Spiral, 2019 – ★★★★

Sold to me as the queer Get Out, Spiral (no, not THAT one) is something altogether else. It is an allegory of the “other,” in this case a mixed-race gay couple with a daughter moving to small town, Illinois in 1995. The answers are rarely given, only implied. Is that person he’s talking to dead? We don’t know. The surest answer, though, is that hate and othering is a cycle, and there will always be the “normies” around to do the othering. There are some genuinely frightening moments, and some that hew too close to past horror tropes. And maybe we should’ve cut away from one particular effect that would be better heard/implied than seen, but he film goes the Coen Brothers route, opting to show around the climax instead of use it directly, and where sometimes it’s hit or miss whether that works (Burn After Reading, one hell of a miss) here it enriches what came before it by allowing us to fill in our own blanks, and seeing the cycle of hate continue on like the spiral of the title. Well worth the watch.

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