BEYOND THE WALLS (2016 - French)

Studio:       Shudder
Director:    Herve Hadmar
Writer:       Herve Hadmar, Marc Herpoux, Sylvie Chanteux
Producer:  Christine de Bourbon Busset
Stars:     Veerle Baetens, Geraldine Chaplin, Francois Deblock

Review Score:

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Summary:

A woman becomes trapped in a nightmarish netherworld after inheriting a strange house from a dead man she never met.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Episode 1 – Despite not knowing the man and having no relation to him, children’s speech therapist Lisa inherits a strange old home from Andre-Rene Bainville. Lisa learns from the estate lawyer that Andre left an instruction to enter his house on June 1, 2015, which is how they discovered Andre had been dead in his chair for 30 years. On his will, Lisa sees “John 10:9” written under Andre’s signature next to a drawing of a red box. She also discovers he authored a book titled, “When You Get Lost.”

Hearing screams from the other side, Lisa breaks through one of the house’s walls. She follows a hallway and goes through a door leading to a strange room where she encounters a grimy man wearing a boar’s head. Lisa flees, but becomes lost, realizing she has somehow stepped into a labyrinthine house inside an otherworldly reality.

While trying to find her way out, Lisa meets Julien Fouquier, who helps her hide from beings he calls “The Others.” Together they look for the location where Lisa entered this world, but discover it seemingly no longer exists.

Episode 2 – Lisa glimpses her little sister Sophie, who drowned when Lisa was 15. Julien explains that the house weakens those who are trapped inside with visions of the dead.

Julien shows Lisa a map he has been drawing on a wall based on several years of exploring the house. Lisa recognizes the box from Andre’s will when she sees a red door drawn on the ceiling. If they can find it, Julien believes the red door is the way out of the house. Julien tells Lisa he learned about the door from another trapped man with whom he spent time before.

Lisa has Julien leave her alone, thinking that her sister will return if Julien is not with her. Lisa instead finds a man who tells her Sophie is behind the red door. He also tells her that Julien needs to see him as he hands her an old photograph of he and Julien as soldiers.

Lisa returns to Julien. Julien tells her he first entered the house on November 7, 1916. He also explains that the man she saw was Charles, his best friend who died in La Somme when they fought together in World War I.

Lisa tells Julien about the bible quote from Andre’s will. Julien suggests it may connect somehow to a chapel located in the house and they set off to find it.

The two of them find a man in a trance. Julien explains that those who surrender to the house become black-eyed slaves before fully transforming into one of the Others. From a hiding place, Lisa and Julien watch as an Other with oily black skin, whom Julien identifies as one of the “First Men” who have been in the house a very long time, breathes into the entranced man’s mouth and turns his skin black.

Julien and Lisa sneak out and encounter a black-eyed derelict. Lisa kills the derelict when he comes too close to her. With the derelict’s blood attracting the Others, Lisa and Julien rush to the chapel.

Following the Bible verse clue, Lisa and Julien crawl through a tunnel above an altar that leads to a door. They turn the door red by smearing it with blood and the door opens. Julien and Lisa enter a foggy forest where they become separated. While fleeing from a vision of Charles, Julien is surrounded by a group of First Men and Others. Lisa follows her sister to a small house on a lake. She knocks on the door and is greeted by an older woman named Rose.

Episode 3 – Rose reunites Lisa with Sophie. Lisa takes up residence in the lake house with her sister and Rose. After spending a long period of time there, where it is perpetually daytime, Sophie tells Lisa that the way back to the main house can only be found in darkness. In order for it to become night, Rose has to die.

Anxious to escape with her sister and to find Julien, Lisa moves to attack Rose. When Lisa hesitates, Rose overpowers her and starts drowning Sophie in the lake. Lisa recovers and kills Rose with a rock, but Sophie disappears in the water.

Night falls. Lisa returns to the main house and interrogates one of the black-eyed men for information. He explains that time passes differently in the trees and says she has been gone from the house for several years. He warns that Julien is preparing to surrender himself to the house.

Lisa finds Julien in a trance with black eyes. Lisa breaks Julien out of his trance by playing the song from his musical pocket watch. The two of them rekindle their growing romance.

Lisa tells Julien that Sophie said they had to go down to find the way out of the house. Julien realizes that if they do escape, they will return to their separate eras where the other person does not exist. Julien lays out a plan in which he will go to Andre in his time, tell him their story, and ask Andre to will the house to Lisa. Julien additionally says that he will leave a hidden letter for Lisa so that she will be able to return and save him.

Julien and Lisa descend to the lowest floor of the house where they are surrounded by First Men. Rose appears, making her way toward the couple as the First Men retreat. Rose tells them that the house by the lake can be theirs forever. Julien and Lisa instead jump into a hole and fall down a tunnel into water.

