.png){kind=logo}
In “Rock Springs,” a newly widowed, grief-addled mother moves with her young daughter to a creaky, remote cottage in the woods of Wyoming, which, as anyone even casually versed in horror cinema will immediately guess, turns out to be a bad idea for all the usual reasons. But it’s the more unusual reasons — and in particular, one non-generic, historically specific one — that give Vera Miao‘s debut feature its punch. The eponymous town, it turns out, is the site of the real-life 1885 Rock Springs Massacre, in which at least 28 Chinese immigrant miners were killed by their resentful white counterparts, and that atrocity bleeds into Miao’s present-day ghost story in unshakable ways.
The latest entry in a growing subgenre of American horror films in which racial trauma drives much of the terror, “Rock Springs” benefits in its contemporary scenes from a mulchy, overcast sense of place and a fine, tensely wired performance by Kelly Marie Tran as a westernized Asian-American woman with no idea of the diasporic quagmire she’s stepped into. There’s a certain stylistic familiarity to these proceedings, as Miao borrows tropes and even wholesale shot constructions from recent genre forebears — but when it plunges directly into history, in flashback scenes headlined by the redoubtable Benedict Wong as a miner running for his life, it’s a more bracing, lingering work. Genre-oriented distributors should take interest following the film’s premiere in Sundance’s Midnight strand.
A surreal prologue introduces young Gracie (Aria Kim), a solemn-faced poppet in pink pajamas, wandering a desolate dreamland of gray hillocks built from gathered ash or dust. Like the baleful graphics that bridge the film’s chapter headings — of a strange, bulbous organism morphing and swelling in bruised, rotting hues — it’s a striking visual effect without much immediate thematic payoff, though it comes to suggest a kind of barren holding room between life and death. Back in the real world, Gracie has retreated into silence since the untimely death of her father, and a move to rural Wyoming — where her out-of-commission cellist mother Emily (Tran) has taken a job teaching community college — hasn’t exactly brought her out of her shell.
Moving with them is Emily’s likewise bereaved mother-in-law (Fiona Fu), a first-generation Chinese immigrant who speaks no English — not the only cultural barrier between her and Emily, born to Vietnamese parents but adopted and raised by a white family, who regards with skepticism the older woman’s traditional spiritual beliefs and rituals. Many of those, in this moment, revolve around securing a safe passage to the afterlife for her late son: That they’ve relocated in the “month of hungry ghosts” is a point of major concern to her, dismissed by Emily with some irritation.
But the ghosts do hunger, it seems. It isn’t long before Emily is having regular, not entirely benevolent visions of her late husband in the new house, while Gracie, who already has something of a fey aura about her, seems to be a magnet for rustling signals from the beyond — and that creepy, raven-haired antique doll she picks up at a local yard sale isn’t helping matters either. The house may be haunted, but playing outside is no safer: The woods have eyes, and grasping hands too.
Just as the situation reaches an eerie crisis point, Miao abruptly switches tack and perspective, yanking us back 140 years to real-world horrors that unfolded on the very ground where Emily and Gracie’s new house now stands — a far more effective and disquieting play on the rooted-on-the-spot time travel device seen in the recent Robert Zemeckis dud “Here,” though Heyjin Jun’s camera can’t afford to stand still in a situation of escalating peril. With burly melancholy, Wong plays Ah Tseng, a Chinese migrant worker employed — with his young nephews — in the Rock Springs coal mines, though introduced on an idle day off in their makeshift camp. As the Chinese men shoot the breeze and play cards, a mob of armed white miners gathers over the hill and encroaches on the unsuspecting outsiders.
The ensuing attack is staged with harrowing, heart-in-mouth immediacy, shot by Jun with propulsive, handheld looseness and mud on the lens. Occurring shy of the halfway mark, it’s the film’s standout setpiece, unmatched for chilling vividness and tension by anything that follows. But “Rock Springs” remains both shivery and affecting as it tracks the spectral echoes from this tragedy to its 21st-century domestic drama, intelligently shedding light both on a buried historical hate crime and the ongoing microaggressions experienced by Asian-Americans across the country today.
Miao has a brisk, tingling command of atmosphere, and if she occasionally seems still in search of a style all her own — with one hat-tip too many to the “Hereditary”-patented upside-down driving shot — this promising debut has a human touch and point of view that are rather more distinctive within the genre, resting on Chinese mysticism without cheapening or exploiting it. Don’t feed the ghosts, “Rock Springs” warns its audience. But don’t fear them either.
English (US) ·