Divorce sucks. It represents the unimaginable horror that the person who you thought knew you best is now your adversary. POSSESSION absolutely nailed the mechanics of divorce. There’s a different horror that comes in the wake of separation or divorce, the horror of “getting back out there.” What makes the prospect of dating so especially terrifying is the sense one just emerging from a relationship where they were unheard. Ask most divorced people about their exes and they’ll tell you some variation of “They didn’t listen.” Bruised, lonely people who feel unheard and unloved are meat for the grinder in modern app-driven dating environments. Swiping pictures in solitude, hoping that some unseen stranger will see their profile and feel a spark of something. This is the hell that SUCCUBUS exploits so effectively for horror.
R.J. Daniel Hanna’s SUCCUBUS spends its first act and much of its second act playing in the screen-life space. What it lacks in completeness like MISSING or SEARCHING, and startling realism, like the dark web sequences in RED ROOMS, it more than makes up with by acknowledging that app usage is itself a social act, the protagonist Chris (Brendan Bradley) turns to his friend Eddie (Derek Smith) to set up his dating profile. The other revelation from the first half of the film that was so resonant was that people’s use of the internet now is strongly siloed. Chris seems to use a circuit of just a Facebook knock-off, the dating site, and a web interface for his baby monitor. It’s only once Chris is jarred by contact from Orion Zephyr (Ron Perlman) does he branch out in his web use, and when he does, it isn’t with the practiced precision of Kelly Anne in RED ROOMS. Dude knows how to do a Google search and look at the top results. That’s it.
After being bullied during profile creation by Eddie, Chris is advised to match with everyone. Eddie assures him the reason is to maximize his chances. We can tell in these scenes that Eddie is all bluster. His is an affected machismo, hollow and lacking the confidence he pretends to have. Using the app in this way clearly wears on Chris. He and his wife, Sharon (Olivia Grace Applegate), aren’t even formally divorced. They’re separated, and Chris clings to hope that his marriage can be recovered. Even if it can’t, he’s still obviously grieving his marriage, and the admonition to match with everyone commodifies and dehumanizes the women he might meet. Chris seems to realize that if he’s using the app in this way, others are as well. So we have a character who feels unloved and unheard, participating in commodifying and dehumanizing behavior, while simultaneously being commodified and dehumanized.
Enter Adra (Rachel Cook). Her profile says “Help me” and has a suspicious link on it. We can tell something’s immediately not right with Adra. Sure, it’s a horror movie, but the profile looks like so many phishing scams across social media. Cook is inspired casting. Not only is she game and able to sell us on the danger of the titular succubus, she also is a pervasive face across social media. She has four million followers on Instagram and has one of the most popular OnlyFans accounts. OnlyFans, which rose to prominence in the early days of the pandemic, offers commodified sexual attention with an interface that feels and looks like a social network. With friend requests, DMs, and a scrollable feed that features ‘likes’ and comments, it’s the perfect place for someone like SUCCUBUS’ Chris to mistake one kind of attention for another.
Adra is reluctant to show her face and initially hides behind Snapchat-style filters and seems kind of flighty or distracted. One thing she seems certain of. that Chris seems ready to believe. is that she’s trapped and in need of assistance. This feeds into Chris’s need to matter and to be perceived. He feels separated from Sharon, who’s out with her friends having a night on the town, and he’s even separated from his friend Eddie, because he won’t embrace the same grunting, horny priorities. Here’s Adra, who is beautiful, dreamy, and needs help. In a bit of good blocking, the longer Chris talks with Adra, the clearer she becomes, and the easier she is to understand.
Chris’s rendezvous with Adra is derailed by contact from the mysterious Dr. Orion Zephyr. Zephyr seems pushy and invasive. He asks Chris questions about the nature and recency of his contact with Adra. The matter-of-fact quality of Zephyr’s questions shock Chris. First, it kind of shocks him into realization about the nature of his interactions with Adra, and second, it makes him feel, rightly, that his interactions have been less private than he thought.
The first two-thirds of SUCCUBUS really cook. Brendan Bradley is the kind of engaging lead you need to make screen-life really work, and Cook and Perlman help give the early goings a sense of fear and urgency. It’s when the film transitions from screen-life that things start to get wobbly. The film adopts a visual language that is mostly engaging. The creature make-up for the succubus is great, and there’s some satisfying gore, but there’s one major visual that seems so clearly cribbed from another film that it’s uncomfortable. I won’t go into details here, because they’re third-act spoilers but the movie reaches a point where there’s an uncanny visual similarity to GET OUT. Adopting the visual language of a film about the commodification and dehumanization of Black people in a film about how dating apps commodify and how divorce is dehumanizing is a hell of choice. It just makes everything after it seem less important. To that point, the movie tries to land with some tongue-in-cheek silly humor, which is inconsistent from the earlier established tone.
The last leg of this film is very pretty to look at, but it doesn’t really hold it together from a narrative perspective. That said, there is something here. When the film is still in the screen-life space, it crackles with anxiety, and the loneliness of the lead is palpable. We understand why he was lured in by Adra. This is the kind of mixed bag I can recommend, because it’s interesting and ambitious, so even though it doesn’t stick every landing, it is still evidence of talent. I doubt this is the last horror fans will hear from Hanna, and that’s a good thing.
them, not even once. When he’s not disappointing his cats he’s watching and writing about film.
His interests run toward naturalism, SOV and forgotten thrillers. Against his better judgment he
has hosted a podcast, Impossible Coin, for six years.
Tags: Andrew Brick Johnson, Brendan Bradley, Emily Kincaid, Horror, Jimmy Jung Lu, Olivia Grace Applegate, OnlyFans, R.J. Daniel Hanna, Rachel Cook, Ron Perlman, Rosanna Arquette, Screen-Life, Shout! Studios, The Internet
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