Nix

A child’s not very mysterious disappearance and the violent death of her father at the hands of something monstrous form the core of Nix, a structurally ambitious but performatively weak offering from prolific Sharknado director Anthony C Ferrante. Flitting back and forth in time, it deals with the loss of young Tessa (Angelina Karo) and the subsequent collapse of her family, which includes a mother who can’t let go (latterly played by Dee Wallace of E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial fame); brother Lucas, who becomes a drug addict (Skyler Caleb); boring normal brother Jack, who defaults to being the hero (James Zimbardi); and the addict’s young daughter Zoey (Niesha Renee Guilbot). Whilst they chip away at one another’s remaining ability to cope, Jack tries to protect Zoey and untangle the secrets of the past.

It all seems to hinge on a strange, Creature From The Black Lagoon-style beastie which inhabits a lake in nearby woodland but also makes appearances in the family home, causing a serious damp problem in the basement (which nobody seems inclined to deal with, despite the fact that it will probably lead to rot in the foundations) and haunting the fragile Lucas. Jack is at his wits’ end trying to provide support for his relatives’ mental health and consequently feeling unable to embark on a relationship with devoted friend Liz (Angie Teodora Dick). The supernatural and psychological narratives interrelate in ambitious ways which offer up interesting possibilities but which Ferrante ultimately lacks the skill to carry off.

There are some good bits of work here. A particularly effective choice involves a change of lenses which makes the basement, huge and creepy when Jack and his siblings are young, look small and mundane when he enters it as an adult. There’s a charismatic turn from Tracy Pfau as an old woman who lives near the lake and may or may not know something about the monster. Poor lighting, mostly mediocre acting and choppy editing let down the rest, however, and it’s not helped by material which feels spiteful to no particular end, like the depiction of Lucas’ ex-girlfriend. Whilst his addiction receives a degree of sympathetic treatment, hers is relentlessly monstered, and she’s treated as a failure for being unable to look after her child whilst Lucas does not come in for the same level of approbation.

With the exception of the underdeveloped, doting Liz and the two wee girls, female characters generally get a rough ride here, but men are not much better off in terms of substance or depth. Ferrante is probably hoping that nobody will notice this because we’ll all be too distracted by the monster, a common mistake in horror – the best designed monsters lose their edge if we don’t care about the people they’re after. This one looks fairly good for a low budget effort, and Ferrante has the sense not to overuse it, but the much scarier connotations of the story he builds around it are squandered in a clumsily handled finale.

A great deal is made of the fact that ‘nix’, which Lucas scrawls during a bad episode and which comes to be treated as the monster’s name, is a word of foreign origin (a variation on German ‘nichts’) and means ‘nothing’. All manner of nonsense if attached to this idea, but what it might best be understood as signifying is that there is nothing to see here. Move along.