The arrival of an African refugee upends a Bulgarian town in Ivaylo Hristov’s pointed tale of xenophobia.
Svetlana Yancheva and Michael Flemming in “Fear,” directed by Ivaylo Hristov.Credit...Film Movement
FearDirected by Ivaylo HristovDrama, Romance1h 40m
At the beginning of “Fear,” the dominant feeling is loneliness. In a coastal town in Bulgaria, shot in somber, expressive black and white, a middle-aged woman named Svetla [Svetlana Yancheva] leads a life that seems to shrink before our eyes. The school where she had been teaching shuts down, leaving her unemployed. A widow, she visits her husband’s grave, buys a few eggs on credit at a small grocery and engages in some desultory banter with a group of soldiers.
The soldiers work for the border patrol, and in due course they are alerted to the arrival of a group of migrants from Afghanistan. Dealing with refugees is a matter of dreary routine — displaced people pass through here frequently, hoping to make it to Germany — though a television news reporter tries to sensationalize the situation. She asks the unit commander [the wonderfully gruff Stoyan Bochev] leading questions about terrorists and drug smugglers and tells her viewers that the mood on the border is “tense.” Not really. The Afghans are tired and anxious. The locals seems to be afflicted by a mixture of grumpiness and resignation, torn between xenophobia and compassion.
Svetla experiences her own version of that struggle when she meets Bamba [Michael Flemming], a refugee from Mali. Their first encounter, while she is hunting rabbits in the forest not far from her house, has a surreal, almost cartoonish quality. She brandishes her shotgun like a Balkan Elmer Fudd. Bamba carefully sets down his suitcase and greets her in English, a language she doesn’t speak. Bewildered, she brings him home, putting him up first in a storage shed and then in her home.
It’s their friendship, inching toward romance, that inflames Svetla’s neighbors and activates the fear of the film’s title. The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection. At first the casual racism that peppers discussions about Svetla’s houseguest seems a matter of ignorance — ugly but not fully hateful. Hristov shows how words lead to actions, how jealousy and boredom blend with prejudice into a toxic brew. Someone throws a rock through Svetla’s window. Obscene graffiti appears in front of her house. A cluster of townspeople who might have been written off as bumpkins, drunkards and clowns coalesces into something like a lynch mob.
It’s scary. Not that Svetla is easily frightened. Yancheva gives off a strong Frances McDormand vibe — sarcastic, weary and impatient, her brusque manner shrouding a flinty decency. She’s the charismatic moral center of the film, much as McDormand was in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
“Fear” has a clearer, more detailed sense of place than that misguided movie. The faces feel as lived-in as the landscape of stubbled fields and boxy farmhouses and sprawling buildings that look either unfinished or half demolished. The caustic, fatalistic humor has as strong and distinctive a local flavor as the hot peppers and mushrooms that Svetla prepares for Bamba.
He is the catalyst for the film’s actions and reactions, but at the same time “Fear” doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Flemming has a wry, melancholy manner, and Bamba has a tragic back story, but he also functions more as a symbol than a fully formed character. His role is to awaken Svetla’s latent tenderness, to expose the intolerance of the people around her, and to help Hristov deliver a timely humanist message. But he remains a stranger in a story whose moral is that he shouldn’t be.
Deon Taylor is a fascinating figure, having forged his own path as a Black filmmaker in Hollywood, independently producing, and now distributing, his films. He also seems to be single-handedly keeping the mid-budget adult thriller alive [see: “The Intruder,” “Black and Blue,” “Traffik”]. He is rigorously focused on the craft of filmmaking, but he’s also obsessed with serving a multicultural audience that goes largely underserved by certain swaths of the industry. A global pandemic was certainly not going to derail his mission, and in his latest film, the horror flick “Fear,” Taylor takes the pandemic head-on, utilizing our collective anxieties as the grist for his storytelling mill.
“Fear” is a COVID movie, and a contagion film, and a haunted house story rolled into 100 feverishly stylized minutes. Joseph Sikora stars as horror novelist Rom, who takes his girlfriend, Bianca [Annie Ilonzeh], on a weekend getaway in Northern California as a reprieve from the pandemic lockdown. They arrive at the rustic Strawberry Lodge and as he’s about to propose, he blanches and falters, instead revealing that he’s invited their group of friends to celebrate Bianca’s birthday. They’ve got the lodge to themselves for the weekend, and seriously, don’t worry about the incredibly creepy innkeeper who leaves them a terrible bottle of wine, or the detailed stories that Rom tells about the miners who tortured and killed Indigenous women thought to be witches. Nope, nothing to worry about at all.
As the friends confess their phobias around the campfire as a means of catharsis, the story unfolds every which way. There’s the fear of contagion and paranoia that sets in, especially after a news report about a new variant, and as Lou [rapper T.I.] becomes increasingly ill. There’s the “Brujas of Fear” taking hold of their minds, as it becomes clear that Rom combined his book research with his weekend getaway. But are these friends letting their own fear infect each other, or is it the brujas, because that’s an important distinction.
“Fear” relies on craft for creating atmosphere and tension — the sickly greenish handheld cinematography by Christopher Duskin, the pounding score by Geoff Zanelli and the impeccable sound design. But the script, by Taylor and John Ferry, proves that it is possible to have too many ideas for just one film. Taylor’s other outings, like “The Intruder” and “Black and Blue,” were sleeker and more streamlined high-concept projects; in “Fear” it feels like he’s throwing everything at the wall — thematically and aesthetically — not to see if it sticks, but because he so enthusiastically wants to do it all. The overwrought screenplay, however, doesn’t get deep enough with the characters, or allow anything to breathe.
Deadliest of all, “Fear” is just not scary. The jump scares don’t land, the fears themselves are all a bit silly and it feels like Taylor is holding back for the majority of the run time. An hour in, the setup is still going on as Rom rummages through old photographs, putting together connections the audience has never been privy to. We’re both ahead of these characters, who are a little too dumb to root for [with the exception of Bianca, an excellent “final girl”], and playing catch-up at the same time. It doesn’t start ripping until the last few minutes, when the film should have been unleashed the entire time.
Ultimately, Taylor’s goal with “Fear” is to argue that we shouldn’t let fear rule our lives, but he doesn’t so much as show why that is rather than just repeat it. But set against a global pandemic, the film proves the opposite — in moderation, fear can be a good thing.