The Tall Man (my take on the movie with spoilers)
How do you define a good person? They do kind things, help the needy, keep secrets and never betray those who are close to them.
How do you define a bad person? They betray you in the worst possible way. They physically and emotionally hurt people and show little regard for the people around them or their dire circumstances.
In movies and books, villains and heroes are carefully and easily identified by the audience. In a visual medium, their introduction is accompanied by an appropriate background score- something peppy for the hero and something ominous for the villain.
The villain bears dark outfits and ugly smirks and overdramatized by giving them an unusual costume and appearance- bald heads, mustaches, dark hair with curls…
Our hero on the other hand is usually a simpleton and wears bright clothes. So okay, we’ve established that good means colorful clothes and smiles while evil means brooding and chilling grins and dark attires.
In books, the contents villain is easily identified by their sharp dialogues or a secondary character usually pointing it out to the hero.
In any case, the creator of movies and books clearly lay out for the audience on who we are to root for and who to hoot.
But what happens when we are presented with circumstances in a movie where the hero performs villainous deeds and the supposed villain isn’t actually that evil? As a viewer, I was in quite a dilemma when I watched the Tall man.
The Tall Man is not an all-out horror movie. There is actually quite a bit of drama in it and the plot has a touch of ambiguity in it. It is up to us decide who is right and who is wrong.
After the mine closes in a small remote town called Cold Rock, the citizens are in despair and if their livelihood hasn’t already taken such a beating, they live in fear of an unseen entity called the Tall Man who apparently abducts children.
My first thought was that the movie was drawing inspiration from the legend of Slenderman- the faceless entity who plays with peoples' minds and traumatizes and stalks them. As the movie progressed, it seemed something even more sinister was afoot.
The twist in the middle, took me by surprise. Here we were presented with a sweet and kind nurse- Julia who stayed in town after it went bankrupt, and took care of the people. She can’t stand it when people tease the needy and even offers her own food to those who need it. Her kind deeds and her ability to keep secrets of families is what makes her trustworthy and everyone loves her.
She is also brave and when her son is kidnapped, she follows and tries to fight off the assailant. Unfortunately, she is no match against the cloaked figure and soon she is incapacitated.
It is when she wakes up that the truth unfolds and I must admit- I did not see it coming!
Spoiler alert! Julia is not as innocent as she appears. In fact the small boy she calls her son is not her son and in fact her hostage. Not in the terrifying sense- at least not according to Julia who argues that she had been a good provider and a wonderful mother.
Her argument is that as soon as the town fell into despair, the children were deprived of a good education and toys and basically a childhood. She was helping them by giving them a life they deserved, by er…kidnapping them.
In her twisted mind, she was doing a huge favor to the families by abducting children and giving them to other families who could take care of the children.
Just before you could process this, we are presented with more chilling information- Julia had killed the children and buried those she couldn’t take care of.
As one of the children- Jenny narrates- was Julia really wrong? While some children made it to good families and lived happy lives and got everything they deserved, many didn’t get to live. In the end too, Jenny asks the audience if by voluntarily getting herself abducted by the Tall man who turns out to be Julia's husband, alive all this time- was a good choice. She did after all, abandon her family and kept David’s existence a secret (the child Julia had claimed to be her son and given away for adoption).
It is quite a moral dilemma but crime is crime. Julia did take the children against their will. Perhaps their families would have found a way to take care of their kids and the townsfolk definitely didn’t need to live in terror of a legend Julia had created. They had enough problems already.
It was the kind of movie that questions everything you believe in and I enjoyed the twist that took the story to a whole new level.
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