QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The three words in the film title neatly summarise the premise of this queer horror. Young medical student Laura’s (Camilla Issa) fears of being ousted exaggeratedly manifest themselves into a parasitic demon hellbent on killing her. This genre movie is a sad reminder that we live in a world where personal revelations still bear severe consequences.

Laura is in a secret liaison with fellow student Wendy (Mariela Guerrero), which she desperately tries to keep it under wraps. She navigates a deeply puritanical society, a conservative family home and even close friends who refuse to acknowledge her sexual proclivities. Wendy’s bizarre and gruesome death sends her spiralling further into the closet. She claims a boyfriend in order to mitigate her own feelings of deep-seated shame. During a weekend getaway at one of her friend’s summer house, her suppression turns into horror. This is where she encounters the attractive Jessie (Camilla Santana), and her desires prove far too potent to resist.

This predicament is underpinned by the threat of a nefarious demon. Director Victoria Linares Villegas provides little exposition by way of the demon’s origin story. We make it out to be a singular incorporeal entity. One that acts parasitically, teleporting itself from host to host. Taking over the body it inhabits, eyes become all white, the iris turned it a hollow, single-minded killer. The demon strand is kept looming in the background, the cause of numerous inexplicable campus deaths. Laura’s personal traumas come to infect her social circle in the most unexpected of ways

Director Victoria Linares Villegas takes a neorealist, almost documentarian approach. With a sedative, almost meditative pace unusual for a horror movie, the grisly moments erupt to a muted effect. Reminiscent to Greg Arraki’s horror-com Nowehere (1997) in its low-fi, teenage angst aesthetic, there also nods to Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) and the more recent Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022). Don’t Come Out however is a beast in its own right: devoid of suspense, humour and exuberance. The mood is always somber and dry. Villegas is apt at subtle experimentations utilising tropes ever with tenderness. The result feels understated, loose, at times perplexing with whole cast of unlikeable characters and a characterless demon with questionable motives.

These qualities are not a deterrent. Don’t Come Out is quite the novel ride. The horror is secondary to the fascinating psychological unravelling of a complicated and prickly protagonist. Wwe are inclined to judge Laura’s bad life decisions as self-inflicted. This is a reaction to perpetually inhabiting hostile environments. Spaces usually deemed safe. For many queer people, these are just as menacing.

Don’t Come Out just premiered in the Generation 14plus of the 76th Berlinale.