The Face of Horror

Perennially adapted since 1825, Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s Yotsuya Kaidan is Japan’s most famous ghost story. It describes a husband’s duplicitous betrayal of his wife, whose vengeful spirit returns to haunt him, and has long been appreciated for its feminist catharsis.

Now behold Anna Biller (The Love Witch) who deploys her consummate emulation of vintage aesthetics to concoct a wickedly camp yet insightful retelling of this morality tale. As The Face of Horror, this macabre trajectory is transposed to 14th-century feudal England where Biller cannily reflects the misogyny of a medieval milieu right back at our own, while stunningly fashioning a gory tribute to Technicolor shockers.

Jonah Hauer-King (William Tell, TIFF ’24) stars as Edward, a solipsistic knight errant who murderously schemes with his squire to seize a farmer’s estate by marrying the farmer’s daughter — quite literally over her father’s dead body. Blinded by grief and courtly love, the guileless Eleanor (Kristine Froseth, TIFF ’22’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline) accepts Edward’s hand, but it’s not long before the rogue’s insatiable libido pulls him towards more royal aspirations in the form of a wealthy countess (Bella Heathcote, TIFF ’17’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women), and so yet another murder of convenience foments.

Shooting on sumptuous 35mm, Biller (who also designed the film’s vibrant costuming) achieves an extraordinary pastiche of bygone style and form that recalls Powell and Pressberger as much as Corman and Hammer. But it is her tonal tightrope walk that is most remarkable, as every aspect of the production is so precisely calibrated — from the pitch-perfect stylized performances to the brightly accented violence — that the sincerity of its underlying melodrama is never diluted by its pervasively wry wit.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: suicide, self-harm, explicit violence, mature themes, sexual content