Torn Hearts
BLUMHOUSEAlluring the mixture of abandoned houses and music-making may be, film has done very little with it. They are competent when independent, with both inspirations making for equally forgettable features from the past year. The Owners and Studio 666 spring to mind in those homely horrors and musical misgivings, but never the two shall meet. Not until Torn Hearts, that is, from Brea Grant. Her amicable complexities for 12 Hour Shift were a tad overbearing for the cast at hand, but the promise shown in this latest Katey Sagal-led feature is promising, if not a little short on depth. Playful pockets of psychological horror lead musicians to haunted homes and tortured individuals in an amalgamation of two ideas hoping to stake their claim in the horror sub-genre game.
Where the opening of Torn Hearts plays like a trailer made for television, the feature that follows feels best suited to the streaming platforms. That isn’t a knock, but it is nice to note that Torn Hearts knows what it wants to be and adapts to the reach it has. The sisterly hatred at the heart of these moments is played up in a creepingly dull fashion. Usual notes of horror and an animosity lingering over the newsreel-like footage that followed has an obvious conclusion and a setlist of horror charms that are about as placid and overstated as any country musician’s setlist. Gunshots, creeping keys of a piano and the rushing of blood all feature almost immediately.
That contrast is necessary and as generic as the music put together by the new country duo, who are grand admirers of Harper Dutch (Katey Sagal). Naturally, that admiration turns from childlike glee at meeting with and discovering the work of such a legendary performer to a darker turn that tells an audience all far too quickly. Sagal is given some great moments, wielding a shotgun at the highlight of a climax that relies a little too much on cutaways to distract from the action. Still, it is quite fun, and the performances of Abby Quinn and Alexxis Lemire are amicable considering the material they are having to work with. Torn Hearts may be a delightfully firm horror piece, but it is just as firm and unmoving in its lack of adaptation to new horror tropes. It is reliant on the old hands of legendary castaways and the horror that comes from murders and background information an audience knows, but the characters don’t.
Blumhouse’s model of feature filmmaking is an opportune one that has capitalised on a horror fan’s love for the cheap and creative. Shoestring budgets which have the odds in their favour for latching onto larger and larger audiences. Torn Hearts won’t manage that stratospheric reach of the business model’s hopes, but it will provide amicable scares and chilling performances. The real horror of Torn Hearts is modern country music, and Grant applies that greatly. It is, after all, a film about trust and a desperate attempt at showcasing role models are not all that they seem. Role models don’t usually linger on with shotguns, but Torn Hearts manages the dazzled star power of former stars extremely well, and the distance individuals may go to protecting their heroes, even if they’re trying to kill them.