The Transfiguration - Review

The protagonist, Milo, in Michael O'Shea's directorial debut, The Transfiguration, lines his shelves with classic vampire films; we hear him rave about Martin and Let the Right One In, and he even goes to a screening of Nosferatu. Now, straight up references to heavyweights of the genre in which you are working are always a bold choice (one that can pay off, Scream for example), unfortunately, here it backfires slightly, serving only to remind me of the many other excellent films I'd probably rather have been watching at that point. 

Anyway, the sort of vampire tale that we see centres on the teenage Milo, played with a steely yet vulnerable reticence by Eric Ruffin, who lives with his older brother in the kind of Queens housing project that makes the proximity of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's Brooklyn surprising. The world which our characters inhabit is a harsh, brutal one - devoid of any romantic whimsy - it is one of the highlights of the show. This "urban jungle" (yes I'm going to say that) also serves as an apt setting for the story of isolation which follows - smartly reflecting the relationship between Milo and his situation - we see countless shots of him, cornered by featureless blocks of concrete, literally belittled by his environment.
  
It is in these moments, as a portrait of the devastating effects of economic deprivation, that I found the film most interesting, capturing something of the loneliness felt by those left behind by society. In one conversation Milo responds to the question, "Do people ever tell you that you don't talk a lot?", "No one ever speaks to me."; a simple yet affecting line, it gets to the heart of the isolation central to Milo's character. Throughout the film, O'Shea uses this powerlessness quite smartly to present his protagonist Milo as a product of these circumstances, establishing a link between his murderous tendencies and the tragic situation in which he finds himself, he gives the film an engaging socially aware edge.

Unfortunately, the film fell down for me in the moments of horror which were rendered quite unimaginatively. Each of Milo's kills was captured with a detached, observational tone that brought to mind a nature documentary more than anything else, with the only real change in tone being caused by a pulsating synth score, which swelled to deafening levels. The lack of excitement created by these sequences ultimately led to a rather monotonous, dour atmosphere, so cold that I found the film hard to engage with. In The Transfiguration, O'shea has created something that lacks the scary moments to interest you on a straight up horror level, but that also doesn't quite have the poignancy to captivate emotionally. To summarise, it's not scary enough to be a horror, but not sufficiently emotionally engaging to work simply as a character study.