‘The Fireplace’ (a.k.a. ‘Adult Swim Yule Log’) is a comedy horror film taking place in a cabin in the woods. The film follows Alex and Zoe as they vacation in the mountains. Having planned a romantic getaway and a proposal, Alex and Zoe are interrupted by uninvited guests.
The film opens on the fireplace - a familiar streaming trope for setting a festive mood. A woman enters to clean up for her Air B'n'B guests. She opens the door to a woman in need and is subdued by her hand her mentally challenged son. The cleaner is soon killed by the son, and the pair hide as they hear Alex and Zoe return to the cabin.
There Alex tries to set the mood for proposing, but the two are soon interrupted by the town's sheriff and deputy. They are told that there has been a murder nearby and to be on the lookout for suspicious types. It is also revealed that the log Alex had found for the fireplace was taken from a nearby hanging tree. Warning the pair the log has negative mystical energy, they should not keep burning it, and put it out.
After the officers leave, Alex and Zoe are interrupted by a foursome of double-booked guests. Unwilling to leave, the group joins the pair. Everyone comes to terms with having to spend the night together, and settle by the fire. After taking some edibles, one of the group, Henry starts seeing a small man in the fire. Following him in through the fire-pit, Henry is offered a deal by the man, - to re-do his life and do better for himself. The man in the fire shows Henry the past, when his mother was pregnant with him, and tricks him into stabbing her. The film then returns to the group in the cabin, by the fire, with everything unchanged but for Henry to have been replaced by another man, without anyone noticing.
The group then put out the fire and disperse to settle for the night. Another member of the group is then found killed in the shower - bludgeoned to death. Everyone soon discovers the yule log to be sentient and murderous. Another person is taken out by the log and Alex and Zoe try to hide from it in a closet. Alex eventually lures the log outside, but the remaining three survivors are then attacked by the mother and her mentally disabled son. Alex is tied up and the girls are brought before the son. At the same time, an alien spacecraft lands outside and an extraterrestrial being attacks the mother, killing her. The alien then turns his attention to Alex, but before it can kill him, its attention is turned to the other room, where it takes out one of the girls, only to be killed off by Zoe. The son is then also subdued and Alex and Zoe make a run for the car.
Fleeing the cabin, Alex and Zoe drive into a ritualistic cult meet, with the sheriff inviting them to accept their fate and remain in the woods. The pair drive over him and flee the scene. At daybreak, the pair stop at a red light on the road and vow to protect each other, with Zoe agreeing to marry Alex. Unknown to them, the yule log had followed them, which then proceeds to kill them.
Interspersed throughout the film are scenes from the cabin through the ages, showing the tragic fates of the people who had lived there. Depicting a scene during the time of slavery in America, a man and a woman are shown discussing the sale of the woman's son to a new owner. Having failed to uphold his promise, the woman stabs the man for having sold their son to a bad slave owner.
The other scenes contain a cross dressing man being found out and a woman committing suicide sometime during the 80's. The finale of the film transitions to an add agency depicting a pair of characters from the preceding Civil War era scenes, with their roles reversed, showing the woman to be the man's boss. The two stoop into a repetitive spiral, rehashing their lines from before as the film closes.
'The Fireplace' opens on the quiet and calming yule log scene, with the story beginning to unfold through auditory cues only as the B'n'B owner enters and is subsequently subdued by the ill-willed mother son duo. With the initial 15 minutes of the runtime being devoted to auditory clues only, the film then pans out, expanding both the visual scope and beginning to introduce more characters.
Perhaps too much to ask of an audience, the film does not exhaust its potential for having the story set entirely with the fireplace in the foreground, with the creator of the project, writer and director, Casper Kelly opening the story up to a multitude of characters and a mess of different concepts.
'The Fireplace' is a project gone into trope overdrive - it uses almost every conceivable idea for a horror film that can be thought of. Set in the cabin in the woods, the film places its characters on a game-board of weirdness, where every move that is made lands the players in an entirely new hellish scenario of insanity.
The film incorporates murderous backwoods hicks, ancient curses, sentient inanimate objects, aliens, demonic spirits, aliens and cults, topping it all off with an incomprehensible time-loop paradox. Leaving nothing out, 'The Fireplace' is a chaotic overlay of interwoven ideas that is somehow tied together by the incessant urge of the main characters wish to escape the awfulness that is the cabin.
Without taking itself too seriously, the film offers a disorienting amount of threats to Alex and Zoe, with them not really ever questioning what horrific thing is after them, rather focusing on escaping. With a touch of absurd comedy, the film somehow bumbles through all of the abovementioned tropes and generates a fair amount of levity and amazement though its absurdity, as it is truly a credulous and unpredictable feature, twisting and turning with utter disregard for trying to impress anyone, rather fuelled and egged on by trying to top itself into a new level of bizarreness.
Bizarre, yet cogent, 'The Fireplace' has the feel of a low-rent fever dream, indulging in following through one crazy story tread after another. The feature presents the exact opposite of its namesake - where the yule log creates a joyous and relaxed mood, the film drags the viewer through an excess in insanity, dipping in and out of various horror tropes. Bizarre and original, the film deserves an A for effort.
Score: 3/4
Comentarios