ALBERTA’S HOME ALONE
Calgarian’s thriller taps into parental anxiety
It’s quite possible that Mike Peterson has given more serious thought to the movie Home Alone than anyone on earth.
The Calgary filmmaker insists there is a river of darkness lurking beneath that seemingly innocent 1990 slapstick comedy, in which young Macaulay Culkin thwarts bumbling crooks Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci as they attempt to rob his family home. Apparently, the idea has haunted him for some time.
“You’ve got these guys who are set up as comic characters, but they are really horrible, psychotic individuals terrorizing a child,” Peterson says. “What do they want in that movie? Why are they there at that house? They are there to break in, maybe, but then it becomes about something else.
“It’s a pretty strange story. Put in the comedy setting, you can kind of gloss over a lot of those motivations that are fairly dark and disturbing — but what do they do if they get that kid?”
Peterson was interested in playing with the idea for his second feature, the exceptionally unsettling thriller Knuckleball.
The film, which screens April 17 as part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival, also involves a precocious kid who is left to fend for himself against at least one psychopath. Rather than be in a stately suburban house, however, young Henry (Luca Villacis) is at his grandfather Jacob’s (Michael Ironside) isolated farmhouse. When the old man suddenly dies, Henry finds himself the subject of unwanted attention from a mysterious young man named Dixon (Munro Chambers).
Peterson says he made a conscious effort alongside co-screenwriter Kevin Cockle to make references to Home Alone’s resourceful-child-in-peril trope. But the father of three also suspects the true terror at the heart of Knuckleball comes from a much deeper, overwhelming fear.
“Kevin and I have a couple of other projects where it’s based on some scenario of me being afraid of not being able to protect my kids,” Peterson says. “I heard another author say this recently: the first instinct you have as a parent is fear, it’s not love. I think that’s accurate. It’s a real strong motivator. You have these little strains of thought that go down this path, and they are not pleasant.”
Fortunately, Henry is a remarkably capable 12-year-old boy, which the film, refreshingly, argues may at least be partly due to his fondness for video games. But he has been left with his grumpy baseball-loving grandfather because his troubled parents crave some alone time.
Unfortunately, the isolated farmhouse does not have great cell reception. Henry has forgotten his phone charger and his grandfather doesn’t have a landline. When gruff grandpa dies in the night, Henry is trapped.
Through Peterson’s command of tone and mood, this scenario alone turns into an engrossingly visceral horror film. But there are other layers to it, particularly when family secrets come to light.
Peterson and his crew shot for 24 days, mostly at a rural house and farm near Fort Saskatchewan. The ominous isolation and snowy forest add greatly to the film’s overwhelming sense of dread. But the film also boasts three very strong lead performances.
As Henry, Winnipeg product Villacis is in virtually every scene and conveys a perfect mix of wise-beyond-his-years smarts, innocence and fear. Chambers, likely still best known for his heartthrobby role of the troubled Eli Goldsworthy on Degrassi: The Next Generation,
offers a performance of such concentrated creepiness as Dixon that it should forever kill off any notion of him as teen-idol type.
Knuckleball also gives Ironside, one of Canada’s most beloved character actors, a meaty role to sink his teeth into. Peterson met the actor in Los Angeles more than a decade ago. Ironside had noticed Peterson’s Alberta licence plate and started up a conversation. The then-fledgling filmmaker told the actor that he would call him one day and offer him a role.
“I called him up and thought, ‘There’s no way he’s going to remember this, but at least I have a cute story,’” Peterson says. “And then he remembered it. He remembered it in great detail — detailed enough that I think he corrected me.”
Ironside also brought in his own ideas to the role, telling Peterson stories about his own distant father. That insight influenced in the script.
“I rewrote some of those interactions and based it on how he described his experience with his father,” Peterson says. “I know it choked him up on set a few times.”
Peterson also gives both himself and co-producer Julian Black Antelope some cheerfully unflattering cameos a la Alfred Hitchcock. Antelope, a director and actor known for Blackstone and Into the West, has joined Peterson as part of a loose collective of filmmakers that have been prolific as of late. Peterson, Antelope, Rob Grant, Lars Lehmann, Kurtis David Harder and others have worked on some or all of a half-dozen mostly genre films that have been locally shot over the past year and a half.
“I’m really hoping that this film is one of many we’re making as a group of filmmakers that can show the quality of storytelling and technical filmmaking that is possible to come out of here,” Peterson says.
“Hopefully it will make a little bit of noise here about what we are capable of doing and what we are doing. I think we’re doing some really cool s---. This is one of five films that we’ve made in the last 14 months and we have a couple more on the slate.”
Peterson and Antelope are among the producers of upcoming Calgary-shot thrillers True Fiction and Alive and the comedy A Boat Movie.
Peterson himself has two projects he hopes to direct this year. One is a murder mystery set on a Mars colony. The other is a thriller about a hit man who faces his archnemesis in a retirement home.
All of that would make for an eclectic body of work for the Calgary filmmaker, particularly considering his first feature was 2011’s live action role-playing comedy Lloyd the Conqueror.
“Honestly, it’s just trying to make stuff that I think I would like to watch and things I think that I can do well,” Peterson says. “If I think I can do it well and I’d want to watch it, then let’s go for it. In this type of movie, you get to put more of an authorial voice in the camera than you do in something like Lloyd. With that type of film, the director can get in the way of the comedy. I think it’s just serving the comedy.”