In “Behavior,” Larry Fessenden’s Sam doesn’t prefer to be requested too many questions. Irrespective of that these questions come from his ex-girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury), from a spot of affection or concern, and for a great cause: Sam is slowly destroying himself. “I’m committing suicide on the installment plan,” he says with a wry snigger on the movie’s starting, his phrases slurring and his smile distracted; it doesn’t really feel like a joke. He doesn’t like the sensation of being put underneath a microscope, each one among his actions scrutinized. Too many questions make Sam a bit upset, even a bit horrifying. It’s been this fashion for some time, even earlier than Sam meets the vampire Anna (Meredith Snaider), even earlier than Sam’s life is irretrievably destroyed. “Behavior” is each a vampire film and never.
Written, directed, and edited by Fessenden, this movie is a delicate masterpiece. Sam is a younger man making an attempt his greatest not take care of his father’s current passing and an unravelling relationship. Tight writing and deft characterization clarify that Sam comes from cash, and that he went to artwork college however has lengthy given up any creative aspirations (he now works 4 nights as a supervisor at a bar). He went to prep college and may afford his spacious condominium, with its exposed-brick partitions and contrived bohemian aesthetic, due to an inheritance left to him by his long-dead mom. He can recite Cyrano de Bergerac on the drop of a hat and spends his days getting drunk together with his shut, likewise artsy and financially safe pals, Nick (Aaron Beall) and Rae (Patricia Coleman), who’re themselves a pair on the verge of breaking apart.
Sam has a consuming downside, and his girlfriend Liza decides she will be able to’t dwell with him anymore, so she strikes out, assuring Sam that she nonetheless desires to work on their relationship. She wants some area from his fixed consuming, how he behaves when he’s drunk and hungover, and from his refusal to be an energetic agent in his life. Sam solely ever drinks and strikes from one second to the subsequent with none pause for sober introspection. Liza asks Sam to type himself out. However Sam forgets about Liza, and he asks as quickly as he meets Anna at Nick and Rae’s Halloween occasion. Sam is absolutely good at forgetting. He’s instantly besotted with the mysterious lady with quick, darkish hair and a smooth, measured voice.
Anna is calm and warranted—she is, in a manner, nonetheless. Sam will not be. Sam embarks on a passionate relationship with Anna, however progressively notices himself turning into absentminded, drained, nauseous, and, general, very weak. As a result of Anna has been biting Sam throughout intercourse, proper earlier than he comes, and has been apparently consuming his blood, Sam turns into satisfied she is a vampire. He begins having unusual, phantasmagorical desires of Anna, her pores and skin scaly and her fingers clawlike, surrounded by all of the iconography and results that populate vampire motion pictures. As Sam will get sicker and sicker, he loses his grip on actuality and himself, and himself in delusion. Fessenden’s genius isn’t offering us with a transparent reply as as to if Anna is a monster—it’s as much as us whether or not we need to see Sam or Anna because the destroyer of his life.
As with many vampire motion pictures, there’s a studying handy for this movie that might place it neatly within the ranks of our vaunted horror movies, which limn patriarchal fears about ladies, weave tales about their unclean our bodies, and illness. It’s defensible to see Anna because the villain as a result of so lots of our cultural tales place ladies as monsters.
In The Monstrous-Female: Movie, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed writes about lady as vampire in horror movies. Girls emerge in popular culture as monstrous beings because of public fears of each straight and queer ladies’s sexuality and sexual confidence, which threaten to subvert or “undermine the formal and extremely symbolic relations of women and men important to the continuation of patriarchal society.” That’s, the realities and subjectivities of varied and sexual ladies give the deceive the parable of patriarchy, the rationalizations behind the subjugation, disenfranchisement, and the secondary function allotted to ladies. “The feminine vampire is abject,” Creed writes, or fearsome, “as a result of she disrupts id and order; pushed by her lust for blood, she doesn’t respect the dictates of the regulation which units down the principles of correct sexual conduct.”
By this studying, Anna, depicted with the standard imagery and vocabulary of the life-sapping vampire, is the monstrous-feminine as a result of she leads a correct man to his wreck. And Sam is, not less than on the face of issues, a correct man: he drinks, like his father earlier than him and Nick alongside him, and he fucks, a robust picture of virile masculinity. When he turns into sick, he’s left emasculated, sapped of his vigor.
