Minor Horror #11: Soft for Digging

This is the eleventh in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post.

Soft for Digging (J. T. Petty, 2001)

The release date is 2001, but let’s be clear: spiritually, this is a 90s movie. Its tone is 90s, its tactics are 90s, its strengths and its weaknesses are those common to the 90s, and increasingly less common thereafter. This is not a movie with an inkling of 9/11. More specifically, Soft for Digging is an example of a particular, very distinct strain of 90s filmmaking: the American “indie” (in quotation marks because there is, of course, a whole world of difference between an “indie” and a movie which is merely independently produced) which uses genre as a framework for self-consciously clever aesthetic and narratological experimentation; some more prominent examples of this tendency include Aronofsky’s Pi, Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven, and Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Soft for Digging is not especially like any of these in terms of plot, look, or vibe, but there are a couple notable similarities: first, an emphasis on more or less alienated men, men who are out of step with the world around them in some way, and who are rendered both potentially vulnerable and potentially dangerous by this fact; second, and more importantly, all are seem to be animated more by the idea of a method by which to make a movie, more than a purpose to put the method towards. The point is to make a movie in a particular way; what will, say, happen in the movie is a secondary matter.

I worry that I’m coming off as negative. I don’t mean to be – there’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing things this way; I certainly don’t believe the “point” of a movie is to tell a good story or anything. But it’s important to articulate what a movie is doing, just as a matter of clarity, so there’s no confusion about its priorities. Of course, the formal preoccupations are especially obvious in Soft for Digging; it would be hard to miss what was going on. First, there are the chapter headings punctuating the action, which are verbose and “literate” in an old-fashioned way, a kind of pastiche on what you might find in a minor 19th-century novel. Then, in contrast, there is the action itself, which plays out almost entirely without dialogue. The film is committed to this bit to the point of muffling phone calls behind windows or cutting just before conversations must inevitably occur. It wants you to notice how good it is at communicating visually, and with ambient sound – and you do, of course. It’s impossible to miss. But, as alluded to, this commitment is not quite absolute – at two points it breaks with it, the first when a crime is reported, the second when the true nature of that crime is made clear.

It is only a slight spoiler to reveal that that crime is the murder of a very young girl; to reveal its true nature would be a much larger one, and one which I will forgo, because this is a film whose pleasures are derived largely from the slow unfolding of its (ultimately rather simple) mystery. The murder is witnessed by an old man, who wanders into the woods one morning in search of his cat (you can almost hear him thinking, “it was right there just a minute ago, where did it get off to?”), and happens to come across a strangely calm girl and a man who, somehow, does not seem to be family. There is a sense in which it’s a deliberately comic image: the old man in his red bathrobe, clutching a mug of coffee he’s clearly forgotten about, standing too far away to quite tell what’s going on – but something seems wrong about it, somehow, so he follows them, and is proven horribly right.

It’s in these early sections where the film is at its most effective. The woods in question are one of those new-growth areas that aren’t really “forests” so much as collections of trees, slender young trunks thinly spread with a whole lot of leaf litter in between. It’s winter, and it feels like it, everything just a little grayer, colder, drearier than it would be at any other time of year. The old man lives alone with is in a house that’s seen better days, and he carries himself with the quiet resignation of a man who knows he has, as well, and that there’s no sense hoping for more at this stage. He has accepted that this will be his life, and it’s not going to change, until one day… well, no sense in dwelling on it. All this is communicated, more or less, by the way he prepares his breakfast, his habits at the start of the day. Soft for Digging was a student project, which I mention not only because, by those standards, its tonal control is extremely impressive (at least in these initial scenes; it does somewhat overstretch itself in its later, wilder moments), but also because it’s an slightly odd choice of a subject at that stage in one’s life, rather sad, rather morbid, probably not something you can really cast your friends in, evidence of preoccupation with a bad ending that’s still very far away. This also makes it distinct from the other films mentioned above, which are all about much younger men.

There is a fatalism to the way Soft for Digging lets things unspool, but a soft fatalism, mellow. For a long time it feels like a character study wrapped in a tissue of crime – the police come, and then come again. They can’t find the body, even in the place where the old man saw a dead little hand. He can tell that they’re starting to doubt him; one of them puts an envelope of brochures for retirement homes in his mailbox. He looks through them, but doesn’t really consider it. He knows what he saw. And his cat is still… well, not missing, but keeping its distance. What’s its role in all this? He starts to have dreams that feel more like visions. There’s something that bothers him about what he saw in the woods. Something that didn’t add up. Something feels wrong, but he can’t pin it down. The feeling starts to become a purpose. In this way things slowly begin to turn. There’s a moment that seemed, while I was watching, to strike the wrong chord – eventually, it becomes clear that it was the movie showing its hand, showing you it is not playing the game you might think it is. The woods dissolve into the grounds of a building, an institution, and now things feel desolate in a different way. At the end of the movie is a bitter note, a clever capstone that puts a frown on your face. The lesson seems to be: sooner or later, everything good goes away; the bad things, though, don’t always work that way.