They Live in the Grey, 2022.
Directed by Abel Vang & Burlee Vang.
Starring Michelle Krusiec, Ken Kirby, Madelyn Grace, J.R. Cacia, Ellen Wroe, and Cami Storm.
SYNOPSIS:
A social worker with clairvoyant powers has visions of supernatural forces haunting a family when she investigates a child abuse case.
Capturing a certain mood on film must be a daunting task for filmmakers, even more so if you want to maintain that mood for any length of time. They Live in the Grey is a movie that captures the mood of grief and maintains it throughout, and oh boy, does it maintain it throughout. Oh boy, because They Live in the Grey is 114 minutes long and if it were, say, a funeral doom album by an obscure European metal band then keeping up that dreary sense of hopelessness throughout would be applauded, nay encouraged. But it isn’t a doom metal album.
They Live in the Grey is a movie, designed to be watched by an audience who are sat in front of it with the hope of being entertained, or at least moved to some sort of emotion. If said audience gets to have something to think about, to get involved with or, perhaps, end up in deep discussion with somebody about then all the better, but entertainment is key, and They Live in the Grey is so one-note, so wrapped up in its own sense of melancholy that is doesn’t ever become anything other than a gloomy melodrama, and the drama part of that word is often missing also.
The story revolves around Claire (Michelle Krusiec), who we first see trying to hang herself in her home. It turns out Claire and her husband Peter (Ken Kirby) had a young son who was killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Peter left due to being unable to reach Claire in her grief-stricken state. They are still in touch and Peter is trying to reconcile with Claire but her intense grief and sense of loss is proving too much.
However, the suicide attempt fails and Claire returns to her job in the Child Protection Service, where she is assigned the case of the Lang family, where the young daughter Sophie (Madelyn Grace) is suspected of being abused as she has bruises on her body. Once inside the Lang household Claire begins to have visions of a ghostly woman, followed by several other spectral entities. She decides to quit the case but when the Lang family are threatened with having Sophie put into care as there are more bruises appearing, Claire decides to help, and as her burgeoning clairvoyant powers start to reveal what is inside the Lang house Claire not only begins to piece together what happened to Sophie but also comes to terms with her own grief.
Watching They Live in the Grey you get the feeling that The Sixth Sense made a big impression on The Vang Brothers as it is very difficult to get away from the “I see dead people” motif that both movies employ, especially in this movie as that is pretty much all that Claire does. She wonders around the Lang house, or even stays in her own house, and has visions that may or may not be connected – most often not as her son’s death has nothing to do with what is happening with the Lang family.
Despite the artistic flair that some of these visions display, it amounts to very little when you consider that Claire is not a very sympathetic character – which is an odd choice considering what has happened to her – and all of this misery is needlessly stretched out in an attempt to create something meaningful and affecting, when in reality it is dull and tedious because spending every scene with a terminally miserable character played by an actor with only one expression on her face the whole time (alright, she has two – frowning and screaming), and whose line delivery is mumbling whilst occasionally crying at the same time, is as painful for the audience as it clearly is for everybody on the screen. And there is nearly two hours of this.
There could be something at the centre of They Live in the Grey, because The Vardy Brothers can clearly shoot a movie and set a mood (although more than one would be nice), but it is too derivative of other movies that have done similar things but with more clout. The thing is, if this had been made before The Sixth Sense it is unlikely to have had the same impact as that movie as the writing is too disjointed and uninteresting to engage a mainstream audience. As it is, it was made over twenty years after The Sixth Sense and it adds nothing to the ‘horror as a metaphor’ style of filmmaking it embraces.
Yes, They Live in the Grey is dark – both literally and stylistically – but two hours of the same dour expression and the same old ghostly apparitions (shrieking women, old people, kid with blood on his face, etc.) popping up to go ‘Boo!’ just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially when the horror is pretty much non-existent.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★
Chris Ward
