Dir. Patricio Valladares (2023)
A metal band travel into the woods to shoot a music video.
One of the more fascinating rabbit holes that I occasionally allow myself to descend into is the insanity that has surrounded black metal. It's a scene that has some legendarily crazy moments, from the murder of Mayhem member Euronymous to the suicide death of Dead, another member of the band Mayhem, and subsequent usage of photographs from the scene as an album cover for the band. There have been church burnings, Paganist Nazis, sexual assaults, and many, many murders that can be credited to the death-obsessed genre of music. While every genre has its fair share of criminal elements, black metal's criminality is astounding for its tiny population: it's rare that musicians live out their lyrics, but black metal bands seem to have a huge propensity for committing violent and illegal acts. This brings us to Invoking Yell, a Chilean film about an all-female black metal band who seek to inundate their music with sounds of anguish and torture and end up finding exactly what they're looking for.
Tania (Macarena Carrere) and Andrea (Maria Jesús Marcone) make up Invoking Yell, an experimental band that uses "psychophonic" sounds, allegedly the vocalizations of the dead, to make their music. The duo has brought along Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich) to film their attempt at creating video to go along with their recent demo album, promising her a potential spot in the band if she does a good job making the film. As the trio takes to the woods, recording ambient sounds and performing drug-induced Satanic rituals, true motives are revealed and the band might become as notorious as their heroes.
Conceptually, the film works really well for what it's trying to accomplish. It's sort of a Chilean The Blair Witch Project mixed with true crime, and director Patricio Valladares does a great job of making Invoking Yell as realistic as possible. Unfortunately, that also comes with some downsides. Filming three girls walking through the woods with no supernatural elements in the background is still just three girls walking through the woods, no matter how dark their personal tastes in music may be. It's an incredibly slow moving film, and while there's certainly a payoff and some decently dark scenes in the final act, I can imagine it would be difficult to feel your attention was warranted unless you're already into the concept of the black metal scene.
Negativity aside, Invoking Yell is an excellent example of the type of film it strives to be. It's a pitch perfect found footage film, successfully capturing exactly what it would be like to be in this situation through every frame. The film takes place in the 80's, and everything from the music to the quality of video fully encapsulates the decade. It doesn't seek to build tension so much as it tells a story, recognizing honestly that stories like this often have quite a lot of downtime. Valladares wants to make a movie that tells the story of a crime, and it does exactly that with no room to spare. It is still a movie, however, and does struggle a bit at times to fulfill the entertainment portion of that endeavor.
Carrere and Marcone are flawless in their performances as the two metal wannabes at the center of the film. They reek of desperation and a desire to be accepted, despite outwardly claiming to want nothing of the sort, of course. They're the type of lonely outcasts that everyone who criticizes the goth scene makes them out to be, a copycat of better and more important bands even as they claim to do things no one has ever done before. Invoking Yell is a love letter to black metal, and though the audience will doubt that these women could ever make it in the genre, they remain determined to stake their claim by any means necessary. If you can get past the downtime, and especially if you're as fascinated with the story of black metal as I am, this one will be for you. If not, you're probably better off looking elsewhere.
Who this movie is for: Found footage fans, Black metal lovers, Wannabes
Bottom line: Invoking Yell is slower than it needs to be, but it's also a hyper-realistic portrayal of what a situation like this would really be like. The tiny cast does a great job in their roles, and Valladares creates a found footage film that feels like a throwback to a time before that was even a thing. If you enjoy the history of black metal, this one will provide an interesting look into the kinds of goings-on that make the genre so fascinating. If not, this one will likely trudge along a bit too slowly for you.
