CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Dawning (2009)

SYNOPSIS: college-aged siblings Chris (Goslow) and Aurora (Townsend) visit their estranged father, Richard (Coral) at his cabin in the woods. Richard, a recovering alcoholic, has separated from Chris and Aurora's mother and is now dating a woman named Laura (Kellogg-Darrin).  Meanwhile, Chris is contemplating quitting school, and Aurora is scarred by her parents' divorce and her father's lack of attention and devotion. As Chris and Aurora arrive at the remote cabin, the happy family reunion turns awkward with recriminations, guilt-trips, accusations, and innuendo. Then, the family dog is mysteriously wounded while the family gathers for a camp fire to roast marshmallows. After the dog's death, a mad, armed stranger (Salmen) breaks into the cabin and holds the family at gunpoint.  "It's waiting," he insists, describing some unseen monster that apparently murdered his girlfriend. The family attempts to overpower the stranger and notify the police about their predicament, but the phone lines are out. And bizarre, unearthly noises keep emanating from the woods and from the roof of the cabin. After a time, each member of the family disappears into the woods.  And when they are seen again, they seem different, wrong.

COMMENTARY: Horror films that accomplish a lot with very little are not that common anymore, and director Gregg Holtgrewe's Dawning (2009) fits that bill rather nicely.  Dawning is an ultra low-budget, rough-around-the-edges affair, a sort of The Evil Dead (1983) meets The Blair Witch Project (1999) only with no special effects and no monsters. Actually, that's not a completely accurate description. There are monsters in this film, but at times they appear to be of the personal, self-doubting, human variety rather than the demonic one. In short, Dawning concerns a dysfunctional family that comes together for a weekend retreat in the woods but soon encounters Something Evil. That evil is either an invisible, monstrous creature that seizes on interpersonal weakness and human foibles, or the Monster from the family's collective Id: the self-doubt of the dramatis personae made manifest; a sense of personal paranoia that grows and grows and roils and roils until murder is the only possible outcome.
Buttressed by an unsettling musical score, some excellent cinematography and a lot of really canny editing, Dawning proves an arresting and suspenseful experience. At several critical junctures during Dawning, characters hear their own worst thoughts vocalized in the voices of their beloved family members.  Now, in the actual cuts, the audience never actually witnesses those family members speaking such unkind, ugly words. It's all craftily accomplished so that it becomes plain that the characters are hearing opinions that have never actually been stated by another human being. Those insults and attacks are either the Monster's doing or simple human insecurities somehow being broadcast.  But the effect is insidious: like having a nagging, betraying, personal Iago in your ear at all times, saying just the thing to confirm your own low opinion of yourself. It's unsettling, and highly imaginative, and Dawning plays diabolically on the idea that something evil is tearing this family unit apart, and that it thrives on division and insecurity.  In the environment of the 2000's, with so much anger and division poisoning the national dialogue, the film also erects a powerful case that everyone is hearing their own ugliness echoing in their heads, assuming it comes from others, and then striking back. In this way, Dawning seems to concern projection.
It's quite possible there is no monster in the film, just a sweeping, multiplying sense of mistrust and dysfunction. Even the film's revelatory shot, seen in a flash of lightning, could be no more than a phantasm.  From one point of view, it's as if all the dysfunction of the family coheres into a supernatural entity and then threatens its creator.  The component parts of this particular Beast are substance abuse, resentment over divorce, anger over Richard's brand of judgmental machismo and other aspects of interpersonal strife and alienation. 

Dawning is a really low-budget horror film, one that stretches its meager budget to the fullest, but which can't really show anything besides some very troubled characters arguing inside a small cabin for eighty minutes.  For some viewers, this clearly won't be enough. Yet Dawning gets under your skin and discomforts,  in large part because of the ambiguity of the monster. It's the polar opposite of most genre films being made in this era: no fast-cuts, no elaborate special effects, and little concentration on grue and guts.  The film's performances are serviceable and sometimes more than that, in the case of the impressive Goslow. But in so many significant ways, Holtgrewe is the real star of Dawning.  As a director, he's got a strong eye for composition, and the unique ability to craft frightening images just by carefully observing natural vistas, or holding a shot perhaps a little longer than usual.  Dawning ably and gamely plays with form, and as a result doesn't look, feel, or sound like the average, processed genre film. In fact, it may "dawn" on the audience during a viewing of Dawning that many genre films of considerably higher budget could learn a thing or two about crafting atmosphere and suspense from this little diamond-in-the-rough.