Horns (2013)

Horns arrives from 2013, directed by Alexandre Aja and adapted from Joe Hill's novel, and it occupies that unhappy territory where a supernatural premise, a murder mystery, and a comedy of manners are all asked to share a single bed. Daniel Radcliffe plays Ig Perrish, accused of killing his girlfriend, who wakes one morning to find horns on his head and a new talent for extracting confessions from strangers. The film is a tonal jumble, as the critics said at the time, and it never resolves whether it wants to be a lark or a lament. Radcliffe, to his credit, commits fully to both readings at once.

The cast is white in the way that Canadian productions of a certain budget tend to be, with a few minority faces in the background and no visible effort to arrange them. Michael Adamthwaite's Eric Hannity is identified as Ig's gay friend, and the horns later compel him to act on feelings for his male partner, a development that occupies perhaps ninety seconds and is never mentioned again. Juno Temple's Merrin is a corpse with a backstory. She is raped, murdered, and then revealed to have been dying of cancer, which is a great deal of suffering in service of a man's grief. The film does not seem to notice, and it certainly does not ask us to.

Elsewhere the ledger is nearly empty. No racial themes, no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent characters, no historical revisionism. A bartender burns his own establishment for the insurance money, which is greed as punchline, not as indictment of anything larger. Physical disfigurement is used for horror, which is what horror is for. What we have here is a genre exercise with a mean streak, more interested in the devil's set pieces than in the congregation's conscience, and it has no interest in sermonizing to anyone. It is a film about vengeance that takes vengeance seriously and nothing else seriously at all.