By Thomas Puhr.

It didn’t go where I expected it to. And at the end of the day, isn’t that just about one of the best things a movie (especially a horror outing) can have going for it?”

Watching Luke Boyce’s Revealer (2022) gave me a much-needed lesson in patience. I began the film, Boyce’s feature debut, resigned to the expectation that I’d probably hate it. The premise smacked of on-the-nose politics and ’80s super-nostalgia: Amid an apocalyptic disaster in 1987 Chicago, peepshow dancer Angie (Caitlin Aase) and Christian fundamentalist Sally (Shaina Schrooten) find themselves trapped together in the titular adult entertainment store.

The opening minutes – which come replete with a thrashy heavy metal score and an awkwardly staged juxtaposition of Angie dancing in her booth and Sally shouting with self-righteous protestors – didn’t bode well, either. But I was surprised to find myself becoming invested in the characters and their fight for survival. Once the world ends and the narrative hones in on the two women, Revealer becomes a surprisingly thoughtful meditation – one, make no mistake, still drenched in blood and guts aplenty – on empathy, faith, and friendship.

Boyce and screenwriters Michael Moreci and Tim Seeley (both of whom come from the world of comic books, which shows in their punchy, irreverent dialogue) cleverly navigate around obvious budgetary constraints. Rather than leaning into the mayhem outside (beyond some ominous clouds and lightning, we don’t see much of anything), the writers focus on the logistics of their protagonists figuring out a way to get out alive. Indeed, they milk a fair amount of suspense out of the two simply trying to reach each other by knocking through a wall. They also evade the tedium into which single-location stories often sink by ditching the store and following the two underground (once a speakeasy, the building rests atop secret tunnels built during Prohibition). 

A crucial decision the writers made was to have Angie and Sally become Odd Couple-like friends instead of just making them go at each other’s throats for 90 minutes. There’s some nice humor at play during an early sequence in which the strait-laced religious zealot goes through a gauntlet of horror-movie traumas (fighting off Angie’s zombified boss, smashing slug monsters right out of 1986’s Night of the Creeps with a crowbar) while her grungy partner offers support and guidance from the relative safety of her encased booth. Although Schrooten is tasked with delivering a few too many “you’re a sinner” rants (like Angie, audiences will likely get tired of her proselytizing pretty fast), her character elicits genuine pathos. Interpreting the apocalypse as a biblical rapture, she struggles with the dawning realization that she’s yet to be beamed up to heaven. Boxed inside the “stripper with a heart of gold” trope, Aase has less to work with, though her character’s drive to get home to her nephew – for whom she is the caretaker – gives us something to root for.

Shudder: Revealer will debut on horror streaming platform in June
Boyce deftly blends sci-fi and religious imagery during some action scenes (the pair’s gooey face-off against the demon Asmodeus lets him channel his inner Sam Raimi).

The two leads keep the proceedings afloat not only because of their chemistry (Schrooten and Aase play off each other well, to be sure), but also the fact that their characters are handled with a surprising earnestness. I didn’t think the film would teeter into John Hughes-style schmaltz, but its “we’re not so different after all, you and I” message had me thinking more than once of The Breakfast Club (1985). Both Angie and Sally, for example, get their own teary-eyed confessional monologue in which they explain (a bit too explicitly, also like Hughes) why they’re more complicated than their social label suggests.

It’s no spoiler to reveal that the end of the world Revealer portrays is indeed biblical in nature (we learn this during its prologue, in which a hateful televangelist gets his in the afterlife). Boyce deftly blends sci-fi and religious imagery during some action scenes (the pair’s gooey face-off against the demon Asmodeus lets him channel his inner Sam Raimi). More interesting, however, is Moreci and Seeley’s surprisingly cutting religious commentary. Both women, we realize, are boxed in by their respective orthodoxies: Angie by an industry that objectifies and belittles her (she does, however, proudly assert that she likes her job), Sally by a dogma that constricts her to outdated gender norms. In an otherwise unsubtle film, it may be easy to overlook its most progressive message: That fundamentalist Christians conceive of God as not all that different from the men leering on the other side of a peepshow booth.

Revealer is a bit sloppy and bloated (despite its crisp runtime), but it’s still a good two or three notches better than most of Shudder’s recent releases. In short, it didn’t go where I expected it to. And at the end of the day, isn’t that just about one of the best things a movie (especially a horror outing) can have going for it?

Thomas Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published “‘Mysterious Appearances’ in Jonathan Glazer’s Identity Trilogy: Sexy BeastBirth and Under the Skin” in issue 15.2 of Film International. 

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