The Red Mask

Bluesky

If you’ve ever written any kind of fiction yourself – and certainly if you’ve edited it – you’ll know that it’s impossible to get good results if you’re sentimental about it. Recent years have seen one popular film franchise after another collapse under its own weight because producers have confused fan service with good writing, and this unfortunate affect has been amplified by the development of little cliques of highly aggressive online fans unwilling to tolerate any views that differ from their own, along with studio heads too stupid to distinguish what is loud from what is actually widely believed. The Red Mask Movie explores these issues in the context of a fictional franchise and a studio which is trying to have it both ways, to appeal to those elements at the same time as casting its net more widely by hiring a young queer Black woman to write the script.

This woman is Allina (Helena Howard), and she’s living in fear due to the number of highly explicit threats she keeps receiving over the internet. This pretty standard stuff, but at the same time, it makes clear from the start that what many woman live with day to day is much uglier than anything you’re likely to encounter in a film, even at a festival like Frightfest. Partly as a consequence of this, Allina has moved out of her home for a while, staying in a spacious rental house in the woods with her fiancée, Deetz (Inanna Sarkis). They have the advantage of peace and quiet, but she’s still struggling with her script, and she’s aware that if anyone did turn up intending to hurt her, she and Deetz would be on their own.

Much like Scream, the film opens by musing on the clichés of the genre, whilst also noting that small details referenced early on are obliged to be meaningful later: enter Chekov’s bear spray. Other obviously daft elements go unacknowledged but will be quickly picked up on by viewers, from the highly convenient knife block in the kitchen to the fact that neither woman seems to understand the concept of curtains as things that can be closed. The slasher horror has long had meta elements, responsible for much of its comedy (and the inscrutability of that to outsiders), but The Red Mask does it well, and sufficiently so that you will also feel, very early on, that you have a handle on the fictional franchise and could probably figure out the outline of previous instalments yourself.

The action picks up about a third of the way into the film when two strangers arrive at the door of the house. Are they the next renters, arrived early by mistaken or something more sinister? You don’t get any points for figuring that one out. Still, it’s nicely handled. Ryan (Jake Abel) and Claire (Kelli Garner) admit that they are horror film fans. They’re intrigued when they learn what Allina and Deetz have been doing for inspiration, and so Claire suggests that they play a game.

What follows makes up for its predictable aspects with cleverness elsewhere. There’s smart staging, structural and visual misdirection, and a number of sharp twists. The real difficulty that the film faces – like many of its ilk – is in getting viewers to emotionally invest in what they see when they know that it might not be real. Is that person dead, or just pretending? When we’re not sure, the actual horror we might otherwise experience is delayed, its impact then reduced, and despite the quality of the acting, all we’re left with is the game. Still, it’s an exciting game, and although seasoned slasher fans might think they’ve seen it all as far as kills are concerned, the final one delivered here is original, shocking, brilliant and, in its own way, delightful. In light of its success, the risk is now that The Red Mask will be turned into a franchise itself.

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