NIX
It was a trauma from which the Coyle family never recovered, a rainy day camping in the woods near Living Springs in northern California, Tessa going down to the lake to retrieve a floating baseball as mom, dad and her elder brothers Jack and Lucas prepared burgers, never to return; Lucas having bullied her only moments before, not for the first time, he took her loss particularly hard, never pulling his life together.
Twenty-five years later, mom Donna is on four types of medication and still insisting that the family come together for the annual celebration of Tessa’s eighth birthday, an extra place laid with Lucas’ junkie ex-girlfriend having abandoned their daughter Zoey into their care just in time for Lucas to blow his brains out in mom’s bathroom, leaving behind a single word scrawled in blood on the mirror– NIX.
Promoted as “from the director of Sharknado,” Anthony C Ferrante may have felt it was time to move on from making deliberately awful movies but has instead made what is presumably an unintentionally awful movie with NIX, credited to four writers, Ferrante included, who it seems did not speak to each other while making their contributions, such is the ensuing mess unleashed.
Valiantly leading the film as Jack is James Zimbardi, the only member of the family functioning as an adult but trapped as caretaker for his mother, while The Lords of Salem’s dependable Dee Wallace is undependable Donna, matriarch of a broken family, her husband gone, estranged from her brother and unable to come to terms with a past which haunts her and her children.
The monster which lurks in the waters in the forest a metaphor for mental illness glimpsed in memory and waking nightmares, the premise of NIX is original and disturbing but as it progresses and peels back layers of obfuscation the truth makes progressively less sense, the potential of the first half squandered as events are revisited and logical impossibilities suggest either a time loop or that nothing is real, the product of a deranged mind infected by a microorganism present in the lake.
Floating somewhere between Creek and a Field Trip for The X-Files, with awkward dialogue, superficial emotions and the tangled past rewritten so any meaning becomes as muddy as the lake where it all started, all NIX has to recommend it are the makeup effects of the sinister swamp monster and Lucas with his lid off and the outdoors locations, a wilderness daunting and unknowable in its magnificent untamed vastness.
NIX will be available on digital download from Monday 31st October
