Movie Review – Anguish

Anguish (1987)
Written and directed by Bigas Luna

Sometimes, you discover an underrated movie so cleverly made you are shocked that more people aren’t talking about it. That’s how I felt thirty minutes into Anguish as the film made a huge revelation that completely turned the audience on their head. I won’t go into more detail in this introductory paragraph, but I will discuss spoilers below. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, I would recommend finding a way to do so. Streaming in the U.S. is only available via a Full Moon Features channel subscription on Amazon. I don’t know about the rest of their catalog, but this is well worth watching, and it has clearly inspired several contemporary horror directors.

John Pressman (Michael Lerner) works as an ophthalmologist’s assistant and lives under the controlling gaze of his mother, Alice (Zelda Rubinstein). Ironically, he’s progressively losing his ability to see, which his mother has developed a strange remedy for. She hypnotizes John into a trance, sends him out to murder people, and brings their eyes back home to her. However, as this story plays along, the camera pulls back. We realize John and his mother are part of “The Mommy,” a horror film showing at a movie theater. An anxious teenager in the audience, Patty implores her friend Linda to leave. But Linda’s enjoying the show. Strange effects happen to audience members as a result of things on screen. Yet the movie shifts its identity again and becomes something else, a story that resonates with our present far more than it did when this film was made.

Part of Anguish’s charm is its celebration of the experience of watching horror movies. Patty and other audience members are so overcome with fear at a certain point that they start to imagine a threat to the audience. This part of the film is a wonderful celebration of what draws people to the horror genre. That anxiousness, the tension, the falling over the edge into the abyss. We love horror because despite giving in to the magic of the movie, it’s not real; we are safe. Yet, the film challenges that when it morphs into its final form for the third act. A real-life danger comes to the theater, and suddenly, the chilling reality of the possible threats in our own lives emerges.

Because so much of Anguish surprises us, it can pull the audience into its spell. The extended hypnosis sequence might be one of the most harrowing sequences I’ve seen in a horror picture in a long time. Nothing particularly gory happens during this scene. Zelda Rubinstein is going through her spiel to get John in a trance. The scene goes on and on, hinting at something possibly more nefarious intended by the people who made “The Mommy.” We follow multiple audience members as the words being spoken seem to be putting them into a trance as well. Is one of them going to snap and do something? The movie forces us to float in this tension.

Anguish is a film Hitchcock would have loved with its recurring motifs of spirals and eyes. There’s John’s voyeurism as he stalks his prey, and the audience is sitting in the theater, peering into this other reality. Eventually, we have a witness to murders, signified by an eye peering through a crack in a bathroom stall door. The whole picture moves with a unique rhythm that lets us know the filmmaker understands where he’s going and that we’re just along for the ride. There’s also a cruelty here that only works in the horror genre. Characters squirm and twist in their seats; watching the movie feels like torture for them, yet they get a sick pleasure from it all.

Of all the films I’ve watched recently, this is one I would love to experience in a theater setting. The way Anguish plays with layers of reality has got to make that sort of viewing so exciting. The movie begins with a warning to not look too closely at anyone else in the theater because they may not be who or what you think. As we move back from our starting point, we wonder who that warning was meant for: The people watching “The Mommy” or those of us watching Anguish. The filmmaker is providing the audience with one of the ultimate film experiences, where you feel so immersed in the story you begin to question your own reality.

I would expect that Anguish would be part of the midnight movie rotation which includes Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead, El Topo, and Pink Flamingos. It’s strange to me that it hasn’t, and I have to chalk that up to a limited initial run, so most people just don’t know Anguish exists. Also, it may be tied up with weird licensing issues, so screening isn’t always feasible, especially for smaller art house theaters. Regardless, it is a film any lover of horror should seek out as soon as possible. It’s everything Wes Craven wanted Scream to be, but it pulls the audience into its twisty maze of ideas.