horror-obsessive
Grief horror usually chooses melancholy. A hush falls, a house gets heavier, a silence stretches until something in it finally breaks. Pathetic Fallacy picks a different key. Asher’s wife dies early on, and what pours out of him isn’t quiet mourning, it’s rage, loud enough to summon a talking spider willing to cut a deal. That choice, prioritizing anger over sorrow, is the sharpest thing director Adam Egypt Mortimer does with an already overstuffed premise.
The title is a dare before the film even starts. “Pathetic fallacy” is the literary term for projecting human feeling onto nature: a storm that mirrors a character’s despair, a wilting garden that echoes heartbreak. Mortimer doesn’t just use the device, he stages it. Asher’s trip up the mystical Mount Samdi assembles a forest of talking animals that exist because his grief is loud enough to warp the landscape around him. It’s a cosmic horror movie that takes a vocabulary word out of a poetry seminar and makes it the plot’s actual physics.
A Faustian Bargain With Teeth
The bargain itself follows old rules. A crazed killer drives Asher through a tunnel and out the other side of reality, into a realm ruled by a spider voiced by Natasha Lyonne, who offers to bring Iris back. Faustian trades are a horror standby precisely because the cost is never proportional to the ask, and Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari’s script (the pair also wrote No Exit and co-wrote Ant-Man and the Wasp) leans into that imbalance rather than softening it for a grieving lead.
Mortimer stacks genres on top of that bargain instead of picking one. Original songs and score from synth composer Johnny Jewel push the film toward pseudo-musical territory, woodland critters voiced by Something in the Dirt filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and by The People’s Joker director Vera Drew (who also edited the film) push it toward comedy, and Chuk Owens’ 35mm night photography keeps pulling it back into something genuinely unsettling. That’s a lot of tonal plates to keep spinning, and the fact that the film mostly avoids conventional jump scares while still landing one makes the choice to include it hit harder.
Grief as a Genre Engine
The countdown that intercuts Asher and Iris’s courtship with the clock ticking toward her death is a blunt structural trick, and it works anyway: by the time the countdown hits zero, the audience has spent an entire montage falling for a relationship it already knows is doomed. That’s the kind of mechanical confidence that separates a film willing to earn its grief from one that just performs it.
Pathetic Fallacy is Mortimer’s first film since Daniel Isn’t Real, and the jump in scale and ambition is obvious even before Lyonne’s spider opens her mouth. Where that earlier film kept its horror mostly internal, this one externalizes everything: rage becomes a mountain, mourning becomes a bargain, and a pop star’s grief becomes the reason a forest starts talking. It’s a bigger swing, and it’s the kind of swing horror festivals exist to catch before wider distribution ever gets involved.
Nothing about a release beyond the festival circuit has been confirmed yet, which is normal for a film fresh off its Fantastic Fest premiere. What’s already clear is that Mescudi’s first leading performance, paired with Jessica Rothe’s, gives Pathetic Fallacy an emotional anchor sturdy enough to support all that formal chaos. Horror fans who want their grief processed through raw fury instead of hushed dread should keep this one on the radar.
Quick Takes
- Pathetic Fallacy had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest.
- Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) stars as Asher in his first leading film role, opposite Jessica Rothe as Iris.
- Natasha Lyonne voices a Faustian spider character within the film’s alternate realm.
- Adam Egypt Mortimer directs from a script by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, following his earlier film Daniel Isn’t Real.
- The film was shot on 35mm with cinematography by Chuk Owens and an original score by Johnny Jewel.
