Summary
“Ode to My Family” has an overreliance on cliché like other episodes, but it lacks a clear thematic throughline and is too ambiguous to provide real dramatic payoff.
Unlike “Our Little Sister” and “Wedding Dress”, which are largely undone by being a little too pacey for their own good, Episode 3 of Terror Tuesday: Extreme, “Ode to My Family”, takes its time. But also builds to a payoff that I think is a little too messy and deliberately ambiguous for its own good, lacking a clear thematic throughline in the way the first couple of episodes of this anthology do.
There are definitely nods in certain directions. The dynamic of a family is, as per the title, of some concern, and there’s a particular focus on the relationship between a son and his stepfather, but it never coalesces into something I’d describe as an actual point. There are some effective sequences and standalone visuals, though.
Haunted House
The idea of a haunted house is nothing new in the horror genre, of course, but “Ode to My Family” settles more on the idea of a haunted room, bolted shut and secured by an ominous bit of paper marked with symbols. From it, all manner of evil seems to seep, corrupting the rest of the house and its inhabitants, especially after the doors are finally unlocked by the curiosity of Win.
We should mention Win since he’s ostensibly the protagonist. He has been ostracised from within his own family after blabbing on his step-father, forcing a short-notice relocation for the entire clan, which is falling apart from within. Win’s snitch status is compounded by his relationship with his stepfather, their lack of a biological connection coming up frequently.
The problem I had with relating to this family is that they just seem awful, both in general and to each other. There’s so much hostility between them that it’s difficult to imagine a version of them that ever got on, and so their fates – which are predictably violent – never really mattered to me.
An Overreliance on Cliché
If this doesn’t scream “don’t open” I don’t know what does
As with some previous episodes in this anthology, the dependency on cliché to tell this story saps some of the entertainment, and without the novelty of a proper underlying point, the cliché is kind of all there is to go on. So we have haunted rooms, possession, bumps in the night, dark-haired women with creaky joints, all of the good stuff.
The locked room is obviously the genesis of all this, but once the door is breached it’s fair game throughout the entire house. Each family member goes through bouts of possession, with the matriarch’s being the funniest because her outburst is a nutty kitchen-set scene wherein she aggressively chops things up while cackling and going mad.
The sister confused me, though. She’s generally so unpleasant that I wasn’t sure whether she was possessed or not.
A Violent Climax
Terror Tuesday: Extreme Episode 3 ends with a flurry of violence, with the entire family butchering themselves in exaggerated states of possession.
But I think this is misdirection, and the show does seem to imply this. Through snippets of different scenes, I think the intended takeaway is that Win poisons his family, sick of feeling ostracised and alone, and that the more exaggerated sequences are his efforts to justify what he has done. It’s telling that the spirit is an evil version of himself that tells him he’ll never be lonely again, implying that the events in the house are cyclical. Indeed, once the door is locked, we can see through the crack that an earlier scene is unfolding again, with the ghoulish family inside looking out, and then at the camera.
Again, I’m not entirely sure how to interpret this – is the family trapped in a murderous spiral, doomed to repeatedly kill themselves again and again, locking the door and then allowing it to be unlocked to unleash the same violence again? Or is my theory that Win killed them all and is just a garden-variety nutcase embellishing everything else more feasible?
Discuss in the comments, I guess. Either way, the lack of clarity seems a result of weaker storytelling than elsewhere in the series.
RELATED:
