Mark H. Rapaport’s new film“Godhead”is a master-class in ratcheting up tension. Shot in black-and-white with camerawork that makes the audience feel like a voyeur uncovering perverse secrets, the film blends faith, sex, lies and discomfort into an unknowable dance between its leads.
The premise kicks off simply: A rural Catholic priest (Al Warren) is toured by two bizarre twins (Sarah Coffey and Kimball Farley), who look like an unholy blend of Die Antwoord, Grimes and overcooked ravers. They believe they are part of a prophecy and need the priest’s help to fulfill it. They also have a gun.
And the priest has a young boy (Luke Speakman) that he seems to keep captive indoors … To say more would ruin the film’s twists and turns, which were met enthusiastically at its world premiere screenings at Montreal’s genre-focused Fantasia Festival this week. Rapaport, whose well-received 2023 debut feature“Hippo”also premiered at Fantasia, spoke with Variety about his choice to do another film in black and white, how“Godhead”takes aim at crooked authority figures and leaving the audience with challenging questions. I always find that in life I come up against authority figures in a way that feels unfair.
I often am too nice to people, and I think I have a little bit of second-born’s gullibility. As I grow up and hopefully become a dad, I’m trying to shed that. I think in this movie, I was able to put a finger on that feeling of being aware of the hypocrite or the manipulator.
From childhood until adulthood, you have your religious figures, you have your family, you have your bosses. I’m always a very trusting person, and so I found that there’s real horror in that. This movie, although framed as a Hitchcockian thriller of sorts, is really a canvas for me to explore those frustrations.
It’s a tough tightrope to walk. I hope I’m able to do that successfully by staying with the characters first and being able to feel with them, and writing the script from their intentions and their heart, and not letting the plot of a horror film take over the greater emotional core. Of course, we do go there and go to dark places and twist and turn, but I try to always bring it back to the characters.
I always can do better finding that humanity. It’s funny, there was another version of the ending where it was a massive, obvious F-you to all of these evil characters. I was talking to Al Warren, who plays the priest beautifully and with so much real emotion, and he got me thinking about the end edged out.
Without spoiling it, he stated,“Let’s think about where this could go if you, as the director, practiced forgiveness,”and I found that in doing that I actually wrapped up up with a much more horrifying ending than had I brought the hammer down on his character. I think there’s an eeriness to forgiveness as well, in that the ultimate manipulation is forgiving your manipulator. I wouldn’t mind if the audience felt maybe characters made the wrong decision at the end.
That just keeps the question going, because the movie at its core is a question for the audience, less than an answer. In my old version, I tried to provide the answer, and it just wasn’t satisfying. So it was a real exercise in reeling back that sword that the director wields.
That’s where we wrapped up up. It was my instinct off the bat just because my first film was in black and white and it was such a fun, beautiful little film. People loved the black and white.
It felt like a different world. And so it started as a,“Well, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” My brain was thinking in black and white.
But of course, you need the narrative to deserve black and white. As I started to write the script, I just couldn’t see it any other way. I was very much into Robert Eggers’“The Lighthouse.”
He makes a ton of great movies, but this three-hander … I sought to place us in some sort of timeless world. It felt black and white was an effective way to do that. In addition to the beauty of the shadows and the moodiness that it’s able to convey, there’s how it relates to the themes of good and evil, right and wrong, truth and untruth.
I had a full-circle moment in writing the script where there’s a gray area that I put in there, because, even though it’s in black and white, it potentially concludes on a gray area, which to me is the most horrifying area of all. We all want to know: Are we black or white? When I was able to think of it as a spectrum and not just black and white, it opened up a whole new visual language for me.
Alief is representing“Godhead”for worldwide sales as it searches for distribution.