After a two-episode slump with April’s I’m Just F*cking with You and the questionably-holiday themed All that We Destroy, Hulu and Blumhouse’s horror series returned to form with last month’s They Come Knocking. Going into the series’ final episodes, it continues that streak with what end up being its best installment: the July 4th-themed, Culture Shock.
Directed by Gigi Saul Guerrero, who wrote the script with Efrén Hernández and James Benson, it follows Martha Higareda’s Marisol. After trying to cross the border from Mexico to America only to be raped and then left behind by the “coyote,” she prepares to attempt the journey again months later — this time with her rapist’s baby due any minute. Similar to the structure of episodes past, most of the film’s first half is focused on building tension that will break somewhere around the halfway point. However, unlike previous episodes, that build up is arguably tenser and scarier than what comes after.
With dialogue almost entirely in Spanish and presented in a stripped down, realistic way, what makes that first section so disturbing is how plausible it all feels. Marisol’s situation is extreme, but it’s easy to imagine any real woman making the same decisions facing at least some of the same threats. Marisol’s assault establishes how vulnerable she is even before the film starts and each new element only adds to that palpable sense of danger.
There’s her baby, which her doctor, Lupita (Laura Cerón), says is due any minute. There’s the untrustworthy “coyote,” who already turned on her once. There’s the leering man who owns the way station near the border who attempts to rape her only to be thwarted by one of the other travelers — who just happens to be an infamous assassin for the cartel. There’s the cartel itself, whose members chase and kill those attempting to cross the border for sport. And then there’s the border itself, with its own set of heavily-armed guards and the unsure future that lies ahead if she does make it across.
Though all those obstacles are partially a way of ramping up the tension in the film’s first half, what makes them so effective is that they make it very easy for the audience to imagine being in Marisol’s position. It is near impossible to watch Culture Shock without drawing parallels to the real world and by the time Marisol does manage to make it to the border, the danger she’s in is almost overwhelming in its believability. So, it’s almost a comfort when the film suddenly shifts into a more heightened reality.
It’s tough to describe without giving away all the film’s twists, but basically, Marisol wakes up in a candy-colored Stepford America that’s part of what a fake news cast at the beginning of the film calls an Immigration and Cultural Rehabilitation Center. Suddenly able to speak English and kept away from her miraculously delivered baby by a perfect housewife named Betty (played by cult horror scream queen, Barbara Hampton, no less), Marisol quickly realizes something isn’t right with this seemingly perfect American neighborhood. Admittedly, horror fans and really, most film watchers will figure out the conceit fairly quickly, but Guerrero and crew keep the story from becoming some rote horror trope by not shying away from all the heinous, damning implications of not only that premise, but what it’s supposed to suggest about America in real life.
Culture Shock was meant to be watched on Independence Day, but perhaps it’s even more effective viewed after spending that day watching fireworks, eating burgers and listening to strangers sing “Proud to Be an American” with tears in their eyes. More than any other previous installment of Into the Dark, Culture Shock questions the meaning of its chosen holiday in a way that makes it difficult to sit back and celebrate. It does not paint a beautiful, untroubled picture of America in this moment in history and while it may be hard to confront that message, perhaps turning away would be even worse.
