Wounds

 

Name: Wounds

Directed By: Babak Anvari 

Subgenre: Supernatural Body Horror

Series: Spooktober 2020 entry #30; review #92

Review: Will (Armie Hammer) is a pretty unlikeable guy. He's in a relationship that's going nowhere because he spends nearly all of his time working (and loitering) at Rosie's Bar--a dingy, roach-infested hole, where he pines after his good friend, Alicia, in vain. Will's life takes a bit of a turn when he lets a gaggle of underaged college kids drink while he's on shift. That wouldn't be a problem in-and-of-itself, because Will's totally cool like that, but the teens end leaving their phone as they scamper away when Will's other beefcake Confederate patrons start aggressively hugging it out. Will, being a bit of a detective, gets access to the teen's phone and finds that they've been dabbling in a bit of the spooky scary occultism: specifically, The Translation of Wounds, a Gnostic text on the use of wounds as portals to extradimensional entities for power and profit. We then follow Will as he descends into a quasi-Lovecraftian madness while simultaneously proving (to himself and the audience) that his girlfriend was right: he is hollow, just a body--a mock person." Sounds pretty interesting, right? I mean, we've got a seedy bar and damaged protagonist blindly stumbling toward esoteric powers by way of body horror: what could go wrong? As a matter of fact, quite a bit. First and foremost, whether or not it was intentional, Will's character is kind of the worst, and he only gets progressively less sympathetic as the film limps towards its conclusion: a climax that isn't particularly well set up, either. The vast majority of the film is a character study on Will and his failing relationships with friends, lovers, his work, and himself and practically ignores the far more compelling body-horror-based rituals the film is based around. There are a mere handful of scenes spent building up to the film's story, lore, and climax, but they're disjointed and cast aside until the climax just sort of happens. There's no bite to it, no tension or foreshadowing or even sympathy for the characters as they just sort of exist on screen throughout the film. Wounds has such a compelling idea--with its inverted, flesh-based gnosis--but it does next to nothing with it until the end and, while it's admittedly a very neat scene, it ultimately doesn't matter when it happens, essentially, in a vacuum. While it brims with potential, Wounds is as ultimately as vacuous as its main character.

Overall Score: 2 out of 5 Chads feeling pretty wounded. Did Wounds scare you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

IMDB: Here

How to Watch: Wounds is available on these platforms.

Official Trailer