Love and monsters stalk the backwoods of Kourtney Roy's macabre Kryptic

Ahead of a special live-scored screening, the renowned photographer and director reflects on “liminal spaces” and gore-filled supernatural encounters

By ADRIAN MACK

Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic.

The VIFF Centre presents Kryptic Live on May 9, with a one-time-only live score by composer Cayne McKenzie, followed by a Q&A with director Kourtney Roy. The film runs at the VIFF Centre from May 9 to 13

IT’S A LONG WAY from small-town B.C. to France, but that’s where Stir reaches Emily Carr grad Kourtney Roy—in her sun-drenched Paris living room. She’s framed perfectly inside the Zoom window against a vivid blue wall, rather fittingly given the blaze of colour that characterizes the renowned photographer’s work, which is frequently located in empty Canadian backwaters and other border regions of the psyche—“nowhere places,” in her words—often with Roy herself as the subject, just as often posed in comically macabre and perverse situations. 

Accordingly, Roy’s debut feature, Kryptic, comes on like an erotic art-horror flick with an unusually intimate feel for rural Canada, as if Possession had been air-dropped into Revelstoke.

“I’ve spent a lot of time travelling and a lot of my photo projects are road trips, just travelling through Canada, sleeping in my car, sleeping in motels, finding the next bar, the next Legion,” she says. “Those are like holy spots on Earth, places where you meet the most interesting people. If you’re in a small town and you don’t know where to go, go to the Legion.”

Kourtney Roy.

She has a handful of well-regarded shorts under her belt, but Kryptic came about when friend and screenwriter Paul Morgan proposed a feature based on Roy’s photography. “And I agreed, naively enough,” she laughs, with undue modesty. Morgan wanted “ideas, vignettes, whatever you want to see in a movie,” she explains. “I wanted mucus and monsters. He had profound ideas like ‘female-driven plot’ and ‘questions of identity’ and ‘going on a road trip in search of yourself…’”

The finished product is elliptical and perverse, with Scottish actor Chloe Pirrie (Black Mirror, The Queen’s Gambit) playing a woman (or two) who encounters a horrendous creature of supernatural provenance somewhere in the woods and mountains around Hope, B.C., where much of Kryptic was shot. Things only get stranger from there, with Vancouver’s Jeff Gladstone eventually bringing his customary lack of inhibition to a more human and pathetic kind of monster. It’d be wrong and also impossible to explain more, but in its performances and elsewhere, Kryptic neatly marries Morgan’s loftier ambitions with Roy’s desire “to make a really fuckin’ cool movie.” Cayne McKenzie, who plays a live score for the Vancouver screening, heightens it all with an eerie synth soundtrack.

It all begins with the disappearance of a crypto-zoologist and subsequent efforts to track her down. Roy frequently refers to “liminal spaces” in her photography, which Kryptic further explores for physical and metaphysical meaning. In other words, if you’re out hunting Sasquatch—or “Sooka”, in the case Roy’s film—you will likely suffer the splintering of inner and outer reality. 

“With cryptids and supernatural encounters in general, if you have an encounter you remember, then it’s probably not the first time,” suggests Roy. “Maybe they encountered you as a child and years later they contact you again. But if they’ve noticed you, you’re gonna lose your job, your marriage, lots of people end up committing suicide after they’ve had these encounters, whether it’s UFO/alien or cryptids, whatever. I don’t know if these encounters are true or not, or if it’s something psychological, or if its an actual phenomenon in the world, but it’s true that your life turns to shit.”

Kryptic eventually pushes the needle on its gore and mucus and other unwelcome fluids, and there’s lavish monster effects derived from Roy’s proper disgust with things like star-nosed moles and hairy crabs. But of all the film's effects, Pirrie might be the most special. She was cast with three weeks left to spare before production and brings an intuitive groove and coherence to a very difficult part. 

“She’s dealing with a lot of things that aren’t very clear plot- or continuity-wise,” says Roy, who largely left the actor to her own devices. If there’s a precedent for the performance, you could maybe look in the direction of Vertigo. Roy chuckles. “We kinda ripped that off a bit. This love object that’s idealized and doesn’t really exist, where love becomes control and turns to something much more horrible, which isn’t love anymore. Love is already bad enough. Love is dangerous. That should be the logline. On the poster.” 

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