Page - 31 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

20 minutes is mysterious and jarring, held together by the underlying humming score Carruth employs (Carruth composed the music for both of his films). A man – cred- ited as “Thief” (Thiago Martins) – harvests some blue dust and larval worms from plants growing in a greenhouse. Combining this azure substance and the worms, the man brews a concoction. Some boys drink this potion, resulting in a psychic connection and giving them fantastic abilities to mimic each other’s movements. How this spiritual link works is unexplained, yet that it is happening is undeniable – it antecedes a later scene of Kris and Jeff witnessing a murmuration of starlings, the birds undulating across the skies in inexplicable natural harmony (fig. 4) as the couple realize that their personal memories are intertwined (more on this below). The Thief places a worm in a capsule. After failed attempts to sell the “drug”, he abducts a woman, Kris, and forces her to ingest the pill. This leaves her in a hypnotic trance-like state and under total control of the Thief’s verbal suggestions. Over the course of several days, the Thief steals Kris’s funds and identity, forcing her to enact bizarre repetitive rituals of drinking water, stacking poker chips, and transcribing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden onto paper scraps which she makes into a large chain (similar to the one seen in the opening shot). In this liturgy of imprisonment, the camera frames the Thief in the peripheral, able to hear him but unable to see him; he tells Kris his head is made of the same material as the sun, blinding her (and us) to his visage, a thwarting of any possible face-to-face encounter with the Other.44 After the Thief leaves – again, we hear but don’t see him go – Kris slowly awakens from hypnosis (or does she?) to discover an enormous worm crawling under her skin. Despite her most violent efforts, she is unable to remove the parasite from her body. The film jump-cuts to a new character, credited as “The Sampler” (Andrew Sensenig), placing a large amplification speaker pointed downward into the earth in an empty field, a pulsing soundtrack emitting from the sound system. The Sampler is then seen waiting in the field at night when Kris appears, bleeding and wearing only a nightshirt. “It won’t come out”, she murmurs. The film’s soundtrack begins again as we watch the Sampler’s surgical process of removing the rope-like parasitic worm from Kris and placing it within a young pig. The exorcism complete – one recalls Christ casting demons into a herd of swine in Matthew 8:28–34 – the pig is then brought back to the Sampler’s farm as Kris stumbles dreamlike through her house, a crowd of hazy figures surrounding her. She suddenly awakens in her car by a highway, confused and feeling untethered to reality; by now, she has lost her job, her finances, and any sense of security in the world. She has experienced the most invasive and destructive of traumas – her very sense of self has been violated and erased. 44 An allusion to Emmanuel Levinas. 30 | Joel Mayward www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36