There is so much I want to say about Starfish (2018) that I am feeling overwhelmed by it… please just give me a moment to gather my thoughts… here, let’s play the trailer in the meantime:
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
I watched this trailer this morning (thank you again, Mania, for your IG post) and I promised myself I would watch the film T-O-N-I-G-H-T no matter what and, I kid you not, I found myself thinking about it a few times during work and was anticipating coming home to finally get sucked into the character’s sad and lonely world.
And what a sad and lonely world it was! Starfish tells the story of Aubrey as she navigates grief due to the passing of her friend (illness), her own failed romantic relationship (cheated on her husband), and the end of the world (mysterious portal let monsters into our dimension). Even though the entire movie was saturated with symbolism, it was grounded with basic human emotions and for that reason, and that reason only, I can tell you that I fell in love with the character and her journey.
When Aubrey breaks into her late friend’s home after the funeral, she willingly isolates from the world and removes herself from reality (or does she? insert evil grin) to deal head-on with her loss and her regret. Regret is a huge ‘monster’ living inside her and she manages it with music (music! queue Sigur Ros and 65 Days of Static).
Aubrey is not different from any of us, she is a woman who made a few mistakes along the way and, due to terrible timing, she was not able to ‘be there’ for her friend when she needed her. Life moved on and what had to happen, happened. Aubrey thought of herself as a bad wife and a bad friend and carried that with her, to the point that when she was ‘confronted’ by her dead friend as to why she was pulling away from the world, she said it was because she could not forgive herself, to what her friend ‘reminded’ her that she had to do what made her happy…
[Side note: Even though there were killing alien monsters all throughout the movie they were not the focus of it, they were simply symbolic adversaries ‘guiding’ the main character in her depressive episode and in her journey towards healing. If it wasn’t for the self-reflective side of the movie, then it would have been a regular Horror movie with monsters, jump-scares, gore, etc. Just FYI.]
I have not mentioned an important element of the story –the tapes. The tapes helped Aubrey ‘get out’ of her funk by making her leave the house in order to find them all across the desolate town. You see, the tapes had special ‘messages’ about the portal hidden in the songs, but the tapes were scattered all over town by the dead friend; when Audrey ventured into the ‘apocalyptic snowstorm’ town, she dressed up with her ‘armor’ to protect herself. (Symbolism, shmbolism.)
If the presence of symbolism had not been enough at this point, the ending really knock it out of the park. Okay, before I say goodbye and leave you with the last full seven minutes of the movie which were perfect btw, I would like to say that it was so cathartic seeing a character struggle with complicated human emotions because it reminded me that no matter how lonely I might feel sometimes, there is probably someone out there who might be struggling just like me, and that, my Horror friend, is healing in itself.
In Love and Fear,
-Marath
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