Be It Resolved

Resolution (2012) came before The Endless, even though we watched it second. They are very intertwined, possibly to the point that it doesn’t matter which you watch first.

It starts with Peter Cilella getting a video email of his friend frolicking in the countryside, shooting guns and smoking crack. This is Vinnie Curran, the tweeker gun-nut from The Endless. So Cilella heads up to help his friend out, telling his wife he’ll be back in a week - just before he heads out of cell range. When he gets there, Curran is friendly but psycho, and refuses to go to rehab. So Cilella hits him with a stun gun and handcuffs him to a pipe. He’s going to let him sweat our detox for a week, then either go to rehab or go to hell.

But while Curran is suffering cold turkey, Cilella keeps finding odd documents - books, slides, movies. They have cryptic information about the land around and even themselves. That email he got that started the whole thing wasn’t sent by Curran. It’s not clear where it did come from. And when they watch the file again, it has changed - and now shows the two of them from just minutes ago.

Also, Curran’s dealers come by - high school friends of the two of them. Curran owes them a lot of drugs or money. Then it turns out that Curran is squatting in the house he’s staying in - it belongs to an Indian reservation, and the Lou-Diamond-Philips-looking security guard is giving them 5 days to get out. (These scenes are cute because Cilella is gratingly P.C., prefacing every statement with a “no disrespect to your traditions meant.”)

So, while Curran is pretty much stuck on the suckitude of his detox, Cilella is getting more and more paranoid about the weird people he is meeting, and the inexplicable messages he keeps finding. Since we saw The Endless, we kind of know what’s going on. I’m not sure whether that is a good or bad thing.

We also meet the Frenchman in the RV trailer that we meet in The Endless, and even one of the directors, who is one of the main characters in The Endless, although we meet when he is younger, and in a different cult.

This isn’t actually much of a horror film. Like The Endless, it’s sort of a slow burn that seems to be about one thing, but turns out to be about something else. And both are equally good, and go well together. I wonder if this will be a trilogy?