Nocebo won't cure what ails horror fans
Even Eva Green and Mark Strong aren't enough to pad out this story of a fashion designer suffering from a strange—and possibly imaginary—illness
Photo: RJLE
If you didn’t already know that the star of Nocebo was named Eva Green, plenty about the movie might suggest it: she wears green, her character’s house is painted green on the inside, and she spends most of the movie “green around the gills,” as they say. Beset by illnesses that may be psychosomatic and/or supernatural, Green’s Christine is emotionally burdened by an incident eight months prior, which initially remains mysterious aside from the fact that it involves multiple bodies. Not to mention the plague-ridden dog that showed up and shook ticks all over the room, one of which bit her (if, in fact, it was real). The dog vanishes, but the bug bite persists.
The immediate inclination of horror viewers in a post-Shyamalan world might be to search for hints that either her husband Felix (Mark Strong) or daughter “Bobs” (Billie Gadsdon) is really dead, persevering only as a hallucination. But once it becomes clear what Christine does for a living—designing kid fashion that she finds “inspiration” for all over the world—and Filipina caregiver Diana (Chai Fonacier) shows up unexpectedly on her doorstep, the answers begin to unearth themselves pretty quickly.
Though not as commonly uttered as its antonym, “nocebo” is a real term for a non-effective treatment that psychosomatically harms a person. It doesn’t quite apply here—if anything, both Christine’s pills and Diana’s folk remedies make her feel better. But once Diana acknowledges the tick, and catches it in a matchbox, no less, things take a sinister turn: perhaps the cure is merely a set-up for an even worse condition.
Because what’s going on is quickly obvious to anyone paying even loose attention, Nocebo ultimately becomes a bit of a patience test in the same way as the many other Blumhouse movies about people wandering around an empty house in search of noises. Since it’s obviously not going to resolve until the end, viewers must slowly take in a great wealth of exposition they’ve likely guessed at in advance. Director Lorcan Finnegan at least throws in a couple of visual swerves which, along with the cuckoo metaphor of his last film, Vivarium, suggest a baby bird must have seriously traumatized him at some point in his life.