In a modest ranch-style house, secluded in the anonymous desert countryside, white lights violently flash and flicker behind the blinds of each window. Bursts, as if a handful of flash grenades are being thrown or a firefight is being had inside. Static green lights halo the top two windows. It’s a striking introduction to the violence of the landscape we’re about to occupy for the 90-minute runtime of filmmaker Zac Farley and post-modern cult novelist and artist Dennis Cooper’s newest film, Room Temperature. The third film the two have co-directed—the first Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015), the second, Permanent Green Light (2018)—Room Temperature is making its Midwest premiere on September 17th, opening the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Room Temperature focuses on a family’s annual tradition of turning their home into a makeshift haunted house. A boyish janitor, Paul (Chris Olsen), from the local high school appears one day to take part in the set-up. As the viewer is introduced to the various elements of the project and construction, the macabre preoccupations of the father (John Williams) are gradually revealed. The father’s violent tendencies are manifested through this haunted house—his role plays of murdering his family or having them undergo violence act as a yearly outlet so that life can continue without upset. As with all of Cooper’s work, there’s a diabolical power dynamic on display. The push and pull between the son, Andre (a strong debut for Charlie Nelson Jacobs), and father has an unnamed incestuous undercurrent.
Andre’s hounded and coerced into this “play” by his father and is now old enough to push back against it. And there’s Andre’s twink French friend, Extra (Andre Dargent), who lives with the family. Extra is the familial punching bag, and Andre’s adolescent sex buddy. He’s treated more as the family pet than another member.
The environment, though intermittently visually engaging (mostly utilizing the formulaic rule of thirds), is a too-literalized manifestation of the family’s, and each individual member’s, isolation. The abstraction it invites has nothing to juxtapose against. The triumph of Cooper’s prose comes from the intimacy in which he approaches violence, sexual or otherwise, and how the terse, economic language suggests the often inaccessible, rudimentary internal workings of those who both inflict violence and have it inflicted upon them. And he does so among the normal, daily ins-and-outs of his characters’ lives, they function within a real world with real consequences. The ease which his characters slither and slide around within the most extreme of taboos is the shocking factor, not the taboos. Here, there’s no normal, no “real,” no moral outline in whatever society these characters are embedded in, so there’s no strangeness to perceive in this world.
Everyone introduced acts in this muted, hostile way. It’s normalized and, eventually, monotonous. The distance and expansive space these characters occupy is such that there’s too much remove–intimacy, violent or otherwise, can’t exist in this environment.
In a 2018 interview for Interview Mag, Dennis Cooper was asked how involved he is in the aspects of filmmaking such as framing and cinematography: “That’s Zac’s strong suit and writing is one of my strong suits. Everything is completely collaborative. He generally has a sense in his head of how to visualize it, but we talk about everything and I’ll tell him my ideas. Before the actual shooting, it’s collaborative but with him being the boss, because he’s better at it than I am. But when we actually shoot it, I’m there and I’m working on the set and everything.”
Conceptually, I can imagine these characters operating within this narrative in a novelization by Cooper, but Farley’s visual manifestation and stylization leaves much to be desired. Similar to the effective aesthetic choices of Permanent Green Light in the way characters are primarily met in centered medium close-ups, pulling back to focus on the sparse surroundings does Room Temperature no favors.
Yet, the intrigue introduced upon the film’s opening carries itself through the runtime on the pure imagination of Cooper’s story and strength of the ideas presented. The most engrossing aspect of Room Temperature is the act of seeing a narrative constructed along with the DIY physical transformation of the house, the brick-by-brick revelations as the space the story takes place in is slowly converted. Paul, the outsider, is a unique metaphor for the sense of invasion of privacy that a home haunting invites, a journey through someone’s personal space and life. Puce Mary’s score is a defining accompaniment. The most effective emotional moments come in the quietness after the haunted house is complete and has been hosted, when the characters are left alone to think of what has come to pass despite little revealed or resolved. I’m charmed by Cooper’s openness to form a working relationship with a young artist simply because of a kinship in interest and sensibility.
Room Temperature is a worthwhile outing in Cooper’s usual preoccupations, and the ideas are new and engaging, but the stilted and flat affect that the film maintains never transcends itself. It’s stilted and flat.