Lisa runs out of breath underwater. Sophie appears and breathes into her sister’s mouth before swimming away. Lisa swims after Sophie and when she finally reaches the surface, Lisa discovers she has returned to reality alone.

Lisa returns to Andre’s house, tears into the chair where he died, and finds his book, “When You Get Lost.” Lisa reads the book and discovers it tells the complete story of her and Julien. At the end of the book, Julien reveals that he did return to his reality. After World War II, Julien went to find Andre but discovered he did not exist. Julien then took the name Andre Bainville and bought the house and the armchair to ensure that Lisa would ultimately be able to find him.

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Review:

Lisa has no idea who Andre Bainville is, but she just inherited his mysterious mansion sitting solemnly opposite her apartment.  What’s even weirder is Andre Bainville has been dead for 30 years.  If not for an odd instruction left with a lawyer to enter his home on a specific date, Andre’s body might never have been found.  Lisa (Veerle Baetens, looking like Hilary Swank’s French sister) can’t even begin to comprehend how a man she never met would know that she would live across the street in 2015, much less that she would even exist at all.

Nevertheless, Lisa’s name is on his will.  Also on the will is a cryptic Biblical reference and red rectangle drawn beneath Andre’s signature.  Lisa doesn’t yet know what mystery she is involved in, though she is already confused by the clues.

Thinking it might provide her some respite from bedwetting nightmares of a drowned girl in a lake, Lisa moves into Andre’s old home.  Ignoring the dirty chair he died in, Lisa is drawn to a peeling pattern on the wall.  When she seemingly hears a child screaming on the other side, Lisa performs an impromptu sledgehammer remodel and the deeper rabbit hole drop begins.

On the other side of the wall, Lisa loses herself in a labyrinthine underworld of columned corridors and ominous architecture capable of confounding Sarah Winchester.  The exit back to reality behind her has disappeared.  In front is a threatening man in a boar’s head mask alongside crawling people with oily black skin.

Lisa has somehow stepped into an alternate reality from which there is no apparent escape.  Her only hope for survival is another mystery man named Julien, himself trapped in this unreal realm for longer than he can remember.  Together the two wayward souls work to uncover the truth behind this side of Andre’s house, hoping to outlast its horrors and find the elusive red door that might finally lead them back home.

A nightmarishly chilling 90-minute mystery movie is tucked tightly inside “Beyond the Walls.”  You just have to go through the 140-minute entirety of a sometimes slow three-part mini-series to get there.

Despite how that sounds, labeling “Beyond the Walls” as overlong wouldn’t quite be correct, as a shorter runtime might not be better.  Trimming excess exposition and inessential side scenes would result in snappier suspense more appealing to action-anxious audiences.  Though compacting its tempo would come with the caveat of cutting a silent character study while sacrificing much of the mood.  Lose those two outstanding elements and the film loses its identifying intrigue.

“Beyond the Walls” essentially has a choice of two developmental directions.  Spend more time exploring its lore with deeper relationships and there is enough material for a full TV season of haunted house horror.  Concentrate on the core while filleting the fluff and thrills instead run straight to the forefront.  Like its heroine, “Beyond the Walls” enters an area in between these two ends where it doesn’t fully fit, yet finds a role within this weird world where it isn’t out of place either.

Questions of optimal duration aside, “Beyond the Walls” is a surprisingly compact film with the illusion of enormous scope.  There are only three top-billed performers and a few brief support roles that can be counted on one hand.  Yet the density in their collective story and its realization through sumptuously sinister production design make the movie appear impossibly bigger than it actually is.  It’s a multisensory experience that eerily captures the otherworldliness of an unusually alluring dreamscape and sets it in the center of your psyche.

Imagine the disturbing sickliness of “Silent Hill” meeting the hypnotic gothic romance of “Dark Shadows” with the elegant playhouse presentation of “Masterpiece Theatre.”  Other atmosphere-oriented thrillers induce dreaded dullness with sleepwalking sequences of tiptoeing down dark hallways.  Here, strange scenery has a personality that is provocative.  Quiet characters are mesmeric merely through presence.  Even in moments of onscreen inaction, your attention is entranced by the pall settled over each second.

If you end up walking ahead of where the mystery wants you to be, which can be done should you piece together the puzzle before Lisa, “Beyond the Walls” still has surprises in store to stay satisfying, and its execution does not disappoint.  For all the minutes used that might not be needed, some could be spent on expanding the Lisa/Julien bond that is critical for the climax.  But enough of the emotional intent comes through that the resolution remains haunting.  “Beyond the Walls” is a movie whose imagery burns in the dark even after eyes close, with a story that stays swirling long after it ends.

NOTE: The film’s French title is “Au-delà des Murs.”

Review Score:  80

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