defies categorization, not because it’s radical, but because it has no aesthetic identity. In a structural sense, the film feels fragmented and linear, with each scene dedicated to a single idea, a single thought, a single concept unconnected from what came before. As soon as the film introduces new information, it discards every bit of theme or subtext up to that point. For instance, Gunner’s ruminations on mortality make way for a mythical quest that feels like an entirely different film, when the two ideas should feel entwined. Similarly, the subplot of Amos lying to Mary about Gunner’s whereabouts is swiftly forgotten, so the focus can shift to Amos’ search. Each scene seems to replace what came before it, rather than complementing it or responding to it (and poor Mary, whose mortality is the thematic center of the film, ends up completely sidelined). The Water Man is ambiguous when it should be clear, obfuscating its drama in order to propel its plot. It’s also literal when it should be ambiguous, answering any lingering questions about its premise through plodding, logistical explanations of symbols and ideas that don’t need explaining — or rather, wouldn’t need explaining, if their emotional impact on Gunner was remotely clear. In either case, whether the film is doing too little or far too much, the weighty story at its center, of trying desperately to conquer, confront and eventually come to terms with death, takes a back seat.

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