Anna Zlokovic’s Feature Debut Is a Vestigial Appendage on the Work of Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent’s expressionist mom-and-monster film The Babadook has maintained surprising pop culture relevance through references made on TV comedies and in other horror movies: You’re the Worst, The Magicians, Robot Chicken, Saturday Night Live, and last year’s Scream reboot have collectively fostered along a tradition of name-dropping the dapper thought-form fiend over an impressive spread of years, from 2014 all the way to 2022. What a way to celebrate the film’s basic conceit; turns out you really can’t get rid of the Babadook. Mostly this has turned out for better, but occasionally, a bit for worse, as with Anna Zlokovic’s first feature, Appendage.
Zlokovic’s film misses the point of celebratory tongue-in-cheek referentialism, not to the point where the horror cinema gods will force reassessment of The Babadook’s status as a contemporary classic, but enough to cheapen everything of merit about Appendage. And there is plenty of that: Practical effects, for one, are always welcome in one of the movies’ most tactile genres, and Appendage flexes puppet work that’s astonishing in its liveliness and slimy frank grotesquerie. Top-tier snark from Emily Hampshire, playing an inveigling supporting character with caustic relish, is another highlight, coming just ahead of Desmin Borges as a mincing, pretentious fashion designer. The average viewer will love hating both of them, in between their bouts of fear-sweating.
Details like these give Appendage weight. But the film’s “trauma, actually” throughline, facilitated by a blandly written lead character and a performance to match, lifts that weight when it should press the audience down. Zlokovic’s overdetermined metaphor about the relationships people have with their negative emotions, their self-doubting and self-deprecating sides, could speak for itself without over emphasis; Hannah (Hadley Robinson), the protagonist, breathes in an atmosphere primarily composed of both, after all. She’s struggling at work, where she labors for the praise of her boss, Cristean (Borges), who pooh-poohs every design put before him and dangles the possibility of a career in Hannah’s face like a carrot before an apprehensive rabbit. Work bleeds into her life with her boyfriend, Kaelin (Brandon Mychal Smith), her best friend Esther (Kausar Mohammed), and with her parents (Deborah Rennard and Pat Dortch). Everywhere she goes, her anxieties haunt her.
Then comes the pain in her stomach, the spot on her abdomen, and the toothy monster head that eventually erupts from the spot. Hannah is a product of chimerism, the twin that survived in her mom’s womb and absorbed the other’s DNA; in adulthood, and at the worst professional and personal times possible, the twin, looking like a California Raisin from hell, emerges to rasp all of Hannah’s insecurities aloud to her face. The creature is conceived in slime and scorn, occupying a branch on the same family tree as the pint-sized terrors in Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case, and the season 2 Tales from the Crypt episode “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy.”