Pete Ohs’ Jethica opens with a bang: Elena (Callie Hernandez, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Kristin Stewart) is having back-seat sex in a deserted parking lot. In post-coital chitty-chat with her off-screen male partner she drops a bomb, loosely paraphrased as “I once lived in my grandma’s trailer in New Mexico because I killed somebody.” We’ll return to this setting several times over the course of this film, which is fitting for a movie that’s all about cycles and breaking free of them.
Jumping back in time, we’re in rural New Mexico. Filling up at the gas station, Elena spots an old friend, Jessica (Ashley Dean Robinson). But Jessica seems ill at ease and evasive, and first declines, then accepts, an offer from Elena to come back to the trailer and catch up on old times. It turns out Jessica is on the run from a stalker named Kevin (Will Madden), and she’s had to uproot herself twice already to get away from him. She shows Elena some video messages from Kevin, which display all the entitlement and threats you’d expect. The “letters” he sent Jessica are even worse, suggesting Kevin has a little boy’s brain in an adult man’s body. Which, come to think of it, probably describes a lot of stalkers.
Jessica decides to stay with Elena for a while, because who would think of tracking her to a trailer in the middle of nowhere? Kevin, that’s who, and before long he appears, although shuffling and zombie-like, similar to a hitchhiker they passed on the road earlier. But despite this guy looking exactly like Kevin, Jessica insists it’s not him. How does she know? Because she has Kevin’s corpse in her car.
The Kevin that keeps showing up, it turns out, is a ghost. Elena has some experience with ghosts—her grandma was a mystic who cast a spell on the land so she could reunite with her dead husband, and apparently that spell has a Pet Sematary-like effect on any corpses brought onto the property. Also according to Elena, there are three ways to get rid of a ghost: it can choose to leave on its own, you can get another ghost to kill it, or you can give it what it wants. While Elena and Jessica are pondering their next move, there’s at least one thing operating in their favor—ghostly Kevin may be annoying and threatening, but he can’t come into the trailer. Ghost rules, it seems, have something in common with vampire rules.
I don’t know what Jethica cost to make, but it has the freshness of a micro-budget film that relies on creativity and ingenuity to make up for a lack of financial resources. I mean that as a compliment, not a knock, and am also pleased to report that the actors and technical elements in Jethica are much better than you would expect from an apparently low-budget film. Hernandez owns her character, while Robinson is fine in a more limited capacity, and Madden finds the ridiculousness as well as the menace within his character. There’s nothing funny about stalking, but, as we learned in the Harry Potter movies, sometimes the best way to deal with a fear is to make fun of it.
Ohs’ cinematography is quite good, and John Bowers’ music, sometimes reminiscent of John Carpenter’s soundtracks, does yeoman work creating mood from ambiguous visual materials. Horror buffs, who comprise most of Jethica’s likely audience, will also enjoy the many references to other horror movies. The weak point in Jethica is the screenplay, which was created by the cast in collaboration with Ohs. I was particularly annoyed that the film ends with several sequences that seem tacked on to stretch the film to feature length. First of all, you never want to leave your audience with the feeling that you ran out of ideas 10 minutes before the final credits run. Second, that time could have been better used to elaborate on the rather thin development of the main characters, thus solving two problems at once. | Sarah Boslaugh
Jethica is available for streaming on Fandor beginning Feb. 14.
