Most horror about aging treats the old woman in the back bedroom as furniture until it needs a scare. Sick does something meaner. It ties her to the teenage boy in the house and argues that they are terrified of the exact same thing.
We sat down with writer and director Agata Trzebuchowska and her two leads at Fantastic Fest to talk about it.
Two fears, one problem
Sick sends siblings Maks and Emma to the Polish countryside to look after their ailing grandmother. The grandmother spends most of the film as background, frail and barely there. Then she comes back as a person with wants of her own. We asked how the film pulls that off without treating her as a prop.
“This fear of growing up as well as fear of aging is basically about losing the person you know yourself to be.”
Trzebuchowska said her goal was a fully fleshed out character who also works as an external manifestation of Maks’s internal fears. The two threads felt deeply connected to her, so grandma stops being scenery in the back half and starts reacting to what is happening between the siblings.
There is a twist in how she reacts. Trzebuchowska described her as a bit of a snake like person, awake to stop the two of them crossing a line. And by forbidding it she makes it more attractive. The guardian and the accelerant are the same character.
Why horror at all
This story could have been a straight drama. Trzebuchowska went genre on purpose.
“Horror has this value that it allows you to sit with discomfort and to visit these darker places.”
She is aware the film touches a sensitive subject and said the genre element makes it more digestible. That is a clean piece of thinking about what horror is actually for, and it explains the whole shape of the movie.
Nobody was managing the audience
Konrad, who plays Maks, said he tries to isolate from himself completely when he builds a character. When the cameras rolled he was just Maks. He was not thinking about what is disgusting. He was not thinking about being scary or how the audience would take it.
Katarzyna Lubik, Emma, described a cast who had not met until two months before the shoot and got there on rehearsals, improvisation and a shared sense of humor.
The production was small and the freedom was total. Trzebuchowska said they decided early to go with the flow, make any mistakes they wanted, and be uncompromising about the theme.
