Review of Horse Girl (2020)
Seen in 2020.
With respect to Todorov’s The Fantastic (1970), this is an exercise in futility. Sarah is possibly mad, possibly being abducted by aliens in a UFO, possibly travelling through time, and possibly a clone of or otherwise identical to her own grandmother, among other hypotheses. Perhaps, reaching further, Sarah is stuck in Christian Purgatory, which is the name of her favourite TV show and the premise of the similar film Jacob’s Ladder (1990). All indications as to the veracity of these hypotheses can be dismissed in the light of a competing hypothesis.
Even the final scene, where Sarah levitates on camera, can be dismissed as a dream or delusion in the Todorovian-uncanny scenario where she is mad. It is the same with the scene near the beginning of the movie where she looks out the window of her shop and apparently sees the horse that she herself will later be leading: Although the full symptoms of her hypothesized madness have not manifested by that point, the glimpse can still be a sign of that madness in a latent form. Correspondingly, the apparently crazy things Sarah does, like replacing the pipes in a rented kitchen and sewing protective coveralls with an awesome back zipper on a stick, can be ideas implanted into her mind by the aliens to cause authorities to dismiss her claims about aliens.
As in The Turn of the Screw (1898), there is no way to know whether the aliens are “real”, but this is not the literature (or cinema) of the fantastic. Simply blurring the ontology by deprivileging the implied narrator and juggling different explanatory models is not the elegant writing of a Henry James, nor is there any necessary contradiction between Sarah’s madness and the various ideas she has about what’s going on. More importantly, the science fiction premises of the narrative are presented as laughable even within the narrative. Purgatory is caricatured and supposed to look awful, Darren is supposed to be an idiot for buying into “ancient aliens” and Bigfoot lore, and so on. When purportedly real aliens appear on screen, they’re all-black humanoids in a contourless all-white world and their revolving hands make the sounds of Sarah’s sewing machine, which is just as implausible as the conspiracy theories Sarah is mocked for upholding.
Fair enough, the real-world conspiracy theories alluded to in the script are narcissistic bullshit and deserve a bit of mockery. Just presenting them more seriously, as in Signs (2002) or The Mothman Prophecies (2002), would not have made Horse Girl a better film. This means only that, if you were to go the Todorovian-marvelous route and accept the aliens as “real”, the film would be poor science fiction. Similarly, if you were to go the Todorovian-uncanny route and accept only Sarah’s madness as “real”, the film would be an unsympathetic, at times farcical depiction of severe mental illness. That’s not better. Admittedly, the portrayal of the doctors is uncommonly fair for a movie about going insane, and a working-class TV junkie like Sarah is a good choice for depicting insanity as an impersonal force, but the lights are stereotypically low in the psychiatric care facility, and the psychoses are not quite believable.
Horse Girl would be bad as SF and bad as a conventional or medical drama. The attempt to balance the genres was misguided.