Intensity: 🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and Directed by BT Meza
Affection is an ambitious sci-fi horror production that explores memory loss and another big trope that would spoil the punchline if I gave it to you. The reliable Jessica Rothe plays Ellie, a woman who awakens in a bed next to a man she doesn’t recognize and a little girl who calls her mommy, whom she also does not recognize. The path to recovery proves highly problematic, as the more she learns about her condition, the harder it is for her to accept. There is something very wrong with her condition, and it has mad science undercurrents. If you buy the central premise, it’s a wild ride. It’s a punch line that makes or breaks the film for many viewers, and a subject of much debate. I found the twist intriguing, if a bit messy.
You won’t know it for about half the movie, but this movie is holding a very interesting hand. An underlying mystery feels pretty mundane at first. Why is Ellie’s memory so messed up? The prologue suggests that something very violent and nasty happened to her, and that she might be suffering from a concussion. Spoiler alert. It’s not a concussion. Her husband, Bruce, and daughter, Alice, work hard to reboot her memory, but she just can’t access any prior experiences.
Writer/director BT Meza plays this hand carefully. He teases the story. You can feel that despite the love and affection she receives, there is something uncanny, something just off-kilter about her whole experience. As a result, the movie spends a good portion of the first act and a half watching her struggle with recovery. It feels more like a Lifetime movie at times, and some hardened horror fans may feel the urge to check out during the opening frames. I would urge those people to hang in there, because the answers to the mystery are worth the price of admission.
Why are they so isolated? Sure, it’s idyllic, but they are far away from any neighbors. Do they have any friends? Are they the only survivors of something apocalyptic? Is this Earth? Perhaps she’s a hologram? Or, is she a robot? Is she an alien experiment? Maybe she’s just permanently and incurably crazy. All of the evidence feels so tangible, so why is her world so off? Ooooo! Mystery!
The Cast of Affection:
- Jessica Rothe plays Ellie Carter, a woman recovering from memory loss. She has memories, but they don’t match up with her situation. She has a name, but it isn’t Ellie. She is a stranger in her own home. Or is it her home? Oh, it’s all so confusing!
- Joseph Cross plays Bruce Carter, Ellie’s husband, who is trying to nurse her back to health. He patiently reminds her of their life together, but nothing sticks.
- Julianna Layne plays Alice Carter, their daughter. Alice is confused about why Mommy doesn’t remember things, but she accepts her, even if she is slow to accept who Alice is.
A Summary of Affection:
The movie begins at the site of a car crash. A woman lies in the middle of the road, dazed, and struggling to get to her feet. Her car is ditched, with the motor still running. Seizures rack her body, but she still manages to stagger to her feet. She turns, and another car barrels into her, sending her flying.
Next, we see the same woman lying in a comfortable bed. It’s morning. When she wakes up, she is startled and confused, not recognizing the man lying next to her. This is Ellie. She scrambles out of bed in a panic and flees down the staircase. The man, who claims to be her husband, Bruce, follows her down the stairs, trying to calm her down. Ellie lashes out in bewilderment, though the photographic evidence on the walls suggested that these two had a happy history together.
She believes her name is Sarah Thompson, a computer scientist from Maine. She retains some professional memories, but she doesn’t even recognize her own image in the mirror. Was it the car accident that robbed her of her memory? Curiously, she doesn’t appear to bear any scars from a terrible double accident. The adorable little girl enters the scene, wondering what’s wrong with Mommy. It’s Alice, and Bruce explains that Mommy has memory issues, and it’s up to them to help her remember their life together.
Bruce gives Ellie some videotapes of the family doing things together, and Alice keeps prompting Ellie to do their old favorite activities. But nothing rekindles any recollections. Eventually, Ellie surrenders to the situation and starts building new bonds with Bruce and Alice, but things still feel a bit off.
The Shift (non-spoiler)
Inconsistencies emerge. Some of the stories Alice tells her don’t match what she understands about their shared history. Also, both Alice and Ellie share a strange circular scar on their back. Alice isn’t sure what it’s from either.
