The gender found footage it has become a considerable plot risk. Y Hex, from director Kevin Ko and another of Netflix’s weekend movies, cuts through it through sheer skill, a well-constructed script, and a brilliant atmosphere. The film, which joins the long tradition that began The Blair Witch Project in 99 is a reinvention of the split reality. Also, of that naturist and apparently ordinary condition, which hides the supernatural in the midst of common settings. But while other premises fail to explore the idea of audiovisual material that must be reinterpreted as terrifying, Hex triumphs. And it does so from the eloquent connotation that fear is something more than what can be seen.
That sense of the absurd and the confused makes Hex in an interesting narrative experiment that Ko leads to a good level. Especially when building the premise of fear and what is hidden in the supernatural from the inaccurate. From the conception of a curse as terror turned into something tangible, to the dimension of the invisible sustained in the apparent. Hex goes to considerable lengths to depart from the usual horror movie clichés. At the same time, he ponders how technology reacts to unexplained forces., a topic that the film reinvents with a good pulse. In fact, several of its most interesting scenes take place in the midst of how the sense of hypercommunication can be a tool of the terrifying.
Hex
Hex, new Netflix movie, bets on a type of stylized and complex terror of enormous effectiveness. It’s not just the story of a supernatural event. It is also a journey through the possibility that horror is something more than the obvious. Between both things, the film ponders over the codes of the genre from an ambiguous, twisted and manipulative morality. Also, through the condition of their characters. Each of them are victims of an invisible evil that manifests itself in disturbing and sinister ways. A look at horror, which spreads through everyday life like an infectious entity with its own weight.
The point was elegantly deepened in Host by Rob Savage. But the 2020 film failed to put together the pieces of a dark puzzle. On the contrary, Ko manages to build an interesting version on a new dimension of horror, exclusively contemporary. The wide range of audiovisual resources today, become windows into the paranormal. So the terrifying manifests itself in gloomy footage, nightmare images played on screens and mobile phones. As it advances, Hex creates an interconnected web of ideas about the antiquity of evil and how a shadowy entity can take on sophisticated forms. By the end of its first installment, the Netflix film made two things clear. This is not your usual horror movie. And without a doubt, she is one who plays with habitual pieces with an intelligence that exceeds the average.
When darkness cries out from the depths of technology
Li Ronan (Tsai Hsuan-yen) tries to protect her daughter Dodo (Huang Sin-ting) from an invisible doom. She does it by all the means at her disposal and also, driven by an increasingly cruel expeditious guilt. The Netflix film uses the usual troubled mother trope to ask some questions about ambition, greed, and failure. And it is perhaps this unexpected background that gives Hex of a sophisticated second reading.
As the curse progresses — and manifests itself as a shadowy presence around mother and daughter — the atmosphere of the film becomes unbreathable. Especially when the idea of death and its consequences becomes a point of debate. Is murder the ultimate intention of an invisible, suffocating and dangerous sentence? In fact, the film raises the unsettling caveat, that killing is not the worst thing a supernatural conviction can do. With a sick perception of transcendence, the film investigates the possibility that paranormal cruelty encompasses other layers of existence.
And that caveat allows Hex show their best weapons and resort to the narration of terror as an event on the edge of everyday life. As the consequences of the curse that haunts Dodo and his mother become more intricate, the film plays with ambiguity. What is real and what is fictional in the hundreds of images repeated on phones, computer screens and security cameras? Is dying from the curse a true liberation?
Hex: in the shadows awaits the inexplicable
The Netflix movie doesn’t make that clear right away. And in fact, one of the highest points of Hex is not to lavish excessive explanations. The argument is based on his ability to terrify from the mystery and the director strengthens the idea of the inexplicable in the visual. Shadowed corridors plunged into silence broken by unclassifiable sounds. Apparently casual terrifying images that are woven into slow variations of reality. Hex it is a careful construction of the substance of terror as more than an abstract idea.
And indeed, the threat in Hex It goes through the very human need to fix mistakes and vindicate questionable decisions. Little by little, the script makes it clear thatevery act, even those with the best of intentions, has a consequence. That dying is not the worst thing that can happen and that what is hidden in the shadows can be worse than we imagine. It is this condition of the inexplicable that gives the film its curious personality. In the end, also his profound version of the terrifying that hides in everyday reality. A major triumph in a genre worn out by the — misuse — of its resources.