The Dæmon had its world première at FrightFest 2024, 23 Aug
To look out from land to sea is to have a glimpse, from the vantage of (temporarily) stable ground, at the ever-changing infinite beyond – or, put another way, to stare into the abyss, and to see what stares back. This is why the beach is a liminal, literally littoral space which affords a view of humanity’s bounds and existence’s edge. Elliot (Nick Searcy) has long lived in an isolated forest cabin overlooking one of Michigan’s Great Lakes – so great where he is that it is impossible to see across to the other side. All that staring and contemplating appears to have messed with his mind – for in the opening scene of David Michael Yohe and Matt Devino’s feature debut The Dæmon, as Elliot handwrites a raving letter in manic ALL CAPS, he has a hallucinatory vision of his left wrist throbbing and then bloodily exploding open. His forearm now restored to normality, he finishes and addresses the letter, then heads down to the shoreline at dusk, where he vanishes forever.
When Elliot’s estranged adult son Tom (Tyler Q. Rosen) gets the news of his father’s presumed death, and also receives that final letter assuring him that he was right all along and summoning him home, Tom heads back alone to the lakehouse that is the seat of his childhood trauma and also his inheritance, leaving behind his wife Kathy (Sara Fletcher) and breaking off all communications. Tom is obviously as damaged as his father, and seems headed down the same dark path, but those who head out to the lakehouse to bring him back from the brink have problems of their own. Kathy has long been unhappy in her marriage, and has strayed in moment(s) of weakness. Her brother Mark (Oscar Willis) buries his issues and anxieties in an unhealthily monomaniacal work schedule. And Mark’s wife Jess (Adriana Isabel), who emerges as the film’s protagonist, had a very troubled childhood of parental abuse and addiction, even if she was able to overcome this and now works helping others to get through their issues and to climb out of their dark holes. Still, Jess’ considerable empathy is accompanied by vulnerability, making her as susceptible to despair as anyone else.
All these characters have their personal demons, playing out as psychodrama in the film’s secluded lakeside setting which, as Mark points out, is “right out of a fucking slasher movie”. Yet the outmoded diphthong in the orthography of the film’s very title evokes something antiquated and primeval (primæval, even) also at work here, a Great Old One in the water that confronts those who encounter it with an overwhelming sense of failure, madness and emptiness within themselves, and lures them to their doom. So The Dæmon, shot with queasily mobile, often out-of-focus camerawork by DP J.R. Kraus to capture these characters’ disorientation and dejection, is simultaneously a study in the destructive power of depression, and a Lovecraftian creature feature – and it locates a point where both these seemingly contradictory readings can momentarily coexist, not unlike the place where solid ground is washed (and gradually eroded) by shifting water. Here individuals’ unresolved problems are exposed to cosmic horror, whose unfathomable depths both put these human affairs into perspective and render them harrowingly sublime.
strap: David Michael Yohe and Matt Devino’s debut feature both subjects and sublimates human psychological issues to Lovecraftian cosmic horror
© Anton Bitel
