It’s easy to forget, in the unending hellscape of 2020, that there are some good things that happened in the last decade. Homophobia remains a serious issue, but younger folks may not remember just how omnipresent it was in the 80s and 90s. PG-rated movies would have anti-gay slurs casually bandied about. AIDS tore through a number of queer communities in the US, leaving emotional scars that remain to this day. Straight folks took this as either confirmation that gay people were just wrong or as a warning sign about the havoc they could wreak if they were allowed to be near children. No, no one was ever able to say what the havoc was. Just that it would be wreaked.
Enter Spiral. Set mostly in 1995, Spiral is a psychological thriller about… well, that exact transition. The elements are familiar to any horror fans. The menace of the suburbs, full of small town tyrants with urbane aspirations, is well-mined territory for the genre. Is there something supernatural happening, or is the main character having a break from reality? And, of course, the omnipresent question of: Is the conspiracy real?
But despite the familiar elements, Spiral feels unique. Adding a lived-in, beautifully performed performance examining the pains and joys of growing up gay in the late 20th century helps it feel novel. And while we currently live in an era overrun by conspiracy, so much of our current conspiracy ecosystem comes from the 90s. Spiral captures the confused paranoia of the era wonderfully. Those elements combine for a fresh, entertaining psychological thriller.
I don’t like this any more than you.
Malik (Jeffrey Chapman-Bowyer) grew up a gay, Black man in the 1980s, and this left some scars. Thankfully, it’s the enlightened 90s now. He is married to an older White man, Aaron (Ari Cohen), has a decent relationship with Aaron’s teenage daughter, Kayla (Jennifer Laporte), and has just left the city for a beautiful house in the suburbs. Right away, there’s some awkwardness. When Tiffany (Chandra West) drops by to deliver a housewarming plant, she confuses Malik for ‘the help.’ Upon learning that Malik and Aaron are a couple, she cheerfully comments, “We don’t have any of you in town.” LGBTQ people? Black people? It’s tough to say. But Malik understands the sentiment.
Aaron doesn’t, though. In the 90s, one thing many white liberals prided themselves on was being ‘colorblind‘. White? Black? Why does that matter? In a real way, that’s the core conflict of Spiral. Malik sees the hostility of the town. From the way people stare at him when he goes jogging to the offhanded remarks, he feels the hostility. But Aaron knows these kinds of folks. He lived among them for years as a straight-presenting man. He know that they are decent people. Malik just doesn’t give them a chance. Does Malik just have PTSD from surviving a violent hate crime in his youth? Or is Aaron unable to see the systems at work around him?
But this is how it works.
First and foremost, this is the Jeffrey Chapman-Bowyer (UnREAL) show. He is in nearly every scene; only Jennifer Laporte (West of Hell) routinely has meaningful scenes on her own. And Chapman-Bowyer is phenomenal. He is the rare femme-presenting gay dad in film, and Chapman-Bowyer plays him as both thoughtful and truly panicked. As Malik falls deeper into the web of conspiracy only he sees, the way it shatters his burgeoning relationship with his new daughter is genuinely heartbreaking. Chapman-Bowyer never lets us forget the pain and anxiety at the heart of Malik, even as he starts to become unhinged.
Laporte, a relative newcomer, is also quite good. Though she doesn’t get enough to do to come alive in the same way Malik does, her relationship with him is the film’s most important. She is both defensive of her father’s radical lifestyle change, getting into fights with kids who judge him, but also uncertain of Malik’s part in her life. He isn’t that much older than her, after all. The film’s best and saddest scene belongs to Laporte and Chapman-Bowyer, as they confront the limits of what one person can do against the world, and both actors nail it.
I haven’t really mentioned Marshal (Riverdale‘s Lochlyn Monroe) and Tiffany (Chandra West) and their son Tyler (Ty Wood), who are at the heart of Malik’s imagined conspiracy. That is, unfortunately, because they’re… fine. Lochlyn Monroe is basically revisiting his Riverdale role, albeit with more of a liberal lean. And, I’ll be honest: He wasn’t that good in Riverdale. As a bland face of the establishment, he works well, but he never conjures much menace. Nor do Chandra or Ty, honestly. More focus on them and less on the “Is something supernatural or is Malik going craaaazy?” question would have served the movie well.
And this is how we make it work.
You will likely see this compared to Jordan Peele’s ouevre of socially conscious horror. I think it’s bleaker than Peele’s work, though. Or, not bleaker, necessarily. In conversation with. A forebear to. There’s a reason, I think, why Spiral is set in the 90s. Malik is in desperate need of a support network that understands what it is to be a Black, gay man entering a very White world. He doesn’t have a Lil Rel Howery to watch his back. Isolation takes a profound toll.
But, like Get Out, the more the film leans into its most overt horror elements, the less well it works for me. The editing tricks Harder uses to show how Malik is losing time are great, matching one of my all-time favorite horror movie cuts, the Jennifer’s Body football field scene. But it doesn’t totally work when it slips from psychological thriller into full-blown horror. As a psychological thriller, I think Spiral is top-notch; as horror, I was left a bit wanting.
But in the end, that’s a small complaint. This is an excellent, if flawed, movie. It’s worth seeing for Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman alone; add in a deeply felt story about being an outsider in an idyll and you have a thriller I found genuinely moving. The film takes the time to make you care about its leads, which makes the mounting terror far more effective — and allows the film to linger in your mind, a heartfelt paean to the necessity of solidarity among marginalized peoples.
SPIRAL will be available on Shudder on September 17th. Written by Colin Minihan & John Poliquin and directed by Kurtis David Harder, SPIRAL stars Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Ari Cohen, and Jennifer Laporte.