As Ellie begins to accept her role in the family, something ominous alerts her to potential danger. During a game of hide-and-go-seek with Alice in the woods near their home, Ellie is surprised by a body trying to emerge from a body bag. Ellie finds Alice, and they run back to their farmhouse. She enlists Bruce to go check out the woods. He claims it’s much ado about nothing, but agrees to check it out. After returning without seeing anything, Ellie is distraught, adamant that what she saw was not a hallucination.
The distress triggers something deep in Ellie, and she begins to convulse with seizures. Bruce reacts oddly, retreating in shock and dismay. When he finally returns, he shoos Alice upstairs to her room, and then attacks Ellie as if to strangle the seizures out of her body. Ellie manages to break free, escapes into their nearby cornfield, and then encounters the BARN, which holds many dark and sinister secrets. Bad experiments have happened here… and saying anything more would spoil the movie.
Evaluation of Affection
A round of applause to Jessica Rothe. She is an actress who at this point in her career could do almost anything, and she has settled into the horror genre. This is a very different role than her most notable performance, as Tree Gelbman in the Happy Death Day movies, but still requires the same acting muscles. In Affection, Rothe conveyed a woman trapped in another woman’s body. A woman sewn with doubt but stubborn enough to try and make sense of things. She’s always been adept at portraying women under duress, and she does it in many ways in this outing.
Joseph Cross does a good job here too. He’s a flawed and sympathetic villain, whose behavior is deplorable and understandable at the same time. The movie hides his villainy for a long period, because his motivation genuinely comes from love. But it’s a misplaced love. Bruce is a tragic figure. Not as tragic as Ellie, but tragic nonetheless. Young Julianna Layne hits all the required emotional marks. She’s absolutely adorable, and performs a scene that is 100% heartbreaking. The cast does a fine job.
Fans of non-stop action and jump scares may pull out the “B” word: Boring. To that, I would say hang in there. It gets pretty action-packed after the big reveal. When the movie switches gears, the information comes hot and heavy, and it might take a re-watch to discover the subtleties of who (and what) Ellie is.
The Reveal
The twist, as I have suggested before, is pivotal and is well developed. However, reactions to the reveal have been mixed. Without revealing too much, Bruce is a desperate mad scientist. The audience response, from IMDb review posts, indicates a sharp divide in how successful it was. Some hate it, and I mean REALLY hate it. Others found it a genius response. Chalk a lot of this up to the pacing. The gonzo experiments executed a dramatic tonal shift from one type of movie to a completely different one.
The first act and a half is played very softly. The characters are all sympathetic, and apart from the violent prologue, it feels like a medical recovery drama/mystery. If you didn’t know this was a horror movie going in, the first two acts wouldn’t suggest it. When the switch gets flipped, it gears up and becomes pure sci-fi horror, with plenty of body horror and shocking violence. I bought the premise.
The whole affair also has a thread of tragedy, punctuated by a bittersweet concluding frame.
Concluding Thoughts
If you enjoy a horror mystery and can handle a bit of herky-jerky pacing, I think you will find a lot to enjoy about this movie. It certainly gets you thinking, right along with Ellie. Again, the options of what might be happening are myriad, and the film plays it tight to the vest until the reveal. After that, it goes Cronenberg, and that’s fun. For a small mid-major film, it packs some impressive makeup and special effects. An instruction manual is masterfully illustrated, and I would love to see how developed that prop is. Props for the props!
This is BT Mezas’ first IMDb credit, and if this is his very first film of any kind, it’s remarkable. This could be the building blocks of a fine career. Small steps. This movie isn’t breaking box office records, but it could still find an audience that remembers it. (Irony intended.)
This will be a big year for Jessica Rothe. She has three more horror films coming out this year. Imposters, an alien-invasion horror film, has drawn plaudits for her performance. It played at several festivals earlier this year, and the producers are still looking for a distributor. Lastly, she also has a serial-killer-on-a-river movie co-starring Jane Levy, River, coming out on September 10. Two weeks later, more spectacularly, the giant snake movie Beware Boiúna will be released, which feels like the proper giant snake movie we were deprived of with the Anaconda reboot. Can we give her the Scream Queen crown already?
Trigger warnings for Affection: Domestic and Child abuse. If these are non-starters for you, there are some very tough moments in this movie that you may want to avoid. Affection is unrated but is solidly within R-rated territory, for violence, gore, language, and sexual content.
Review By Eric Li
