Netflix has one of the largest media libraries in the world. Figures are a bit hard to come by, and the company’s offerings change almost daily—but most estimate that the company has many thousands of movies and TV shows available to stream.
Having a library like that at your fingertips is pretty great—but it’s also a little daunting. As a Netflix subscriber, I’ve spent many an evening flipping through titles I’ve never heard of, wondering if any of it might be worth my time, only to ultimately settle for a familiar movie, or yet another episode of 30 Rock.
Not a bad strategy, I guess. But sometimes I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing something great.
That’s why we’re starting a series we’re calling Backwoods Netflix, where we take a look at Netflix titles that are just outside the mainstream, stuff you might not find unless you really went looking.
For our first Backwoods Netflix review, I’m taking a look at Resolution, a sly meta-horror from co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.
The film centers around two friends: Mike, a successful family man, and Chris, a drug addict who’s holed up in the woods to get high and play with guns. When Mike gets a video of Chris’s dangerous antics, he leaves his wife and heads for the shack where Chris is squatting to ask him to go to rehab. When Chris refuses, Mike handcuffs him to the wall and tells him that whether he likes it or not, he’s getting clean.
This image—a man shackled to the wall of a sparse cabin in the woods—is the one that Netflix uses to advertise the film. It’s a sly bit of misdirection, suggesting torture porn in the vein of Saw or Hostel, when the movie is anything but. And it’s not the last bit of misdirection the filmmakers engage in. The question of what kind of story this is persists through the entire film—and not to Resolution‘s detriment.
On the contrary: forcing the audience to ask that question, and ask themselves what kind of story they’d like it to be, is precisely the point.
Resolution contains all the necessary elements for a truly scary horror film—and it is, indeed, quite scary at times. There’s a man handcuffed to the wall, a cache of guns under the house, a mental hospital up the street, and the menacing owner of the house where Chris and Mike are squatting, who warns them that “these hills are littered with the bones of dead addicts.”
There’s also the stories Mike keeps finding in the woods: cave paintings, books, slides, film strips, and video tapes. Each tells a scary story ending in death and suffering. But who—or what—is leaving these stories for Mike to find? And what happened to the French ethnographers, folklore experts, who disappeared in these woods years ago?
At the same time, there are hints that perhaps this isn’t a horror story at all. The pace is that of a relaxed indie movie, and there are none of the cheap scares that one might expect from a horror flick—no killers or ghosts jumping out from behind walls.
There are hints that at its heart, this film is simply about two friends, about their history together, about Chris’s addiction and Mike’s guilt. Mike’s method of getting Chris clean, unorthodox though it may be, seems to be working. As the days wear on, it becomes clear that the two friends are, perhaps, working their way to some sort of resolution, some sort of catharsis.
Horror story or friendship story? A film ending with violence and death, or emotional growth for Mike and Chris? Which is Resolution? And which would we, the audience, rather watch?
Resolution slyly forces us to consider these questions, and by extension a host of others: What is appealing about horror movies? Why do we like to be scared? Why do we demand violence? Why do we need blood?
It’s a bit like Cabin in the Woods—a movie that, though clever and well-constructed, was a little too self-aware for my taste. Resolution similarly leads its audience to interrogate the horror genre, without losing its way in a morass of winking meta references.
At a brisk 93 minutes, Resolution is definitely worth watching. It’s not your typical horror movie, so adjust your expectations accordingly. What it is might be even better: thought-provoking, mind-bending, fascinating in every frame—and yes, pretty damn creepy.
