Southbound (2015)

Anthology movies keep getting a try in horror circles, going back at least to 1945's Dead of Night, one of the better ones. Since 1959, they are routinely compared to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone—even that franchise has tried the feature film pastiche approach a few times. There's a lot of ways to do them, with and without frame stories and connective tissue, but the one thing they have in common is that they seldom work very well. Too much narrative starting and stopping is part of it (the binge killer), and maybe the compression of the stories too, which often feel undeveloped (looking in your direction, V/H/S franchise). Arguably it's the case with Southbound too, as evidenced not least by the popular theory that it's actually about "Purgatory" (capitalized). Whatever. If you think about anything too much it falls apart, but the genius of Southbound is that it doesn't really give you time to think. You're just plunged into witnessing terrible events that somehow matter. That's why they're terrible. It's the usual unruly mob of filmmakers with these things (Roxanne Benjamin and Radio Silence directed three of the five pieces between them and also take producer credits, but there are many chefs working in this kitchen) and they hit on the device of making their stories interlock, and then more or less circle back to the start like Dead of Night, which is effective and disorienting. Southbound constantly almost makes sense but then falls apart right in the places that provoke the most anxiety. The stories are different from one another too, exploring different takes on horror set cheek by jowl and run through the gauntlet. With the whole picture coming in under 90 minutes, that's less than 20 minutes per story. Further cause for bewilderment is that it's not always entirely clear when one story is ending and the next starting. This movie keeps knocking you back, never gives you a chance to collect your thoughts. That helps make it work, but what really helps is that the stories are all pretty good—trippy, fragmented, shocking, insidious. High tension. And they waste no time. Monsters roam the desert. A cult wins converts with servings of mystery meat. A home invasion is brutal, traumatizing, mostly unexplained. Calls to 911 turn into surreal conferences. From segment to segment, Southbound tends to give you just what you need to know to wreck your bliss. Nothing is explained. Everything is understood. No time to think. Keep moving.

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