Storytelling is a kind of haunting. A kind of rehabitation of the past through the eyes of the present. Creating art is a way to enter into a conversation with the audience and show them something new in the familiar or shine light on the unknown. Human history has seemingly more often than not tended toward the darkest possible acts—ones we struggle to articulate fully with something as amorphous and shifting as words. Some subjects, in order to be absorbed or entertained by the listening or viewing public, must be approached sidelong. The most effective artists able to accomplish this feat are those headstrong enough to demand you approach their art from more than just the surface level.
So it is, and so demands, writer-director Johannes Grenzfurthner’s latest unusual act of artistry, RAZZENNEST. Now playing at this year’s Fantastic Fest, Grenzfurthner’s follow up to the immersive horror of MASKING THRESHOLD takes a new approach to both storytelling through film generally and horror specifically. It also, somehow, manages a kind of modern approach to its voices even as they echo the past. Framed as the recording of a commentary track over avant garde-ist Manus Oosthuizen’s (Michael Smulik) latest work, RAZZENNEST, demands you take control of feeling out and interpreting the story.
An increasingly tense and awkward interview between Oosthuizen and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic Babette Cruikshank (Sophie Kathleen Kozeluh), who sometimes comes across as a bit out of her own depth. Alongside supporting commentary from key members of Oosthuizen’s film crew, RAZZENNEST is biting satire of the industry as it is and as it’s going, with a stubborn creative head whose bombastic ego fills the room and an interviewing critic who seemingly forgot to do much research on her subject. Sprinkle in the butting heads of crew members airing the reality of tensions during the filmmaking process and you’ve got a story with enough kindling to build to one spectacular, provocative explosion.
RAZZENNEST is far less direct than its predecessor, MASKING THRESHOLD, and as such may be difficult to grasp onto for some, but it proves, if anything, that Grenzfurthner is out to make art that is provocative and lingering, immersive in an almost inarticulable way with the kind of horror in its climax that has its teeth sunk in before you’ve even realized it’s bitten. It is, also, a novel approach to the forced confrontation with history we occasionally seem to need. Not in our faces enough to be decried as obvious or too on-the-nose, but impactful enough to make us think and remember. Is it worse to watch the horrors of war unfold before our eyes, or to hear them reinhabited in the present?
Tags: Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest 2022, Film Festivals, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Masking Threshold, Michael Smulik, Razzennest, Sophie Kathleen Kozeluh
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