Trigger Warning: There is a sequence in the climax of the film with extensive cross-cutting that may be disturbing for photosensitive viewers.
There are some films which, from the start, communicate to the audience that what they’re about to witness will incorporate the full measure of the cinematic experience. While your first thought might go to pitch or volume, a peak auditory assault holding hands with a visual one, in the case of Joseph Sims-Dennett’s (Bad Behaviour) new horror thriller Baal, having its world premiere at Beyond Fest 2024, it’s a precise execution of the visual with a subduing of the auditory that induces dread and conveys approaching horror. With a still camera set on a flame and an opening sequence set within a large forest, one immediately becomes overcome with a sense of eventuality, a foreboding of destruction from which the devastation will be immense. Though the metaphors hold strong throughout Baal, a tale that uses many in its exploration of grief and redemption, they lack the surrounding clarity necessary to complete the chokehold the film seeks to place upon its audience.
Meg Clarke as Grace in BAAL. Image courtesy of Sterling Cinema/Blue Finch Film Releasing.
Upon learning that her father has died, Grace (Meg Clarke) reluctantly agrees to go home to claim the body and his things. In the process, she searches for her brother, David (Gautier de Fontaine), whom she left behind some years ago. Upon learning that he’d fallen in with a bad crowd and was lost, she decides to hire her old geology teacher, Mr. Green (Leighton Cardno), to lead her deep into the wilderness where her brother may be living. But the deeper she goes, the stranger things get, requiring her to confront things she’d rather leave in the past.
A scene in Joseph Sims-Dennett’s BAAL. Image courtesy of Sterling Cinema/Blue Finch Film Releasing.
There’s an interesting contradiction taking place within Baal. The tagline is “Terror is a Place,” while the title is Australian slang for “no” or “not.” Therefore, if one were to compare the two, they seem to oppose each other. One a definitive statement meant to create unease, the other a declaration of rejection. If terror isn’t a place, where is it? What does it reside in? In a similar vein, Grace, during her quest to find her brother, is told that he’s living in a utopia within the forest, creating the drive to go deep into the wilderness. Now, when one thinks of a utopia, they imagine a place of perfection without pain, suffering, or want. Except the term, in its original intent, translates from the original Greek into “no place.” Utopia is a myth, a legend, a break from reality — it does not exist, and from the moment that Grace learns of it, those with an awareness of the word’s original meaning are already aware that this hunt may turn dangerous before this tale’s end. If terror is not a place and utopia is no place, then what exactly is Grace looking for or, more interestingly, what is it she’ll find?
Before getting to that, let’s take a look at Sims-Dennett’s penchant for visual communication. The opening scene is that of a close-up of flames before it transitions to a bird-in-the-sky angle shoot of a forest that seems to go on far into the distance. Together, there’s a suggestion of nature as significant to the tale, the burning flames only able to take shape by the friction of wood and the inclusion of air, two things in great supply in the second shot. This goes even further when we’re introduced to Clarke’s (Five Blind Dates) Grace, a red-headed young woman wearing a yellow jacket, frightened and alone, looking out over a cliff into the distance and yelling for help. From the back, in this moment of desperation, she’s looks like a wandering flame, her torso making up the yellow zone of partial combustion and her head the flickering red at the tip; not the hottest part of the flame, but hot enough to set a forest ablaze. With these visual elements in place, Sims-Dennett unnerves the audience further by jumping backward-and-forward in time until about roughly halfway through when the jumps are no longer necessary, but also signify a specific change within Grace and the narrative as a whole. For a different film, the jumps would be a flash of style meant to create confusion where a straight narrative would be easier to follow; here, however, the jumps are another attack of nature unto us, as time-itself is unstable within the woods. It’s a breach from the natural order, making all that’s within Baal a physical manifestation of its thematic elements: it’s no place in which terror exists. Or, put another way, terror is everywhere. Interestingly, Sim-Dennett doesn’t confine symbolism to the woods with a visit to Grace’s uncle, a former coalmine worker, providing warnings to her about her estranged father, the woods, and her bloodline, which make him a literal canary that she ignores. (The literal aspect coming from the frequent shots of the uncle’s very active yellow canary in its cage.)
However, where this is interesting and the metaphysical elements grow in presence to create some of the most unnerving nighttime forest sequences since Koko-di Koko-da (2019), their respective presentation and construction is confusing and, therefore, reductive to the whole. Religious symbolism combines with familial bad blood and isolation to create a hot bed for either parasitic hallucination or, as the film would have the audience believe, something supernatural. Both are entirely possible, but it’s when the film leans toward the latter that a few things either don’t make sense in the presentation or execution or conclude with more questions than answers. It’s that space where style overtakes the substance, raising the stakes for Grace as it instills a sense of foreboding and ill will within her and the audience, yet doing nothing with it that clearly serves the narrative. Emphasis on “clearly” as the Sims-Dennett’s script possesses great complexity and rich ideas in the run-up to the answers. It’s there, however, that things seem to fail to coalesce into the kind of clarity that leaves one feeling satisfied in the conclusion.
Credit to Clarke who carries the bulk of Baal on her own. It’s not an easy task, especially when Clarke is tasked with making the audience believe in Grace’s vulnerability and potential distress. What we do come away with is a sense that Grace possesses a fortitude that only sibling love can forge, that only a sibling can hurt us in a specific way that no other can. Clarke makes us believe this, which is necessary to engage with Baal at all. She has capable scene partners who give the world of Baal dimension, but it’s mostly Clarke in the woods and she ensures that we buy-in to her distress and her confidence in equal measure.
Meg Clarke as Grace in BAAL. Image courtesy of Sterling Cinema/Blue Finch Film Releasing.
Baal is an interesting feature for its use of visual language. The way that Sims-Dennett utilizes the introduction to this world and Grace within it, the supporting characters, and cross-cuts to rapidly insert images like intrusive thoughts, speaks to a command of cinema beyond the spoken word. It’s so incredibly powerful the way that Sims-Dennett continually connects back one moment in the film to another, over and over, that we, the audience, have little sense of anchoring beyond Grace herself. It’s an absolute shame that it leads to a place in which narrative resolution is quick and drastically unsatisfying.
Screening during Beyond Fest 2024.
In theaters and on VOD July 18th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Beyond Fest 2024 Baal webpage.
Final Score: 3 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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