Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Cabin Fever: Reviewed by Davis Rivera

In his 2003 directorial debut “Cabin Fever,” writer/director Eli Roth has carefully crafted a film of mood where the actors appear to effortlessly support themselves without the interference of Roth to help develop their characters. Roth does this in many ways, most notably the higher ratio of key to fill distilling the screen with a low-key lighting set up rarely seen since the “golden years” of horror which included such heavyweights as Hooper, Raimi, and Carpenter. He begins the film using strictly saturated colors even panning to the sky at one point to reveal that it is as red as the blood that will be shed later. As the blood begins to flow, so do the desaturated colors in the faces, clothes and walls belonging to the characters’, dampening the bright hues of the first forty-five minutes to a memory. This is to emphasize the fact that the life-threatening virus has reached them and there’s nothing they can do about it. The film is not picturesque nor is it exquisitely adorned; but by eliminating these textbook examples of presenting the mise-en-scène to the viewer, Roth has allowed us to pay attention to the characters and since there are so few we can quickly look around at the scenery and determine whether the subtle changes are signaling their impending doom or their possible relief.

The film begins by introducing us to the five main characters: Jeff, Karen, Paul, Marcy, and Bert. They are all recent college graduates who decide to celebrate this momentous occasion by going out into the woods and having lots of premarital sex and drinking plentiful amounts of alcohol. A not-quite naturalistic high-key lighting that sets the optimistic mood of fresh-faced kids having one final celebration before they begin their lives as adults emphasizes these scenes and every scene presented before the group reaches the woods. Once they reach the woods, however, natural-key lighting slowly takes over. The group’s string of unfortunate events begins when Bert goes hunting and accidentally shoots a violently ill vagrant thinking he is a squirrel and leaves him to die alone. Later in the film, once the lighting has reached its final stage of low-key, the vagrant returns to their cabin asking for help only to be beaten and set on fire as he walks away and collapses into the town’s water supply. At this point, Roth’s evocative score returns with its diegetic use of the sound of flies, segueing into the next crucial scene.

The following day, Karen, the love interest of Paul, is shown drinking from a glass of water. Beginning with this scene, the contamination of the water becomes part of the film’s drinking motif, which repeatedly shows each of the main characters, except for the selfish Jeff, drinking the one substance that can harm them. The disheartening series of events begins with a shot whose composition emphasizes the foul water, which appears to have bits of waste inside of it. The glass Karen drinks from is granted an exaggerated visual importance in the foreground of the composition and leaves Karen almost completely blocked out of the shot. Its proximity to the camera and its size make it impossible for the viewer to ignore, reminding us of the vagrant’s death only minutes before. Very soon after, Karen begins to exhibit the same symptoms shown by the vagrant earlier. Not knowing what to do with her, the group locks her in a tool shed to guarantee she’s been fully quarantined. This proves to no avail as Paul later finds out when he opens the shed and finds the virus has eaten away almost all of her flesh.

Soon after the fall of Karen, the other members of the group begin to turn on one another. They all decide its best to stay together regardless of their bickering, except for Jeff, who has been sure of the cabin’s perilous nature ever since the diseased vagrant showed up and was beaten and killed by the group. Jeff wisely leaves them and, carrying a case of beer, runs into the woods to make it on his own. After Jeff’s departure, everyone else soon becomes infected. Bert decides to take action and drives into town to get help only managing to infect a young child whose caretakers are aware of the disease Bert is carrying and attempt to chase and kill him. When they all reach the cabin a caretaker of the child kills Bert, Paul kills all three caretakers, a vicious dog kills Marcy, and Paul attempts to make it into town but soon collapses in the middle of the highway. Luckily he is picked up by a trucker and dropped off in front of a hospital. The doctors decide that they cannot help Paul so the sheriff arranges for his body to be discarded in the woods. Ironically, he ends up partially in the water supply used to produce the town’s tap water and local “natural spring water” brand of bottled water. The one survivor, Jeff, awakens in a bush surrounded by empty beers cans and walks back to the cabin to check on everyone. He is somewhat grief-stricken to see that they are all dead but immediately becomes filled with joy at surviving the ordeal. The camera tightly frames Jeff in his moment of jubilation confusing the viewer as to why Roth has chosen to constrict him in such a way. Moments later, he is gunned down by police who believe he is a raving victim of the disease.

The main reason Roth successfully maintains such a clear mood of trepidation throughout the film is that he doesn’t allow us to maintain any kind of long-lasting bond with his characters and he stays away from an over-usage of prostheses or props to create the mood he’s so craftily formed. He understands that something that is beyond these characters’ control, their poisoned surroundings, is infinitely more frightening than any monster and allows the ominous tone to reverberate until the film is over.

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