Slapface uses folk horror tropes in the service of an anti-bullying fable, also examining themes of grief, trauma, and poverty in a bleak tale made dense as mercury by pain, loss, and loneliness. Its multi-purpose allegory doesn’t always convince, but its grim back woods atmosphere and despondent tone certainly do.
Brothers Tom (Mike Manning) and Lucas (August Maturo) are both grieving the deaths of their parents, years earlier in a car wreck that both boys survived. Tight-lipped about their feelings, they vent their feelings through games of ‘Slapface’, taking turns to strike each other with increasing force. Tom, the elder of the two, also drowns his sorrow. Pre-teen Lucas, inspired by local legend, performs a ritual which summons the Virago Witch (Lukas Hassel), who becomes a vengeful mother figure to the tormented boy.
Jeremiah Kipp (expanding on an earlier short film of the same name) grounds his supernatural tale in a soupy mire of American gothic atmosphere and real-world rural decay. Even the spooky abandoned building in which Lucas meets the witch is barely any more run-down than the brothers’ house. The colour palette is suitably muted, apt for both Lucas’ mundane existence, and the shadowy liminal space in which the witch goes about her gruesome business. And this walking hook-nosed metaphor is both a strength and a weakness.
A monstrous figure is an effective conduit for examining grief, and in this way Slapface feels like a more adult-orientated version of A Monster Calls or I Kill Giants. But the ambiguity in the actual existence of the creatures benefit those films, as their protagonists’ interactions with the supernatural can be understood as manifestations of their inner struggle. Here, the same implication fails. Kipp wants to keep the existence of the Virago Witch mysterious, but she simply inflicts too much violence for us to be convinced that it’s all in Lucas’ head. It’s therefore a little too much to swallow that Lucas is automatically blamed for that violence.
Where Slapface certainly does work is in the ways it depicts that love and abuse are practically interchangeable for poor Lucas. In the titular game, it’s made clear just how hard the adult Tom is striking his brother. And his first interaction with the witch is a clinch that could be a maternal hug or a rib-splintering crush. Even his furtive relationship with Moriah (Mirabelle Lee) springs from his bullying at the hands of her friends (twin sisters; another nice nod to classic fairy tales). And like all victims of bullies, Moriah is only affectionate to Lucas in secret. When in company of the sisters, she’s clearly happy their violent attentions are elsewhere.
Young August Maturo is hugely impressive in a difficult, multi-faceted role. That Lucas doesn’t convince as being capable of the carnage for which he’s blamed is in no way down to flaws in the performance. For any doubts about its success as allegory, Slapface is thoroughly convincing in its depiction of trauma and loneliness. It would be no surprise for a young boy’s retreat into fantasy to be of the grimmest possible sort.
Available on Shudder Thu 3 Feb 2022