Push (aka Open House) had its world première at Sitges, 7th October 2024
Natalie Flores (Alicia Sanz) is haunted. At the beginning of Push (aka Open House), in 1993, she is sharing an intimate conversation in bed with Matt (David Alexander Flinn), where he asks her to leave her family in Barcelona and to come away home with him. “To America?” Natalie says, perhaps not quite ready to cut the cord, “I’ll think about it” – but then the light dims and flickers, and Matt turns into a bloody corpse in front of Natalie’s eyes, before she wakes with a start from this nightmare, now alone in bed.
Natalie’s beloved Matt was in fact recently killed in a car accident while they were eloping together. Eight months later, Natalie is trying to move on while still retaining a connection to her past with Matt. She has indeed moved to America, to Northern Michigan, while heavily pregnant with Matt’s child – and she is working as a realtor, trying to sell a beautiful 1890 property, “registered with the Historic Preservation Society”. The house has been on the market for years since the murder of its previous two occupants and some mysterious accidents, and is considered “unsellable”, even “cursed” – in a word, like Natalie herself, haunted. Yet Natalie is determined to find the old place a new owner, so that hopefully it can put its history behind it and accommodate a better future – as indeed she would like to do herself.
Still, the sign out front which states that the address for this ‘open house’ day is Craven Road, and that the firm employing Natalie is called Hitch & Wan, is also, by nominal association, a signifier of genre, suggestive of suspense and perhaps the supernatural within its open doors. Certainly the first and only Client (Raúl Castillo) who comes to view the property, and who arrives just as the sun is going down so that his face remains in shadow, is evidently something of a creep – and once Natalie finds herself stuck that night in the house, with the lights weirdly flickering and items like a music box or a gramophone seeming to start up on their own, it is unclear whether there is something paranormal going on, or the Client – who we know has returned to the house before Natalie herself realises it – is just messing with her before moving in to enact something more sinister. Either way, with its opening car accident, its pregnant heroine and its relentless intruder, Push is also conjuring Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury’s home invasion shocker Inside (À l’intérieur, 2007) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) – while its closing scenes in a hospital evoke Rick Rosenthal’s slasher sequel Halloween II (1981).
Once Push has gone full cat and mouse, Natalie’s waters break, requiring not only that she escape the clutches of the mad, murderous pursuer who plagues her like grief or even death itself, but that, mid-flight, she successfully deliver and keep alive her newborn (which is all, besides trauma-tinged memories, that she has left of Matt). Meanwhile, the tracking shots (the film’s dominant cinematographic mode, courtesy of DP Daniel Katz) which snake along with Natalie through dark hallways and narrow tunnels figure this young, terrified woman as herself on a journey of rebirth as she struggle to emerge into the light. So in the end, this film ambiguates, indeed triangulates, between a straight-up literal, a supernatural and a psychological reading, with Natalie’s hard-earned lessons in surviving alone and standing on her own two feet coming across as, at least in part, a metaphor of single motherhood. Collaborating once again as writers and directors (as they have done with The Boy Behind the Door, 2020 and The Djinn, 2021). David Charbonier and Justin Powell bring the thrill of the chase, while also confronting their parturient protagonist, as at the beginning, with a vivid nightmare of all her anxieties about impending maternity. Ultimately, she will not just cut, but bite, the cord, and find her own path, turning her back on history’s ghosts – even if a coda implies that they never fully go away.
strap: David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s ambiguous thriller sends a single mother-to-be down haunted corridors of grief and panic
© Anton Bitel
