BLACKOUT (Fantasia Fest 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Charley (Alex Hurt) is a painter in Talbot Falls, a small town in upstate New York, and things aren’t going well. He’s had a nasty break-up with his girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin), made an enemy of her father, the powerful property developer Hammond (Marshall Bell), and his father – who was also Hammond’s lawyer – had died. We meet Charley after a period of isolation where he is stressed out and ready to move on, but he has business to take care of first. Apart from that related to Sharon and Hammond, a task demanding his most urgent attention pertains to a series of vicious murders in the region that a local mob – hungry for answers – have increasingly framed as the work of Latino laborer Miguel (Rigo Garay) who was found near one of the crime scenes. But Miguel knows the truth: what he saw was “hombre lobo” – a wolf man – who looked an awful lot like Charley…

With its recent world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest, Blackout is the third and final instalment of revered horror auteur Larry Fessenden’s trilogy of updated classic horror monsters, his contemporary werewolf story wrapping up the series which also consists of his vampire movie Habit (1997) and his reimagining of Frankenstein in Depraved (2019). Like these former films and the other significant entries in his filmography as director, writer, producer, editor and actor, Blackout reveals Fessenden is a filmmaker whose unparalleled genre literacy results in meticulously crafted films that do not miss a beat. Despite delving into dark themes, there’s a certain comfort that comes from watching Fessenden’s films in that we are so completely in the hands of a filmmaker who has fully mastered the strange power and delicate nuance of horror at its best.

Hurt brings to his central performance some young Dustin Hoffmann vibes, and his status as a painter taps into a long, evocative heritage of horror films from Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Color Me Blood Red (1965) and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil (1974) to Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer (1979) and Joe Begos’s Bliss (2019). In those films, like Blackout, troubled characters are cast as painters to allow them a forum to visibly depict their inner turmoil. In Blackout, this painterly aspect grants Fessenden a narratively sound outlet to dabble in more experimental, abstract filmmaking techniques at times, including a beautifully animated transformation flashback that remains one of the film’s most memorable moments.

While set against the backdrop of smalltown political corruption, Charley’s journey lies very much at the heart of the Blackout, with the title alone explicitly tethered to the memory gaps he experiences as a result of his nocturnal lycanthropic escapades. But while the werewolf attacks are visually striking and certainly tick the necessary generic boxes required for a genre banger, they are never disconnected from Charley’s own experience, and the film is in large part simply about his enormous emotional pain and how he struggles to take action. Blackout is explicit in its scepticism about how glibly the word “trauma” is thrown around in the genre space right now, but still offers a poignant and emotionally intelligent exploration of control, memory, guilt and loss through the familiar figure of the classical werewolf.

NOTE: Without actors and writers, we wouldn’t have movies. This review was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in the United States, and the author of this review supports them unequivocally.