Double Helix

© The Tree of LifeEveryone acts like nothing just happened but everything just happened.

I remember walking with you on the beach at sunrise, hands coupled, the clear cold air jagged in our throats, the ocean feigning benevolence. Sandpipers strutting the wet sand, stabbing their own reflections.

"Do you think it's weird how no one hardly ever talks about someone till they die unexpectedly?"

"Like?"

"I don't know. Bowie. Robin Williams."

"People talked about them a lot."

"Yeah, but not like they did when they died."

"It's because they were shocked. No one saw it coming."

"I guess. Seems strange to me still."

"Whatever."

Up ahead lay at least twenty bodies. Human bodies. We tried not to glance at them as we passed, but we saw enough to see they'd been mutilated. I wanted to make a joke about the mystery of whales beaching themselves, but I didn't. I'm glad I didn't. I hadn't known then how long we had left, and I'm glad I didn't befoul the already turbid waters of our last few hours together. Avoidance humour has its time and its place, but its time was not then and its place not there.

Who am I speaking these words to? To your memory, of course. To the strands that spiraled the precise patterns of your makeup, to the double helix that was you.

To the coiled tracks of shorebirds and the fading tracers of space junk.

I probably should have been more attentive to your theories. It's true I talked about you plenty before you were taken, but the voice in my head will no longer shut up about you, yammering about each detail like the Echo to my Narcissus, demanding I remember the time you inadvertently tucked the train of your wedding dress in your panties at the reception after returning from the bathroom (how no one even told you until the obligatory video had been captured), urging me to replay the panicked moment you thought we'd been unearthed by Bigfoot while camping in the Rockies (turned out to be a gopher), lamenting the shocked silence of the world in the sterile wake of your passing.

Have you ever imagined a field so huge it might as well be boundless? I think of you in such a place, your thin dress adhered to your curves, tall grasses eddying like liquid around you, your arms extended as if in a heaven designed by Terrence Malick. When such things could occur, before the slaughter, we would set up the TV on the porch and watch The Tree of Life and get hammered on those cocktails you called Fighting Irish, the ones only you knew how to make, while the wide cerulean day cooled into a tremulous cobalt evening, both of us poleaxed with melancholy over Brad Pitt's inkling toward his deficiencies, then stirred and charmed to grateful tears by Jessica Chastain's supple grace.

But now people act as if nothing happened, yet I know damn well plenty happened and that none of it is good and most of it is like finding your way through a dreadful dripping tunnel where dull bells toll and quick dark things skim your lowered head only to run into a sign that reads in strident black letters: This Is The Very End.

20. to 17. Ice and Quiet to Disquieting Skies

17. Take Shelter  

Okay, another movie many would not classify as horror, but for me, what is more horrifying than having to choose between accepting your mental health is slowly disintegrating and acknowledging the possibility the world might be approaching apocalypse? Add to that an incredible performance by Michael Shannon, more than ably supported by the lovely Jessica Chastain, an eerie and haunting score, and atmosphere to spare—loveliness, loneliness, and dread braiding like the skeins of birds that dance in these bleak midwestern skies—and I've just talked myself into watching it again. These are ordinary blue collar people we can relate to, an important aspect of why this film is so effective. For that and more, Jeff Nichols is someone else to keep an eye on; his direction lends this film a powerful sense of quiet unease worthy of Lynch while splicing it seamlessly with a Malick-like lyricism. Given my own tastes, and everything mentioned above, that combination is damn near unassailable. I'm already regretting having this too low on my list.

18. Kill List  

Ah, England again. Ben Wheatley: watch out for him. There's little I can say that won't spoil it, so yeah, just find this gem and watch it. Unflinching is a word that leaps to mind. Unpredictable, too. Really, like many films on my list it's a hybrid—a pagan horror mystery thriller road movie. Yeah, just watch it. Be warned, though: it doesn't pull its punches. Thoughtfully brutal. 

19. Alien  

In light of my last choice, highly predictable, no doubt. But still. Pretty much everything I said about The Thing applies equally here. If anything, it's even more claustrophobic, has a slightly more iconic gross-out moment, asks questions about artificial intelligence many straightforward sci-fi films often flub, and there's a little more Yin to The Thing's Yang. As in Sigourney. Yes, it's hardly original of me, but I compare the two films in the darkened movie theatre of my head often enough for it to be unhealthy, and I love them both, and perhaps because it came first I rate Alien a tiny notch higher. As great as the XY ensemble in a whiteout was, the extra X in a black void just edges it. Oh, did I forget to tell you how goddamn terrifying it is? In space, no one... etc. 

20. The Thing  

John Carpenter's version, from 1982. Once again, the borders are blurry, but whether this is sci-fi, horror, or horror/sci-fi doesn't really matter when you sit down to watch it and realise far too late you're trapped in scary-as-hell world, except it's not hell, unless hell froze over, because this is Antarctica and your choice is: stay and fight (or hide from) whatever appallingly wrong thing has invaded your camp and taken over your friends' bodies or walk out into the ice and die. This film is relentless. And beyond the relentlessness, there's a purity, too. Just watch the clip. It's an incredible opening scene. Gorgeous, expansive, somehow lonely. But after this, everything closes in and becomes chillingly, hermetically sealed. (Highest resolution and full screen recommended.)