The simplest description of “The Spine of Night” is “a 1980s heavy metal album cover come to graphic life.” Barbarian shamans, petty despots, noble knight sages, craven knaves, megalomaniacal necromancers, blood, guts, and a parade of naked flesh are all given a spark of spontaneity by hand-rotoscoped animation to emphasize jaw-dropping over the top violence instead of blunting it. Writer-directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King spare little and go the distance on churning the stomach; they’re as far from the uncanny valley as possible, but going the opposite direction has a way of making gory displays more disturbing, not less, a’la “Superjail!,” “Mr. Pickles,” or, for best comparison, “Metalocalypse.”
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Under the surface, “The Spine of Night” has little in common with any of these, of course, being a grim-faced entry in the “epic fantasy” genre: The scope is vast, the implications great, and the pomp sky-high, though all traces of grandeur are tamped down by the film’s macabre presentation and grave stakes. Combined, these qualities make Gelatt and King’s work a challenge to summarize. Plot-wise, the movie is set in their setting’s present day, and chiefly concerns the character trio of Tzod (Lucy Lawless), the anonymously named Guardian (Richard E. Grant), and Ghal-sur (Jordan Douglas Smith). Tzod is the leader of her extinguished swamp-dwelling tribe; the Guardian is an ancient entity tasked with protecting from mankind the blue petaled flower referred to only as “the bloom”; Ghal-sur is an academic nice guy who actually turns out to be a selfish, power-mad douchebag, and thus the driver of the movie’s eras-spanning narrative.
Tzod seeks the bloom from the Guardian to right Ghal-sur’s wrongs, comprising a slew of atrocities and war crimes committed over what feels like centuries. She also happens to be in possession of bloom of her own, seeded in her swamp long before her people were wiped out by the sniveling tyrant Lord Pyrantin (Patton Oswalt). This is where “The Spine of Night” begins in earnest, swapping back and forth between Tzod’s discourse with the Guardian and the countless troubles of this imagined world: First the tale of the bloom’s resurgence, then of Ghal-sur’s rise to power, then the final legs of his domination before the climax, with a brief stopover so the Guardian can tell of the bloom’s origins. Lawless and Grant’s wraparound dialogue supply the film’s episodic structure with a focal point, adding awesome breadth to the story’s forbidding account of a history defined, it seems, entirely by human cruelty.
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Make that inhuman cruelty, actually; there’s nothing human about “The Spine of Night” at all, nothing inviting or warm except for flashes of compassion found in individual characters scattered throughout. Phae-Agura (Betty Gabriel), a warrior scholar and member of an ancient order of knowledge-hoarding librarians, struggles with her vows to her snotty book club and her responsibility to the people of her city; two lovers, Gull (Rob McClure) and Dae (Maggie Lakis), the lone survivors of one of Ghal-sur’s grand conquests, wax poetic about the stars in the sky after partaking in bloom before a handful of his guards discover and execute them. Humanity under duress isn’t really humanity at all. It’s a helpless cry for intervention that never arrives. In another movie, Phae-Agura would make a wonderful protagonist, perhaps the archetypal hero fated to defeat Ghal-sur and return peace to the land. In “The Spine of Night” she’s a footnote.
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But so’s everyone else Gelatt and King have rallied to their supporting cast: Oswalt, McClure, and Lakis, as well as Joe Manganiello, Larry Fessenden, Patrick Breen, Tom Lipinski, Abigail Savage, and Nina Lisandrello. Their characters each have their part to play, and more often than not their part leads to their gruesome death, because what’s the most likely fate for the living in times and places so amoral and cold? Some of the film’s deaths provide satisfaction. Some are simply heartbreaking. But Death itself feels like an invisible character in “The Spine of Night,” and time, too, these being the only constants other than Tzod, the Guardian, and Ghal-sur. Frankly, “The Spine of Night” hits with such folkloric authenticity that the film’s effect is not unlike an old edition of a mythological textbook. This could well be a weathered cultural text explaining the worldview of an ancient, extinct civilization: The legend and lore feel of a piece with ancient Roman stories of gods and monsters, inventions for making sense of an insensible world.
Gelatt and King probably didn’t have such high-minded aspirations when conceiving of, producing, and animating the movie, but it’s nice that they found their way into the cut. “The Spine of Night” is best enjoyed as a grisly genre exercise and sensory pleasure instead of a fictional history lesson, though this tertiary detail buttresses the others for the better: The best reason to watch the movie is for the thrill of the animation and the dark fantasy background, but add a little bit of gravity and suddenly those elements gain in psychological impact. The reason shows like “Superjail!” and “Mr. Pickles” fade away, and why they don’t work in the first place, is the absence of substance; they’re there to shock, nauseate, and upset, and that ingrained cynicism makes them impossible to enjoy, much less appreciate. (“Metalocalypse” avoids this empty nastiness by having something to say, even if the “something” occasionally just boils down to “heavy metal rules.”)
On the other hand, “The Spine of Night” has ideas to express and emotions to communicate: Power corrupts, authority is oppression, godhood is fascism, and man, for whatever justification he provides from one barbarity to the next, is a pox on the Earth. But the film doesn’t brute force these thoughts down the viewer’s throat. Instead, they occur organically, lingering just beneath the surface of Gelatt and King’s medieval, crimson-soaked eye candy. [B+]
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