21 Days of Spooky: Possum (Matthew Holness, 2018)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Matthew Holness's Possum. Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: A heavily traumatized puppeteer must return to his childhood home and face the psychological horrors that have plagued him his whole life. Also, there's a creepy spider-like marionette hangin' round.

Possum is pretty much the epitome of this whole feature, a film that lingers in your mind way after you've first watched it. Heck, there's a high chance that you're not going to watch it ever again, even if you loved it (like I did), because it straight-up messes with your head and sets you straight into the fractured mind of the main character without never letting go. And that's without even mentioning the adorable nightmare fuel that is the spider marionette, which is every bit as iconic as downright ungodly horror. It's a perfect psychological twister.

The film follows Philip (Sean Harris), a puppeteer that, for reasons unexplained (oh lord, imagine if those reasons had been explained?), has fallen from grace and so he has to return to his childhood home, creepy ass spider-puppet in hand. The creepy puppet is named Possum, and it represents a dark side of Philip's psyche, to the point in where he's long haunted by it even after getting rid of it several times. As with any trauma, that fucking spider keeps coming back, showing up when Philip least expects it, and even chasing him around the grim landscapes of the little town he grew up in.

Residing in the childhood home is Maurice (Alun Armstrong), Philip's uncle, who seems to relish in treating the lanky guy like absolute shit, and tends to stick his metaphorical finger in every possible metaphorical wound his nephew has. Maurice is an overall unlikeable human being, even when seen from a point of view separate to the main character, so it's surprising how nobody in the town set fire to the house with him inside. Philip, due to whatever happened previous to the film's events, has absolutely nowhere to go, so he has absolutely no option to move elsewhere or do anything else with his life that to suffer.

It's never about the physical horror. Sure, you have every once in a while the very visual manifestations of Philip's various trauma, mostly portrayed by that fucking spider, but 80% of the film is simply about the main character's suffering and everything that affects it. We eventually start digging up, always visually and never in dialogue, that something terrible happened to him as a child, and due to that everyone in the little town reacts negatively towards him, thus further fucking up his already fragile state of mind. But he never falters; he genuinely wants to escape, he needs to be free from his trauma.

So, you have lingering shots of the grim landscapes. So, you see every crevice of Philip's worn down and absolutely destroyed childhood home, a sign of how nasty and horrible Maurice is as a person and homecarer. You follow Philip as he walks around the town trying to find some answers, only to be ambushed by his own trauma at every corner. You never quite understand what's going on with him, but you know you trust him, and you actively root for him to get better, to break from the toxicity... but how can he set himself free, when his trauma will chase him everywhere until he slays it once and for all?

Everything gets under your skin here. The spider doesn't end up being so scary when you actively start fearing everything else about Philip's life. Heck, sometimes the spider arrives and you're like "well, at least it's not another person silently treating Philip like dirt". And isn't that fucked up? We're seriously rooting for the physical manifestation of his trauma to appear instead of the horrible, nasty world that will receive Philip once he's finally gotten rid of said trauma. People can be unforgivable, and even more so to those who have trouble voicing their pain out loud.

It's not an easy film to watch, but it should be recommended viewing, as amazingly it helps you get in touch with your humanity, feeling everything Philip feels, and slowly realizing that lanky spider with the human face is not the true horror, but what it represents.

Tomorrow: Spooky things happen to insufferable people in Ari Aster's Midsommar.