Dis­cov­er the criss-cross­ing chills of this hor­ror anthology

Anthol­o­gy hor­ror films come in many forms. At their sim­plest, they just place their dif­fer­ent episodes one after the oth­er (Kwaidan; Three; Lit­tle Deaths), per­haps with a wrap­around sto­ry (Creepshow; Tales from the Dark­side: The Movie; V/H/S), or a more arbi­trary struc­tur­ing device (The ABCs of Death; Tales of Hal­loween), to lend a sense of over­ar­ch­ing coher­ence. Some­times they tell one con­tin­u­ous sto­ry, but divide it between dif­fer­ent direc­tors work­ing in dif­fer­ent styles and sub­gen­res (The Sig­nal). And occa­sion­al­ly, at their most com­plex, they inter­weave their sep­a­rate sto­ries, Short Cuts-style, into a criss-cross­ing, Moe­bian total­i­ty that is big­ger than its parts – like Trick ​’r Treat, A Christ­mas Hor­ror Sto­ry and now South­bound.

The first sto­ry in South­bound, direct­ed by the film­mak­ing quar­tet ​‘Radio Silence’ (Matt Bet­tinel­li-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Mar­tinez and Chad Vil­lel­la), is also, para­dox­i­cal­ly, the last. Pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly fore­ground­ing the cir­cu­lar nar­ra­tive path that the over­all film will take, The Way Out opens in medias res, with two blood-soaked men (Chad Vil­lel­la and writer Matt Bet­tinel­li-Olpin) dri­ving in con­fu­sion and ter­ror. Pur­sued by hov­er­ing grim reapers, the duo loops back again and again to the same gas sta­tion and motel, despite always mov­ing for­ward down a straight-seem­ing road – until even­tu­al­ly one of the men decides to stop run­ning, and enters a motel room in pur­suit of a lost daugh­ter who is always tan­ta­lis­ing­ly just out of reach.

All the themes out­lined here – guilt, pun­ish­ment, entrap­ment, lim­bo, demons, choice and the elu­sive pos­si­bil­i­ty of redemp­tion – recur in the film’s oth­er sto­ries, each set on the same stretch of lost high­way in the mid­dle of an Amer­i­can nowhere. Rox­anne Benjamin’s Siren sees a trio of young female jazz musi­cians break­ing down on the road. As they end up spend­ing a long weird night with the damned, Sadie (Fabi­anne Therese) tries to work through her regrets and denials over what hap­pened to the band’s fourth mem­ber, and. unlike her friends, makes a bid to retrace her steps.

David (The Sig­nal) Bruckner’s The Acci­dent fol­lows a man (Math­er Zick­el) mak­ing all the right eth­i­cal choic­es after being involved in a hit-and-run, but still descend­ing for a time into a hos­pi­tal-set hell – with his crime (pay­ing too much atten­tion to his mobile phone while on the road) meet­ing with a match­ing pun­ish­ment. Patrick Horvath’s Jail­break sees a mid­dle-aged man (David Yow) des­per­ate­ly tres­pass­ing where he def­i­nite­ly should not be in the hope of recov­er­ing his long lost sis­ter (Tip­per New­ton) – and refus­ing to accept that she has in fact found the exact place where she belongs. Final­ly, Radio Silence returns with The Way In, in which a cou­ple are on a coun­try hol­i­day to cel­e­brate their daughter’s entry to uni­ver­si­ty, only to find them­selves under attack from masked assailants with a hor­rif­ic score to (un)settle and col­lat­er­al dam­age to spare.

Abstract and eeri­ly incom­plete, South­bound unfolds in a place where Marien­bad heads south to the Twi­light Zone and Dead End, and where moral fail­ings col­lide with macabre con­se­quences. Besides the voice of Lar­ry Fessenden’s DJ and songs which are heard on the radio, cer­tain oth­er sounds (knocks, rum­bles) and loca­tions bleed through the dif­fer­ent sto­ries’ con­nec­tive tis­sue, as do fre­quent glimpses of the sim­i­lar­ly pur­ga­to­r­i­al Car­ni­val of Souls play­ing (on repeat) in the background.

“Fuck this shit!” are the open­ing words uttered in South­bound, ​“Let’s go home.” It is a nos­tal­gic desire to return to an Eden that has long since been shat­tered by these char­ac­ters’ actions or inac­tions. ​“When are you com­ing home?” the wife of the dri­ver in The Acci­dent asks him over the phone, unaware that, if he comes back at all, he will be for­ev­er scarred by his trip – where­as in Jail­break, the sis­ter is reluc­tant ever to return to a home that she her­self destroyed. For South­bound is an infer­nal road movie where every­one, chased by per­son­al demons, won­ders if there real­ly can be ​“a way out”.

Find­ing your own way out of the film’s infu­ri­at­ing spaghet­ti junc­tion of nar­ra­tive cul de sacs and byroads is indeed a chal­lenge, but no pun­ish­ment. For it offers both the vari­ety of a mul­ti-authored anthol­o­gy, and the con­ti­nu­ity of a tight­ly con­struct­ed fea­ture – and as to whether it ulti­mate­ly takes you to a place of bot­tom­less despair or dawn­ing hope, the choice is yours.

South­bound is released on DVD and Blu-ray 8 August by Stu­dio­Canal UK.