Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Murmuring.Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is an anthology series with eight episodes brought to audiences by directors of notable horror flicks of the past decade. These directors like Ana Lily Amirpour (director of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), David Prior (director of The Empty Man), Panos Cosmos (director of Mandy), and Jennifer Kent (director of The Babadook), among others, bring a unique vision to each individual story.
The format of this series is refreshing, and almost seems like a horror playlist curated by del Toro himself. He introduces each episode in an Alfred Hitchcock style of presentation, but it is so undoubtedly del Toro’s vision. Even though his name is in the show’s title, each episode belongs to their director, and del Toro makes it a point to mention their names. Each story has their own emotional ride for the audience and brilliant use of tension and practical effects. However, Jennifer Kent’s episode titled The Murmuring, which serves as the season finale, is perhaps the most emotional of the eight.
Jennifer Kent’s Previous Use of Emotion
Umbrella Entertainment
Jennifer Kent is undoubtedly one of the best directors working today. Her feature length debut, The Babadook, uses grief as an underlying theme to shadow her film in darkness and despair. Her next film, titled The Nightingale uses anger and revenge as a catalyst to tell the story about trauma. While there are violent sequences in The Nightingale, it does not overshadow the emotional themes.
Related; The Babadook: A Modern Masterpiece or Overrated?
Similar to The Babadook, the scares and tension are prevalent but don’t completely bury the emotions Kent is trying to convey. As a director, Kent can convey what’s hidden beneath the surface without spoon-feeding the audience. Her characters are as real as they could be, which is achieved because they deal with real emotions that audiences can see themselves experiencing.
For example, in The Babadook, Essie Davis’ character is experiencing grief with her young son over the death of her husband. That grief is visually manifested in the form of the “monster” that dwells in her home. But the Babadook itself is not the monster (as the trailer falsey misleads the audience to believe). Grief and tragedy are the monsters, and they are more real to the audience and more terrifying than any creature hiding in the walls.
In The Nightingale, Aisling Franciosi’s character is the vessel that the audience experiences a very real and traumatic experience through and she copes with her trauma and anger in a fairly violent way that acts as a cathartic release for her and the viewer. But how does Kent use the tools she has clearly mastered in her episode of Cabinet of Curiosities?
The Emotion in The Murmuring
Netflix
In all eight episodes of del Toro’s produced series, the supernatural is utilized in some way. Whether it is a demonic entity or realms outside the known world, we see the abnormal collide with the normal. Kent’s episode utilizes both the supernatural and natural but her main emphasis is the known horrors of our world. Her episode, The Murmuring, stars Essie Davis and Andrew Lincoln as Nancy and Edgar Bradley. The married couple study the migration and nature of birds. They find themselves placed in an old home to conduct their work isolated from civilization. It is revealed that this couple is estranged and heavily focused on their work which helps them suppress a tragedy.
The tragedy is implied in small but subtle ways. This couple lost their child during her infancy. Nancy becomes obsessed with the history of the house she and Edgar find themselves working out of. The history of the house reveals a decades old tragedy where a mother drowned her child and ended her own life. Prior to this revelation, Nancy sees and hears oddities throughout the home, perhaps supernatural ghosts, but Edgar does not seem to understand.
Edgar is shown to be more into his work. However, he craves intimate connection with Nancy who pushes herself away from him. The line that shows her true feelings is short, but tells quite a lot of this couple’s backstory. Edgar passionately kisses Nancy, who pushes herself away and cries out:
Edgar and Nancy are experiencing a darkness and estrangement many couples in this modern day can relate to. The death of their child has put a fear in Nancy that makes her lack motivation for intimacy. Intimacy could lead to pregnancy, which could lead to tragedy that Nancy clearly does not want to experience again. This is where the true horror lies in this Cabinet of Curiosities episode, and it is also one of the reasons The Murmuring is the best directed episode in the entire season.
“What’s the point?”
Jennifer Kent’s Direction in The Murmuring
Jennifer Kent has made it a staple of her directorial style to not show everything and force scares onto the audience. On the other hand, her shot composition allows for the audience to inadvertently search for something out of fear. She plays upon the real fear of the darkness and slowly moves the camera to let the audience scare themselves. However, this is not done by accident. In The Murmuring, she sets her scenes up with quiet tension, mostly in the darkness. Essie Davis searches for the source of either a sound in the night or the place where a ghost might be hiding.
While the episode is not necessarily scary in the conventional sense, it is horrifying in the emotional sense. The audience is seeing a couple drifting apart and a wedge driven between them. The horror in the episode is the way she materializes the image of grief. The ghosts are present; and they convey some effective scares but they’re not the overall antagonists. Essie Davis’ character Nancy is searching for freedom, a phrase she uses when she describes her rationale for studying birds. They have all the freedom to go and do whatever they want, and this fascinates her.
Nancy is far from free for most of the episode. She and Edgar are trapped in this house where water is the only way in or out. They are physically confined and emotionally confined to their own trauma. Edgar is more open about his feelings and attempts to understand his wife. But she has trapped herself within the four walls of her own grief and secluded herself from him. They are both lost, and the episode leads audiences to wonder how their journey will end.
The conclusion of this episode is satisfying in the sense that Nancy gets closure. She leads the spirit of a young boy into the light and sees the events that led to his mother’s suicide. She is able to see how losing a child impacted this mother and what it led her towards. Then, while outside, her body is surrounded by the birds she spent so much time studying. Nancy then tells her husband she is finally ready to talk of their deceased child. This represents the final stage of grief, acceptance.
There is no battle between good and evil nor a violent possession of the mind. The episode just shows two people (brilliantly acted and cast) who spend time accepting grief and see oddities in seclusion. The premise is rather simple, but Jennifer Kent’s brilliant direction and the breathtaking cinematography reels audiences into the most realistic story in del Toro’s show. Kent has shown a dedication to the genre and fans of the horror genre wait in anticipation for her next project.
