Horns

Since caus­ing a stir with Switch­blade Romance back in 2003, prodi­gal­ly tal­ent­ed French hor­ror direc­tor Alexan­dre Aja has been like a mon­ster hid­ing in the shad­ows, churn­ing out vivid­ly vio­lent genre exer­cis­es (Piran­ha 3D, Mir­rors) while wait­ing for a more full-bod­ied project that would allow him to stir the blood before splat­ter­ing it in all direc­tions. With Horns, Aja final­ly gets a chance to spread his wings and make a film with some heart, even if that means rip­ping one out of his lead character’s chest.

Ig (Daniel Rad­cliffe) is hav­ing a hard time. His life­long love, Mer­rin (Juno Tem­ple), has just been mur­dered, and since she had dumped him just hours before her death, every­one – includ­ing his own par­ents – sus­pects that Ig is the cul­prit. As if that weren’t enough, Ig has start­ed to sprout horns from his head, horns that only his child­hood best friend (Max Minghel­la) can see, but that nev­er­the­less cause every­one he encoun­ters to spon­ta­neous­ly con­fess their dark­est thoughts and desires to him.

A dark­ly com­ic and brood­ing­ly lovelorn super­nat­ur­al mur­der-mys­tery that’s been human centipede’d to the rear end of Ricky Ger­vais’ The Inven­tion of Lying, Horns packs a whole lot of movie into its two-hour run time, as if both its direc­tor and his lead­ing man are try­ing to make up for lost time. Careen­ing between gen­res and sub­plots like it’s try­ing to out­run a sec­ond draft, the film is admirably held togeth­er by the cohe­sive pow­er of Aja’s steady hand and Radcliffe’s com­mit­ted per­for­mance, both of which help to ensure that Ig’s wrench­ing jour­ney isn’t defused by its detours.

Horns works because Ig’s plight becomes increas­ing­ly human as he’s over­come by satan­ic forces and sub­se­quent­ly trans­formed into a pitch­fork-wield­ing detec­tive. Aja’s dev­il-may-care approach to the sto­ry allows him to casu­al­ly mine reli­gious texts for their emo­tion­al con­tent while also ignor­ing their the­ol­o­gy, Ig’s twist­ed ordeal rely­ing on Chris­t­ian imagery with­out ever hav­ing to believe in it. Horns couldn’t care less about God, because even dur­ing the film’s sev­er­al overex­tend­ed flash­backs, it’s always irre­ducibly focused on how peo­ple deal with their demons. Ig’s rela­tion­ship with Mer­rin is sweet enough when­ev­er it spurts to the sur­face, but the film is most damn­ing­ly con­vinc­ing when it push­es Ig to con­front the ways in which he can be a bur­den on the peo­ple he loves, an arc that’s espe­cial­ly heart­break­ing dur­ing the scenes he shares with his trou­bled father (the great James Remar).

Also cru­cial to the film’s charm is how Aja’s mor­bid sense of humour and max­i­mal­ist visu­al flair almost always serve the sto­ry. The director’s com­plete lack of restraint might push the movie to a place that many view­ers won’t be will­ing to fol­low, but Rad­cliffe owns the dark­ness until the bit­ter end. The road to hell has always been paved with good inten­tions, but rarely has it been this weird, wind­ing and wonderful.