Two movies are fighting for the attention of the audience in Jakob’s Wife, and both of those movies have a lot of potential that has gone sadly unexplored by co-writer/director Travis Stevens. The first movie is a blackly comic twist on the old dramatic staple of the dissolving marriage, and the other one is the mostly-sincere tale of a vampiric curse and the minister who vows to get rid of it. The movie is less successful at convincing us that the latter somehow stands in for the former, which follows the minister’s wife through the motions of becoming – then embracing the comparatively more exciting life of – a vampire.
Jakob (Larry Fessenden) is the minister in question, content with his life spent serving and proselytizing for God. Anne (Barbara Crampton) is his wife, who is far more bored with the servile stuff and resentful of simply being known as the pastor’s better half. While Anne is silently struggling with this, the town is beset by a vampiric presence, and during her indiscretion with another man, madness strikes: Her secretive beau is set upon with murderous rodents that eat him alive, and Anne is bitten on the neck by the vampire, known as “the Master” (Bonnie Aarons, looking like Schreck’s Nosferatu under layers of surprisingly effective makeup) for the way he/she/they/it seems to enslave hapless victims.
It has already happened to seemingly sweet parishioner Amelia (Nyisha Bell), who turns into a cursing, spitting, toothy, red-eyed version of herself, and now Anne becomes a hornier, more aggressive, and more athletic version of her own self, to the goggling chagrin of her poor pastor husband. This is the part of the movie that works surprisingly well, in large part due to the performances from Crampton and Fessenden, who both seem entirely capable of and skilled at selling the joke. Jakob is suddenly surrounded by vulgarities and grotesqueries, interrupting his comfortably sheltered life. Anne shifts from wearing the nondescript plaid clothing of a boring woman to donning sharply colored outfits of the cleavage-teasing variety.
It’s a good joke, delivered with aplomb by the actors, Stevens, and co-screenwriters Mike Steensland and Kathy Charles. The other half of the movie presents something of an unexpected problem. On an aesthetic level of creativity, the pleasures are obvious: There is throat-ripping, blood-spurting, and skin-slicing violence here, and when it comes, every bit of it is accomplished through expertly devised practical makeup effects and prosthetics that suggest a much higher budget than the film likely had. On a storytelling level, though, it comes down to a lot of deadly sincerity, exploring the options to rid of the Master, that meshes uncomfortably with the dark humor of the relationship drama.
One mostly comes away from Jakob’s Wife wishing it would commit to one avenue of tone. This is something that Stevens does not manage well, instead lurching from a comic idea to a gruesome killing, then back to a comic idea (rinse and repeat), with a sense of routine. We get a lot of cleverly devised effects work and a good deal of the dynamic of the central relationship, but not enough of either to elevate each other or give us anything we haven’t really seen before and done better. Here is a movie that is funny, nasty, and syrupy in about equal measure. That’s too many qualities for it all to work.
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