ABOVE: Rebecca Fraiser, Gareth Koorzen and Drew Harwood in ‘The One You Feed.’ (Photo courtesy Koorzen)
According to actor/producer Gareth Koorzen, half of the two-man team responsible for “The One You Feed,“ the concept for the movie came to him in a dream.
That advance knowledge might help when you sit down to watch this new, queer-skewed thriller, because without it, you’re likely to be very confused.
Set in an unforgiving wilderness, it follows a young man (played by Koorzen) who wakes up in an isolated farmhouse after being mauled by a mysterious animal during a desert camping trip. He is in the care of a woman (Rebecca Fraiser) in an old-fashioned pioneer dress, who has cleaned and bandaged his wounds but offers no information about where they are or how he got there; her muscular, long-haired buck of a husband (director Drew Harwood, the film’s other creative partner) is a mostly silent figure who tends the chickens that seem to serve as the couple’s only source of sustenance. As the stranger recovers, he becomes part of an unpredictable, sexually charged household dynamic that alternates between tenderness and abuse; gradually, he realizes that this enigmatic couple are both his rescuers and his captors, yet his impulse to escape is tempered by a growing attraction he feels to the husband, in whom he senses both a kindred spirit and a dim recognition of something from his own disjointed memories.
Even that brief synopsis is enough to tell you that “The One You Feed” draws inspiration from that certain genre of horror film centered around mysterious, possibly murderous hicks in a remote rural setting – the kind of movie that found its zenith in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and spawned decades worth of similarly themed gorefests from there. But what becomes clear only upon watching are the roots that can be traced – albeit through a few tangles – to a range of cinema artists from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch. Esoteric and illogical (or rather, following a hidden logic of its own), the film as conceived by Koorzen and Harwood evokes not only a dreamlike reality, but plays like a surrealist morality play, a kind of parable about things so primal that they – like the characters themselves – don’t even have a name.
Fortunately, the filmmakers themselves have answered at least a few of the questions that arise from their ominous opus, which is now available on Amazon and other VOD platforms. For instance, we know there’s romance underneath all the backcountry creepiness. As Koorzen further explains in the film’s publicity material, “We wanted to tell this love story between two men in a dreamlike manner.”
“We really wanted to make an LGBTQ film that expanded our current understanding of sexuality,” adds Harwood, who besides directing also wrote the screenplay with his co-star. “We want to help normalize sexuality and sexual orientation and remove labels… We wanted to display sexuality and sexual expression in its simplest form and for that to be beautiful. I really feel like we succeeded.”
In fact, there is a kind of beauty to “The One You Feed.” Harwood brings a studied sensibility to his work behind the camera, displaying a knack for the visually striking in his choice of framing and angles; even more effective is the filtered, golden sheen of Samuel Ott’s cinematography, which goes a long way toward capturing the hallucinatory aesthetic required to render the impression of a lucid dream.
In terms of depicting the beauty of human sexuality, however, any claim of success would have to be described as subjective, at best. For one thing, the depictions of actual sex that occur – and they do, in both opposite-sex and same-sex pairings – are so intertwined with domination, punishment, and hostility that they will likely feel to most viewers like problematic expressions of a fetish. On top of that, though the film features many scenes of bare skin being caressed, washed, stroked, and otherwise sensually explored, each of these are so coupled with a tangible sense of non-consensually invasive transgression – along with more than a dash of body horror – that they become about as un-sexy as naked flesh can be.
The problem goes deeper than that, though. In building their ambitiously archetypal saga, Koorzen and Harwood have pushed so far into the realm of the unconscious that their film becomes not only opaque, but obtuse. Their messaging about sex and sexuality is jumbled together with observations about the struggle for power in personal relationships, the conflation of roles between oppressor and protector, the animalistic impulses that can blur the thin line between sex and violence, the projection of our own desires and fears onto the world and the people around us, and any number of other weighty, wide-open topics that could (and have) provide fodder, each to themselves, for a thousand other movies.
The result comes across mostly as a confounding muddle. While the deliberate vagueness of circumstance effectively serves the movie’s disorienting tone, it leaves the audience so distracted by trying to make sense of the situation in front of their eyes that they have little attention left for contemplating any of the deeper subjects being explored within it. It’s a problem that can’t be fixed by the simple suspension of disbelief necessary to avoid questioning the plot holes in similar horror movies; the questions we are forced to ask ourselves in this movie go far beyond watching a masked killer catch up to his fleeing victims even when he never moves faster than a shamble – they have to do with basic information that the characters not only never seek for themselves, but don’t even seem interested in finding out.
Part of this has to do with the aforementioned surrealism that goes hand in hand with the movie’s dream-ish milieu. While at times “The One You Feed” might spark comparisons to the work of playwrights like Beckett and Pinter, whose characters often interact within a timeless setting and behave according to inexplicable motivations, it never approaches (or even seems to acknowledge) the absurdity inherent in its action – something that, arguably, almost defines the work of those pioneering artists. Likewise, while it seems imbedded with symbolism that is keyed to deeply personal associations from its creators – much like the work of David Lynch – those symbols are at once too ordinary and too oblique to make us care.
All of that could have been alleviated, perhaps, by a cast capable of finding truth within the conceits and translating them to the screen in a form that at least resonates with real human emotion. The performances we get instead are little more than adequate, perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the amateurish feel that keeps the movie from ever realizing its hypothetical potential.
Does that mean “The One You Feed” isn’t an interesting piece of filmmaking? Not necessarily. There is much to fascinate in this leisurely paced (but mercifully short) art film/horror hybrid, and curious fans of the genre may well find themselves engaged in spite of its shortfalls.
On the other hand, they might be better entertained re-watching “The Hills Have Eyes.”
