THE BUTTERFLY ROOM (2012)

Studio:       Naedomi
Director:    Jonathan Zarantonello
Writer:       Paolo Guerrieri, Luigi Sardiello, Jonathan Zarantonello
Producer:  Ethan Wiley, Mark Moran, Enzo Porcelli
Stars:     Barbara Steele, Ray Wise, Erica Leerhsen, Ellery Sprayberry, Julia Putnam, Heather Langenkamp

Review Score: 

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Summary:

A butterfly collector begins a strange relationship with the girl next door that has dark parallels to the woman’s past. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In a flashback, a young girl bleeds in the bathtub. Her stern mother enters the room and scolds the girl, forcing her head underwater.

Anne is an older woman who lives alone. As two workmen landscape outside her apartment building, Anne intentionally kicks out the ladder from Chris, the man working in a tree. Nick, Chris’ boss, apologizes to Anne for Chris’ clumsiness and admonishes Chris for damaging the chainsaw.

Inside her apartment, Anne repairs a broken doll. Anne sees that her neighbor Claudia’s daughter Julie is locked out. Anne invites Julie to wait for Claudia inside her apartment. She then shows Julie how she collects butterflies for mounting by using a killing jar. Claudia later arrives to collect her daughter and she invites Anne to dinner. Claudia also mentions that she has heard loud thumps coming from Anne’s apartment, but Anne feigns ignorance. The thumps happen again when Claudia and Julie return to their apartment.

Anne buys chemicals and supplies for her hobby. In the trunk of her car are mounting pins big enough for a human. Anne returns home to a notice on her door that unapproved renovations are forbidden within the apartment. Workman Chris comes over to apologize at Nick’s insistence. He mentions having previously seen Anne speaking to a little girl on the landing. Chris enters Anne’s butterfly room and is shocked by something he sees. Anne sprays him with deadly chemicals and kills him.

A flashback shows Anne befriending a crying girl named Alice at the mall. Alice claims that friends stole the money her mother gave her to buy a doll. Anne buys her the doll. Alice gets Anne’s phone number so that she can pay her back. Once out of sight, Alice tosses the doll in a garbage can. Alice later visits Anne and presents her with a portrait she drew of the woman. Anne gives her a mounted blue butterfly in return. Alice notices a handmade plate on the wall that Anne claims was made by her deceased daughter Dorothy. Anne volunteers to be Alice’s French tutor so that she can see the girl again. Alice then pays Anne the money for the doll, but Alice asks if she can keep it instead. Anne agrees to give it to her as an allowance.

Back in the present, the wall thumps continue. Anne is seen taking a sledgehammer to her wall. She then travels to a rundown apartment building. Anne uses keys to enter an apartment there. Inside are a dead pet bird, the blue butterfly that Anne gave to Alice, and hand drawn portraits of other older women. Anne has a memory of dressing Alice in a motherly moment before going to the elevator. Anne stops the elevator and opens the floor panel. At the bottom of the elevator shaft is a woman’s body that Anne then sprays with chemicals.

During dinner at Claudia’s, Anne harshly scolds Julie for ignoring her manners and swearing while at the table. Anne then has a memory of forcing Alice to write with her right hand by tying her left hand to a chair. Later, Claudia tells Anne that she is pregnant with her new boyfriend’s baby and that she wants to go away with the man for a weekend. Anne agrees to watch Julie while Claudia is away. That night, Anne discards a heavy bag into the dumpster.

At the mall, Anne sees Alice with another older woman who turns out not to be the girl’s mother. Back at the apartment building, Nick asks Anne if she has seen Chris. Nick then finds Anne’s bag in the dumpster and looks inside.

While staying at Anne’s, Julie sees Anne cutting fabric while muttering strangely about “Alice.” Another flashback shows Anne punishing Alice for using her left hand again and for breaking a glass. Alice threatens to not come back. Anne doubles her payment to Alice as an apology. Alice also ignores Anne’s question about the other woman at the mall.

Anne drops off Julie at school and has a conversation with a young boy named William. William’s mother angrily tells Anne to stay away from her son. The previous flashback then continues. Anne follows Alice to her apartment, which is the same one seen earlier with the body in the elevator shaft. Alice is picked up outside in a limousine by another older woman named Olga. Pretending to be Olga, Anne then goes up to the apartment and meets Alice’s mother Monika. Missing her leg, Monika reveals that she is a SWARB escort, which stands for “sex with a reduced body.” Monika knows that her daughter extorts money from older women. When she insults Anne, Anne kills Monika by knocking her down the elevator shaft.

Nick tells Anne that he knows she is tearing down a wall in her apartment against regulations because he found her bag of sheetrock in the dumpster. He tries to blackmail her as he helps move a wardrobe in front of the door to the butterfly room to keep Julie out.

Anne looks for Alice at the mall and finds her with Olga. Anne kills Olga in the bathroom while Alice is in a stall. Back at her apartment, William’s mother from the school appears and reveals that she is Anne’s daughter Dorothy. Dorothy destroys the plate on the wall and threatens her mother. Meanwhile, Julie breaks the back wall of the wardrobe to reach the doorknob and peek inside the butterfly room.

