True originality is hard to find. It’s hard to find because it’s hard to define. If something is truly original, we may not have a pre-conceived critical framework to apply to it. We can derisively compare movies to anything that has come before them. This movie is like this, that, and the other thing. Doing so robs the discourse of any meaning. It’s anti-discourse: a reductive mix-and-match strain of comparisons from our personal cinematic memory banks. Hey, we’ve all seen some movies, and seeing them means we can delight ourselves by showing what we have seen. Satranic Panic does not have very much pretext, because its original in a way bigger movies don’t get to be anymore. Filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay — at the sprightly age of 20 — is becoming a provocative purveyor of truly original ideas.
Alice Maio Mackay is on the vanguard of something new, a New Queer & Transgender Cinema that exists within the liminal spaces of fluid gender identity, within the constructs of queer horror and internalized gender messaging.
Gender, here, becomes more than gender. Gender becomes an aesthetic device. Swaths of pink-blue light infiltrate a deliberate and intentional color palette. Regular horror devices are applied, stylish musical segments fancifully assert the film’s Queer Spirit, and the messaging resonates along multiple levels, disassembling social constructs within more typified genre devices, while radically reinventing the wheel.
Satranic Panic is new art. That does not mean it is expressed perfectly. The story doesn’t make very much sense. The movie is random, fast on its feet, and reeling side-to-side, until it unspools with some weird third-act choices. There is a looseness to Alice Maio Mackay’s vision, though, that is so refreshingly pure and enigmatic, the movie is a flurry of silly genre details that build out into a bigger picture. It’s not a great movie by our recognized standards for what great horror movies have been. It’s too punkish, free, and dissociative for that.
What Mackay’s doing is presenting Gender as a prime text, with the horror being silly and goopy and full of arterial squibs and blood spray. This is not serious message-centric cinema writ large, this is mainstream anathema expressed through progressive social means.
Aesthetic overrules everything. Color palettes shift and adjust. Color is used with meaning and the story is simple and intuitive — a character is killed off by a shadowy cult, who must be tested by the two related main characters, who are embattled with the fight of their lives, pitted against the status quo of gender identity and against their dysphoric sense of selves. The duo go on a roadtrip to avenge their slain friend through a very-Queer series of confrontations with some killer demons. The film is wild and unmoored, casting deeply into a pool of open-ended genre construction. And it’s deeply entertaining the whole way through.
Satranic Panic is a movie of moments. It’s full of moments. Good, unique moments, that do not have to remind us of anything else, because it feels structurally free from typical constructs, of gender and genre identity, in a film in which those two concepts blur the lines between cute and fun expressions of identity.
The best way to say it is that Satranic Panic is a damn good time in search of a movie to anchor it. Sure, a formula-addled critique would say the movie is not put together coherently, that the outline of the thing is chaotic and outwardly-reaching toward something it cannot yet grasp, but there is a refreshing newness to it all. A sense of true originality. In these new spaces and concepts, we find a brave new expression of identity, uniquely Queer & Trans issues, and a film that exists within this alternative dimension wherein this is a common and standard way to go about making a movie. One thing is for sure: Alice Maio Mackay is a filmmaker for a new future of Queer cinema, and we couldn’t be more here for it.