Wounds: This One Hurts
*Some spoilers (and some shade) ahead.
There are few things that are more disappointing than a film with a great cast and a terrible script. It’s a category of film that’s far more established than we’d like to admit, filled with actors who are so likable we’ll sit through over 90 minutes of garbage just to see them. Among its ranks are Sam Raimi’s The Gift, Mamma Mia 2, Ingrid Goes West, Movie 43, just to name a few. By making bold moves yet somehow shocking no one, Babak Anvari’s 2019 film Wounds finds its way onto this list within the first 10 minutes of the film. We open on a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took council with this great solitude - and the whisper has proved irresistibly fascinating.” Oh interesting, are we going to relate this to the story? No.
Suddenly we’re in a bar in the South, almost completely devoid of southern accents and charm, but instead filled with our friendly main characters, randomly aggressive men, and college kids who verge on caricature-esque. The dialogue starts as sitcom-ish then devolves into unpleasant bickering, and there are conversations that end up sounding forced. Armie Hammer is exuding the energy of an approachable frat boy and his confidence already seems unfounded. The scene is set up almost like a play—more specifically like a high school theatre production that’s student-directed and lasts far longer than it needs to.
This loosely-named horror film is set up with an impressive lineup: an exciting cast with the backdrop of New Orleans, perhaps the most haunted city in the country. All of the pieces were right, and yet in its hour and forty six minute runtime, it accomplishes nothing. Armie Hammer stars as Will, an apathetic, unsympathetic bartender who accidentally discovers a disturbing video left on the forgotten phone of a bar patron. Now that he’s seen said disturbing thing (so... it’s a video of a severed head with bugs coming out of it) the college kids who left the phone behind are now onto him! Oh no! The rest of the film is basically just nightmare sequences of shrill noises, dark tunnels, and cockroaches—perhaps the only aspect of the film that might warrant squeamishness.
As we watch our protagonist(?) fight to understand and absolve himself of this torture, much like the audience, he is left with his questions unanswered. None of these aesthetic horror choices are enough to cover the story here, or rather, the fact that there isn’t one. Wounds makes for a strange and uninspired viewing experience, where disturbing things are suggested but not ever addressed.
There are moments in this film that at first glance seemed promising, and as you watch Armie Hammer walk down a dark hallway you think, yes yes something scary is finally happening! only to have it revealed seconds later that no, nothing is happening, nothing has happened this whole time, and nothing will happen.
The film bravely showcases the perspective of an attractive white man descending into madness, via his fraught relationships with women: his girlfriend (Dakota Johnson) and the girl he likes (Zazie Beetz) but it never resolves, it never explains itself. It never picks up the pieces of its ambitious but messy narrative and all we are left with is cinematic blue balls. Despite Armie Hammer’s sweaty determination to make his character interesting and Zazie Beetz being reliably endearing, there was no payoff for the madness.
New Orleans has a rich and dense history of every kind of horror lore, and Wounds found a way to not mention any of it, nor do any justice to the city itself. Wounds could’ve just as easily been set in Milwaukee or Scottsdale or Dallas, as we see very little of the city and absolutely none of its spooky magic. No one expected Wounds to win an Oscar or even make waves at any festivals, but no one could’ve predicted how horribly mundane and specifically unsatisfying it would end up being. As a horror film fanatic and a former Armie Hammer fan I cannot stress this enough: the aesthetics here are not enough. This isn’t Hitchcock or Kubrick: I guarantee you the visuals don’t make up for a lackluster movie, even if those visuals involve Armie Hammer smoldering in a t-shirt and jeans.
