Bulgaria: Roseville (2013)
Folklore is a powerful thing. It lays clear our deepest fears. It’s primal in its intensity. It’s revealing.
Except here.
Roseville manages the unusually impressive feat of presenting unusually elaborate folklore while remaining utterly vague and incomprehensible. There’s a tree which is old – the only oak in Bulgaria. And a secret treasure allegedly guarded by it. Oh, and there are some wolves. And some sort of buried ancient evil. The tree is also located at the exact centre of the world. (Call me a sceptic, but as the world is a globe, couldn’t every single place on Earth claim this? The centre of what, exactly? It’s never made clear.)
Roseville does this a lot – presents information as though it’s highly significant and then fails to explain it in any further detail.
We open with police footage from 1985 and an interview with the local chief of the police (now retired). Four bodies were found having died mysteriously, a fifth person is missing. There has been a mysterious fire which has melted the tyres of a car. One of the bodies has been disembowelled and is almost impossible to identify. The police are at a loss.
The police chief says he was never able to solve the case. A rather bold series of statements is made that the film is a reconstruction of what happened (although how it can be a reconstruction when we’ve already been told no one knows what happened is never actually made clear).
I rather liked the opening. It’s an interesting enough hook that I was intrigued, and the fact that this wasn’t going to be the recovered footage showing us exactly what happened at least increased the novelty aspect.
The following half hour is spent as newlywed couple Vassil and Nadja travel to the remote hotel Roseville in the depths of rural Bulgaria (the drone shots of impressively dense forest do indeed suggest how remote and unpopulated the area is). During the drive they are distracted by a mysterious black creature in the road, before they finally find their hotel and their host George. His friend Dora is also present, as is American photographer Steven (who’s there to film rare birds).
None of this really makes a great deal of sense (why is an American wildlife photographer here in the middle of nowhere where the avian life doesn’t seem particularly unusual; why would a honeymooning couple come here when even they admit they could have been abroad somewhere warm; why is no one concerned by the wolves; why does George give us at least three different origin stories for the mysterious tree, none of which seem relevant?), but it’s moody enough that I was willing to go with it, especially once we learn Vassil has a mysterious triangular scar that he has never been able to explain.
Soon Vassil is having strange dreams, all of the characters are hallucinating freak events, birds are falling dead from the trees, maggots are appearing on the old tree and not once does anyone think to say “you know what, things are really fucking weird”. They all say that things are strange, but none of them seem to realise just how strange, despite the fact that the events are horror film-strange. Vassil is clearly possessed. I say this not as a demonologist (because I’m obviously not) nor as an exorcist (ditto) but as someone who has seen The Shining. It’s very much the reference point here as the tree (or whatever – we never know) exerts its influence on Vassil and causes him to fulfil his destiny by becoming one with the Overlook. I mean Roseville.
Look, this is generic, alright? It’s both riffing specifically on Kubrick’s Shining and generally on every film in which someone has their free will taken away from them and their written role as the harbinger of whatever come to fruition (although in this case we never really learn what Vassil’s role is, nor what’s happening).
I was willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt, because although it wasn’t particularly original it was at least atmospheric and the hotel and woods made for a moody setting, when I checked the time and realised I was only half an hour in. The film is two hours long. That was when I started to lose patience. When we finally reached the end of the film I was truly horrified, but only because it turned out the climax was false and there were still forty minutes left. Forty long, painful minutes.
You wouldn’t think you could get a solid hour and a half out of a man being possessed and not actually doing anything, but Roseville is determined to prove you wrong.
Had any of this actually built up to anything it might not have been so bad, but it doesn’t. Things happen that are presented as significant yet make no actual sense: the demon (and I don’t even know if there was a demon, because that’s how vague this is) carves symbols into the photographer’s chest which an epilogue reveals are…nope. I don’t know. Coordinates? It’s not clear. There’s something about a solar event, but that’s as far as it goes for the explanations.
The absolute highlight is when the policeman in the epilogue tells the filmmakers he’ll tell them what he thinks happened, but only off camera. Which he does. Off camera. The film then ends. We are left utterly none the wiser. It’s a fuck you to the audience that is one of the single most annoying things I’ve ever seen and made me genuinely sorry that I’d spent two hours (two long, long hours) watching this. I was still mildly peeved by the fact that the policeman told us two of the deaths were unexplained. We watched the man slash his own throat. How is that unexplained? Or the woman that was hanged. I saw her hang herself. That’s the very opposite of unexplained. (The disembowelling happened off-screen, as did the mysterious fire. A fire so mysterious, in fact, that the narrative forgets to return to it.)
Vague can be disturbing if the viewer senses a meaning behind it just beyond their grasp. It ceases to be disturbing when it becomes clear that it’s devoid of meaning at all. It’s not vague – it’s incompetent. This is an incompetent film.
Throwing out the fact that the American was a KGB asset, and that the hotelier and his friend were former secret Hungarian police agents, adds absolutely nothing other than proof that the filmmakers had no idea what was actually happening or how to end this. So instead they bombard viewers with random pieces of information in the hope that something will stick. Nothing sticks.
I’m genuinely sorry I watched this. It does, however, tie in to the previous reviews in a way which almost (almost) makes it worthwhile: a horror film where the intention is there but none of it quite works.
Disc: DVD (Region 2, UK)
Source: eBay
Availability: Still widely available; other Region 2 (Turkey, Germany, Eastern Europe) releases exist. The rest of the world can only stream.