Southbound (2015)

Southbound arrives as a 2015 horror anthology, five interlocking tales stitched along a nameless desert highway, and it conducts itself with the grim patience of a film that has already accepted damnation. Travelers flee floating creatures. A band called The White Tights wanders into a cult dinner of burnt roast beef. A distracted driver performs surgery on a stranger at the instruction of voices that are not, in any meaningful sense, helping. The prevailing theory holds that everyone here is dead, cycling through a purgatory assembled from their own guilt. The film never explains this. It repeats the same photograph, the same bullet wound, the same creature standing at the shoulder of the road, until the loop closes on itself and starts again.

The cast is mostly white, the directing quartet includes Roxanne Benjamin as its lone woman, and her segment hands its running time to a female band. This is a staffing arrangement, not an argument. The film has no interest in gender as a thesis, no interest in race at all, and its body horror is punitive in the old-fashioned sense: a bear trap, an opened rib cage, a black fluid that signifies something worse than illness. The desert is a spiritual wasteland, not an ecological one. Nobody here is lectured about carbon, capital, or the correct feelings to hold about their own flesh. The antagonists are demons and something older still, and they want nothing from the living except company.

What remains is a film that unsettles without sermonizing, a rare animal in any decade. It asks the audience to sit inside ambiguity and offers no moral where the asphalt runs out. World-weary as this reviewer has grown, there is still something to admire in a horror anthology that trusts silence over speeches, and discomfort over instruction. It is a modest achievement, and a clean one.