Reviewing The Grim and the Dark

 I really love documentaries. So much so that I got a Masters in the field. I was very curious when I learned about The Grim and the Dark. Several of my friends had been interviewed for it, I'd seen some behind the scenes photos posted here and there and I'd heard the star of Napoleon Dynamite was involved. This last point, along with the fact that this was a debut picture and the director was seemingly not involved with any marketing had me cautious.

 

I made myself a cup of tea and locked in. The film opens on a Adam Curtis-esque slideshow, with Jon Heder delivering the opening narration. It's mostly platitudes, along with a puzzling statement on romanticism (the first and last mention of anything even remotely related to art history). The credits play and we find ourselves with Jon, phoning his friend Eric (who we will get back to), asking for help on picking a gift for his kid who likes D&D. Ah. So this is one of those.
Let's get this out of the way now : people do not know what documentaries are. The perception is largely that documentaries are the TV shows that are on the history channel, a pure delivery mechanism for information in video format. That is not what they are. Documentaries are non fiction cinema. If you go to a docu festival you will see wildly varied works : some experimental, some live action, some animated, some driven by the directors personal ideas, some following people they've met. The Grim and the Dark is playing pretend at making a documentary. It has an audience surrogate in the form of Jon because "that's what you're supposed to do". It's mostly interviews because "that's what you're supposed to do". It ends on one of the three messages all American slop has to pick because "that's what you're supposed to do". This thing has a budget, yet it doesn't have half the imagination of some of the shoestring docs you can catch at your local indie theater. There is a review of this picture published on the Wargamer website and it is frankly the best example to support my point. Entitled "Napoleon Dynamite's Warhammer documentary is a glorious guide to grimdark gaming", the review includes the snippet "The interviews aren't scripted, and each segment seems to have been a single take -" and I have to wonder if the reviewer has ever seen a documentary before.

The first real sequence of the film takes place in a Houston game store, hosting what you'll recognize as the Vastarian event if you're a little plugged in to the scene. This opening to me showcases the shortcomings of the project perfectly. The film is extremely ugly. It repeatedly fails to show what it is about : the miniatures. At the Vastarian event we get a blurry shot of the back of one mini made by Weirdingsway, along with some very sparse footage of the amazing warbands. In a later sequence in Finland we're treated to a blink and you'll miss it shot of the minis and boards of the Warhead crew. The best we get is a slideshow of some models, some art and the camera filming the printed 28mag collection, as well as a short scene of Matty Knuckles sculpting in VR, far and away the coolest looking part of the film, and I wish we got more of it. The hypnotic black void of the program, combined with Matty's charisma and voice make it actually very compelling.

This bit genuinely rules, wish it was the whole thing

Beyond this, it's fairly dire, and it feels infuriating. Not just for me, who knows what lies beyond the edge of the frame, but also, I suspect, for the uninitiated. If you don't know about miniatures, this is mostly a collection of nerds, talking about an art practice they do but we never really get to see. There is one scene later on where you think you're going to see someone paint on camera, but that doesn't actually end up happening. Instead, at the end of the movie, we get Jon Heder pretending to paint a 1490 Doom miniature. You can see there's no paint on the brush, it actually made me sad. 

I think this same shot is used twice within a minute but I can't be fucked to compare them frame by frame

I have no issue with staging sequences in a documentary, it makes practical sense. Sometimes you need the person you're filming to do something specific to get a good shot, or you want some footage of them working or something so you stage it. The issue here, is it feels hollow because so little effort went into it. Watching Heder struggle with painting would have been infinitely more interesting. But this film is allergic to having anything to say about the practice of making miniatures. At one point, the minis evade the camera for almost 30 minutes straight, and I feel confident in saying this is not intended as a statement. What we get instead is interviews, and a lot of them, some even over zoom. Without fail, they're filmed in the most bonkers way imaginable. With the (attempted) comedic bend brought on by Heder, I could have almost been convinced it was a bit. The camera wobbles, the guests have kilometers of headroom, they're shot from the top looking down, it's bizarre. The most unhinged one takes place at the Vastarian event, with the Weir Brothers (big fan guys, love the blog, love the pod). The brothers are crammed in a corner while Heder sits miles away on the opposite side. Like, look at this :

come on

Why is there a chain on the wall ? Why is the frame like this ? Do they know what the rule of thirds is ? And why on earth are they pointing a fan directly at the microphones ????