To see Anna as a conventional monstrous-feminine, because the femme fatale and men-destroying vampire, would go away us with the conclusion that “Behavior” is constant custom in its echoing of patriarchal fears. However such a conclusion doesn’t really feel proper—it might imply the movie has nothing new to supply past aesthetic modernity. Such a conclusion elides one thing integral to the movie: its remark of Sam and what’s being stated via this wanting. There may be baked into “Behavior” Fessenden’s subversive cultural critiques and insights, not less than in unfavorable reduction. Insightful although it’s to think about this movie via the lens of conventional feminist movie principle, it’s not solely fruitful as a result of the movie’s monsters have switched locations; to see patriarchal regurgitation in “Behavior” is to not see it because the self-aware, self-critical, and renegade art work it’s.
A second, various studying, motivated by a social realist perspective slightly than a strictly feminist one, sees Sam because the agent of his personal destruction. This studying reveals to us how grief destroys an individual, or maybe explicates the shortage of that means for a sure sort of individual within the trendy world. This studying is one many viewers espouse once they describe this movie as hopeless or unhappy, which it actually is, but it surely nonetheless leaves the movie feeling much less incisive, much less alluring than it’s.
There’s a third studying —a synthesis of those two—an understanding of gendered monstrosity commingled with social realism—that gives a manner into “Behavior,” revealing it to be one among up to date horror’s resounding masterpieces.
There’s a faint edge to “Behavior,” as if clouded by the mystifying fog of its style and visible language. Blink, and also you’ll miss it. However it’s there, this one thing, and you’ll find it in what the ladies round Sam say. “Behavior” follows Sam and is about Sam, but it surely additionally refrains from criticizing him. It’s within the area round Sam the place Fessenden writes, cautious and measured as brushstrokes, one thing much more nuanced, much more fascinating than drained patriarchal fears: a girl’s fears.
Anna tells Sam little or no about herself. We don’t know the place she lives, what she does for work, or even when she is seeing different folks. She doesn’t eat something in entrance of Sam, she doesn’t drink something. She solely exhibits up when the day is beginning to fade, at all times dressed like Gary Oldman’s Depend Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Her relationship with Sam is, for all intents and functions, informal, purely sexual. Anna is, in different phrases, a imaginative and prescient of a “cool woman,” wanting nothing from Sam emotionally, not even exclusivity, solely curiosity and consent.
Anna is a far cry from Liza. Liza is heat, sunny, blonde, at all times caressing Sam, touching his face softly, being attentive to his declining well being and his moods. Emotionally entangled with Sam, Liza asks him powerful questions and needs earnest solutions, desires Sam to turn into higher, to attempt more durable, desires exclusivity, at all times asking him, as if jealous or fearful, whether or not he has began seeing another person. Anna couldn’t care much less about how Sam is doing—when he leaves the dinner desk to throw up at one level, she doesn’t observe him to the lavatory, doesn’t appear involved about him in any respect. When Sam does the identical with Liza, she is extremely apprehensive.
“I’ve began seeing any individual,” Sam tells Liza when she asks him out for breakfast at some point. Liza’s face falls—they haven’t known as it quits on their relationship but, and for Liza, it’s nonetheless only a break. “I’m not saying it’s severe or something, however I simply really feel like we must always begin to say our factor is over.” Sobs effectively up in Liza’s throat. “Nicely, that didn’t take lengthy,” she says, trembling, not wanting to take a look at him, shoveling her breakfast into her mouth with a hurried panic, as if each offended at and afraid of Sam’s anticipated solutions, the drained look in his eyes. “How lengthy have you ever identified her? Are you fucking her? Nicely, I hope you’re being cautious. You met her at that Halloween occasion, proper? I knew it once I noticed you there.”
Sam will get fed up, his phrases turn into sharp, and his voice high-pitched: “This isn’t a separation when you preserve quizzing me on all the things! I imply, how is that this any completely different from residing collectively? You bought me underneath a fucking microscope.” It’s a heated and messy trade, the polar reverse of the dinner Sam had with Anna the evening earlier than. Solely Sam eats that evening whereas Anna watches. She evades his questions on her work. “How a lot do you should learn about somebody to be drawn to them?” she says finally. “I believe that the much less you already know about me, the longer you’ll keep .” And he or she is correct. Whereas Liza’s questions push him away, Anna’s cool evasiveness is so alluring as to occupy all of Sam’s ideas for days. Liza clearly loves Sam, whereas Anna is chilly to the contact, but even so, Sam likes Anna extra, as a result of she doesn’t ask him questions, as a result of she is the way in which he needs Liza was, as a result of she is the way in which Sam is to Liza.
Anna is a person’s superb of a girl, a great that is known as a reflection of his self, of his personal poisonous masculinity that makes use of and manipulates ladies and others, that takes from others with out a care for his or her well-being. This isn’t to argue in opposition to the concept that Anna is a vampire, or that Sam will not be a sufferer of Anna. However it’s to counsel that Sam turns into a sufferer of a being very similar to himself, of his personal poisonous masculinity personified.
