Lois Cairns, former film critic and film history teacher, lives with her husband Simon and her son Clark in Toronto – a life marked by the search for a vocation, marked by depression, insomnia, intense self-doubts and lack of faith in her abilities as a mother to her autistic child. Catching the glimpse of a woman figure in an experimental movie made by her nemesis Wrob Barney leads her to the first female filmmaker of Canada, Iris Whitcomb – a lead she gladly follows. She actualy receives a funding to research Whitcomb's dubious history in Ontario and Europe, her fanatically religious father who destroyed their family and her connection to a certain Wendish deity called Lady Midday. She can even re-hire her former assistant Safie Hewsen, who, being of Armenian - Yezidi origin, brings along her own beliefs and deities. As their research advances, Lois starts experiencing seizures and catches whiff of supernatural phenomena surrounding her and especially her son. Not long after does she become aware of undeniable parallels between her life and that of Mrs. Whitcomb, and these parallels sow the seeds of a fear she and her family might end up as the Whitcombs did: ruined.
I've always been prickly, and teaching brought that out in me extra hard, especially when people got really stupid.
Problem main character. If we could award literary characters according to their unlikability, Lois would be Queen. Or Goddess. And wouldn't care. And she still would be bickering, dissecting the point of such an award, smartassing about the historical meaning and development of queendom and godhood in the Western world because we're surely all idiots and need her to explain. Fueled by her self-diagnosed neurodivergence and her depressive state, relying on her almost savant-level knowledge of anything film and mythology, she explains everything to bits and pieces, clogging the plot with unnecessarily wordy background descriptions, information on film history, commentaries, explanations. She drowns any concept remotely interesting by showering us with info-dumps.
Take for instance, the passage she is visited by a night terror. As soon as the word "night terror" is pronounced, the author jumps to a new paragraph explaining what a night terror is historically, why it is different than a nightmare and its interpretations, and then finally going on to describe what happens in the middle of the night. Any suspense that was potentially built up until that point completely ruined.
These passages, some of which admittedly genuinely, subjectively interesting and even useful for creating an atmosphere and solidifying Lois' disposition, unfortunately make up the bigger part of the book and hindered the flow for me. Even though you can sometimes kind of see where she is coming from, especially later in the story, it was plain exhausting and frustrating for me to be lead through this book by someone of Lois' nature, I feel tired having finished this. Not even the remaining three easy-going, one-sided and extremely simple side characters can ease that exhaustion – Lois' selfless husband Simon, her glorified assistant Safie and her saint-like mother Lee are all there to accommodate her and nothing else.
[...]but I'd never been able to resist a new myth, creation or otherwise.
No doubt that the weaving of different “mythologies” and their interaction is brilliantly done. Obviously it is kind of the point of folk horror to take these elements and use them for the consumption of horror related entertainment. I am not a religious person at all, on the contrary, I'm actually pretty godless, but I still feel a slight uneasiness when authors use different beliefs in their fiction for this purpose, to make their stories more interesting. The Yezidi elements used here leave the same bad taste in my mouth. Not to mention minor incongruities while doing so – like speaking of the lack of “human” qualities of a certain Yezidi figure, it being beyond good and evil, but describing this figure as “he” and “him” all the while, giving it a definite human quality of gender.
Contrary to what your impression may be, I am not ranting here at all. I love Gemma Files and I know her writing and that is why I consciously decided to read Experimental Film. There are absolutely brilliant bits here, which unfortunately get lost because focus is so much on a very peculiar main character; the film theory which is Files' home run, some genuinely scary moments, an insanely interesting concept and (arguably) pioneering neurodivergent main characters. It surely has a haunting quality. You just need to invest some time to get through and appreciate what you like in it.
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