Well, she is manipulated by Ann Dowds character because she believes her to be a family friend and chooses to trust her.
I think that it could have been as simple as making it a different kid, or have the Rotten say something earlier in the film about how the guy trusts too much or something, etc.
What really got me was it was the exact same child who was proven to have lied.
Yeah, and if the point is that he’s losing his temper explosively yet again and dooming the whole world with his alpha-male rage in the process, leaving the room to go get the implement with which he’s going to lose his shit doesn’t quite track.
I thought he was getting the axe to better chop up the stage and get at the nape of the neck of the rotten.
This Kilroy shot was 100% worth the price of admission:
I suppose if I was writing that, I would have had at the very least a male student tell him where to find the axe. The issue really is that it is the exact same kid that previously lied to him, and was proven to have lied. It just felt a bit too much of a stretch for me.
I agree with all of that except her being a family friend. Again, she presents as just a fellow grieving mother at a group, they barely know each other and Dowd pretends she didn’t know Annie’s mom. The trust is not because she’s a good friend or a long term confidant of anyone in the family, but because Annie is grieving and desperate and alienated from her family.
@JonRowe, the thing about the children lying was just a misdirect, all around. Of course Pedro was going to fall for it, and of course Mitra knew better. As she tells Pedro, if you’re afraid of a hole, It will open a hole underneath you. So while it may not be realistic that Pedro would fall for transparent lying – that he would walk right into the hole! – it’s arguably the point of the scene.
I get the sense that the script had greater things in store for that climax in the school auditorium. I fully expected Pedro to yank the curtain aside to reveal something monstrous and elaborate. An apocalypse is, after all, a revelation!
I’m also imagining the setting for the finale was supposed to be a whole school full of children who had massacred their teachers and used the bodies as nesting for Azrael. But we just got six child extras and a tiny stage with a dirty curtain against a concrete wall. It seemed to me like a situation where the locations or shooting schedule didn’t quite come together. : (
Also, the mechanics of that sextant rite seemed pretty iffy to me. Pedro is supposed to lift the 500 pound bag of pus out of a hole in the ground to a level where Mitra can stick its neck with a poker mounted on a tripod? Seems Pedro and Mitra might want to run down the hall and brush up on some remedial physics real quick. : )
But I got what Rugna was going for, and that far into the experience, I wasn’t going to let some detail like production values mess it up for me!
And, yes, that did kind of make the whole awkward “I need his nape!” worthwhile!
By the way, did you guys get why Mitra chose Pedro to accompany her to the school while sending Jaime out to look for Santino and Sabrina? She says it’s because the demon will use Pedro’s fear of losing Santino against him, but that’s not it at all. It’s because of rule #7, which isn’t revealed until the end: you cannot be afraid to die.
So earlier, when she asks Jaime if Pedro was the one she’d heard about who blocked up the heating vents (i.e. attempted suicide), she’s not concerned about Pedro’s mental health, or even his lack of suitability to do the job. On the contrary, she’s verifying that he qualifies for rule #7. She chose Pedro to come along to do the rite because she knows he’s perfectly willing to die.
Which, I suspect, is why he doesn’t.
That may have been the intention, but I don’t think that scene worked for me as it happened. The entire school climax was a cool idea, but could have been executed better. I really liked the entire entombing the rotten with the rest of the faculty and covering them with lime to hide the smell. Some really cool stuff, I think I just would have probably written it differently, Mitra dying so quickly felt really weird to me, especially as it all happens offscreen. She doesn’t break the 7 rules, yet dies anyway, it felt a bit against the lesson of the film.
That moment when Jair calmly walks over and asks his grandmother for tea… chills. So effective.
Her dying absolutely happens onscreen. We see every hammer strike.
And the rules just protect you from the demon itself, not the things it possesses or influences.
I agree. This is exactly how I felt about Act 3 of Bottoms where budgetary limitations are made up for by sheer chutzpah and creative spirit.
We see her already incapacitated, not dead, but her being initially taken over by some children happening offscreen felt unearned for that character. Maybe if she had made some sort of noise that was her being scared that triggered them to feed off the power that fear gives the devil? There are mushy messages with the lore near the end of the film that felt inconsistent. Why did she stay in the room and not go with him then? Why set up all of the stuff before you are ready? The whole scene felt weird, because you have a character, Mitra, who has proven herself to be correct and useful the entire time, and listened to by Pedro, just to have him stop listening at that one moment?
Well, my response would just be to reiterate the stuff I’ve written upthread about the movie’s overarching theme and how it relates to Hereditary. And as @malkav11 noted, Mitra’s death is very onscreen, very graphic, and arguably the entire point of the events we see during the movie. Remember that she muses about the Evil coming to that town specifically to find her in Jaime’s mind.
There’s a case to be made that the main protagonist in this movie is Mitra. It’s just that we don’t realize that until she shows up and explains what’s happening.
Ha ha, you saw Bottoms.
I’m glad that seemed to work for folks, and I adored Shiva Baby, but farce can be a hard sell for me; it turns out I did not want Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennot’s Wet Hot Gay American Summer. : (
I think the problem is, I understand the entire point you are trying to make here, but that particular scene and how it plays out doesn’t work for me, and I think actively works against the narrative of the film.
Think about it this way, what was the point of lying to Pedro to get him out of the room? To kill off Mitra? Who could stop Azrael from being born? If he was never going to find the axe (which wasn’t there) he wasn’t going to get Uriel out of the stage enough for Mitra to be able to do anything anyway. We earlier had 3 grown men struggle to move Uriel, let alone Pedro by himself.
To me, the scene would have been much more successful had he realized he was lied to, and found the axe somewhere else, taking far too much time to find it, and coming back to see Mitra was dead and it was too late.
I think it is a problem of the staging of the scene. It looks hopeless BEFORE he leaves, and her dying doesn’t really change the calculus much of how hopeless it is. It felt like that was done so we could get the admittedly gruesome death scene we got. Maybe if he was actually making really good progress, and it seemed like the axe would make a difference? But the way it was staged, it look impossible either way.
That makes sense, and as I noted above, I have some reservations about the staging of that finale as well! But it seems it affected your enjoyment of the movie in a way that it didn’t affect mine. Hopefully, Rugna will be able to play to both of us in his next movie!
Oh by no means did I think it made the film bad, I think it just stood out as puzzling to me when the rest of the film felt so air-tight.
I would definitely agree this is the best horror film I have seen since Hereditary, but that was one small nitpick I had with the film.
I think the point was to make Pedro so frustrated and enraged and hopeless that he does what he does, which is kill Uriel with the axe in a vengeful fury and release the demon. It’s not entirely clear to me whether the rotten die on their own eventually. One might think so given the urgency with which Mitra treats it but on the other hand Uriel has been like that for over a year before the events of the movie and it seems plausible to me that the urgency is to prevent someone else from coming along and doing so. It must not work for the demon’s minions to do it, or it gets something out of the manipulation of getting regular folks to make that choice.
Roger & Me!
I love that production still so much, as a sort of post-movie decompression. It reminds me of the production still from The Witch of the Victoria Secret model and the little girl:
At a certain point, something that was incredibly horrific and made me feel terrible can actually make me smile.
From Letterboxed.
Me, during that scene.
