Rewatching
Dust Devil, it's what I wish would exist more often in horror
cinema. Too often it repeats itself in the least interesting ways even when it's
supposed to be intelligent. There are thousands of horror films in existence,
and many of them are sadly not good.
Dust
Devil is thankfully made with a lot more on its side. Set during political
upheaval, three individuals are interlinked together. A woman (
Chelsea Field) who had left her husband
after feeling she is suffocated in the suburbia. A widowed police detective (
Zakes Mokae) who, as the police force is
slowly being broken down and disbanded, is left on his own to track down a
killer who commits ritualistic bloodbaths with his victims' bodies. Then
there's the killer himself (
Robert John
Burke), a man with no name, a vagabond, who is not just a man but a being
of magic who has existed for aeons. From the beginning, for some of the
criticisms you can land of the film,
Dust
Devil is a unique creation with such craftwork to it. Visually splendid, it
drags you into its atmospheric tone with its sweeping deserts, lost country
roads, and slowly decaying and dying towns. Given a chance to do what he
desired to make, the director
Stanley
uses numerous types of camera movements, visual manipulations, and choices in
composition and lighting that stand out immensely. It creates a sense of
something completely alien, melding the political strife of the period with the
ancient and the nightmarish. The politics, the apartheid of South Africa slowly
crumbling to pieces, complicate the story further, adding greater layers to the
material as the human landscape shown is left desolate and lost, an environment
in confusion where there is tension between everyone before even taking into consideration
the being of darkness posing as a handsome, mysterious traveler. Already with
this,
Dust Devil stands so much
above countless other genre films in how it is presented and what the content
is.
For pieces of it so clearly
connectable to other films, there's others that make the film stand out, and
unfortunately "
unsellable",
including being butchered in length by
Miramax.
That the detective is a balding, older black African man. The heavy use of
ritual and magic, through a former film projectionist/shaman (
John Matshikiza) who acts as the
narrator and the consort for explaining the danger of the killer. What starts
with an understandable plot, of a supernatural mass murderer who encounters a
woman alone by herself, is pushed into unconventional corners. Whether it's the
atmospheric use of whale songs over sand dunes, or the abstract flourishes such
as a watch whose hands are moving fast, the film feels like the creation of a
director given only one chance to show what he could do, but he went further
and used this sense of desperation to create such an unconventional work that seeps
in its own particular, cohesive world. The setting is already effecting, a
place of lost souls for the titular being to harvest, but it is unsettling in
its violence and the special effects. Braver is the fact that, when most genre
films now pull mythology through realism or candy coat it, this film is
effectively the ancient, supernatural world making itself known on a rational,
chaotic place, and the characters having to accept it instead of a
rationalistic explanation to explain everything. It will take some people off
guard how this irrational supernatural mood eventually effects the tone and
structure of the film's plot, making its continuous narration actually
justifiable practical, even if it's both a flaw but also a virtue in how it
adds to its unconventionality. By its end, in an abandoned town buried in sand,
the abstraction completely takes over the structure, and while it may put some
off, it reaches a grand crescendo that is compelling for this viewer.
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