Styria

Styria is one of many adaptions of Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella, Carmilla. As the horror-loving lesbian that I am, I’ve seen several adaptions of Carmilla at this point. Styria falls more or less in the middle of these adaptions.

Styria takes Carmilla and moves it to the modern day. Teenage Laura has been kicked out of boarding school and is now keeping her father company while he studies a spooky manor in Hungary. Laura, a depressed loner ends up meeting a mysterious girl named Carmilla after she is in a car crash. Laura and Carmilla grow close despite the fact that Carmilla gives off all sorts of bad vibes. As the movie goes on and Laura and Carmilla grow closer, the girls in the nearby town begin to go mad. This leads to a rash of suicides and the revelation that there are unnatural forces at work.

The first problem with Styria is that the acting is uniformly bad in a way that makes me think it’s probably the director’s fault more than the actors. The movie certainly doesn’t know the best and most interesting way to frame a dialogue scene. Eleanor Tomlinson who plays Laura has no onscreen presence. But that’s pretty common for movies starring pretty, teenage characters. However, Stephen Rea plays her father and he’s also bland and uninteresting. I know Rea can act and has stage presence. None of that is one display here. As much as the actors can say their lines with varying levels of believability, nobody has any stage presence or draws your eye. This makes all the characters bland and thus, I was less interested in the story.

The film looks bland as well. It’s a very grey, colourless movie. They probably thought that this colour pallet would make the movie spookier but it doesn’t work. It’s dull to look at. Even specific horror moments don’t pop because they are likewise colourless and almost understated.

Styria wants to be atmospheric but it doesn’t have the attention span or pacing for it. The movie feels like it’s 1/3 establishing shots but they never fully establish the mood they’re going for. It just jumps from one disconnected spooky shot to the next which makes the film feel overcooked and overworked rather than drawing its audience into this atmosphere.

Carmilla and Laura’s relationship is another letdown. For one thing, they only kiss once. This is mostly a friendship, not a romance. But beyond this, the girls’ scenes together have no charge. The scenes between Carmilla and Laura in the original novel are both romantic and have a sense of menace. The scenes between these characters in Styria have maybe a fifth of that. It’s just two girls who are friends. There’s no intense connection or looming threat from Carmilla. Like everything else in the movie, the relationship is rather dull.

The last act of the movie is actually not bad. The last 15 minutes do pull some things together and feature some good visuals. However, this comes too little too late. As much as I appreciated some of the ideas and visuals, I still didn’t care about these characters.

With a better director, Styria could have been good. But it needed to succeed in atmosphere to succeed as a movie and it didn’t. As such, it ends up as a middling attempt at a Carmilla adaption. There’s nothing particularly new to be found here and nothing old done really well or given a new twist. Overall, Styria is competent if disappointingly bland as a film.

Overall rating: 5.4/10

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