Lace Crater (2016)

Movie: Lace Crater (2016), directed by Harrison Atkins

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.08 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:06:58 (careful recovery run)

 

So I’m slightly injured, I think—I’ve got some pain in the ball of my left foot, and inflammation of the hip flexors, which I put down to four consecutive nightly runs outside on the pavement for 7-8 miles each. I think I just pushed things a little too hard and now my body is yelling at me for it. So for now, I guess I’m back on the treadmill for slow and gentle runs until things start healing up a bit, which is a drag, but since the ol’ mortal coil has apparently betrayed me, this seems to be the perfect excuse to trot out some slow-moving body horror like Lace Crater, which I found while poking around through the back alleys of Amazon Prime’s horror section. You know, where the weird stuff hangs out.

 

And Lace Crater certainly qualifies as at least a little weird in my book. Maybe not for the first act, which I found a bit hard to get through; I’m not generally a fan of the mumblecore thing, and the first 20-30 minutes of Lace Crater is yet another exercise in watching a vague clot of twenty-somethings who are ostensibly (if not necessarily demonstrably) friends as they go off to spend a weekend together somewhere. There they have the obligatory inarticulate and banal conversations which somehow get even less interesting when they get stoned. However, things get considerably less dull when Ruth—who is fresh out of a breakup and looking to hook up with Andrew who is ALSO fresh out of a breakup and seems like he’d be into it until he abruptly leaves their molly-soaked cuddle pile and makes her doubt her attractiveness and self-worth because these twenty-somethings are so very, very high school—goes back to her room and bangs a ghost.

 

I mean, there’s more to it than that, such as some of the best foreplay sweet nothings ever committed to digital storage. (“Do you defecate?” Ruth asks Michael the Burlap-Covered Ghost; bestill my fluttering heart.) But honestly, the conversation between Ruth and Michael is the only interesting one in the movie, so I’m gratified that the participants were rewarded with a little spontaneous across-the-Great-Divide bow-chicka-bow-bow. The problem is, the next day Michael is gone and Ruth doesn’t feel so hot. She throws up on the car ride home, which might be a hangover, and keeps waking up covered in a thick coating of slime, which… probably isn’t. She’s also hallucinating and experiencing weird space-outs and time skips, and her doctor thinks she may have picked up a very rare sexually transmitted infection which he ominously declines to name. (Give it to her straight, doc—is it Spectral Herpes, or a dose of the Ectoplasmic Clap?)

 

It’d have to be a pretty dang rare STI indeed, because I’m thinking back to health class and I don’t recall one that causes your skin to peel off like you had the world’s worst sunburn and also makes you projectile-vomit mysterious black liquid, but, granted, it was a long time ago. Anyway, Ruth’s physical form and mental health deteriorate rapidly, as her friends shun her either for allegedly sleeping with Andrew when omiGAWD-I-wanted-to-sleep-with-Andrew, or just for being Spectral-Herpes-gross, or both. Even her ex has a new girlfriend, so she’s driven back to the coach house that Michael haunts; can she find happiness, or at least closure, with her wraith-with-benefits?

 

With a narrative like that, it could have been a straight-up gross-out horror movie, but Lace Crater aspires to more than that. Having seen that it’s devoid of both lace and craters, I can confirm that its unusual and opaque title is definitely evocative and not literal, which might indicate to you that the whole film has a heavy film-school-final-project vibe to it. This is Harrison Atkins’s first and only feature, and he leans in on the surrealism pretty hard, which can get tired really fast when it’s done poorly. The good news is, I think it’s done quite well here, and everything is lent a welcome cohesion by virtue of a terrific performance by Lindsay Burdge as Ruth, as well as a suitably haunting (I know, I know) soundtrack.

 

If you aren’t big on the arthouse aesthetic and you like plot-driven movies with unambiguous endings, you should steer clear of this one. I have my own personally satisfying interpretation of everything that happens and what it means, so Lace Crater doesn’t leave one completely at sea, but as Burlap Michael tells us straight out, “you don’t get the answers. The answers never come.” Unless, of course, you bring your own.

 

Oh, and if you get frisky with a ghost, make sure to use protection.