Still Ohio

Still Ohio is a class act all around, a fine first step for Allshouse to introduce herself to the cinema world. There is an excellent opening visual of a closed bathroom door in the back of a business, behind which there are the sounds of a woman in trauma. That caught my attention and kept it. Then the film smash cuts into the credits, which are done with a delicate handwritten font over roadside scenery that screams more art house than grindhouse. Then Allshouse does the same thing that Obsession and Backrooms did in order to wildly succeed: making sure a solid dramatic foundation was laid out for the horror to be built on. Many horror movies only establish normalcy and mundane routines to then get disrupted by the dread factor in the story. Still Ohio gets a dramatic conflict worthy of its own movie established, which is then beset by the sinister happenings that make it all the scarier, as we are emotionally invested now in the outcome.

Ana (Fernanda Lopez), Julia (Sofia Uribe Angelopoulos), Johnny (Jake Melamed) and Henry (Michael Zapesotsky) drive through the night in Still Ohio.

“Still Ohio is a class act all around, a fine first step for Allshouse to introduce herself to the cinema world.”

Still Ohio also shares with Obsession and Backrooms a Twilight Zone level of surrealistic horror that defies reason. Supernatural events happen, but the filmmaker doesn’t spend the rest of the story defining how the events came to be. Certain things are accepted as “is,” and it is never explained how or why. The results are very scary, with a lot more audience engagement as the horror is not easily defined. This method of “strange happens” is similar to the magic realism used for years in Central American literature, where outlandish occurrences are woven into regular life for expressionistic purposes. Still Ohio engages in black magic realism, using a dark arts prism to channel the emotional ugliness Allshouse is recreating.

Despite going full-blown Blue Velvet “beneath the surface” creepy on small gas stations, Allshouse has managed to make a bizarre mind bender that isn’t overly reliant on the works of David Lynch. Still Ohio stands up on its own, stylistically, with everyday details made more gruesome through the director’s own motifs and methods. The only tool Allshouse uses from the Lynchian toolbox is the discipline of making the way into all the complications extremely simple. It takes no time at all for the audience to pick up on the time loop specifics, with the repeated use of roadkill and the same gas station appearing over and over. By making it easy to understand what is going wrong, the complications that develop are easy to follow, even when it gets really weird. Still Ohio is a nifty indie chiller that shows how smart and elegant the horror genre can be.