For film fans, Jessica Rothe is perhaps most recognizable from the horror comedy series, Happy Death Day. In them, she combined a gift for physical comedy and a certain jaded skepticism to make light of being trapped in a Groundhog Day-esque death curse. However, in her latest film, the domestic horror, Affection, she weaponizes those same skills to portray a more abject terror.
Rothe plays Ellie, who we first meet injured and crumpled in the middle of a remote road in the dead of the night. The first shot, a slow push in toward her seemingly lifeless face, feels like it’s meant to recall the post-shower murder shot of Janet Leigh in Psycho, tying the movie to a slasher tradition of men who terrorize women. Ellie (and by extension, the audience) are disoriented, frightened but unsure of what—until she’s run down by a car. She wakes in a bedroom she doesn’t recognize, next to a man she doesn’t know, who calls her by a name she’s never heard. Things quickly turn violent, but she’s suddenly shocked into stopping when Alice (Julianna Layne), calls her “mommy.”
The man, claiming to be her husband, Bruce (Joseph Cross), explains that her confusion is due to her “condition”, a seeming psychosis that causes seizures and makes her mix her own identity with all the other people and experiences she’s encountered in her life. From there, Rothe has to balance Ellie’s hysterical outbreaks with dread and a sense of wrongness that Ellie can’t deny. In those early scenes, writer-director BT Meza perhaps overplays the creepiness. In one moment, Ellie conveys her dissatisfaction by plunking around on a piano so out of tune that it feels comically cliché. In another protracted sequence, Alice is inexplicably coy during a game of hide and seek with Ellie in the woods. Perhaps worst of all, though, is Daniel Berk’s score, which seems to liberally copy the most iconic phrases of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s work on Annihilation.
Still, for every choice that doesn’t work or feels a touch too derivative, there are more that impress. During that same hide and seek game, Ellie comes upon what appears to be a body wrapped in plastic, the person or thing inside still seemingly alive. It’s genuinely unnerving and things only become more sinister when Bruce comes back from the woods after looking for the body only to say he’s found nothing, that Ellie’s visceral experience must have been another one of her fear-driven hallucinations. Admittedly, for experienced film viewers, Bruce never exactly seems credible, but this is the point when Cross’s wilting, nice, wife guy act becomes unquestionably sinister.
It’s also around that point that the film shifts genres slightly, integrating other, unexpected types of horror into its original premise. And it’s here that Affection really begins to sing. If the film had simply been scene after scene of Ellie questioning her perception of reality while weird things happened, it would have quickly grown tiresome. Instead, the film becomes something stranger, more compelling, and it allows its performers to shine even when Metz’s choices occasionally leave viewers rolling their eyes.
Rothe especially stands out, her physical performance becoming more grotesque and inhuman as the film progresses. She’s certainly aided by solid makeup effects and the last acts’s nighttime setting, but the ticks and physicality that make the turn so enjoyable are all hers. Cross also brings shading to a character driven by grief to do monstrous things and Layne avoids being too child actor-y despite not getting much to do except be frightened.
Even so, there are still story and character choices that not even the cast can quite overcome. Yet while Affection doesn’t necessarily tread new ground in either body horror or metaphors about gaslighting, it does explore them in a way that feels uniquely nasty. The film wears its influences on its sleeves and while that occasionally can be to its detriment, it’s still engrossing enough to divert any horror fan.
