THE SUPER: Messy Horror Film With All-Too-Brief Glimmers Of Fun

To name your film ‘super’, or any other synonym for ‘good’, is to tempt fate – or film critics – a little too much. The Super should have chosen a different name, as it most assuredly isn’t super.

It is about a super though – a building superintendent (Patrick John Flueger) who moves into the building he works for with his two daughters, only to find that strange events are leaving a trail of residents dead.

Unfortunately The Super never finds a lane to drive in – it begins as a horror, but then largely becomes a family drama with some thriller elements mixed in, until it remembers in the final act it’s meant to be a horror film. In addition it feels rather aimless, without an engaging pace or captivating plot, and its few good ideas are spread too thin as a result.

The Brief Glimmers of Fun

The Super does have a few great moments, which show off some really clever filmmaking. The film opens, as all horror films seem obliged to do, with a woman alone in their house trying their best to ignore spooky goings-on around the place. However, she isn’t alone – her disabled brother is with her. This brother can’t communicate the fact he knows something is amiss to his sister, but through acting manages to tell us. This rift between what we know and what the woman knows manages to create a rather tense opening, as we will for her to just get out.

Nowhere is this skilled storytelling shown throughout the rest of the film. The meandering plot and strange omission of any horror elements between the film’s opening and final act means it never builds any kind of tension or pace. And then the final act happens.

Without wanting to spoil anything, with about twenty minutes left, the film becomes absolutely insane. All characterisation, foreshadowing, internal consistency and logic from the entire preceding film is dropped, with a twist that the filmmakers must have thought was really cool, and implemented it without considering if it actually works. It doesn’t make any sense in the plot, and obliterates any kind of character motivation or empathy.

However, for the brief time the ‘twist’ plays out, it’s unabashedly engaging. Clichéd horror iconography gets thrown around like confetti at a wedding, actors give their best ‘edgy’ performances that’d be more fitting in a SyFy TV show, and many people get murdered. It’s hilarious – and even more incredible moments happen, but to mention them would be to spoil how wacky they are. It’s just a shame that the bizarre hilarity of this sequence was likely unintentional.

Fine Acting; Bad Script

The biggest let-down for The Super is in its characters, as the entirety of the plot is about the way they interact, but they’re not well defined enough to drive this plot. The superintendent is defined in very basic terms – he has a rather generic relationship with his ‘teenage daughter’, an ‘anti-flaw’ (a flaw that isn’t really a flaw at all), and no apparent motivation for what he does. Flueger doesn’t do a bad job portraying him, but there’s no discernible character beyond the word ‘dad’ painted in broad swathes.

A bizarre performance comes from Val Kilmer as Vincent, a creepy eastern European who follows some kind of satanic practice and, predictably, is the superintendent’s main nemesis. Kilmer is American, of course, and so his accent and performance sit in some weird space between American and eastern European. On top of that he delivers all his lines in some barely discernible half-whisper which, to his credit, does play up the eerie elements of his character. However, he’s played as far too evil to work for the nuance the film tries to imbue in him later on.

Other performances are all fine, but hampered by the script – Louisa Krause as the love interest, Taylor Richardson as the moody daughter, and Yul Vazquez as the work colleague and sidekick all play their roles well, but the characters never stray from their assigned archetypes.

Talk about the performances would be incomplete without mentioning the baffling lip-syncing. Many scenes (particularly at the film’s climax) which should theoretically be tense are ruined because the actors’ lips and the dialogue heard are clearly different. Audio out by a fraction of a second would be understandable on occasion, but whole conversations pass by in which there’s no correlation between voice and mouth. It’s as though the script was drastically changed after the footage was shot and the new lines dubbed on top – either that, or the editor accidentally separated audio and video by a significant margin.

The Super: Conclusion

At its core, The Super doesn’t have a very good idea for a film. The rapid modulation from doldrums to inadvertent hilarity; the ill-defined characters; the rambling plot – all would have been ironed out if director Stephan Rick had definitively decided what the film’s story was.

It’s a shame, because most of the film is pulling its weight. The actors are all fine, the set design and cinematography are all competent, and the costume and make-up are surprisingly useful in creating and defining character. Unfortunately, the creative crew of the film just wasn’t creative enough.

What represents a film more: its highlights or its low points?

The Super was released in the US on 19 October 2018.