Using Stanley Kubrick’s haunted-hotel horror classic The Shining (1980) as a very loose blueprint, Spanish-Brazilian director Sergio Oksman’s lightly fictionalised documentary A Scary Movie is a bittersweet rumination on father-son relationships, lingering family wounds, midlife regrets and cinematic memory. Shot in a naturalistic video-diary style, but with playfully meta flashes of movie-world artifice, Oksman’s modestly scaled hybrid feature has been one of the more esoteric world premieres at San Sebastián International Film Festival this week. A little too opaque and inconclusive, but emotionally rich and full of ideas, this low-voltage charmer should follow its Spanish debut with further festival screenings and more. It is already booked in for Doclisboa in October and IDFA in November.
The setting for A Scary Movie is a real semi-abandoned hotel in Lisbon, where the director and his 12-year-old son Nuno are spending the summer holidays together. Though this elegantly crumbling residence is nowhere near as huge or remote as the Overlook, Oksman includes numerous playful allusions to Kubrick’s supernatural thriller: a silhouette behind a shower curtain, a deserted bar, eerie vintage photos, low-slung cameras prowling the empty corridors, a mysterious room that must never be visited. Nuno also watches The Shining for the first time during the holiday, and seems amusingly unimpressed.
But the real phantoms here are the ghosts from Oksman’s past: old flames, estranged family members, lingering regrets, half-finished projects. Newly separated from his wife, the directed uses the creepy, ominous tropes of the horror genre to ruminate on his own family’s cursed history of divorce and abandonment. He interweaves this contemporary father-son story with archive footage of his own father, Simão, who left his wife and children early in the marriage, slipping our of contact for decades. The director tracked his father down in São Paolo in 2013, returning a year later to make a poignant memoir-film about him, On Football (2015), just as Simão was dying. He includes footage of their awkward reunion here, and shares his anxiety that he will one day be similarly estranged from Nuno.
Another ghost story woven into A Scary Movie is the macabre case of Portugal’s first serial killer, Diogo Alves, who is believed to have robbed and murdered up to 100 people by throwing them from the 65-metre tall Águas Livres aqueduct in Lisbon between 1836 and 1839. One the last criminals in Portugal to receive a death penalty, Alves inspired two of the country’s earliest fiction films. Oksman includes clips of both here, complete with droll critical voice-over commentary from Nuno (“pretty lame”). Alongside footage from his own unfinished documentary about Alves, which features a creepy true-horror shot of the killer’s head preserved in formaldehyde, father and son also retrace his steps inside the gloomy stone corridors of aqueduct, where Nuno shows fear for the first time. “If you can’t read Google Maps then we’re super lost,” he frets.
A Scary Movie is an intimate, quiet, open-ended film that would have had more punch if Oksman had dug deeper into his key theme, exploring the parallels between cinematic horror and its real-life equivalent. Art-house audiences will appreciate the subtlety and ambiguity, but there is arguably a richer, fuller, bolder version of the director’s strong premise lurking in the shadows of his slender sketchbook feature. That said, this artful documentary certainly has the singular feel of a personal passion project, and is full of pleasingly lyrical touches. “Sooner or later, every image harbours ghosts,” Oksman muses. “That’s what scares me.”
Director, screenwriter: Sergio Oksman
Cast: Nuno Oksman, Sergio Oksman, Daniel Blaufuks, Ana Moreira
Cinematography: Francisco Marise, Jorge Rojas
Editing: Ana Pfaff, Moncho Fernández, Sergio Oksman
Producers: Sergio Oksman, Joao Matos, Fernando Franco
Production company: Dok Films SL (Spain)
World sales: Patra Spanou Film, Germany
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Zabaltegi Tabakalera)
In Spanish, Portuguese
72 minutes
