'Blackout' review: Fessenden's werewolf movie is an intelligent horror

Charley (Alex Hurt), hard-drinking artist and traveling contractor, hasn't been much of a morning person lately. Remembering the events of the previous night is a problem for him. But since Charley is the protagonist of a Larry Fessenden horror film, “Blackout,” he too has woken up half naked in the woods and some of the stains on his torn clothes are clearly blood.

Already a sensitive guy, bitterly consumed by the economic, environmental and social direction of his small town, Charley is also processing his father's death, as well as dealing with the fact that he may be a furry creature with a nocturnal schedule. . body count. It's the kind of dilemma that doesn't exactly help alleviate the feeling of helplessness.

Fessenden has long been a mainstay of cult horror as a producer, director, writer and actor. He's no stranger to the alchemy of confusing terror and human anguish, with presuppositions that favor uneven immediacy over slippery, empty shocks. The engaging and thoughtful “Blackout” continues an ongoing project to put a modern spin on legendary figures of horror cinema, from using vampires to explore urban love addiction (“Habit”) to reworking the myth of Frankenstein Like a PTSD Saga (2019). “Depraved”).

With his new film, set in quiet upstate New York, Fessenden finds himself in the werewolf territory that Lon Chaney Jr. first prowled in 1941's “The Wolfman” and which is expressed here as a bestial torment that affects both its main character and a divided America. Charley may be the only character who undergoes a physical conversion every night when there's a full moon, but in a town like Talbot Falls (the last name of Chaney's former character), triggering the dangerously unpleasant identification of a depressed community isn't difficult, especially when everyone is scared by a sudden series of mysterious murders (one of which opens the film when a POV shot of a monster approaches a couple in a field having sex).

A rapacious real estate developer named Hammond (Marshall Bell), whose valuable tourism project is suddenly in jeopardy, channels local suspicions toward a migrant contractor named Miguel (Rigo Garay), even though there is no evidence linking him to the murders. Charley, whose doting ex-girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is Hammond's daughter, would love nothing more than to expose him and save the imperiled soul of his beloved liberal village. But there's the uncomfortable hypocrisy of his own nocturnal mayhem to contend with, which is where Fessenden's update (more garrulous than gory, and still plenty gory) forges its own moral gravitas about the monsters in all of us.

Externally, Fessenden brings some old-fashioned verve to Charley's handful of transformations: punchy editing, harsh sound, strange practical effects, and Hurt's physical, drunken abandon beneath flashy mask work. In all of his other scenes, the actor is a compassionately doomed presence, as if he were on a farewell trip to his normal self as he alternates between righteousness and guilt. In a disturbingly sad and close touch, Charley's late lawyer father, seen in photographs among his personal effects, is the actor's late father, William Hurt. In Fessenden's handling, he almost counts as a ghostly cameo.

Not everything about the DIY aura of “Blackout” is effective, and the pacing can slow as Fessenden's script takes on too much meat (Charley's anguished painting doesn't work) and too many characters, even if some of them are professionals. . colleagues of independent renown: James Le Gros, Barbara Crampton, Kevin Corrigan, John Speredakos and Joe Swanberg. However, the idiosyncratic earnestness of a seasoned horror master playing with the classics remains a hearty midnight snack.