Proclivitas review: a promising Australian horror debut

We’ve all done something we wish we hadn’t. There are missteps that haunt our nightmares and bleed into our waking hours, niggling regrets that can sour our relationship with places, people and ourselves, and tender scars that linger. So it is with West Australian writer and director Miley Tunnecliffe’s atmospherically unmooring Proclivitas.

If your Latin isn’t too crash hot, that word roughly translates to proclivity, or a deep-seated tendency towards certain behaviours. It’s lifted from Marcus Tullius Cicero, the impressive orator, philosopher and unsuccessful political manoeuvrer, who fought to hold back the waves that would wash the Roman Empire away: ‘In the case of what is good, let it be known as ‘inclination’, in the case of evil, call it ‘proclivitas’.’

Cicero’s words are quoted in Proclivitas’ opening intertitle card. Shivering from Latin to English in blood red, they’re set against the darkness of the void and accompanied by a thunderous roaring, like a bushfire, that overwhelms our senses.

Never go back

After that opening, we’re on the kitchen floor with Claire (Stateless actor Rose Riley) as her wounded soul, recovering from addiction, desperately tries to resuscitate her dying mother to no avail.

Returning to the woods-shrouded country town where she was raised, Claire is troubled afresh by a place where bad shit went down, and from which she’s been running, geographically and emotionally, ever since. Intending to get in and out as quickly as possible, she’s set on readying the falling apart house of her childhood for sale.

But the allure of her former crush Jerry (The Power of the Dog actor George Mason) is too intoxicating to resist now he’s a hunky, if too-clean-flannel-shirt-wearing, handyman.

Despite the disdain of Jerry’s busybody sister Tara, a sarcastic shade-throwing local cop played Hayley McElhinney, they wind up back in one another’s arms. This, despite the trauma that tore them apart one drunken night as an impromptu driving lesson led to a disaster that put him behind bars and saddled her with an addiction that has derailed her career in medicine.

As they reforge their wobbling relationship, with Jerry helping ready the house then falling into troubled, feverish dreams in Claire’s bed, there are hints of a wraith-like figure lurking in the undergrowth of an ominously forested painting. The gurgling, oily presence, realised by actress and dancer Kade Power, stalks Claire in the shadows.

But is it really there, or are her demons a psychological mirror of her mistakes?

Watch the trailer

Women in horror

So-called ‘mad and bad’ women – whose losses, guilt and remorse, often thrust upon them by others, manifest in ambiguously supernatural ways – are nothing new in scary movies.

Frankenstein author Mary Shelley poured her grief over the death of her mother, feminist hero Mary Wollstonecraft, and that of her three children, into that endlessly reimagined gothic horror novel. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland battle against a similarly relentless chasm in a mist-choked Venice in Don’t Look Now. No one believes Mia Farrow’s pregnant housewife as she struggles single-handedly against the clutches of a satanic cult in Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby or its big screen adaptation of the same name.

More recently, in Australian cinema, Natalie Erika James explored the cold grasp of dementia on a fragmenting family trinity of mother, daughter and granddaughter in Relic, while Jennifer Kent picked at the terrors of new motherhood and hard-pushed mental health in The Babadook.

In Proclivitas, Tunnecliffe’s debt to these films is written in every beat of her occasionally repetitive screenplay, which struggles to find fresh angles. Some of the colours in her characters’ backstory are a little too washed out. Claire appears to wrangle with an eating disorder, but this subplot’s left far too vague and ultimately abandoned. And yet, Riley inhabits Claire with a careworn depth that’s not always present in the dialogue, maintaining our concern as she crawls through forsaken places both below the house and buried in her subconscious.

For all Mason’s puppy dog charm, Jerry isn’t much more than a doting cipher. Though he earns top marks for subtle pronunciation when he greets his prying sister with, ‘What’s up, constable?’ Tara’s welcome interruptions, with McElhinney clearly enjoying piercing the portentous mood, are too infrequent.

Into the void

Despite these structural quibbles, Tunnecliffe projects commendable menace onto the choking tree canopy that suffocates this dusty home, with its painful memories and dusty corners that creak with odious intent.

The sense of foreboding is turbo-boosted by Julian Oliver’s disturbing sound design, which delivers a cacophony of thrumming insects, scrambled radio signals, crashing waves, car engines and sighs that raise the hair on the back of your neck.

This startling soundscape breathes eerie imbalance into the film’s every nook and cranny, captured with glacial precision by cinematographer Meredith Lindsay. Lindsay has a keen eye for the tremulous panic we write into negative space, which she explodes with the Lynch-like strobing of red-and-blue light, in echo of that fateful night and the price paid by the real victim of Claire and Jerry’s wasted teenage days.

Set to no-doubt expensive needle drops from Spiderbait and INXS that implode Stephen Callan’s wind-howling score, Proclivitas may leave us wanting a little bit more, but Tunnecliffe’s confident direction ensures we’ll be waiting, eagerly.

Proclivitas is in Australian cinemas from 19 March.

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