The Asphyx is a tale of homemade guillotines, electric chairs, and gas chambers; its title “character,” as it were, is a life-sucking, death-giving creature that lets out unearthly wails of agony when trapped in a beam of phosphorescent light (all the better to move it to its own mini-coffin, sealing it up for good). The whole story is marked by excess: every family idyll only exists to flower into a dark bloom of misery, madness, and manslaughter. The incest—between a sister and her adopted brother—is positively wholesome in comparison to the rest of it.
It’s all gloriously Gothic, and the lavish color and loving restoration only help that. This is a world of hot, weird, and somewhat baroque passions.
But most of this is the setting for the horror and not the horror itself. It’s a gaudy stone in an ornate setting, full of its own sumptuous and over-the-top charm, but what stays with you is the red mark it leaves on your finger: the presence of its absences. Because underneath it all, The Asphyx is doing something that, if not all that original, is still quite chilling. It’s getting its true lingering terror not from its many deaths but from when they fail to come. The mad science is indeed quite mad, but its result—immortality—is worse, especially since the movie has the good sense to leave it mostly to implication. As it should: what is eternal life but having to fill in the blank over and over again? Nothing will ever come along to do it for you.
After a brief car crash in the 1970s, we cut back to the Victorian era, where Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens)—peer, psychic researcher, photography enthusiast, and all-around doomed gentleman—is happily ensconced in his own little family idyll. He’s getting married to the lovely Anna (Fiona Walker). Work is going well: in fact, while taking pictures of the dying, he may have recently photographed evidence of the soul leaving the body. There are ripples of repression—Hugo’s adopted son Giles (Roert Powell) and daughter-by-birth Christina (Jane Lapotaire) would like to marry but aren’t sure he’ll approve, and will firstborn son Clive (Ralph Arliss), really be happy to have his inheritance complicated by some new half-brothers and -sisters?—but when they all take to the river with a couple of punts and Hugo’s new camera, it’s a beautiful, sunny day, and there’s nothing they won’t do in these long, long lives of theirs.
Except there’s already a small, embedded snarl, one that it would be easy to miss: lovely though the day might be, it’s also cold. It’s March, too early to be out by the river. They’re all doing it for Hugo: to humor him and let him try out his new camera, which can capture moving images. Even on their best days, this family is marked by a kind of subservience—obedient without being entirely cheerful or convinced—to Hugo’s whims.
Hugo makes his Victorian home movies, tracing the journey of the punts down the river—and Anna and Clive fall into the water and drown.
The tragedy shatters Hugo, and when his footage reveals that the spectral figure of the “soul” is actually speeding towards the imperiled, not moving away from the dying, he works out that what he’s looking at is an asphyx, a desperate mythical creature that arrives to claim each life in its final moments. Everyone has their asphyx, always waiting in the wings for them, and if imminent death brings it close, Hugo soon works out, he can catch it and imprison it. With your asphyx safely locked away, you’re immortal. What better thing to embrace? What better gift to give your remaining family?
If you’ve seen any movies at all, you know the answer is “literally anything else,” but to be fair, Hugo has only just invented movies, so of course he hasn’t had time to see them. And this is not a cautious man: at his core, wracked by grief or not, he’s still the same guy who dragged his family out to a chilly riverside because he had to try out his new camera. He’ll drag them to worse places now, because, again, he has to pursue this realization at all costs.
The psychological pull of Giles and Christina’s uneasy, reluctant compliance with their father’s wishes is well-done, with Lapotaire playing Christian like any other dutiful daughter constrained by her social position into ignoring the fact that her father does not know best and with Powell letting Giles slowly fracture under the strain until he collapses into something harder and purer than before. It’s overwrought (see above, re: guillotines) but real, like the best Gothic family melodrama. All of this is taking a toll, and everyone pays—until only the immortal Hugo and the guinea pig that was his first, and only truly successful, subject are left.
Having that 1970s opening is one of the rare good uses of the flash forward, because we open with a policeman’s horror that someone involved is still alive, and that certainty—that “sometimes dead is better,” as Stephen King would say—sticks with us for the whole film. The Asphyx saves one of its knockout blows—like Tithonus, Hugo has immortal life but not immortal youth—for its final moments, but everything else accumulates steadily. He can live, but the family he sought to preserve was first ruined and then lost for good. There’s one great dramatic choice here, too: the seemingly irrevocable choice to continue immortality, long after it’s become bitter, because bitter is what he deserves. I have to wonder if, a century later, he regretted it. The burned instructions for freeing his asphyx and welcoming his death back into the world are another horror of absence, a hope destroyed.
And now, we return to the presence and to the numb certainty that there’s no way out for him. Not now, and not ever. There’s no end, so we can only stop in a freeze-frame—immorality as a moment in amber—and move on, leaving him there.
