Feminist Fear Freak: The Bay

The only real way to describe this film is as an Environmental Horror Mockumentary. That sounds like too many genres, too overwrought, but it really works.

I can honestly say I've never seen a film like this before. I wasn't particularly excited about watching it, because I'm getting tired of shaky cameras, but I decided to just sit down and watch it on Netflix. When the film started, I was playing some Candy Crush on my phone, only half paying attention. Five minutes in, I set my phone down, backed up to the beginning, and started over.

There's really no way to describe how real this movie feels. Our narrator describes the lives of these people as she understands them, bits and pieces with lots of missing information. She is obviously older, wiser, and broken-down by her experiences. It's interesting to hear the voice of the "final girl" years after the events have ended. Her acting is absolutely superb, as she plays both herself as an intern reporter during the course of the events and then years after, speaking into a webcam and brutally criticizing herself for the way she handled the situation. It's heartbreaking and mesmerizing.

While the "big bad" of the film is an unknown disease that is sweeping suddenly through a small-town 4th of July celebration, that never feels like the true evil in the film. The government, both before and after the incident, are proven to be the bigger terror, hiding water pollution with disastrous consequences.

The juxtapositions set up in the film are really stunning, idyllic scenes of young children splashing joyfully in the pool against images of hospitalized people covered in unknown boils. It has the slow effect of making even the most beautiful, most wholesome, most all-American of images feel sick and terrifying.

For being a film with such a liberal lean, more attention could have been paid to issues surrounding underrepresented minorities - mostly about the complete lack of them. I understand that they were trying to make a microcosm of "good old fashioned small town America" but there are people of color in Maine. And while the films narrator & another main character are both women, the film still doesn't pass the Bechtel Test. But the film also doesn't really sexualize them, which can be quite a rarity in the horror genre.

Overall, in spite of it's few shortcomings, I think it will become one of my new favorites. Because while the jumps were few and the tension built slowly, the next day I was still sitting feeling uneasy, thinking about children idyllically splashing around what they think is safe water. It's a very effective film.

Entertaining