The Wargamer review I mentioned before, says this of Heder : "Jon Heder, it transpires, is the perfect guide." Did we watch the same movie ???? The one where Heder clearly doesn't care about any of this shit ? Heder is the audience stand in, fine, it's hacky, but fine. But why have a stand in who isn't interested, isn't a good interviewer, and is so cringe it's genuinely uncomfortable ? His role is symptomatic of how underwritten the film is. The interviews feel aimless, rambly, unfocused. Part of the failure is that it seems Jon was not given the scenario, he doesn't know what the director is trying to say, and so he can only do so much as an interviewer, and falls back on his painfully unfunny jokes to fill time. Yet he is given the role of carrying the narrative. In the most painful line read of the film Jon says "wow, there's a lot more to this grimdark stuff than I thought !". How do you write that line and go "yeah that's good" ? 

good one

The other part of this underwriting issue is the editing. When you write a documentary, you write about your plans, what you want to say, to show, you write your intentions. And then you are confronted with the reality of what you shoot. And sometimes reality is different than what you planned. Even if it isn't, you now have to edit all of this to make it a coherent text that conveys what you want. Editing a documentary is writing it. It's creating the narrative. The Grim and the Dark feels like it's about nothing because it feels the need to cram in a lot of guests, even when they don't really have much to say, and even when they're repeating stuff that's already been said. If you know about the scene, you'll recognize a lot of the usual suspects, but you'll also likely be confused at some of the inclusions. I'm not trying to say the film should have stirred away from less known voices, and I'm especially not attempting to be the arbiter of who is relevant or not, but there are some really, really weird choices of guests. Did we need the composer for a Warhammer video game ? An author who wrote a commissioned 2000AD novel ? There are so many people in this, and I know that more interviews were done and left on the cutting room floor. What this results in is a movie without characters. We don't spend time with anyone, and maddeningly we don't follow anyone doing, we only see them speaking. I wish we'd seen the set up of Vastarian or the event Matty puts together, I wish there were fewer people in this so we'd learn to know the ones who were there. And because of the lack of persona to latch on to and drive the plot into something cohesive rather than a collection of clips, once again Heder is left alone at the wheel.

So far I haven't mentioned the subtitle of the movie. The Quest for John Blanche, is a second layer of framing device that seemingly completely replaces the "looking for a gift for my kid" thing the film opens with. It's really forced, and it's mostly a justification for the amount of traveling that happens here, which makes no sense under the initial premise. Besides Texas, the film takes place in Finland and the UK. And in the Finnish section, it comes dangerously close to having something to say. A simple edit of a church visit with closeups of a terrain board spliced in opens the door to a lot of questions. Religious imagery is a staple of "Grimdark" and interrogating that relationship seems like a really rich line to follow on, tying into the counter-cultural roots of Warhammer and tabletop games at large (which are mentioned by Matty Knuckles to be fair). The edit here seems to posit that the models we build are a sort of temple, and I really wanted to see where that idea was going, especially since it is directly followed by a long interview with Tuomas Pirinen on Trench Crusade. And yet disappointingly, it swerves away from asking anything about the purposefully sacrilegious stuff embedded in the grimdark. They have Mike Franchina (over zoom) talking about the game, yet the question of religion is never really voiced, and it gets dropped there and then. 

you can tell they were pumped to get Blanche because all of a sudden the movie looks much better

