Compound Fracture (2014)

Director: Anthony J. Rickert-Epstein
Writers: Renae Geerlings and Tyler Mane
Stars: Tyler Mane, Muse Watson, Derek Mears, Leslie Easterbrook, Renae Geerlings, Daniel Roebuck, Todd Farmer, Jelly Howie, Susan Angelo and Alex Saxon

Index: Make It a Double.

This horror movie may open in slow motion and black and white but it quickly finds colour and regular speed and all artsy pretentions are ditched. It’s a confined movie, though, almost all of it unfolding within the compound that Gary Wolffsen calls home, so claustrophobia is a key focus, especially given so many cameras monitoring the place, inside and out.

It turns into a good opportunity for Derek Mears, who plays a particularly nasty monster of a villain, and Tyler Mane, another big scary dude, best known for playing Michael Myers in the Rob Zombie Halloween movies, as well as Sabretooth in X-Men. That’s surely one reason why both chose it for their Doubles—yes, I will be covering it again in Make It a Double Vol. 4—but it’s a Mane Entertainment film too, so it’s also Mane’s film as producer and co-writer; he wrote it with his wife, Renae Geerlings, who’s also his screen fiancée in the film.

As we begin, he’s coming home after twenty years away and it’s made pretty clear that you can’t walk away from being a Wolffsen like he attempted to do. He did walk away from being a Junior though: he was Garrison Wolffsen, Jr., but is now going by Michael, his middle name. His fiancée Juliette didn’t know and that may be as telling as the initial change.

Her first surprise is the massive mechanical gate that controls the way into the compound, along with those omnipresent cameras. His is a string of weird things hanging up around the place: not just decorative chimes, but totems, dreamcatchers and rocks on coloured ropes. There’s a salt line around the house and Gary sets a coffee line as they go in. He also hands a pair of amulets to them as welcome home gifts but it’s clear that that’s not what they are. He is scared of someone or something and these are all protections. And that’s before we catch sight of all the esoteric symbols scrawled onto every surface in Gary’s panic room.

It’s a great setup for a movie because we’re not sure who or what to believe from the very outset. We have to learn some stuff before we can start to make decisions, not least what we accept as real and what’s delusion.

We knew from the prologue that family was everything to the Wolfssens, not just the ones in this film but going back generations, and it is the abiding theme. They have iconography specific to the family, going back to when they were Vikings, and there’s a symbol that shows up a lot, even branded on forearms as a sort of rite of passage.

We also know that this family is broken, but not necessarily why. Michael left to get away from Gary, but he seems pleasant enough, if a bit odd. Michael clearly didn’t expect any sort of welcome but he got one anyway. Juliette is a bit confused by the whole thing but open to a family reunion. Brandon was born there and is both enjoying and not enjoying his return.

And I should explain a few things about this complex dynamic. For one, Gary’s married to Annabelle, but she isn’t mother to Michael and Chloe. That wife is long gone and so is Chloe, both now dead. For another, Brandon, who’s with Michael and Juliette, isn’t their son; he’s Chloe’s but they’ve been raising him since his mother died. For a third, Annabelle thinks that Gary’s deterioration began when he lost Chloe but has since become progressive dementia.

That renders this a powerful family drama, even before we think about any supernatural element. This family sees family as everything, but parts of it have separated, divorced, died, joined and moved from one point to another. It’s a story all about family but it’s also a story about deeper issues: dementia, trust, toxicity, domestic abuse, violence, escape and, deep in its core, love. It’s rarely a happy story, even as it drifts into nostalgia at points. What one may remember fondly, another may not.

I’ll look at this from Tyler Mane’s angle later but you can easily see why it’s an opportunity for him, wearing multiple hats. However, this time round, I’m looking at it for Derek Mears and you may be wondering when he’s going to come up for discussion.

The simplest answer is that he’s the big bad whatever that Gary has built these protections to keep out. He spends much of his time in a black hoodie that makes him seem like a weird cultist and, for the longest time, he only shows up in nightmares and visions. However, he has a real place in this family and, if you’ve looked at what I’ve written carefully, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where he fits in.

It’s a one note character, because, while the rest of them are generally complex, with good in them even if there’s also bad, he’s pure evil. However, Mears clearly relishes the role and is effectively scary throughout, not just because he’s big and strong—anyone who can lift Tyler Mane, who was a 6’ 8” professional wrestler in his pre-acting days, without us calling foul has to be big and strong—but because he’s willing to do absolutely anything to remain in control and, what’s more, he actively enjoys it.

I always try to see the best in people, so bad guys tend to come in two flavours for me: the ones who do bad things for reasons, like Derek Mears’s character in The Aggression Scale, who likes the money that crime pays but starts to wonder as that film runs on whether it’s really worth it; and the ones who do bad things for enjoyment, like his character here. The former may be bargained with or leveraged away, but the latter can’t be. William, which is the name of his character here, will not stop ever unless he can be made to stop.

And, as Michael soon finds, making him stop may not be quite as permanent as he thinks, as the supernatural angle kicks in and Gary gains even more substance than he began with. It’s a peach of a part for Muse Watson, who I know best from a recurring role on NCIS and, within the horror genre, the I Know What You Did Last Summer films.

As with The Aggression Scale, this is a firmly independent movie that’s packed full of actors I recognise, even if Leslie Easterbrook, playing Annabelle, was sixty-four and I know her best thirty years younger in Police Academy.

It’s obvious that this wasn’t made with a lot of money, but it’s cleverly written to make use of a small space, sometimes almost like a play, and it ends up highly effective. One way I can validate that is that Mears really doesn’t have a lot of screen time but it sure feels like he’s in every other scene. That’s presence.