Pooka! (2018)

This one's been on my radar for years. It was made as part of "Into the Dark," an anthology television series produced by Blumhouse featuring standalone horror movies each built around a different holiday. Well, they were all different in season one - season two reuses holidays, which means there are a couple Christmas and a couple New Year's movies altogether. But none of that really matters - both installments I've seen to date have felt like (for lack of a better term) real movies, not TV episodes. I'm not saying this would necessarily have been huge if opened in theaters, but I've seen worse horror movies that were successful.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean Pooka! is great, either. It has elements that are, starting with Nyasha Hatendi's performance as Wilson, an actor hired to inhabit what's essentially a cross between a Teletubby and Furby as the mascot for a toy its company hopes will be a big Christmas release. In addition to Hatendi, the movie features some stellar design and cinematography work, including evocative (and unnerving) shots of the costumed mascot in hallways. Visually, this one works, and that may or may not be enough to warrant a tepid recommendation.

The issue, sadly, is the plot, which catapults us right into spoiler territory. Only in this case, you may be better off knowing in advance where this is going, because otherwise you're probably going to be disappointed. Still, if you're averse to knowing where stories are headed, feel free to jump ship now.

For those of you still curious, Pooka! is one of those movies which spends its runtime dangling the question of how much you're seeing is real versus how much is some sort of dream or delusion. The main character experiences events that turn out not to have happened, there are signs reality is inconsistent, and the movie teases us with questions about his background.

For the most part, the nebulous questions presented are simultaneously fun and creepy. The problem is that it eventually offers some answers, and that's when the fun ends. In the last ten minutes we're shown what appears to be a memory explaining the preceding movie has been a hallucination. So this is basically following the Jacob's Ladder template.

I'm certainly not against mixing drama with horror - I love The Babadook and Bring Her Back, for example - but making that sort of thing work as a conclusion to an otherwise fun movie about a creepy (and campy) evil mascot suit would require one hell of a balancing act. And, with all due respect to the impressive stuff here that director Nacho Vigalondo and writer Gerald W. Olson did pull off in the first two acts of this weird movie, this falters in the conclusion. Maybe if they'd gone with a theme more directly connected to the premise it would have landed better, but I found myself rolling my eyes at the revelation.

The themes this is ultimately going with, incidentally, concern emotional abuse and instability, coupled with toxicity and the inability (or perhaps difficulty) of sustaining personal growth. To be fair, that connects with plot elements throughout (the selling point of the Pooka! dolls is they randomly switch between "naughty" and "nice"). On a technical level, the script checks off the boxes it needs to, but regardless of what most online discourse claims, movies don't sink or swim on technicalities. The interesting aspects of Pooka! center on whether the entity is supernatural, a manifestation of an actor getting too invested in a role, or something else.

In a different movie, that "something else" might have involved the corporation behind the product exploiting children's fascination for cute toys and shows. It could have explored the ethics of marketing these sorts of things directly to kids while playing off the inherently disturbing aspects of the real-word IP's this was referencing. I'm not saying this had to do that, but I found it weird those ideas never really got explored any deeper than an tacit acknowledgment that, sure, these things are creepy.

Let's talk Christmas. On the surface, the premise is of course playing off the idea of a popular holiday gift, a concept that's come up in plenty of holiday media, perhaps most famously in Jingle All the Way (though Pooka! offers a novel spin on the idea). The movie also makes heavy use of the similarities between Christmas lights, emergency vehicle lights, and stylistic horror lighting evocative of Dario Argento films (this seems to have become a popular staple in Christmas horror, by the way).

Digging a little deeper, we find the movie playing with elements drawn from A Christmas Carol. At the beginning of the movie, the lead character practices the monologue from that story in which Scrooge encounters the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and poses the question of whether the future can be changed. This arguably becomes the template for the movie, with Wilson ultimately perceiving the past (or at least an alternate past), either through supernatural means or simply by remembering. By the end, he's looking on, not unlike Scrooge, as history repeats itself - at one point he even seemingly manages to call his son from the future (though this could easily be interpreted as part of the hallucination, along with everything else).

However you want to interpret it - as actual, out-of-body time travel or the dreams of a dying brain - the ending is far bleaker than Dickens': Wilson can't change anything, and the story ends with him watching alongside with the Pooka!, which now appears as a separate entity entirely, filling the role of the silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

If nothing else, it's an interesting use of the holidays, and - as I keep saying - I found the first two-thirds quite enjoyable (particularly the middle bit). I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention Dale Dickey's fantastic performance as an aging actress. Dickey does a lot of heavy lifting establishing the tone of the movie and deserves a great deal of credit. Of course, the movie's strengths only make it more unfortunate that the ending drains away a lot of the energy from what would otherwise be an easy recommendation.