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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.
“I wanted to make the kind of slasher film that I wanted to see,” Giuliano says. “Something that was stripped down to its core elements. 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.
“Throughout the film, there’s a lot of times when they’re polar opposites of each other,” Giuliano says. “But having seen their previous work, I knew that when the time came for them to deconstruct all that personality stuff and just get feral, they both could do that in spades. 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 guiding principle for Nick Matthews, my DP, and I was to create this feeling of dissonance by couching these incredibly brutal moments within the most beautiful setting imaginable,” he says. “When the audience is seeing something as beautiful as the setting that West Virginia gave us, but then witnessing these horrendous acts happening in the same exact frame, it unmoors them a little bit. 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 don’t see is often scarier than what you do,” Giuliano says. “Sound is a loophole and a way to get around that. 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. Each individual in the audience can project their own thing onto the screen when we’re not showing something, but we’re hearing it. It’s a way to get the audience to participate and interact with the film. They’re not just sitting there and watching.”
Despite his precision in creating “River,” Giuliano ultimately sees it as a back-to-basics project.
“You only need three key ingredients: a cast of characters that you care about, put them in an interesting location and then give them a terrifying villain,” he says. “I wanted to, as sincerely as possible, attempt to scare the audience by using these very minimal ingredients.”
See exclusive first-look images from “River” above and below.
