I’ve written and spoken about H.P. Lovecraft’s impact on the genre of horror up to modern times, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing movies about some unknowable thing or things from some unknowable place working their unknowable will upon some hapless Everyperson. For me that’s a perfect recipe for enjoyable horror. But for something to stand out from the pack in that area it must be truly exceptional in its depiction of Lovecraftian themes, and Fabio D’Orta’s The Complex Forms is just that film.
Christian is a former cook in a tough situation. It’s never specified what he’s dealing with, only that he needs money and is quite desperate. Arriving at a mysterious and isolated Italian villa, he has agreed to sell his body for twelve days to a mysterious organization that will use it to house…something. The villa is filled with other men doing the same thing. Some are quietly stoic about it; some are oddly cheerful. But all soon realize they may have made a dreadful mistake when the beings intending to possess them arrive, and Christian’s world quickly becomes an eldritch nightmare as he seeks to find a way out of this Faustian bargain with whatever extradimensional nightmares have arrived.
The look of this film immediately stands out. Shot in black and white, every shot has a striking high contrast quality to it, not just in color (or lack thereof) and lighting but also in the Kubrickian obsession with framing and composition. There’s not a single wasted frame of footage, not one second that doesn’t look strictly composed down to the last detail, and it pays off in lulling the audience in once we start seeing some of the monstrosities later. The long shots of marble hallways and grassy courtyards done monochromatically are gorgeous to behold, which make the appearance of said monstrosities even more startling. Not in a cheap jump scare way, mind you, but more in the way that you were just looking at something very lovely and ordinary and are now faced with…something not lovely or ordinary.
The creature design and effects in this are surprisingly effective for a film with a relatively small budget. While D’Orta could have very easily chosen a less is more approach to the creatures descending upon the villa and left much of the goings on to the viewers imagination, they instead chose to portray them as ghastly crustacean-esque creatures, something out of the pages of Mike Mignola’s BPRD, all jointed clacking legs and twitching mandibles and clicking claws. D’Orta allows his beasties to be gazed upon, invites it even, not hiding an inch of them. The color scheme does much to hide the zippers, but it’s quite impressive seeing these CGI creations interact with the practical backgrounds. Again, for a microbudget independent film pulling off these effects is a feat. I cannot stress enough that you see these things a lot in the film and they never grow tiresome or any less unearthly. Even their arrival, heralded by a booming clap of thunder, is wrought with an ominous dread, a feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’re about to bear witness to something that has no right being in this realm.
The film’s exploration of some of the less tangible themes of Lovecraft’s fiction i.e., the slime, the tentacles, his fear of Italians, is something a lot of films that draw inspiration from HPL often lack. Not only is the theme of creatures from “out there” coming “in here” present with the actual creatures from “out there” in the film, but there’s also a healthy dose of the classic “horror beyond comprehension” in this film. The creatures are not the incomprehensible part; they’re in the room and comprehended. It’s the why that remains terrifyingly out of reach: why are they doing this? Why are the people who own the villa helping them? What is even happening? D’Orta isn’t concerned with answering these questions, and that’s a welcome change from films filled with exposition and mythos. I don’t mind those things per se, but I respect the choice of “look at this beautifully shot film filled with eldritch horrors that I made, enjoy it and stop asking questions” that D’Orta makes.
The film doesn’t quite stick the landing, and that’s fine, because again…D’Orta is more concerned with the visuals of the story. And, in that regard, he is successful. The Complex Forms is a classic Lovecraft-style story about a normal person that finds themselves suddenly caught up in a situation they cannot hope to understand, at the mercy of forces both familiar (world authority figures) and unfamiliar (extradimensional crustacean monsters). It’s an absolute feast for the eyes, and in a world where a lot of Lovecraftian fiction seems to believe it just needs slime and tentacles to succeed that’s more than enough of a reason to watch it.
