Review: Little Bites

Director:  Spider One

Stars:  Bonnie Aarons, Barbara Crampton, Krsy Fox

Arriving on Shudder in the UK, the latest salvo from the creative pairing of actor/producer Krsy Fox and her husband (the improbably monikered) Spider One is a dependably portentous and morose creeper which makes much of limited means. For those uninitiated, Michael David Cummings (Mr. One) is the younger brother of fellow musician-cum-director Rob Zombie, and shares a similar predilection for the (literally) darker end of the horror spectrum. Unlike his older sibling, Spider One covets the eerie atmospheres of quietude and stillness, and Little Bites evidences these qualities from within the crepuscular corridors of one fraught household.

I say ‘household’, but for the most part this is a lonesome two-hander between Fox’s under-the-weather widow Mindy Vogel and the demon-like creature that lurks (Jon Sklaroff) in her spare room. This haggard, emaciated monster goes by the name of Agyar, and he routinely feeds from Mindy, ringing a charming little bell when the hunger overcomes him. Quite why she acquiesces to this grotesque and harmful routine piques our interest, especially when we gain a stronger impression of the strained familial circumstances. Mindy’s daughter Alice (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro) is staying – indefinitely? – at her grandmother’s (Bonnie Aarons), since Mindy’s fitness has been called into question. What’s more, somebody’s tipped off social services, sending the bureaucratic Sonya Whitfield (horror royalty Barbara Crampton) snooping around the premises.

Little Bites unfurls at an almost hypnotic leisurely pace, like a bad dream that’s coalescing before your eyes. Three features in with Fox, Mr. One has developed a well-realised sense of how he wants things to look and feel and, should you have the patience for it, his brooding atmosphere of unease is handsomely manufactured. The dark creeps in to almost every frame and pore of the picture as he conjures the idea of a murky nowheresville in suburbia. Mindy’s plight, one suspects, is but one tale of tragedy in a sprawling and lonesome vision of middle America.

Agyar’s role in the story is pregnant with the potential for metaphor. With the runs of scars on her arms and legs and her withdrawn, pallid eyes, Mindy has the appearance of a heroin user. Her demon, routinely drawing power from her, is her dependency. Or else it could be representative of more personal demons; a physical manifestation of shame, grief for her deceased husband, or perhaps a long-standing post-partum depression. The so-called dark shadow that lurks in all of us, that we keep at bay to varying degrees of success. Such ideas have been the engine behind horror movies for decades. Living in the bowels of the house, Agyar has the appearance of a prisoner, but it quickly becomes evident that the reverse holds more truth.

Fox plays Mindy with an edge of desperation and vulnerability. A sequence in which she struggles with self-preservation – inviting an unsuspecting stranger (Chaz Bono) home, procured from a bus stop – occurs because she’s clutching at straws, intending to offer the hapless commuter up in her stead. But her overtures to calm and flatter him betray a neediness and social anxiety that adds to the growing notion that Mindy has been alone and lonesome for quite a while. She could be a sister to one of the malcontent women brought to the screen by Angela Bettis for Lucky McKee.

Elm Street alum Heather Langenkamp crops up as a kindly stranger whose unsolicited advice dolled out on a park bench (one of the film’s few sunnier sequences) furthers the idea that anxieties of motherhood are behind Mindy’s malaise. Between this and the negative space carved out by the passing of Alice’s father, Little Bites comes to feel like a spiritual successor to Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. Alice, of course, is also mostly absent from the frame. Absence and lack permeate Mindy’s existence. It’s a sad story to watch, but tellingly gains light when Alice rejoins Mindy in the core of the narrative. The third act sees no particular increase in pace, but the evolution in central dynamic is a welcome one.

With it’s spiritual sister titles swimming in the mind, Little Bites lacks a little for startling originality, but Mr. One’s command of the material patches over most of the nagging feelings of déjà vu. The finale sees it step away from The Babadook, suggesting a far more aggressive, attacking approach to dealing with your demons.