The new micro-budget indie movie Falling Stars is billed as folk horror, and the premise makes it clear why: It’s a story about three brothers who take a trip into the desert to disinter a witch’s corpse, and end up unleashing something frightening. But the film — produced, directed, written, edited, and shot by Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki — taps into a very different species of spookiness than you might expect from that description.
Falling Stars feels more like a UFO or alien-abduction story. The movie doesn’t deal in the creepiness of the dark woods, the muddy hamlet, or the haunted manor: Instead, it taps into a wide-eyed fear of the open sky at night. While watching it, I was often reminded of another low-budget production from a few years ago, Andrew Patterson’s excellent 1950s-style UFO throwback The Vast of Night. That’s a much better-made movie than this one, but Karpala and Bienczycki have found such a unique blend of genre flavors in Falling Stars — witchy folklore with starlit, they-came-from-above terror — that it’s worth checking out.
It’s such a strange world the filmmakers have created, but at first, it doesn’t seem so. Falling Stars is set in the more arid and remote regions of Southern California, somewhere in the Inland Empire, where poor, vaguely countercultural people live in old Airstream trailers and thin-walled bungalows. It’s a recognizable reality, except that in this version of it, it’s a fact of life that hungry witches descend from the sky every “harvest,” in the fall, and take people away. It’s so ingrained in the rhythms of life that the government broadcasts euphemistic “weather warnings” about witch attacks on radio and TV, advising people to stay indoors. Little is said about the nature or culture of witches, and they’re rarely seen in person, but they’re said to look like falling stars as they approach.
It’s the first night of harvest, and three brothers (Shaun Duke Jr., Rene Leech, and Andrew Gabriel) are sitting outside their home, skywatching for falling witches and performing some kind of folkloric ritual — they call it a “fairy ring” — as casually as if they were barbecuing burgers or passing around a joint. The eldest, Mike (Duke Jr.), says his friend Rob (Greg Poppa) has not only seen a witch, but popped one with a shotgun and buried her out near Joshua Tree. Getting into the spirit of the spooky season, the brothers dare each other to go find Rob and get him to show them the witch’s body.
Doesn’t sound like a good idea, does it? Of course, it doesn’t prove to be, and in spite of Rob’s rules about the corpse — no photos, no touching, take nothing, and above all, don’t spend more than five minutes looking at it — things go wrong, and the brothers must deal with the consequences.
It’s a bare-bones plot, and honestly, it barely sustains Falling Stars, even though the movie only runs a brisk 80 minutes. The action is sparse, the ending is blunt, and there’s a lot of expository talking, not all of it artfully written or naturally delivered by the cast. A long, doomy rant by the brothers’ mother (Diane Worman) seems to have been spliced in from a different, much more histrionic film. Karpala and Bienczycki frequently cut away to a radio station where a late-night DJ (J. Aaron Boykin) and his assistant (Samantha Turret) gather hearsay accounts of the harvest from listeners; it works as a device to widen the scope of the world-building, but adds nothing to the slim story.
And yet Falling Stars does cast a spell. Working with (and, when it comes to the film’s scariest moments, making a virtue of) the most limited resources, Karpala and Bienczycki carefully paint a picture of a world on its last legs. Harvest is coming earlier every year, the witches are getting hungrier, and more people are disappearing. The characters are terrified when the situation demands it, but they also have a careworn familiarity with this annual horror, offhandedly trading survival tips and morsels of lore, or looking up rituals not in rarefied tomes, but in well-worn paperbacks. The witches are unknowably mysterious, but also frighteningly everyday.
Falling Stars describes an apocalypse that arrives not in a giant ball of fire, but by inches, claiming a few more lives and eroding a little more hope every year. It could work as an analogy for our degrading climate or social institutions. Or it could just be a particularly memorable and unusual backdrop for a spooky little movie.
Falling Stars is out now in select theaters and available for digital purchase or rental on Amazon and Apple TV.
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