Mystery is seductive. Rhayne Vermette’s Levers understands this acutely. This clasping onto mystery as transcendence both works for and turns against the film. To create an atmosphere of alluring ambivalence and hold onto it isn’t an easy feat and the cracks start showing in the film. By no means, though, this is a lazy film. It has style and sass, a brooding, jagged edge that pulls it through abscesses where other lesser, more disinterested films would stutter and stumble. Vermette has a striking voice, a strong ability to stitch mesmeric, uncanny images and sound into something utterly captivating. But it doesn’t always bloom. Something occasionally stipples it, bending it into programmatic impulses.
A great film may wield a lot of tricks but has lightness beneath. This film insists on its own density and opacity almost too arrogantly. Detachment unavoidably grows between the film and us, the spectator. We may be thrilled and shocked by its moody contours, as Vermette flings between few primary characters, a sculptor and a civil servant being among a larger invocation of community. Right when a statue is about to be inaugurated, that should have been done seven years earlier, the Red River Valley is pushed into darkness. Smoke engulfs everything. For the most part, the film is a sensory immersion in the dark, gesturing that we look for codes and significations in the mesh of strangeness.
How much can pure enigma alone prop up a film, keep it going through curves and bends of a wispy narrative? Levers heavily relies on atmosphere and evocation. Foreboding and chills materialise through the intangible, what lies just beyond grasp. There are countless mysteries undecipherable to humankind, a source of tantalising wonder and curiosity that draws out the hidden charge of sublimity within reality. We are provoked and enticed to look deeper, scratch out the edges.
Breaking from the mundane into an interpellation of elevated suspense and trepidation, unease builds slowly through fears of what we cannot access. There are teasing, blinking sights that may lull and draw us towards danger. Characters yearn for clarity. They seem to be on a quest, impelled to know more while being pushed back by all that evades them. There’s a lot that escapes our grasp and definition. Secrets buzz all around the corners. Snowy flakes and solar flares storm together in a catatonic explosion. Through the liminal folds whisper in unnerving peculiarity. Sensations become skewed towards an off-key assemblage.
There are all these jigsaw pieces culling the film together. Fragments scatter themselves through and piece together the semblance of a narrative. We move through a haunted, half-darkened landscape where all sorts of conjuring seem possible. Even the wildest things feel they can arrive and take place in the film. Vermette does strike an eerie spell. There’s something vividly entrancing about Levers, but it also struggles under the weight of sustained mystery. It exerts too heavily on the story’s rhythms, demanding where a gentler hand would have benefited in greater measure. This constant over-emphasis detracts from a more natural composition, deviating in puzzling, meandering ways. Diversions can be terrific when the filmmaker is also able to direct her vision in a clear way. Here, symbols and motifs spray the terrain, but they aren’t hewn together convincingly. We sense attempts to tie up, render meaning and legibility to the odd visions and tangents. But the sheer aural immersion, which Vermette asks for, isn’t enough to make up for the slighter writing pockmarking the film.
This is the problem that threatens to sink the film, even as it does achieve some inspired sections of disorienting sensation. It feels like a work suspended in a vacuum. There’s not much that grounds it, rendering it adrift and wavering in its own bubble of aesthetic stiffness. The landscapes become endowed with religious reservations and anguish. These associations accentuate the film with the elusive. We may try to affix our own convictions and certainties, only to be dispelled and waved aside by the film’s tide of enigma. Levers resists these with might and tenacity, moving to its own will. There’s something arresting about it even if it occasionally goes off the hook.
