Conjurer of cheap tricks
Top 4 are most recent 5 star ratings
What is Claggartcore?
I'm not sold on the notion of this as being some sort of misunderstood avant-garde masterpiece, or the director's enigmatic anonymity as being indicative of some greater conceptual/performative intent; I am willing to take his one interview at face value that his inspirations are movies like The Sixth Sense and not, say, Wavelength. Which isn't to say I don't find it to be a pretty unique and compelling piece of outsider art, at its absolute best invoking a vibe best described as "demoscene murderdrone".
The first half of this cultivates some truly impeccable Southern gothic vibes, imbuing its pulp sensibility with a genuine vitality and resonance. Soulful and meandering, with a killer blues and folk soundtrack and a subtle supernatural shadow lurking beneath the meticulously constructed social "realism" (realism in the way it is evoked by contemporary Hollywood overcoding, at least, with its reliance on shallow focus and desaturated color palettes and strictly funtional compositions, very HBOcore). Even the extraneous voiceover clumsily literalizing the…