What Josiah Saw, 2022.
Directed by Vincent Grashaw.
Starring Kelli Garner, Scott Haze, Robert Patrick, Nick Stahl, Jake Weber, and Tony Hale.
SYNOPSIS:
Terrible secrets are revealed when an estranged family reunites at their childhood home.
In a shabby farmhouse, Josiah Graham (Robert Patrick, always excellent) lives in relative seclusion with his mentally challenged adult son Thomas (Scott Haze). Josiah spends his days skulking around, gazing balefully out the window, drinking whiskey for breakfast, and tormenting the childlike and passive Thomas. Meanwhile, men from an oil company visit the town’s mayor to seek his assistance in buying out the Grahams. The land is rich in oil and the Grahams are one of the last holdouts. But the mayor has his doubts. The Graham farm, he tells them, is haunted. Thomas was never the same when he discovered his mother hanging from a tree in front of the house, and Mary and Eli, the other two Graham children, left home as soon as they could. The family is cursed, he warns, and no good will come from getting involved.
Coming to Shudder this week, filmmaker Vincent Grashaw’s strange, sprawling, and compulsively entertaining What Josiah Saw is a delicious slice of Southern Gothic family dysfunction and perfect for the dog days of summer. Before the movie sputters in its final stretch, watching What Josiah Saw feels like sitting at a campfire and being treated to an icky, creepy (and okay, long) story of a singularly doomed family line. What brought this clan to such misfortune and hard times? Where are the other two Graham children? And what are Josiah and Thomas doing in that house?
What Josiah Saw gives each Graham sibling their own chapter, offering insight into their miserable lives before bringing the family together for a final reckoning. In chapter one, Thomas is shaken from his lonely, tortured existence when his father receives a vision. Josiah has seen a ghost. Thomas’s dead mother is in hell, Josiah tells him, and it’s up to them to rescue her from damnation. Eli and Mary will be paying them a visit soon, and Josiah needs Thomas’s help in fixing up the place to welcome them home before they can finally right the family’s wrongs.
In chapter two, eldest Graham son Eli (Nick Stahl) is an ex-con who is not doing a very good job at staying out of trouble. He’s been branded a sex offender after a dalliance with an underage girl, and when a child goes missing, the town sheriff makes it clear to Eli that he is number one on his shit list. To make matters worse, Eli is deeply in hock to local crime boss Boone (Jake Weber). When Boone offers to forgive the debt in exchange for a job, Eli has no choice but to accept. The job in question is (what else?) to steal a chest of gold treasure from a traveling gypsy circus. Leaving aside the highly questionable othering of a marginalized ethnic group, this chapter is the high point of the movie and a showcase of Grashaw’s filmmaking abilities. It takes a lot of confidence to open a movie with a ghost and swerve into a white-knuckle criminal escapade, and I was happy to be taken along for the ride. A sequence with Eli fleeing a crowd of howling, enraged gypsies is undeniably eerie and beautifully shot. David Lynch would be proud.
If Thomas’s chapter is a gothic ghost story and Eli’s a Lynchian caper, the story of Eli’s twin sister Mary (Kelli Garner) is a tale of shrieking desperation in the suburbs. Garner plays Mary as a tightly-wound wreck who seems ready to literally explode at any moment. She’s having violent nightmares and engaging in classic depressed person hobbies like photography and CrossFit. Despite her obvious emotional distress, Mary and her husband (Tony Hale, former star of Arrested Development, another great epic of family dysfunction) are set on adopting a child, and they are on the verge of achieving this goal when Eli shows up at their door. He’s received an offer from the oil company. He wants to go home and persuade his family to sell, and he needs Mary’s help.
Like any good Southern Gothic tale, What Josiah Saw revels in heightened depictions of upsetting and sensitive subjects for dramatic value. The movie has some of the classic Southern Gothic soft targets (suicide, Jesus, cognitive disabilities) but includes some I had never before considered (people of Romani descent, women who get their tubes tied). But above all else, What Josiah Saw is a story about the lasting ramifications of childhood sexual abuse. This is not a spoiler, it is the film’s entire raison d’être. If this is a subject you try to avoid, What Josiah Saw is not the movie for you.
When Mary and Eli arrive at their childhood home to ask Thomas for his help, their presence unleashes a ghastly confrontation and the airing of some truly loathsome and surprising family secrets. Ultimately, the final twist doesn’t feel quite as impactful as it should. We already know something is terribly wrong with the Graham family, and the particulars feel less like disturbing bombshells and more like a serious bummer. But one doesn’t watch a movie like What Josiah Saw to celebrate humanity’s potential for redemption. Sometimes, you just want to turn out the lights and watch a sick story about unhappy people, and you won’t find one more compelling than this.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Caitlin Crowley
Originally published August 1, 2022. Updated August 2, 2022.
