As the feature debut of writer-director Adrian Apanel, Horror Story pulls off a nice little magic trick. When fresh-faced finance graduate Tomek (Jakub Zajac), rents a room in a crumbling boarding house that’s straight out of the horror cinema interior decorating textbook, we expect things to go full-blown supernatural (or at least a sort of YouTube Polanski where the tenant is driven into complete paranoia by the seemingly sinister machinations of an eccentric group of cohabiters – with a soundtrack of arguments, moans, creaking pipes and unexplained bangs).
Indeed, not long into the film we meet the landlady – the grandmother of the witchy young woman that showed Tomek around the house, piquing his curiosity with her eroticised draining of a carton of orange juice – who comes into his room uninvited and regales him with wartime tales of resurrected vampiric soldiers and silver bullets. In reality, the titular Horror Story is rooted in the no-mans-land between the end of university and entry into the workforce, with Tomek trying to win back his ex-girlfriend by landing a good job with a bank or multinational. He goes through a series of humiliating interviews, rejected applications, training schemes and examinations – each offering a new negative judgement about his appearance, experience and character. Each of these is further sabotaged in some way by the continued breakdown of his living situation – his water is cut off, mobsters appear at the door and beat him up in a case of mistaken identity, his funds run out because dinner dates with his ex-girlfriend turn out to be just her attempt to get him involved in a Multi-Level Marketing scheme where loans are handed out to duplicitous housemates.
It’s all familiar ground, from the experience for those coming of age in the West in a time of permanent economic crisis, to the enforcement of the power of the privileged through the closed loops of opportunity and “freedom” (the modesty of Tomek’s upbringing and his overwhelming naivety are well signposted). What Tomek finds is the near-impossibility of entering a “system” that he can’t understand, made exclusive by obscure coded languages, paradoxical behaviours and psychological doublethink. The interviewers have relentlessly given their entire beings to this new method, this rewriting and rewiring, until their every gesture and line seems to carry some unknowable and inexplicable significance that demands an impossible answer.
One potential employer, apparently trying to goad Tomek, asks “If a penguin came into this room wearing a sombrero, what would he say?”. Tomek is expected to deny the possibility of the penguin’s speech as he was supposed to have dismissed the premise of the question, but there’s also the implication that being led into such a repetitive decision might itself be a failure to show critical thinking and leadership skills. This would essentially capture Tomek in a double bind where both answers can be both right and wrong, depending on the whims of the interviewer.
All that our hapless hero can apparently hope for is an opportunity to surrender to this new paradigm, become subsumed within its madness, and hopefully emerge as another of the new regime’s number who drinks coffee, practices tai-chi on his break outside the skyscraper, and dreams of violently machine-gunning his co-workers in a paintball game. It’s superficially successful and attractive lifestyle that’s otherwise unfit for life outside of the new downtown industrial zones, the towering glass and chrome forming a sealed, hermetic, and un-alienated universe.
It’s here that find what eventually de-powers what’s an otherwise amiable and realistic work – for all of its horror cinema-aping whimsy. It’s commonly thought that (dark) comedies aren’t good vehicles for making revolutionary or political statements, but we should also remember that the hierarchical structures of cinema were upended and destroyed in the films of the Marx Brothers and other “rebels”. Tati’s parodied commercialised man and the commercialised landscape, while Chaplin was anti-fascist and chaotically intervened in the logical functioning of the modern factory. Chris Morris’s hideous exaggerations of the semiotics of television news and documentary strands proved so acute and successful, the programme-makers could only respond by further exaggerating the packaging and presentation of their shows to try and exceed the limits of the parody, and realise that there’s a strong tradition of quite the opposite within the genre.
Where Horror Story falls short is in the conventionality of its outlook, and there’s a certain nihilism that cuts off any alternative possibilities at the source. The left-wing politics of one visitor to the boarding house are presented as impossibly out-dated (the individual carries a copy of Red Star from 1985 everywhere with him), and so intimidating that they’re met with violence when pushed. The film’s ending places Tomek in a modified and evolved version of the hell he’s discovered, but temper this by guaranteeing him certain comforts that soften the irony. Even Sonia – the granddaughter of the house’s owner – is ultimately revealed to be a not-so-mysterious, wannabe law graduate who picked up her spell-casting abilities while working in an occult bookshop.
Horror Story was begging for some wild break or outrageous rupture, but instead we (and Tomek), find the flattened, deadening normality of a world that asks us to be happy with a temporarily enlivening, a dash of colour in the blankness, a cushion on the bed of nails, a short drizzle in Death Valley. The system isn’t to blame (even though the symptoms have been diagnosed and the malady lingers on), and the classes below the vaunted middle that Tomek is trying to enter appear to be somewhat castigated. Jarek – the only real friend Tomek had in the house before the deepening of his relationship with Sonia – is finally revealed to be a petty swindler and an untrustworthy, perpetual fuck-up, whose life with his girlfriend Marta is mainly a series of very public domestic arguments.
This is an amusing and promising debut, and Apanel seems confident in his ability to find something strange and unique in his actors (Konrad Eleryk is particularly enjoyable as Jarek) Apanel display a sure hand when dealing with the latest manifestations of the grotesque. Unfortunately Horror Story feels somewhat half-cocked and unsure of the extent of its rebel spirit, seemingly willing to smirk when it could and should also snarl.
Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2024 takes place in venues across London 6 – 28 March
For further information and tickets: https://kinoteka.org.uk/
