Allegoria (2022)

So let me see if got this right. Let me see if I gleaned from this what I thought I did. Your art, craft, talent can conjure madness, perhaps this monster that will possibly or probably destroy you? Whether you are an actress with an opportunity to shine on stage with this acting teacher who spits and noises vitriolic techniques and challenges to his class to pull out of them a monster, descriptively quite hyperbolic, or a musician inspired by a bandmate to try out some new chords that would appear to actually draw out something quite menacing. Maybe you are a snobby painter quick to dismiss your girlfriend's desire to act, pretentiously weighing your work on canvas as more valuable than her passion to perform on stage...and after you challenge yourself in the mirror, asking who you are and if you are a fraud, the real art on canvas comes at your expense. Perhaps you are a novelist of gimmicky horror stories, eventually resting too comfortably on your laurels, resulting in the killer you seem to so easily dispatch, in the end taking you to task for his treatment...not just you but your girlfriend, too, the one responsible for his death in the novelist's latest work!

If I'm honest, 70 minutes with these characters was way too long. I generally try not to go down the route, because it is just an easy dismissal of any horror film. While I felt for Krsy Fox's Brody in how Marcus just casually and coldly disregards her call of excitement in a class with a famous stage acting teacher, most of the film's different stories had me wanting them to just get on with it and end. Like the story with a very pretty Scout as a serial killer who sculpts human victims and is clearly planning to add Adam Busch to her "collection" of polaroids...she makes him a "rock star". There is just this lengthy conversation that is awkward and cringe...I was like, "It's clear Adam is going to die, he's so OCD and struggling to impress her". I couldn't wait for her to just get it over with. The endless discussion of a  band regarding the kind of music that draws out much more than the usual...it does get Chang to play the piano, those chords seemingly possessing Fox and summoning a demon we see following behind Chang's Hope as she approaches Brody's bedroom door.

There is this conversation at the end where Hope is trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with Brody and why she's bringing up a prostitute attacked by a dog inspiring Van Gogh to cut off his ear for her. Brody seems "not herself today". I do think that possession scene on the bed and eventually off the bed taking over Brody (and emerges from her on stage the next day) and the figure behind Hope (and that damned "Paint Monster" that looks like it was some sort of manifestation from a dark soul similar to what Robert Anderson Wright was going on about in his raging stage monologue) are freaky and creepy. I'll give the film that. I do think that story about the writer being killed by his creation thought it was very clever, even if I felt I had seen something similar before in King's "Secret Window".