Neil Marshall’s Career Is Full of Visually Stylish Genre Movies That Are As Grotesque As They Are Smart

Neil Marshall makes lean, muscular genre films that are, to a one, as grotesque as they are smart. He’s not fooling around. His Hawksian siege debut Dog Soldiers found a group of British special forces soldiers besieged by werewolves, a conceit landing it somewhere between Assault on Precinct 13 and Aliens and carried off with complementary amounts of inventiveness and verve. He followed it up with The Descent, an all-woman horror film in many ways the exact distaff of Dog Soldiers’ all-male examination of friendship under duress. It’s set in a series of unmapped caves where our hero spelunkers are forced to confront the tensions in their relationships through the metaphor of being hunted by monsters in the dark. Both films find this fulsome conversation about toxicity in roles that men and women are asked to play, and how that toxicity is exacerbated by fear and, literally, darkness. As his films evolve, so do the ways Marshall works through vision as character trait and expository device. It’s something he shares with Greek Tragedy. His work is in good company. For Marshall, the absence of light is less a representation of the unknown as it is a Jungian shadow zone of traumas left unexamined to grow diseased, monstrous, terrible.

Consider the prologue for Dog Soldiers that has a woman camper chiding her companion for whining about bugs and then giving him a small — some could say “emasculating” — letter opener as a gift. He’s a writer, it seems, and will be paralleled immediately with a soldier seen as unmanly for his unwillingness to execute a dog. Masculinity is on trial. When it’s challenged, blood is not far behind. In The Descent, our primary hero Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) has lost her husband and young daughter to a horrible accident only to find, in the bowels of the earth, that her best friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza), has betrayed her. That betrayal becomes the focal point of Sarah’s rage, to the exclusion of all other considerations, including her own survival. Marshall presents her a choice at the end and she chooses – at least in the superior UK version – to remain in the Stygian black of her resentment and fantasies of retributive satisfaction. In both films, Marshall sets the stage for the issues he’ll challenge in the rest of his films and to a large extent the language with which he’ll challenge them.

He parlayed his success with The Descent, home to the single best, most well-earned jump scare of the last twenty years, with post-apocalyptic action flick Doomsday that opens, shockingly, with a young girl losing an eye. The “Graeae” of Greek mythology were a trio of seers, sent away to a swamp, able to see the future but forced to share one eye between them. The Norse’s Odin is similarly afflicted both with prophecy and a single eye. (You could stretch to say that it’s one of Odin’s ravens, Huginn or Muninn, eating the eye out of a corpse during the prologue of Doomsday and in the first image of Marshall’s superlative Hellboy reboot.) The mutilated young woman grows to become Eden (Rhona Mitra), leader of a band of specialized wasteland soldiers and given to using her robotic eye as a spy camera, placed in impossible vantage points to aid her survival and eventual rampage. It’s a literal “second sight.” The premise of Doomsday concerns a plague outbreak, contained to Scotland by the UK, and the necessity of eventually, Escape from New York-style, infiltrating the forbidden territory in search of something that will save the world. Things go wrong, as they do, and Eden is left to try to make her way out. Like The Descent, Marshall presents her with a choice at the end and, like The Descent again, Eden chooses to remain in the unconscious.

Marshall tells the story again in Centurion where Michael Fassbender plays centurion Quintus Dias, lone survivor of a Pict siege, spared for his ability to speak the Pict language. His compatriots are tasked with finding him in hostile land and when they are also ambushed and decimated, what’s left for them is flight before an eventual reckoning with the people whom they have oppressed. As seems the fate for all of Marshall’s non-Descent output, it was derided and ignored despite its obvious strengths. A child is killed at one point in the film, humanizing the Picts and serving as dual mission statements for Marshall: the world is hard for small things and what appear at first to be monsters are perhaps just the projections, the metaphor made manifest, of what our heroes fear. Centurion deserves a reconsideration. Its failure relegated Marshall to a time making good television (for shows like Game of Thrones and Black Sails) and the concluding short of anthology film Tales of Halloween “Bad Seed” that has an evil pumpkin monster eating children. In it, its hero is, again, a woman, harried Detective McNally (Kristina Klebe) with the unenviable task of making sense of it all.

All of Marshall’s themes and predilections come to a head in his Hellboy (now streaming on HBO), an instant cult favorite condemned by fans of Guillermo Del Toro’s classic take on the character and a marketing campaign that seemed not to know exactly how to handle its tone (an obvious comedy that is also so gleefully and unapologetically disgusting). Its story concerns the return of a fifth century witch, Nimue (Milla Jovovich), banished, beheaded and quartered by King Arthur and Merlin, her parts buried in five different churches for safe-keeping. She wishes to spread a plague that will destroy mankind, and hopes Hellboy (David Harbour) will renounce his affinity for humans and join her on the side of the legions of monsters sentenced to eternity in the dark of human imagination. In the course of discovering the plot, Hellboy agrees to trade an eye to a Russian, child-eating witch while dealing with his own repressed understanding of his origins and the tensions with his father (Ian McShane). What results is a wildly-inventive bloodbath that has enough meat there amidst the viscera to make the case that Marshall, in addition to being a great visual stylist and director of action, has something soulful, and valuable, on his mind. He has a horror film now in post-production. I can’t wait.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Hellboy (2019)