Anne begins to turn Julie against her mother and takes the girl to a salon to have her hair lengthened. Claudia returns home. Anne and Claudia later find Julie staring at a shrine memorializing Alice in the butterfly room. At school, William and Julie become friends. Dorothy introduces herself to Claudia and warns her about Anne. Dorothy tells Claudia that Anne once tried to drown her in the bathtub until her father intervened. Claudia forbids Julie from seeing Anne. Claudia later leaves a message for Dorothy to call her back. She then confronts Anne about ideas that the woman put into Julie’s head. Anne knocks Claudia unconscious and drowns her in the bathtub.

Another flashback shows Anne giving Alice the doll that Anne was seen repairing earlier. Anne angrily confronts Alice over the other women. Alice breaks the doll and runs away. Anne begs Alice for one more afternoon together in the confrontation witnessed by Chris. After teaching Alice how to pin a butterfly, Anne knocks the girl out with chloroform.

Julie looks for her mother in Anne’s apartment. She finds Chris’ body in a trunk filled with mothballs. Julie then removes the pieces of the Alice shrine and finds a hole in the wall. Inside is Alice’s preserved body pinned like a butterfly. Anne breaks through the wardrobe and into the room by using Claudia’s body as a battering ram. While Anne hunts Julie, Nick hears thumps from upstairs and takes the opportunity to make good on his blackmail threat. As Nick finds the dead bodies, Julie hits redial on her mother’s phone. At the other end, Dorothy hears Anne threatening the child. Dorothy immediately gets in her car. Anne is poised to kill Nick, but she chases Julie outside instead. While running across the street, Anne is hit by Dorothy’s car. Dorothy then intentionally runs over her mother again to kill her. Nick and Julie survive.

Dorothy and her husband adopt Julie, making the girl William’s brother. At a party, Dorothy scolds her son in a manner that suggests she is becoming like her mother.

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Review:

Depictions of child predators stalking young girls at a mall are unsettlingly disturbing.  No doubt because this is an all too true to life horror.  “The Butterfly Room” finds an inventive way to make this theme even more uncomfortable by making the young girl a willing participant and the predator a mature woman in search of a part-time surrogate daughter.  “The Butterfly Room” is a covered boil thriller that crawls under the skin slowly and infects all the way up to the psyche.

Anne is an older woman who lives alone in an apartment complex.  Well groomed and well mannered, the matronly woman occupies her ample free time by increasing her collection of preserved butterfly specimens.  Norman Bates has taxidermy and Anne has butterfly pinning.  No one in horror movies with a hobby involving dead insects or dead animals has ever been anything less than psychotic, and Anne is no different.

Although Anne preserves her butterflies in glass display cases, no one is actually allowed into her so-called “Butterfly Room.”  That is not her oddest quirk, however.  Anne is part of a dark subculture, for lack of a better way to describe it, in the film’s depiction of a Los Angeles where menopausal women seek young girls for afternoons of temporary mother-daughter time.  It is indeed a strange world where these mature women jealously battle each other for the affections of a child that is not even theirs.  Stranger still is the child who willfully extorts these women through a part-time job of standing in as their daughters.

In the best sense of the word, “strange” describes everything that is captivating about “The Butterfly Room.”  Anne is far from being the only person who exhibits creepy behavior.  The character list is an assemblage of thoroughly odd personalities.  Not only are there women who pay a young girl to pretend to be their daughters and a girl who performs the task, but there is also a one-legged prostitute mother who condones her daughter’s questionable side business.  Butterfly pinning and surrogate parenthood are just two of the strange things going on within the film.

The story is quietly dark and the atmosphere moody.  It plays with a slight hint of surreal while its feet are kept planted in an identifiable world.  Watching the mystery unfold as Anne crafts her own unnerving fantasy through these children is dreamily hypnotic.  And the characterizations of all the mildly and not so mildly twisted personas is just as interesting.

“The Butterfly Room” is a showcase for genre icon Barbara Steele, who has been seldom seen on the silver screen since the century turned.  The rest of the cast is a Scream Queen reunion of sorts with cameos representing several of horror’s most notable films.  P.J. Soles of “Halloween,” Adrienne King of “Friday the 13th,” and Camille Keaton of “I Spit on Your Grave” appear briefly as mothers vying for a young girl’s attention.  Heather Langenkamp of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has a bigger role as a potential foil to Barbara Steele.  And just to make sure that all of the major franchises are covered, Erica Leerhsen of the 2003 “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” adds to that list of the film’s mothers.  “Gremlins” director Joe Dante provides the cherry on top with his quick scene as a taxicab driver.

Finding a weak link in that cast list is hard to do.  The performances are not exactly perfect, however.  There is so much jealous rage and angry scheming going on from everyone at all times that some scenes are overbaked.  It may be because the script is crackling with too much female fury, or it may be that director Jonathan Zarantonello needed to subdue things a bit.

Still, “The Butterfly Room” is on a fast track for becoming the go-to horror film for a Mother’s Day holiday.  Although most of the horror is psychological, psychotic Anne does find more than one way to drop a few bodies using methods both gruesome and slightly comical.  (Try not to chuckle just a bit at the elevator music as Anne fumbles with a corpse.)  “The Butterfly Room” is the style of eerie suspense that sticks in the head even after the credits roll.

Review Score:  80

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