[CFF 2020 World Premiere Review] The Ringing Bell Explores Cosmic Horror but Doesn't Quite Nail It

Two movies this year at Chattanooga Film Festival tackled cosmic horror in the vein of Lovecraft and while neither of them completely worked, The Ringing Bell came closer, for me. It’s an incredibly DIY piece of art that mixes animation with film to create an intriguingly vague story about things humankind was never meant to know. 

Judah (Brandon Cole) suffers from a severe form of hypnagogia, where he spends most of this waking hours in a kind of lucid dream state. The way he interacts with the world is illustrated in stunning animation and filters to showcase the slightly out of step perspective Judah shares. He’s highly intelligent and makes his live freelancing for scientific journals but he’s also grieving over the loss of someone close to him. 

“You can’t sit around waiting for her to come back,” his cousin Brona (Anieya Walker) tells him and she has a plan to get him out of his head. It turns out his uncle has been missing and is now considered dead. Before he vanished, he stored a mysterious box at a bank’s safety deposit and Brona wants it. She’s convinced there’s something to change her life contained within the peculiar box. 

She has assembled a crack team of...well, Judah, herself and a friend named Orva (Joelyn Dormady), who Brona used to secretly “bump uglies” with. Brona has a good plan…”I said it was a plan, not that it was good,” Orva interrupts. But you’ve seen the news recently so, “Fuck it. Let’s watch the world burn.”

Because The Ringing Bell isn’t a heist movie, we quickly blow through them getting the box and hightailing it to Judah’s eccentric uncle’s house to find a key. And while our heroes struggle to unlock the box, a mysterious woman solely named The Banker (Rebecca Sue Button) begins her implacable hunt for them and the mysterious box. 

The most impressive thing about The Ringing Bell is that it represents DIY indie moviemaking at its most fundamental. Casey T. Malone wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored and filmed the movie and while the budgetary restrictions can be seen pushing at the seams, it’s filled with heart and intention. Of note is the score, which acts as a character or narrator, pulling us through the animated sequences and the live action.

The theme, meanwhile, pulls from the best of cosmic horror by presenting the idea of forbidden knowledge being a destructive force. The arrogance of humanity in thinking we are somehow the pinnacle of knowledge and understanding come face-to-face with an oppressive force that is so unfathomable it can drive you mad. “You three haven’t had the slightest idea of what you’re doing,” the mysterious Banker tells them on the phone.

And while Orva seems content to just watch the world burn, is she really ready to face what those words mean? 

What really held the movie back for me, unfortunately, was the acting and the too-lyrical script. The dialogue comes off stilted and the actors sometimes don’t sell the horror of their situation, which brought me out of the spell it was trying to weave. That said, Casey T. Malone is a force to be reckoned with and I’d love to see what he comes up with as he continues to hone his skill.