Locked in the family vault, the asphyx is still screaming.
The Asphyx is streaming on Tubi and Kanopy.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Department of
Conversation
Justified, Season Five, Episode Five, “Shot All To Hell”
“I been accused of a lot of things, inarticulate ain’t one of ‘em.”
So this is the one that, infamously, has Alan Tudyk show up with an amazing performance for exactly one episode; I’m not as bothered by that as everyone else because this show makes giving amazing roles to great actors for one episode its stock in trade. I will admit this is an incredible performance for him though, all intensity and humourless humour.
What’s more interesting to me is that this ends with a kind of button this show has never done, and it occurs to me that for the first time, I desperately want to find out what happens next episode. Most of the time, my emotional attachment to this show is enjoying the episode enormously and approaching it like a slice of life, where I dip in a warm pool once a week. This is different – Raylan has done something big and had it come back on him, and even better, he’s owning up to it in a semi-public way. I have no idea what’s going to happen and I want to find out. Normally that’s something I only feel during an episode.
Meanwhile, Boyd is continuing his attempt to get a specific stranglehold on his town – or, if you prefer, protecting it from outsiders. In the broader context of the show, this feels like an ‘explanation’ for Americans being so insular and borderline isolationist when it comes to their own communities; they can jump all over the Middle East but god help anyone who comes near their shitty small town. Or if you prefer the inside point of view – you can’t do anything about the economy or poverty, so you might as well make your shitty house as comfortable as possible. This is also why the characters obsess over legacy too – your life won’t be great, so you might as well make your kids’ life great.
At one point, Darryl pronounces ‘ideas’ with an ‘r’ near the end, which is how the American accent sounds from the outside.
Biggest Laugh: “Do you always wait in your car for an hour before you get your breakfast?”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Does anybody mind if I order?”
Top Ownage: “A small town doesn’t run on a twenty-four hour news cycle – a small town never forgets.”
Alan Tudyk with a SUB MACHINE GUN.
Their delight at the gun after killing him is so good.
Anyone who’s seen Dollhouse also knows how Tudyk is at going from nice idiot to psycho.
Hmm, I didn’t actually make a What did we watch? thread. So this is it.
The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins – The Carlock/Fey crew are the only people who seem to know how to use Anna Camp (or maybe just grasp that funny women should be funny), I wanted even more of her weird/diabolical chemistry with our short king Daniel Radcliffe. (“If we get married, you’ll never have to testify against me for stealing that cop’s gun!”) The whole episode is themed around exes and Brina’s ludicrously French ex Francois was also funny. The principal weakness of the show seems to be too many cast members; when three characters are spotlighted, the others tend to sit on the sidelines more. Not a bad issue to have otherwise.
Funny stuff/notes: “Do you need us to order you a car or something…?” “Oh no, I find things generally work out for me.” Anna Camp’s obviously fake sign language. Brina getting turned on by Reggie showing “all that ham” in front of Narcissa. “Is it the ex who signed you up for the army?! I love that guy!” It’s a good three-dimensional touch that Brina isn’t a gold digger and has her own ambitions.
Slow Horses, “From Upshott with Love”
River vs. cab driver is a great throughline for this episode, with him managing exactly one major win (correctly working out that the cabbie was lying to him and sticking with him to find that out) amidst several hilarious setbacks (having to stop mid-interrogation to hit up an ATM for more bribe money, getting immediately rumbled as not being who he says he is, and getting abandoned in Upshott). The “immediately rumbled” part is interesting as a comparison to the same happening to the much more capable Lamb, who deserves it less but can roll with it better. Lamb and River also have a good and oddly sincere moment in the car at the end where Lamb–with remarkable kindness on his part–only slightly takes the piss out of him for being overjoyed about getting to do some undercover work.
Meanwhile, Min and Louisa waffle between being cute and being in trouble, and Min solo also waffles between being cute and being in trouble, ending on “trouble,” as his hapless efforts to eke out some sort of win for the night–after he disappoints his girlfriend and doesn’t even get to meet up with his son–end with a gun in his ear.
The Lamb-Katinsky convo is great: two old, rumpled spies talking about the old days, with equal parts bitterness and weird nostalgia.
Taverner raises the possibility of Webb being sent to Slough House. I feel like I know this doesn’t happen, but it would rule. He’d hate it so much; it would be amazing.
Year of the Month update!
Next month, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1949.
April. 9th: Cori Domschot: I Was a Male War Bride
Apr. 13th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Apr. 16th: Cori Domschot: On the Town
Apr. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Confessions of a Mask
Apr. 27th: Tristan J. Nankervis: 1984
And in May, we’ll be opening the doors for your writing on any movies, albums, books, etc. from 2014!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Earth to Echo
TBD: Cori Domschot: Jack Ryan