710 Never Road might have remained obscure had the sisters’ follow-up not been a sensation; but Lake Incognita won so much attention that a retroactive reevaluation of their debut was inevitable. Reddit’s Ostich Sisters discussion group was in full swing well before Incognita became one of 2017’s most acclaimed films, and the Ostichs’ digital fanbase claims bragging rights for having first recognized the sisters as important artists. Lake Incognita is a great movie, but it is so consistent in how it extends the vision of 710 Never Road that you do want to give credit for critical discovery of the Ostichs to someone other than the critics who had earlier dismissed them arbitrarily.
Both films are reimaginings of many past horror touchstones, intended as contributions within specific narrative lineages. One is not clearly more distinguished than the other; each tells a story we’ve seen before, but kindles a new spark of aliveness through a quality that is eerie, primal and feminine.
Lake Incognita is immediately redolent of pine needles and dustily decaying summer camps, of barbecue pits and s’mores and teenagers necking in era-defining cars and a menace lurking invisibly in the woods—of Just Before Dawn, Friday the Thirteenth, The Evil Dead and The Blair Witch Project. But there is a sharp, pining sexuality to the film that none of those predecessors had, there from the opening shot of protagonist Naomi (Kate Windrop) lying on her bedcovers and listening to the sound of her parents’ lovemaking, her expression inscrutable. To an extent, the Ostichs are engaged in a subversion of the slasher genre’s arguably patriarchal subtext, in which sexually active girls are punished by becoming a serial killer’s victim. Really, though, there’s a sense that they are quietly subverting everything—not just the tropes of a film genre, but the mental barriers, the arbitrary impositions of order (passed down as social taboo or constructed through personal adaptation) that we all use to navigate chaos, but which also keep us from seeing life as it actually is.
SPOILERS FOLLOW. If you have not seen Lake Incognita and intend to, skip the next paragraph.
What is in those woods surrounding the old campsite at Lake Incognita? Different subgroups of the film’s fans disagree as to whether the movie ever answers that question, and among those who say it does, there is no consensus as to who or what is out there. Characters refer to The Blair Witch Project at plot junctures that hint at the presence of something witch-like, with multiple bodies. But there are also suggestions that the killer is corporeal, and the final shot famously creates ambiguity as to whether it might be Naomi herself. The Ostichs have sworn there will be no sequel.
When I asked them whether working on Severer 5 had caused their thinking about sequels to shift at all, Suzanne and Martine exchanged a look, like a silent laugh. Then Martine raised an eyebrow, smiled, and said, in the tone of a teasing mother, “We never said anything about sequels, silly! We said there’d be no sequel to Lake Incognita.”
Suzanne jumped in, smiling without smirking. Chopping her right hand on her left palm, she said, “Sometimes people want a sequel so they can go back and spend more time in that same world, and that’s great. Sometimes they want a sequel specifically to see more of the plot, and—we meant not to resolve it. We wanted you to be able to see Naomi as the killer and not as the killer, and to leave that possibility of understanding her in two totally different ways open.”
Martine, whose legs were crossed and who was twisting her dangling foot at the ankle, added, “And this way, Naomi never has to leave the lake,” and arched her back like a cat.
Most recently, the sisters released Narrow Passage, whose two-part narrative structure (SPOILERS follow)—with the first half following preadolescent Crystal and her father on a harrowing canoe trip, and the second uniting them with mom and big sister Beatrice at an isolated vacation home—exquisitely upends audience expectations, heightening tension almost unbearably. This is an invisible-monster movie, complete with hat tips to The Night of the Hunter, Alien, The Thing and The Descent. Technically, the sisters easily earn the right to imply the comparison between themselves and their forebears: no Tobe Hooper, no Takashi Miike, has made a more purely and viscerally scary film.
And in their vision, the Ostichs have arguably already surpassed any of their great predecessors. Like 710 Never Road and Lake Incognita, Narrow Passage obviously resembles past horror touchstones—indeed, it summons those movies’ spirits, as though performing a séance.
And also like the Ostichs’ earlier films, Narrow Passage is intangibly haunting: a straight shot of a liquor you’ve never had before. At this point, the sisters seem less interested in their own virtuosic execution of horror-movie beats than in using these narrative templates as vessels to show and explore life as they know it. They are very sensitive directors of actors, particularly young actors: here, Eryn Slate and Chloe Brice-Kinder disappear into the parts of Crystal and Beatrice. And when the fictional sisters must silently communicate with each other to escape the monster, we see the invisible bond of two real sisters. We believe that Crystal and Beatrice could mutually telegraph the subtlest of intentions without speaking, because right there, onscreen, we have seen them co-inhabiting one energy field.
And so we come to the next entry in the Ostich canon: Severer 5. Since it was first announced that the Ostichs had attached themselves to the Severer franchise, fan speculation as to their motives has centered on two suspicions. The first is that the sisters have gone Hollywood, and from here on out are, and will be, in it for the money. The second is that they are continuing their conquest of particular horror-movie forms, and that—having made all-time entries in the haunted-house, camping-trip, and unseen-monster subgenres—they are now setting their sights on the highly specific challenge of a slasher sequel.
But the truth is darker and more complicated than either of those theories would have it—both more frustrating and more fascinating. For Suzanne and Martine Ostich, Severer 5 is not a slasher movie at all.
“We’re making a murder film,” purrs Martine.
What she means is that every murder shown onscreen in Severer 5 is a murder being shown onscreen in Severer 5. Or, if you prefer, a murder being committed. That fat steak knife with a gleaming sharp blade sinking into an actor’s chest is an actual fat steak knife whose actual gleaming sharp blade is actually sinking into an actual actor’s actual chest. What you will be watching, upon the theatrical and streaming release of Severer 5, are actual, onscreen deaths.
