Wounds (2019)

Babak Anvari's Wounds arrives with the solemn equipment of occult dread: a run-down New Orleans bar, a forgotten cell phone, a tunnel, a pile of teeth, and a great many cockroaches. Armie Hammer plays Will, a bartender whose life unravels after he pockets a phone left behind by a departing patron. What follows is a slow, damp descent into Gnostic ritual and flesh, in which wounds function as doorways and the human body is treated as a temporary container for something older and hungrier. It is a mood piece, and the mood is mildew.

For the purposes of cultural accounting, the film's ledger is close to empty. The cast includes Zazie Beetz in a supporting role and the New Orleans setting supplies incidental background diversity, but nobody involved appears to be making a statement, and nothing on screen invites us to read the film that way. The women here exist as girlfriends and objects of the protagonist's jealousy, which is a storytelling choice, not a thesis. The body horror tradition, meanwhile, is the precise inverse of the body positivity movement: flesh is something that betrays you, splits open, and admits tenants.

There is no economic critique lurking in the run-down bar, no climate anxiety in the swarming roaches, no racial consciousness in the city's geography, no moral instruction offered at any point. The film wants to unsettle, not to teach, and it pursues that goal with a single-mindedness that borders on the admirable. A viewer seeking confirmation of their politics will have to bring it themselves. Wounds offers atmosphere, a committed lead performance, and a final act that dissolves into insects and screaming. It asks nothing of us and tells us nothing about how to live. In this particular climate, that is its own small distinction.