The Canal

So...I'm not crazy about The Canal. I really want to stick to writing about movies I like as much as I can, even if I have issues with them, because, well, I don't want to be a dick. Every movie is someone's favorite movie and I'd never want to try to talk someone out of loving something. Also, I'm not even remotely a critic and I feel no responsibility to write about anything unless I want to. So there.

But The Canal a) does a a lot right and b) it's faults are interesting enough to warrant a discussion. Look, the movie is crazy well directed. And well acted. The issues are all in the script, and I think they mostly center around lack of characterization. The movie is supposed to be about David's (Rupert Evans) descent into madness after the death of his cheating wife, maybe or maybe not prompted by a ghost. But we never really see him act, you know, happy or like a well-adjusted human being, so it doesn't feel like that much of a descent.

I mean, the only thing we know about him is that he likes Cat People. We don't even know for sure which Cat People (though context clues point to the Val Lewton one. If you're interested). His entire character is: a grieving husband who might be going crazy. I don't know, I guess it's kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I have a hard time caring when a character's entire personality seems to exist solely for the story and everything we know them relates to plot. Does that makes sense? I need to feel like a character exists outside of the frame to get fully invested.

There's a moment fairly early on when David flings a folder of crime scene photographs at the door to his bedroom, not realizing that the live-in nanny he's hired to take care of his son is standing there. He hits her with the photos AND HE DOESN'T APOLOGIZE. I mean, okay, I get it, he's supposed to be totally out of it and consumed by grief, but if he's that weird that early on, it doesn't feel like there's a huge journey to go on.

The other thing that bugged me, the one that completely lost me, is really spoiler-y. So skip the next paragraph if you haven't seen the movie.

About, I don't know, maybe a week or two after the police dredge Claire's (Antonia Campbell Hughes) body from the canal, the detective shows up again and says that they found a hammer in the canal with David's fingerprints on it. I immediately stopped paying attention to the story because I was totally consumed with trying to figure out how/why they found this hammer. Did they keep dredging the canal? For, like, a week? For...fun? Maybe they were paid up on the dredger rental for another week, so why the hell not. And, okay, fine, but Claire's body showed no bruising, no signs of a struggle, much less evidence of being hit with a hammer. So...the hammer is weird. Suspicious, even. But I have no idea how it would constitute a reason to re-open the case. Does the detective just have nothing better to do? And that's what I was thinking about for the following ten minutes or so.



Like I said, the movie is incredibly well directed and some of the scary scenes are scary as shit. It just bums me out, because I feel like it wouldn't have taken that much work to make a much stronger movie – mostly, just give us some more first act. Let us see David and Claire happy, or at least happier, so we have a sense of what's been lost. Let David have interests and friends (more than one) so that his obsession is consuming his life rather than just seemingly taking up residence as the only thing in a fairly empty existence. Ugh. Sorry. I'm totally being a dick, which is exactly what I don't want to be. It just bums me out when a movie is ALMOST one of my favorites, but the shortcomings are so sever and specific that they ruin the whole damn thing for me instead. I don't know. Maybe you'll love it; plenty of people do!