You know those fireplace videos everyone keeps putting up on youtube and streaming services? They're basically animated backgrounds, a long, fixed take on a fireplace (usually), meant to be played on a loop as a fancy-ish decoration.
A couple years ago, Adult swim put out a generic one. It looks like any other entry in its genre... until a couple minutes in you hear a conversation, see some legs go by in the foreground; A woman is cleaning the room the fireplace is in, talking on the phone. Then there's a break-in, a horrific-sounding sexual assault... and all the time, the camera stays fixed on the fireplace.
The camera was set up by Alex (Justin Miles), who has a side business doing YouTube yule log videos . He's booked the cabin for a romantic getaway with his girlfriend Zoe (Andrea Laing). When they return to the cabin, they almost catch the maniacs just after they've cleaned up their crime. Alex zooms out from the fireplace to encompass the whole living room, and next thing you know it's a long, drily funny conversation where the focus keeps shifting every now and then to show a reflection of the murderers on a champaign bottle in the foreground as they peek into the room.
Then the sheriff and his goofy deputy pay a visit, warning the couple of another murder nearby. He also notices that the yule log they're burning is from a nearby cursed tree, and after putting it out he warns them to never light it up again - he even admonishes Alex to delete the video, lest the curse spread, J-horror style. Later the cast increases as a group of stoned podcasters intrude (they've timed their edibles to take effect on arrival), there to investigate the area, which is apparently, some sort of "hillbilly Bermuda triangle".
The maniacs are still lurking just off-screen, and in a lesser movie they would be the villains. But this was written and directed by Casper Kelly, who gained viral fame with his 'Too Many Cooks' bizarro fake trailer (which also aired on Adult Swim), so things get proper weird; There's a genteel, time-travelling southern gentleman in a David-Lynch-inspired-room behind the fireplace who seems to be trying to undo overpopulation one birth at a time, the cursed tree provides the titular menace, and there's a late-movie... let's call it complication which is so ridiculous - even after all the ridiculous shit already in the movie - that it made me laugh.
All this is intercut with time-warping vignettes that show us the cabin as it was at different times in its existence, showing us the tragic events that befell a few of its prior inhabitants. A theme emerges, and though it's more open questions than any sort of cogent message (or maybe a meta-commentary about how so much horror these days is about individual or shared trauma?) it provides yet another undeniable jolt of surrealist coolness.
It's not a great-looking film, to be honest, but it's very impressive technically. The first twenty minutes consist of a single unbroken take, the time warps line up just so, the sound design is great, and I really liked that the camera finally unmoors itself from the living room wall when the story's main murderous force literally takes flight, locking the film into a more traditionally shot horror movie.
As ridiculous as it is, the time warps, especially, as well as some good gore, some uncomfortable moments and its batshit craziness give it a bit more heft than your typical horror comedy. The acting is a bit flat except for Laing, who's pretty good. The script has a penchant for quietly funny dialog, with some killer lines every now and then.
If you have any sort of fondness for Adult Swim's specific brand of drug-addled comedy, or the films of Quentin Dupieux, this is a very easy recommendation. Otherwise it'll depend on how much tolerance for nonsense you can deploy before it overwhelms you; There's enough imagination and craft on display here though that I think it's worth giving it a chance.
It's a shame that it's not really a very Christmas-y movie, really - there's barely any elements of the holiday in it, aside from the log itself. But given that it'd be almost impossible to innocently stumble upon this in the spirit it was originally intended, if you can engineer a situation where you can surprise other people with the film's stealth horror in a yule log video conceit... well, that would be a Christmas miracle.
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