Found footage and “screen life” films have brought audiences closer than ever into characters’ perspectives. Some, like Hardcore Henry and 2012’s remake of Maniac, even drop viewers directly into protagonist POVs, cinematically stepping into other shoes. Johannes Grenzfurthner‘s Masking Threshold similarly embeds the audience within a tale of psychological collapse and a fractured mind through an experimental kaleidoscopic approach that makes it impossible to escape the disturbing descent into insanity.
Script-wise, Masking Threshold is a classic story told in an exceedingly modern fashion, a premise that stretches back to the works of Poe and beyond: isolation, obsession, delusion, madness and their inevitably gruesome consequences. An unnamed data analyst and YouTuber who practically lives in the basement lab of his house is documenting his experiments aimed at understanding the unusual tinnitus that tortures him. Tests to classify and measure the effects turns to a search for cure, a discovery of cosmic secrets and a spiral of deranged mad science, all against a backdrop of his ever-present increasingly-unhinged narration (read by Ethan Haslam). A cascading screed of observation and hypotheses, anti-doctor anti-expert rants and narcissistic asides about his life, his struggles as a gay man, his burdensome family: the approach very much feels like Grenzfurthner‘s audio-recording update to the journals of Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists. Yet despite 90 minutes of nonstop dialogue, and occasional appearances from a mother and neighbor, the protagonist remains a cypher; Masking Threshold’s self-destructive psychological horror often feels at odds with that narrative distance, focusing more on actions and outward rants than internal mental strife.
Even if the subject of its tale is underdeveloped and flat as a character, Masking Threshold still unnerves immensely through its unique and abrasive style. Eschewing traditional camera angles and plot structure, the story instead unfolds as a claustrophobic frenetic collage of extreme close-ups (the gross shot of earwax-gunked Q-tip is one for the ages), macro imagery, odd glimpses of its few characters and skin-crawling sound design. Its expressionistic descent into insanity metastasizes the familiar visual language of YouTube video essay into an inescapable montage nightmare, capturing the whirlwind of a mind spinning out of control better than any of the actual dialogue or performances do. What starts as distorted flashes of computer screens and equipment, of working hands and chewing lips, of news footage and doctor reports, grows exponentially unmoored until Masking Threshold has viewers trapped within its relentlessly delirious onslaught of fungal rot, viscera, violence, and insanity that’s borderline Lovecraftian in its protagonist’s mad delusions.
The final act is Grenzfurthner diving headlong into shocking Grand Guignol extremity, via an ending that’s at once disturbing, abrupt, and likely pedestrian for anyone familiar with this genre or its tropes. Masking Threshold’s nasty finish may drop its psychological edge in favor of a splattery crescendo, but whether that’s a disappointing turn or a satisfying genre shift is going to be a matter of horror tastes. What comes before though, is a striking chronicle told through a boldly experimental style that unsettles and accomplishes so much with so little.
Photo courtesy of Drafthouse Films
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