This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers
Two Storms
We don't want what we see-- we see what we want. Freud used the term scopophilia to describe the resolution of arbitrary data inputs into the sense of sight. We immediately pick out our crush in a crowded room, we gloss over mess despite looking straight at it, we find Waldo. You could consider it the act of deriving pleasure from what you're looking at, but really it's the opposite. Desire dictates the shape of the world.
Cinematography is gaze incarnate. An unmotivated image will feel empty no matter how nominally beautiful. When "Hill House" was first released, the mediasphere was abuzz with discussion about episode 6. No surprise there-- what Flanagan has achieved here is a technical marvel. Yet the truly impressive thing isn't that he pulled off an episode comprised of jaw-dropping continuous shots, it's that he pulled it off without sacrificing dramatic clarity. To go one step further, this particular story feels like it couldn't have been told any other way.
This is the wake. The moment of mourning. The collision of family members who until now had been sequestered to their own stories. The siblings gather to witness Shirley's work on their younger sister's corpse. "She doesn't look like she's sleeping. She looks dead," an already drunk Theo mutters several times over. They discuss matters both heavy and banal as they awkwardly settle into each other's company. The camera follows them coolly as they move through the home-that-isn't-home, driven by their vices and desires. Who is comfortable around who? Who always cycles back to the bar? Who approaches the coffin, and with how much reluctance? One standout moment features a clearly shaken Luke accepting Steve's offer of support... only it's Steve who can't handle the body. "Yep. That's Nelly alright, and she's dead!" he babbles, recoiling.
All of this in one unbroken take. Flanagan gives us information, subtle character moments, and tight pacing all without cinema's most crucial tool: the edit. How?
The answer lies with his habitually crisp compositions. No extra visual noise clutters this sterile funeral home. The conspicuously absent score enhances the effect. Flanagan presents the episode theatrically, with an abundance of character-focused beats and monologues. The visuals always come back to one core tenet: motivated camera movement.
A one take is really a series of separate compositions strung together. When Flanagan moves between compositions, he never does so arbitrarily. Every camera movement efficiently sets up the next composition, and is itself perspectivally motivated. Take the moment when Shirley gets frustrated enough to stop lecturing her sister about drinking and get a drink herself. The camera twists to follow her face as she crosses to the liquor, thus also pivoting the 180° requisite to set up the next "scene."
The camera is not mindless. It is not objective. It is driven, like the characters, and we too are drawn into their desire. This manifests beautifully in the arrival of the father.
I can't help but wonder if his entrance would have been even more effective if we too were seeing the aged father for the first time. The adult kids are certainly thunderstruck, as the camera hustles to the door to greet him up close. This kicks off the best sequence in an incredible episode. As he awkwardly greets his kids, the camera begins to slowly spin around. One of these lush rotations shows the adult ensemble, the next shows the child actors surreally situated in the funeral home, the next shows the adults again. Hugh still sees the children within these adults. This simple but heartrending insight wouldn't work nearly as well if presented in a more typical shot/reverse shot. The continuity is what tells the story.
We move with Hugh as he approaches the casket. The walk is long, and it takes some time before our vision resolves on what we're approaching: the child version of Nelly lying dead. This image is effective not because it sneaks up on us, but because it was there the whole time waiting for us to catch up. Overwhelmed with grief, Hugh steps away to the bathroom for the centerpiece sequence of the episode. The camera follows him sauntering down the funeral home hallway. The hall extends eerily, twists around, and spills seamlessly into the foyer of Hill House. He has strolled into memory, and just as the years-younger family emerges, the chandelier crashes to the ground and we
CUT
for the very first time in the episode. They say that the most important part of a "oner" is knowing when to cut, and Flanagan picks an appropriately jarring moment to release us.
In order to pull off the bravura shot that blends Shirley's funeral parlor with the funereal memory of Hill House, the designers built the two sets adjacent to each other. In order to keep the compositions clean and afford plenty of ability for camera movement, each of these sets had to be precisely constructed. The metaphor of this moment had to be built into the backbone of the show. The funeral parlor is maintained with the blood money reaped from Hill House's narrative, after all. Both spaces are haunted by the same ghosts.
Now that Dad has moved us into the past, we fold seamlessly into the drama of the younger family. It's a stormy night then as it is now. We watch as the family scrambles around to find lights in the darkness.
Another subtle composition change comes when a wide shot of scurrying family members sinks down to frame a close-up of Steve's face, who insists to Luke that everything is going to be alright. It is from young Luke to old Luke that the second
CUT
of the episode happens. We revisit his adult self, small, internal, overwhelmed by grief. Fitting that Luke should be the entry point into this next segment, one rife with references to the mental illness, alcoholism, and depression running through the veins of the family tree.
Memories are bandied back and forth, rejected, refurbished, refound. As questions about the past arise, the father begins to monologue. We are not given the relief of cross-cutting, so we share the awkwardness of being trapped in a shared space. We're immersed in it, we feel the rhythms of the anger and hesitance as if we were a fly on the carefully curated wallpaper.
We follow Nell for the third
CUT
which makes sense given how much of the rest of the episode will center around her, or more specifically, her absence. Just as she is present and absent at the funeral home, so too she disappears on that stormy night so long ago. This sequence is when the horror elements start to pop off. The episode has been doing wonders up until this point with 'swivel horror.' If you can't jump cut to a ghost, what about slowly swiveling to see one behind a character's shoulder? The incredible architecture of the home gives Flanagan even more tools in his spooky toolbox. The mother, besotted with the house's sour energy, starts disappearing around corners and acting all weird and stuff. These are the ingredients for a delightfully inventive cat and mouse sequence, in which Dad pursues her around the house as she is differentially lit by lightning blasts and flashlight beams.
Here the function of cutlessness is to emphasize the claustrophobia of being trapped in a collapsing domestic situation. Holding together a home can feel like an act of sheer durational willpower. It's easy for the little things to get lost too, as literalized by Nelly's sudden disappearance. She reappears around the time of the next
CUT
insisting that she didn't go anywhere at all. She was right here the whole time-- they just couldn't see her.
And again the signifiers fold atop each other, as the adult family engages in their most brutal banter yet. Just as Nelly was lost during the storm, her body lays unwitnessed as her siblings exorcise their daddy issues. Eventually Nell's spirit, or the cosmos, or the editor, can't take it anymore, and just as the harshest piece of dialogue is uttered-- 'the wrong parent died!'-- the platform holding Nelly's casket collapses for our final major
CUT.
Even at her funeral she is not seen, and this rupture is her last ditch attempt to break tension and gain attention. For the final stretch of the episode, we settle into a more normal editing style. Kudos to the filmmakers for knowing exactly when to break the one take conceit. It feels as if we've been holding our breath, and we finally get a few moments to be with these characters more naturally as they attend to the corpse.
If you subtract episode 6 from The Haunting of Hill House, the show would still be great. Add it in and it becomes the show's raison d'etre, the nexus of all that comes before and after. So rarely does a gimmick episode manage to fit a square peg in a round hole, but "Two Storms" never loses sight of how its challenging conceit can enhance the story rather than distract. Flanagan and co. clearly constructed the show around this tightrope act, and it is not quite like anything else out there.
Our relationships with each other are also relationships with time, a truth never more apparent than when confronting a grief that resonates through history.
10 / 10
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