The New Yorker | Review: Sue de Beer

BY JOHANNA FATEMAN

No one does high-concept, low-budget horror as exquisitely as de Beer. Her new two-channel film, “The White Wolf,” is a plot-defying twenty-three minutes of werewolf innuendo, set on a fictional New England island where a mysterious medical clinic attracts the terminally ill. As the artist plumbs the folkloric, psychological, and spiritual significance of lycanthropic transformation, she metabolizes her B-movie references in makeshift sets as captivating as a view into a cracked Fabergé egg. A lighthouse in the gloom, a shadowy bar where a striptease is performed against a forest backdrop, and an examination room bathed in green light form the visual backbone of the ambient narrative. The solemn ruminations of the clinic’s head doctor (played by the musician Yuka Honda) and a tense, melancholic score by Andy Comer propel it.