Director: Larry Cohen
Writer: Larry Cohen
Cast: John Ryan, Sharon Farrell, Andrew Duggan, Guy Stockwell, James Dixon
Runtime: 91 mins.
1974
After a lightly avant garde credit sequence with stentorian music over a menagerie of sweeping flashlights, It's Alive drops us into the shoes of Frank (John P. Ryan) and Lenore (Sharon Farrell) who wake in the night to discover that their baby is on its way. Absent are the excited histrionics we expect from such a moment. Frank and Lenore lackadaisically get out of bed, walk around the house a bit, calmly discuss the situation, pick out outfits, and playfully wake up their first son Chris-- all while Lenore's labor pains are increasing. The dissonance between the urgent situation and the casual atmosphere is enhanced by the sound design and editing. The score has disappeared completely, and ancillary noise is cranked up in the sound mix so that we are suffused with every footstep and rustle of fabric. The effect is one of moving through the dumb stillness of an hour too early to be called morning, aware that every noise you make will dominate the space.
We don't get the feeling that something is wrong, exactly, but that all the edges of human experience are shaved off. The family treats the birth of a child like they would the washing of dishes. The bland evenness of white suburban life is uniquely resistant to the shaggy tumults of a life lived; even trauma is subsumed into this all-encompassing sense of normalcy. Frank upholds this delusion when his son asks him about the dangers of death in childbirth. "That sort of thing used to happen, but doesn't anymore."
No surprise that the bulk of It's Alive's runtime will be dedicated to the dismantling of that sense of normalcy, and the ways that it rushes to reassert itself. You see, there is quite a complication in the birth of Frank and Lenore's new child: it is a mutant that immediately kills an entire delivery room's worth of medical professionals, then escapes into the air vents. Frank and Lenore spend the rest of the film reeling from the emotional fallout of losing their baby in this inexplicable way, as well as the social fallout of being the parents of a freak monstrosity. Meanwhile, the baby wreaks havoc out in the world as it seeks something safe and familiar.
Characters responding to rupture with casual contemplation is a recurring motif in the film, as in Frank's elliptical conversation with his boss about how he really ought not to return to work for a PR firm when all the world knows about his monster baby. The only exception to this nonchalance, a burst of raw honesty from Lenore between contractions, provides a skeleton key for Frank's ongoing anxieties: "You do want this baby right? You're not going to feel trapped like last time?" It's Alive is the story of a man who is fleeing from the enormity of parenthood. It's not just that he doesn't want the responsibility-- he is happy to take more responsibility for things he can easily grasp, like work. It's that having a child, especially having a non-normative child, is such a sublime life-changing event that he can't conceive of how it relates to him.
The film's ambition pushes it beyond Frank's internal struggle and into the realm of the social. Most films would have restricted their purview to home life, but here the domestic sequence is truncated to a tremendously satisfying half hour just before the final act. In the meantime, we oscillate between the couple's baggage and the escapades of the newborn.* Law enforcement exists as a sort of underplayed running gag, culminating in a huge SWAT team swarming a house and training their guns on what is revealed to be a perfectly tranquil baby sitting on a blanket in the backyard.
*Chris, the firstborn, is mostly written out of the movie by the end of the first scene, which is a blessing given what we see of Daniel Holzman's acting.
This creates a separation between Frank and the immediacy of the threat. "It's no relation to me," he says about the baby, as the scene cuts to a killing that does indeed have little to do with Frank or the rest of the plot. The editing often performs what it portrays, disconnecting Frank as he is psychologically distancing himself. There is even a moment that edits around a character discussing dissociation in a way that evokes the experience of dissociation. Peter Honess's editing has a destabilizing effect, with conversations and gestures bursting out of nowhere or being lopped off too abruptly. Sometimes the editing gives us a much needed break, like a tense scene at an empty school that takes a breath to observe a cop bending way over to drink from a children's water fountain.
The 70s clothing and sets also work to great advantage in communicating the mental state of our characters. While Frank is hiding away in logic, deflection, and denial, Lenore confronts her trauma head on in what is a perpetually distressing performance, always modulating the excesses she chooses to show with the excesses she chooses to hide. The standout visual moment of her arc comes later in the film as she mutters about making lamb chops. She stands in the kitchen in an aggressively printed dress that very closely resembles the garish pattern of the floor. The camera hovers above the room, tilted down so that the swirling floor/dress pattern eats up the frame, making Lenore feel lost and alone, a wayward extension of her domestic environment.
Despite its complexity, It's Alive is still a dumb monster movie, complete with accompanying spooky soundtrack and cheesy puppet work. But Larry Cohen is far too savvy to ever let the film's cheap or schlocky moments ever feel like they are cheap or schlocky. In fact, it seems like the project of It's Alive is very much about compartmentalizing its genre elements, just as its protagonist spends the whole movie compartmentalizing his fears and anxieties. The score overplays its livelier moments, so that it can be all the more effective when it leaves us in silence. The editing warps to render conspicuous absences. Even the film's centerpiece milkman murder features banality tainted by trauma, blood slowly intermingling with streams of milk.
The horror is successful, peaking in a moment of superb tension that sees flashing red lights illuminate a group of cops searching a large drainage pipe for the monstrous baby. But it is the psychological exploration that sticks the landing best. Soon after the red flashing lights, Frank captures the baby and sprints ever deeper into the dark sewer to escape the police, perhaps to escape all of society. We only barely catch the outline of Frank as the dancing lights do little to cut the blackness. Frank has been running from the darkest aspects of himself and his family for the entire movie-- finally he delves headlong into his unconscious. Only now, in the imagery of nightmares, can Frank admit that he is willing to forsake all that he has in this world for the love of his child. A chilling recognition of love's devastation.
Between the destabilizing editing, the ancillary environmental commentary, and the plumbing of great psychological depths, It's Alive has far more on its mind than one would expect from a movie that climaxes with a man throwing a baby at a police officer. Cohen's work here drives home that there is no such thing as 'low art'-- or at least, any 'low art' can be elevated with sharp care and craft.
4 / 5 BLOBS
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