"The Tall Man"

When I first saw The Tall Man, my reaction was one of scorn, ridicule and dismissal. I turned my nose up at its rural small-town America stereotypes, gaped in disbelief at its mind-boggling plot twists and by the time the end credits rolled and the entire societal vision behind these twists had fully unraveled, I sat flabbergasted, incredulous that a horror thriller could display such abysmal stupidity with such barefaced pretention.

Admittedly, the fact that I watched it in its French dub may have predisposed me to a negative reception; though I understand the necessity to keep French voice actors employed, I am a firm opponent of the practice. When you hear a foreign voice coming out of an actor’s mouth and speaking lines that are mere translated copies of their original words, you are effectively witnessing usurpation. Outside forces take possession of the dialogue and actors to replace half of each with somebody else’s words and performance, and the entire filmmaking process’s artifice is revealed for all to see.

Perhaps it is a petty reason to be biased against a movie, but its negative influence on my viewing experience has been fairly consistent. So watching The Tall Man again, in its original English, proved a doubly rewarding experience: It made me appreciate both writer/director Pascal Laugier’s games with his audience’s unconscious base assumptions in the film’s first act, as well as Jessica Biel’s genuinely committed central performance. Its dramatic twists and genre swerves, rather than the gratuitous rug-pulling that they initially seemed to be, emerge on second viewing as conscientiously-planned, diabolical calculations that make us re-evaluate previous scenes. And yet, while their structure and raison d’être is clearer to me, they still do not quite gel together.

At first, it seems to be a straightforward mystery chiller, with the titular boogeyman figure being blamed for a wave of child abductions in a small town that’s been in depression ever since the main source of its economy – its mine – shut down. Widowed nurse Julia Denning (Jessica Biel) – introduced as the town’s maternal figure by her delivery of a young woman’s baby – seems, like most horror protagonists, initially skeptical until her own son is suddenly kidnapped by a hooded black figure, leading to extended chase and exploration scenes that look directly Xeroxed from Silent Hill games and only stop to reveal the first of many unexpected twists.

This is one of the primary flaws that prevent The Tall Man from being the engrossing, thought-provoking Fincheresque thriller it aspires to be. While it sets up later revelations with subtle dexterity, the first half of the film does not build its world and characters sufficiently enough to make these revelations truly matter. The townspeople remain mostly one-dimensional stereotypes and, with the notable exception of seemingly insane grieving mother Mrs. Johnson (Colleen Wheeler), not enough time is spent with them to make them seem anything more than puppets used to advance the plot at Laugier’s convenience. The protracted sequence in which Julia runs after the Tall Man, fights him, escapes him and runs after him again lacks any real tension or fear (for all the hushed whispers and drawings he inspires, a guy wearing a black hood, jacket and trousers looks no scarier than your average burglar) and the earlier mother-son bonding moments are too saccharine to be genuinely convincing. Perhaps Laugier deliberately wrote and directed these scenes to be trite and artificial as an early indicator that the boy is not in fact Julia’s son, but their failure to invite surreptitious questioning or involve us in their relationship nips any such intent in the bud.

Once the first twist unmasks its characters’ true identities, the change in tone and plot is so jarring that the aforementioned earlier fight-and-flight scenes during which Jessica Biel repeatedly falls over and picks herself up, rather than gain rewatch value, are exposed as misleading padding. Rather than marvel at how well Laugier has fooled us, we feel annoyance at having had our time wasted.

The new developments revealing Julia as the true mastermind behind the wave of kidnappings and the hooded figure as the boy’s true biological mother are similarly botched by Laugier’s misjudged reuse of a storytelling technique from his polarizing 2008 shocker Martyrs. Not content with shedding a whole new light on what he has shown the viewer up to this point, he needs to make it the result of a large-scale conspiracy working for a supposedly grand and noble cause, and then spend the entire third act demonstrating how and why it operates. In the case of Martyrs, the torture endured by one of the film’s heroines was overseen by a secret cult convinced that women pushed to the very limits of pain could achieve a state of “martyrdom” that would grant them a window into what happens after death. Like Whiplash, Martyrs walked a thin line between understanding and outright endorsing the idea of achieving greatness through pain and debasement, and its morally ambiguous ending – helped by the unexpected compassion that permeated the entire film – kept it from the precipice of pretension.

This narrative translates very poorly here: Unlike Martyrs, whose impeccably-structured pacing and dual protagonists – one damaged, the other ostensibly sane – offered alternating points of view and interpretations from the get-go, The Tall Man spends the vast majority of its running time fully endorsing Julia’s perspective and never allowing any doubt as to its validity. So when, in what is admittedly Jessica Biel’s acting highlight, she justifies her actions by blaming the global economic system for creating conditions that make poor children’s happiness impossible unless they are whisked away to “happier” (i. e. wealthier, higher-class) family units, everything we have seen up until this point backs her up and encourages us to agree with her.

In effect, the film paints poor lower-class country folk at best as helpless souls who can’t provide their children with basic needs, at worst as ignorant abusive yokels who don’t deserve kids. Either way, Julia is telling us, kids should grow up in comfortable urban households rather than in the sticks. This spectacularly idiotic classism is fully supported by the townsfolk’s paper-thin characterization and only feebly challenged at the end, where mute teenager Jenny (Jodelle Ferland), having discovered Julia’s secret before her arrest, runs away from her abusive household into the arms of the Tall Man (who turns out to be Julia’s not-dead-after-all husband) and eventually a new, wealthy city family, only to turn directly to the audience at the last minute for reassurance that her decision was the right one. But it’s a weak, fallacious attempt at nuance that comes far too late to mean anything. Unlike the other children, none of whom seemed older than ten, Jenny made her own choice.

Inevitably, this twist will recall Ben Affleck’s far superior 2007 feature-length debut Gone Baby Gone – still his best film to date – in which a little girl’s kidnapping turned out to have been orchestrated by elements within the local police department out of concern for her welfare, as her alcoholic, irresponsible single mother was deemed unfit to care for her. While Gone Baby Gone raised similarly uncomfortable class issues, it took more time to flesh out its characters and balance its perspective, so as to make its conclusion truly resonate within the audience.

It’s a crying shame because Pascal Laugier’s command of atmosphere and actors is unquestionable, as is his ability to craft Russian Dolls-like screenplays whose twists have a greater purpose beyond shock and awe. What he seems to lack is a sense of proportion between his lofty philosophical ambitions and his ability to weave them seamlessly in his story. One might recommend that his next film preoccupy itself more with shared human experience – the real source of Martyrs’ poignancy – than with Big Ideas.