Movie Mahal

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This one has a haunting, traumatic premise about a young soldier who is killed in the Vietnam War but returns from the dead at his family home on the night of his death. Andy, a young soldier, is symptomatic of not only the return of the repressed, which in this case is the lies, death and imperialism of the war but comes to represent a very specific domestic horror that everyone in the town wants to blot out; wasted youth. The tone throughout is one of interminable dread and Andy’s decomposing living corpse is more than vampiric; the dead eyed stare, the ghostly skin and unbearable silence communicates something essentially traumatic which has consumed Andy so he functions merely as a decrepit metronome. Clark also ties in the horrors of war with the breakdown of the family; the ignorant, violent patriarch and the doting mother are also victims of trauma and their collective denial of Andy’s death from the outset becomes a form of resurrection, a wish fulfilment that goes awry, bringing with it an apocalyptic refrain about the human cost of the Vietnam War. Terrifyingly bleak.