Soft Matter is a 2018 horror film about two trespassing graffiti artists, two immortality-obsessed scientists, and one furious sea-god.
When two graffiti artists break into an abandoned hospital to host an art exhibition about ghosts and death, they find themselves face-to-face with a collection of mutants formed by aspiring scientists and a sea creature that could destroy them all.
Combining artistic direction and imagination with film is something many filmmakers do, and are condemned for their efforts to bring together such industries. The problem with doing this is it needs to be made well and for a purpose that the audience can understand and resonate with. Soft Matter clearly had the intention of uniting filmmaking making with SFX, graffiti artists and digital illustrators but ended with an almost painful outcome that will leave you feeling like you had a bad hit of acid.
The premise of Soft Matter comes across as intriguing, and even left some publications to helm the film (note: before it was released) as a hybrid of The Shape of Water and any other hallucinogenic nightmare fuelled film that you can think of, but most notably Get Out. Therefore entering this film from director Jim Hickcox, I had reasonable hope for something that would be a little weirder and far more gory than Guillermo Del Toro’s beautifully haunting masterpiece, yet there really couldn’t be anything further than that truth, which was more than disappointing.
From the outset the intentional comedy feels uncomfortably forced onto the audience, even so much so that I ended up cringing at the scenes of the scientists supposedly having strange encounters with their monstrous incarnations. If you have ever seen the show The Mighty Boosh you’ll know that it’s possible to use exceptionally bad special effects that in turn come across as “so bad they’re good”, which seems like the concept here with creatures made from unknown goop and black bin bags, but without giving the audience even the faintest hint of a laugh or a coherent plot, it just makes the film even worse. From there we start to add the graphic element with quirky illustrations and songs that cause slight confusion for the audience as we’re not sure whether we’re watching an art film, horror film, sci-fi film or some amalgamation of everything that didn’t quite transform into the creative output that it should have.
Soft Matter is one of those movies that will leave you thinking “WTF did I just watch?” and not in a good way. Unfortunately this ambitious venture into filmmaking with a strong influence from different art forms, feels like a student project that didn’t have the funding to find talented actors, a good script writer or someone with a sense of humour. As a viewing experience it feels like a weird LSD-induced nightmare that leaves you feeling you could have spent that hour and 11 minutes doing something far more productive.