In Joshua Giuliano’s debut feature “River,” the line between beauty and carnage is razor thin. The slasher film, set to premiere Sept. 10 at the Toronto International Film Festival, concerns a trio of siblings (Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe and Max Mattern) who, after a tense reunion, take their father’s boat downriver in order to spread his ashes. But after they spot a masked man staring at them from the shore, things go bad quickly.
Without spoiling the often jaw-dropping twists, Giuliano, who both wrote and directed the feature, has made a must-see film for genre fans. Finding a taut balance between echoing the beats of classic slashers and intentionally subverting expectations, it’s evocative of some of his favorite ’70s films, like “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Halloween,” without feeling redundant. For me, slasher films at their very essence are simple and primal.
It’s about a cast of human characters being hunted down by a killer. It’s about the relentlessness of death, the pursuit of death, sometimes the inevitability of death. Even if they’re sequels, the killer dies and they always come back because death never stops.
To me, that’s a terrifying concept.” And who better to sell the horror than Levy and Rothe, who cemented their Scream Queen bona fides with 2013’s “Evil Dead” and 2017’s “Happy Death Day,” respectively. Playing estranged siblings gave the actresses an opportunity to clash and add tension to the story before the bloodshed began. It’s also an incredibly satisfying moment when that happens in the film, because you see two completely different sisters bonding over their shared ferociousness, which is a really fun thing to see.” Beyond the actors, the film is filled with warm shots of the environment, as well as inventive use of light, shadows and color.
Giuliano says he and his cinematographer mined films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” and Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” for inspiration. The best horror doesn’t tell the audience how to feel, it shows them contradictory things in the same frame. If you expose them in that way, they are left to fend for themselves and wonder how they actually feel about what they’re seeing.
We wanted to create a beautiful, brutal film.” Also at top of mind was the film’s sound design, which is deliberately used as another tool to make the audience feel frightened and uncomfortable. What you can hear, even if you don’t see it, and what the audience imagines is usually infinitely more horrifying than what you can show them. So sound was a way for us to access the audience’s collective imagination.
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