Jug Face | Review

Face of Another: Kinkle’s Backwoods Horror a Promising, Faulty Debut

Like a low-fi hybrid of Winter’s Bone and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery comes Chad Crawford Kinkle’s debut, Jug Face. Lucky McKee’s name listed in the producer credits (as well as featuring Sean Bridgers from The Woman) perhaps promises more redneck grotesqueries than the film actually delivers, but one can’t deny that Kinkle has crafted an intriguing creepathon that’s just a bit too rough around the edges to be as effective as its potential suggests. While the film establishes an enjoyable, foreboding tension, the film loses its element of surprise about the time overtly supernatural elements are introduced, unable to maintain the subtle sense of insane, isolated communities it has so painstakingly prepared.

In the backwoods of Tennessee, Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) has recently learned that she will be “joined” with Bodey (Mathieu Whitman) one of the few eligible suitors living within her slowly dwindling community which worships and depends on the brutal control of a muddy, bloody pit in the woods. The trouble is, Ada has been carrying on a passionate and incestuous relationship with her brother, Jessaby (Daniel Manche), and their affair has resulted in a pregnancy. Their parents, Sustin (Larry Fessenden) and Loriss (Sean Young) are unaware of their children’s’ indiscretion, though Loriss is particularly suspect of Ada’s compromised virginity, continually trying to inspect her daughter’s nether regions. Basically, the bloody hole they’re all so nonchalant about, sends visions of who it wants to eat to the village simpleton, Dawai (Sean Bridgers), who fashions a water jug out of the selectee’s face as a herald for each sacrifice. In exchange for these sacrifices, the pit offers healing powers to its worshipers if you bathe in its putrid waters, like some menstruating version of Lourdes. Soon after her announced joining to Bodey is announced, Ada peeks into Dawai’s kiln to see a jug of her face, which she steals and hides in the woods, leaving the pit to exact its own special brand of retribution until it gets what it asked for.

Kinkle’s scenario is surprisingly effective, piling on the grindhouse elements but never managing to feel lazily constructed. There’s a definite menacing quality to this motley crew of characters led by the always fantastic Fessenden (for those who don’t know, he’s a notable director in his own right) and a surprisingly effective Sean Young (even if her Southern drawl isn’t always on point). For those familiar with Bridgers’ antagonizing performance from The Woman, he’s the polar opposite here, managing to be the only presence that really elicits any sort of sympathetic emotion. Lauren Ashley Carter, also a McKee alum, is a doe-eyed innocent here, and gives an effectively believable performance here, even if she’s too questionably coiffed (same goes for Manche) to embody backwoods realness. A decade ago, McKee’s muse Angela Bettis would have shivered her way scrumptiously through this role.

While Kinkle wisely avoids explaining the origins of the hole the appearance of a supernatural entity that visits Ada through kinetic (and unimpressive) visions announces the decline of Jug Face’s potency. While paranormal elements don’t completely mar the film, much like those ghostly children in 2012’s Sinister, these details twist the plot into ludicrous territories. A powerful, unexplainable, bloodthirsty thing in the pit is delightfully eerie, but nothing beats a hillbilly Sean Young viciously burning her daughter’s inner thighs with a cigarette whilst attempting to personally verify an intact maidenhood. Kinkle has more than enough material to keep these otherworldly elements at bay (and could have saved even more of an already limited budget). Reportedly filmed in seventeen days, Jug Face is a weird little film certainly worth a look, and its writer/director is certainly a talent to keep track of.