Dead End (2003)

Dead End arrives from 2003, which is to say from the far side of a cultural frontier. A French production shot in Los Angeles County, it concerns the Harrington family, who take a shortcut on Christmas Eve and find themselves trapped on a road that will not end, pursued by a hearse and a woman in white holding a dead infant. The premise is pulp, the register is pulp, and the film holds no interest in anything beyond the mechanics of dread. Peter Bradshaw called it macabre in the approved manner. He was correct, and that manner belongs to a period before the current vocabulary of approval had been assembled.

The cast is white, the family is white, and nobody remarks upon it, because there is nothing to remark upon. Laura and Marion exist to be terrorized, shot, and driven mad; the screenplay hands them suffering without ever handing them an argument. No character mentions race, class, sexuality, or the environment. The Harringtons' cruelty toward one another is domestic and specific. Frank dislikes his in-laws, Laura resents her marriage, and the rot stays inside the car. There is no system to indict, only a family, and the film declines to promote one into the other.

What remains is craft. The gore stays mostly offscreen, the dialogue is pitched at a satisfyingly pulpy level, and Lin Shaye's descent into shotgun-wielding hysteria won her a Best Actress prize at a comedy festival, which tells us most of what we need to know about the film's moral seriousness. The madness here is a supernatural device, the bodies are props, and the ending is a shrug in a hospital corridor. Judged by the standards of contemporary social consciousness, Dead End is a blank page. It is not a failure of nerve. It is simply a film made before the ledger was opened.