ghost town anthology (w&d denis côté)

In Australia, it seemed to me, there was always the great lurking unknown. Something like 95% of the country inhabit a small band of land near the coast. The interior is a pulsing, potentially malevolent, potentially benign god. Roeg’s Walkabout and Weir’s Picnic On Hanging Rock captured this effectively. Canada has a similar wilderness, which is great expanse of the North. Bleak, inhospitable and for the most part unknown. Drive a couple of hours north of Quebec, where this film is set and it does indeed feel as though you’re approaching the edge of the known civilised world. In Cote’s bleak but watchable parable, this has become the land of the dead. They live side by side with the living, only the living don’t notice them. Until, in this instance, a young man dies and comes back to haunt his parents and only brother, precipitating a mass incursion of the dead into the tiny township of Irénée-les-Neiges. There are all kinds of reference points here, from Benjamín Naishtat’s History of Fear, another cold modern dystopian fable set at the opposite end of the Americas, to Miller’s The Crucible. Even, in the use of one memorable image, Chagall. In the corners of the world which are furthest removed from the trappings of the modern world, closest to the wilderness, the forces of magic can still do their thing.