There is very little buildup to the Blanche interview throughout the film. And when we get there it feels divorced from the rest of the film. Blanche says some funny things about "blanchitsu" which will make you smile if you know what he's talking about, but otherwise the interview feels underpreppared and doesn't really gel with what little narrative the film has. I will say, I think the sound mixing is really good in this part. Blanche is an old man, visibly not doing great, his voice is small and ghostly, but there's a genuine warmth there. There's a real ambiance being set in this scene, and honestly, it works. The cinematography also improves quite noticeably at this point. But immediately after the climactic interview with Blanche, we get back to gaming, with Jon playing his first game ever : 1490 Doom. There's a good bit of focus on 1490 Doom throughout the film. The first shot of the film is a 1,49k Doom. But most importantly, midway through the film is pretty much a full ad for the game. Eric, who we met at the start is in his best Doom sweatshirt, plugs the game and introduces the animated trailer for it. It's just edited in there, with a new dub and a slightly different edit but yeah, it's from their gamefound trailer. 

what's up with the captions man

The gamefound page itself has quite a bit of Jon Heder on it. This is a really jarring section, both visually, as nothing looks like the visual language for the animation in other parts, and sound wise, as we get a narrator with a very deep voice, kinda riffing on the Mikee Goodman voice work in Disco Elysium. The visual incongruity really makes the whole sequence stand out as an ad.

Surprisingly, given the mountain of obvious issues, this film has a production company behind it : the confusingly named Trademark Films (which I initially confused with the other company named Trademark Films based out of the UK). I've not seen anything else they've produced but I think we can learn a thing or two by having a closer look at them. First thing that jumps out is that Eric, who features in the film is a producer at Trademark Films. That's fine, producers are on doc sets all the time. Well Eric is also, according to his own words "the creator of 1490Doom". Ah well uh, you know... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the game being all over the movie. Let's move on to the catalog, and boy is it something. 

what a lineup

Featured besides The Grim and the Dark on the site are two "documentaries" that are essentially puff pieces about instagram influencers. Like, full on ads for these two people's social media pages. The one called Big Time Tommie at least looks insane enough that you could have fooled me into thinking it was sort of ironic, but I have my doubts given the context. 

now this is proper cinema

The third movie that's worth noting on there is another upcoming release : Saints and Sodas. Ah. This is when the penny dropped. Trademark Films is one of those Mormon companies. Jon Heder is Mormon. The 1490 Doom guys are Mormon. The unease around the religious stuff is Mormon. The Grim and The Dark is, as I suspect the rest of Trademark's catalog is, first and foremost a Mormon business venture advertising for a product made by Mormons. To anyone who looks into it the slightest bit, this is a cynical product. It never aimed to celebrate the art made by people. It never aimed to be art itself. The incompetence isn't charming, because it's not inexperience, it's disdain. There is no world in which this could have been something beautiful, because The Grim and the Dark was always designed to be the vanguard of a sinister offensive. The money people saw how much Trench Crusade made, and this film is a probe to measure the size of the gold vein. Investors have smelled the blood in the water and they are on the way. They're coming for the DIY weird minis the same way they did for punk music, combat sports, comedy, role playing games, the same way they come for anything with a crumb of REAL left in it that hasn't been sucked dry of any kind of soul. To me and I think a fair few others, this movement or whatever you want to call it, is touching because of how raw and honest it is. The sorrowful faces sculpted by Weirdingsway, the aged bodies Gardens of Hecate works on, even the silly stuff like Bony Bawks pro Skater, it's wonderful because of how human it is. Because of how real the pain and the love and anger that go into making them are. Because of how it opens the door to expressing these emotions to people who would have never touched a canvas or clay. The Grim and The Dark is a profoundly upsetting reminder that, in the words of Felix Biederman, narrating Fighting in the Age of Loneliness : "This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn't just a problem in our idiotic bloodsport, you're fucked too".