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THE NESTING

BEHOLD! THE KAREN OF HORROR!



★★☆☆☆ (Don’t Bother)

Director: Armand Weston

1981



For every Laurie Strode or Ripley, there’s an overly frustrating heroine (Maggie from 1978’s Piranha comes to mind), but none top Lauren Cochran in The Nesting, a horror movie about a homebody writer who moves into a spooky house in the country for inspiration. According to her doctor, she has agoraphobia (we never see when in her life this presents itself), a deathly fear of leaving her fancy NYC apartment. Once at the strange new home—devoid of electricity, phones, or people—this supposedly intelligent woman seems surprised by how scared she is in the middle of the dark night. A ghostly specter walks the veranda and smokes cigarettes, and it might be connected to the house’s old brothel from the days of WWII. Apparently, there was a terrible murder back then, and of all the people in the world, our conductor through the investigative journey is a weepy jerk like Lauren.



Famous author Lauren Cochran’s (Robin Groves) next novel, The Nesting, is about to be released and she can’t figure out why she’s having nightmares or if they have anything to do with her book. She’s a self-proclaimed “brilliant nut job”, but she won’t work on herself and she does nothing in therapy but snap at her therapist, who tells her she has agoraphobia and it is treatable. At first, I had the same question I did when I watched one of the greatest films of all time, What About Bob?: Why would someone afraid of noises and lights, crowds and outdoors live in the busiest city in the world? I then remembered that until recently, a writer like Lauren would have had no choice but to work in New York City—you had to be where the publishers are. Throughout the film, Lauren has selective agoraphobia. When she wants to use someone for her own project, she shows up at their door or chicken coop without a hitch. If you want to see a great horror film with realistic agoraphobia, check out Copycat.


As The Nesting progresses, Lauren figures out that she does need to get away, so to better her situation, she packs her bags and drives out to the country with her man friend (Mark, played by Christopher Loomis). Our heroine isn’t the only maddening character in this film. Every other sentence out of Mark’s mouth is a clever quip, as if he were a stand-in for a screenwriter who thinks they’re witty.


As the clues to the crime add up, the harder it is to tolerate Lauren. The only time she apologizes to anyone is when she wants something out of them (usually information related to her new novel), and the only way the filmmakers can get the audience on her side is to have a man randomly attack her. A character soothes her and tells her she’s not to blame when a friend of hers dies….but it is partly her fault. In the most Karen moment of the film, she yelled at her friend on the phone and demanded he drive to the country and help her or she was cutting off her money and firing him. As production for The Nesting went on, you can tell the filmmakers didn’t really understand their protagonist. Sometimes they make Lauren smile at a guy before he assaults her, sometimes she stands in front of a mirror and rubs her breasts. Lauren is rigid and afraid of men, so this is completely out of character for her. Maybe it’s the brothel spirits being a bad influence. Sure, I’ll go with that.



Lauren Cochran of The Nesting is the official Karen of Horror, and this isn’t a case of characters and audience ganging up on a middle-aged woman—her age has nothing to do with how she behaves or how she’s treated. Lauren is terrible, demanding and shrill. There’s no reason for this because everyone treats the famous author with respect. She acts out when she doesn’t get her way or people don’t move fast enough for her liking. She orders her shrink to visit her, and threatens to “speak to the manager” by way of complaining to her landlord because it takes a long time to have window glass shipped to the countryside.


There are two heavy-hitters in The Nesting: John Carradine and Gloria Grahame. But while Carradine gets a grand speech at the end, Grahame—the true bad-ass in this movie—has a couple of lines, and is seen at strange angles and at a distance. Just because a movie is a “woman’s vehicle” doesn’t mean it appreciates women or gives them someone to look up to. Watching The Nesting, I thought of another complicated lady of horror: Annie Graham in Hereditary. Lauren and Mrs. Graham have emotional instability in common, but Toni Collette’s talent is smeared across the screen, making Annie easier to consume. It’s obvious that Robin Groves’ strength lies in being a theater actress. She wails and emotes as if she’s on stage. There’s an intriguing mystery with history somewhere in this mess—and a terrifying murder sequence at the end—but this is Lauren’s world and everyone’s just living in it.






GENRES: Atmospheric, Psychological


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