I mentioned in my review of Relaxer that you can just smell the room the protagonist stews in. It just oozed from the screen in nauseating fashion. And while Wounds doesn’t go to the same extremes, the locations and the overall grimy feeling just percolates. It’s a foul, dirty film that left me itchy and in need of a hot shower.

It also takes inspiration from standard genre conventions of a man losing his mind, but it also has its heart set on something different. Consider the tropes. An unexplained curse. An object that seemingly opens a portal to…something. Freaky images that would feel right at home in Ringu…yep, Babak Anvari’s sophomore feature feels inspired by J-Horror.

But while Wounds definitely charts our protagonist’s descent into madness, it’s actually his loss of humanity that will linger in the mind for days. charting our protagonists descent into…well, madness, I suppose…but, more appropriately, descent into an absence of humanity is what will linger in the mind for days.

Will (Armie Hammer) is the kind of underachieving Gen Xer who thinks he’s a much bigger deal than he is. The kind of guy who went to Tulane until he graduated/dropped out and now boozes it up as a bartender at a local New Orleans watering hole call Rosie’s. He’s also working on some unseen book…while drunk, natch. Will makes fun of Jeffrey (Karl Glusman), the new boo of his friend Alicia (Zazie Beetz) for going to Tulane and being so focused on school work. He’s a bully, to be frank. And wants to emasculate Jeffrey because Will is not-so-secretly in love with Alicia.

The bar he works at, meanwhile, has a lived-in, grounded feeling, something Anvari uses to great effect, throughout. It feels genuine and real, down to the cockroaches crawling along the well-used bottles of alcohol that Will has to swat at. Rosie’s the kind of dive bar where under-aged drinkers can use an obviously phony ID card to get drinks (“they’re harmless,” Will scoffs) and where Eric (Brad William Henke), a loud, brutish drunk who lives above the bar, can get into a drunk brawl that ends with a broken bottle slammed into his cheek.

After the brawl sends the under-aged teenagers running, Will discovers a cell phone one of them dropped. Thinking nothing of it, he takes the phone to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Carrie (Dakota Johnson). That night, the phone buzzes:

“I think something’s here with me!”
”We shouldn’t have messed with those books!”
”It’s that fucking thing from the tunnel!”

And like the curiously disaffected man-child he is, Will figures out how to unlock the phone and, by doing so, allows an evilness to pervade his already kind-of-shitty life. He’s cursed and his life starts to unravel in increasingly hellish (and goopy) ways.

There’s a lot going on in Wounds, adapted from the novella The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud. It’s an ambiguous story, treading more in unsolvable mysteries and Eldritch rituals. I haven’t started the book, yet, but after watching this movie, I have full intentions to. The thing the story and Anvari does best is give the movie an incredibly filthy look. Cockroaches are everywhere and become a running theme, throughout. It’s about decay, but decay you can’t see. The decay that hides, just behind the veneer of a wall.

Or a person.

But eventually that decay starts to break the surface and Anvari uses body horror to great effect. Pulsating rashes, blood, a head that bulges as if a balloon were inflating and deflating just beneath the skin and worse are all used to horrific effect. As bugs skitter both seen and unseen, it hints at the inability to get clean, no matter how hard you scrub. Because the true evilness is hiding inside where no brush can clean.

It’s obvious from the start that Will and Carrie have problems. When she discovers the phone, she immediately assumes it belongs to someone he’s cheating with. “I want to trust you,” she tells him but it’s obvious that ship has sailed. And as Will becomes more and more hollowed out by whatever horror is consuming him, he starts to act out in increasingly vicious ways. Armie plays him as an almost lovable douche in the beginning, but as the narrative continues, he becomes so incredibly unlikable and, dare I say, irredeemable?

As the drama starts to hit emotional highs between Carrie and Will, it falls apart a bit, mostly because of the script that sounds stilted when acted out. Literary influences also abound, particularly in the form of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Being “hollow to the core,” as Conrad would write, is a theme constantly examined and referenced. At one point, Carrie sneers at Will that he’s a “mock person;” someone pretending to be human when in reality he’s nothing but a body, filled with pus.

It’s stated that if you see one cockroach, you know that there are more crawling in the walls. Hiding and unseen, just waiting to burst free. And so it is about people. As the curse slowly eats away at Will and bugs start crawling around him, his true self starts to emerge. Dark and hellish. Just like the cockroaches hiding in the walls of his decaying bar.

Because wounds don’t just happen in skin. And walls aren’t always made of wood.