We now have a way of what Sam was prefer to the ladies he dated earlier than Anna—to Liza, and even to Rae, whom he’d been with for some time earlier than Liza. When Sam helps Liza transfer into her new place, Liza’s pals stare daggers at Sam. “I can’t imagine how I’m getting the furry eyeball from these two. What the hell did you inform them about me?” Sam says to Liza. “They’re treating me just like the schmucky boyfriend who walked out on you.” Liza offers him a glance—he was certainly the schmucky boyfriend, resenting Liza for asking him too many questions, for caring for him in the way in which you take care of somebody you like, for holding him accountable for his consuming. Sam squirms underneath Rae’s and Liza’s care as a result of his personal dad and mom had been so absent. Sam doesn’t really feel like he instigated the separation, since Liza is the one transferring out. However he’s fallacious—he pushed her away first. “You bought what you wished: your freedom,” she says.
Later within the movie, we get a transparent picture of what Sam is prefer to his girlfriends when he’s drunk. Anna is speaking to Rae, who’s jealous of any lady Sam sees and who’s overtly hostile towards Anna. When Rae says that her being with Sam is absurd, Anna asks, “Are you continue to carrying a torch for him? I imply, hasn’t it been fairly a while since he used to get drunk and knock you round?” Rae walks away with out responding. Sam bodily abused Rae and emotionally abused Liza.
There’s a simmering violence in Sam that feels as if it’s transferred or displaced onto Anna via his accusations of vampirism. After Anna breaks issues off with Sam close to the tip of the movie, Sam himself irrevocably breaks. After a tough evening, Sam finds Liza together with her throat slashed, and he, paranoid, feels as if Anna is pursuing him, eager to eat him. It’s straightforward, by advantage of the swiftness of Liza’s physique’s discovery and the panic that propels Sam towards his final doom, to assume that the vampire Anna may need killed Liza, however nearer scrutiny gives one other risk.
The identical crucial studying that sees Anna as a monstrous-feminine character is perhaps inclined to see Anna because the one who murders Liza out of a jealous rage, a story depiction meant to articulate males’s fears of ruinous ladies. However although this crucial studying is well-meaning, hoping to index narrative cases of patriarchal fears, it doesn’t sit proper on Fessenden’s story. Anna’s breaking issues off with Sam is simply too measured, too self-possessed; to kill Liza is not sensible for a lady like Anna, who was by no means too invested in a severe relationship with Sam to start with. However killing Liza does make sense for somebody like Sam, a person slowly dropping his thoughts, a person with a historical past of violence towards ladies.
The Anna Sam perceives—the transacting determine who saps him of his vitality, leaving him feeling bodily and mentally exhausted and misplaced, who’s chilly in her cruelty—is in no way just like the monstrous-feminine determine Creed describes. Conventional monstrous-feminine vampires depart their victims “stuffed with new vitality,” Creed writes, with shinier hair, brighter tooth, extra vigor and fervour. Sam, however, is wholly depleted and spent, not not like Liza when she is transferring out, eager to get away from Sam so she will be able to regain herself. In Anna, Sam sees what it’s prefer to be enamored of an individual who doesn’t such as you again in the identical manner. As he throws up day after day, he feels what it looks like for Liza to like him. With Anna, Sam feels bodily how Liza feels. The Anna that Sam perceives is a monstrous-masculine determine, an absent companion not less than, and the type of abuser a girl may worry and keep away from at most. Anna Sam perceives that it’s Sam himself. Anna does to Sam what he has finished to Rae and Liza, and that is the serrating story of “Behavior.”
Fessenden shows an immeasurable consciousness of masculinity in his crafting of Sam, and a sleek sense of self in his carriage. Sam is so extremely charming and fallible; he’s sensible and artsy, and he’s additionally extremely privileged. Sam’s privilege grants him the scope and luxurious to make the selection to not take into consideration himself—to be merciless in a straightforward form of manner, in a manner that so many white males are. Fessenden doesn’t appear fairly so intent on regurgitating patriarchal tropes as he does on criticizing them, displaying them to be ill-suited vessels for lived actuality, and by extension displaying a have to broaden or adapt crucial principle to seize the considerations of artists who may not espouse patriarchal ideology; he appears, with “Behavior,” extra involved with males who’re monsters as a result of they’re males. Sam is frightening, and he’s so indelibly actual.
For its rejuvenation of the vampire movie alone, “Behavior” is an unignorable murals, however for its enlargement of monstrosity, its subversion of our anticipated villains, for its vocalization of girls’s fears, for its depiction of how subtly males can destroy the ladies who love them, this movie is a lovely beast.