his adaptation of Lovecraft's famous story scrupulously—for the most part—follows the labyrinthine, multipart narrative arc of the original tale. We open in what is presumably Arkham Asylum, where we meet the mentally tortured great-nephew of Professor George Gammell Angell of Brown University. (This character is played by Matt Foyer and referenced only as "The Man" in the cast credits; he's the first-person narrator in the original story.) The Man is entrusting his life's work to a fellow dubbed "The Listener" (John Bolen), with the injunction that the Listener must destroy all the papers for the good of mankind. We find out why in a set of nesting flashbacks, before finally returning to the asylum scene.
The first flashback concerns Professor Angell, now deceased (his great-nephew, we learn, is sorting through uncle's effects as his executor), who during the month of March 1925 was aiding an artist named Henry Wilcox (Chad Fifer). Wilcox was subject to a series of bizarre dreams of a strange city and its lurking inhabitant, named Cthulhu. Eventually the dreams ceased, when April rolled around. But this was not the first time Angell had heard of Cthulhu.
We now flash back to 1908, when a certain Inspector Legrasse (David Mersault) approached Professor Angell with a strange tale involving swamp denizens worshipping an idol of that name. (Within this flashback is another short one involving Eskimos who also worshipped Cthulhu.) We witness Legrasse apprehending the cultists in battle. These various incidents have led Professor Angell to postulate a worldwide and ancient cult of Cthulhu. But why the worshippers and the phenomena should erupt in March 1925 remains unknown.
Angell's nephew is left similarly baffled—until he comes across a reference to the fate of a fishing vessel named the Alert in the South Seas. This craft chanced upon an island where none should be, and decided to investigate. Only one sailor, a mate named Johansen (Patrick O'Day) survived. The Man tracks Johansen down, finds him deceased but recovers his journal. We see the events of the journal dramatized, as the crew of the Alert investigates the city of R'lyeh and comes face to face with the nightmare Elder God.
Returning full circle, we witness as a nurse comes to wheel The Man back to his padded cell, while The Listener ponders the famous line that opened HPL's text: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
The best HPL adaptation to date
The reverence, talent, skill, ingenuity, love, insight and craft of all hands associated with this film cannot be overstated. From the writer and director down through the scores of actors and right into the musical wizards (Troy Sterling Nies, Ben Holbrook, Nicholas Pavkovic and Chad Fifer), the costumer (Laura Brody), the makeup artist (Andra Carlson), the cinematographer (David Robertson) and the SFX honcho (Dan Novy), every creator has put in an immense amount of time and energy to bring off this low-budget coup. (The details of the making of the film are seen in a fascinating extra on the DVD, which also features stills, a trailer and some deleted footage.) What has resulted is akin to the wonders of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), but created almost totally without CGI.
It's hard to know what to praise first. But's let's talk about the meta-decision of how to film HPL's tale.
The creators behind this film adopted a brilliant conceit. The movie would be made as if it appeared the year after the story was published. (Would that some actual 1920s director and producer been so farsighted! Just think of the difference Hollywood success would have made in Lovecraft's poverty-stricken life.) So the movie is filmed in an utterly retro manner: B&W, no speech, just music and dialogue cards. (They've even gone so far as to cater to an international audience, with dialogue cards also viewable in 24 other languages, up to and including Welsh!) And the "Mythoscope" process that creates a sepia sheen is fantastic. All in all, as one customer-reviewer has said already online, this is as close to a shot-for-shot recreation of the probable film that never existed as one could imagine!
On other fronts, the acting is very capable, imbued with that special purposeful over-emoting that silent films demanded. The cinematography is evocative and expressionistic, as is the chiaroscuro lighting. The sets and models are meticulous and convincing. (Let's see you try to create a cyclopean "non-Euclidian" sunken city!) And the choice of stop-motion-action for Cthulhu gives the creature a kind of insectile herky-jerky realism that's utterly alien. The combination of all these virtues ensures that the viewer will lose himself from the first minutes in a different era, coming as close as possible to inhabiting the world of HPL's visions. This film makes you want to see a full-length feature—At the Mountains of Madness, perhaps?—from the same team.
As one of the film's creators mentions in the commentary, Lovecraft's core thesis about the fragility of the human mind is inherently non-cinematic. But it's to their credit that they decided to ignore this impossibility and plunge ahead. They've succeeded admirably where others have failed.
