The Carpenter (David Wellington, 1988)

Judging by the lack of decent stills found in my Internet searches, The Carpenter is seriously unfairly neglected. This oddball Canadian indie is a fascinating and mostly successful blend of what in the '30s and '40s was called "the women's picture," slasher horror, domestic drama, the haunted house movie, eccentric comedy, and romance. It shouldn't work, but somehow it does, and I give a lot of the credit to Lynne Adams, who nails the tricky tone in her leading performance, and director David Wellington, who keeps the whole strange thing together with style, especially impressive considering this was his first movie and he was only 25. 

The Carpenter begins with Alice (Adams) suffering a nervous breakdown, cutting up her husband's suits into small squares with scissors, and getting temporarily institutionalized by said husband, college professor Martin (Pierre Lenoir). Even though we don't know much about either of these characters yet, our sympathies are almost immediately with Alice, just from the arrogant, dweeby way Pierre walks in the room with his sunglasses hanging from his mouth and the calm, methodical way Alice slices up his suit. 

Alice recuperates in the institution (with Beverly Murray, the star of another delightfully strange Canadian horror film with a similar narrative setup, Cathy's Curse, in a cameo as Alice's roommate, who won't stop speak-singing the lyrics to 1960s Eddie Floyd soul classic "Knock on Wood"), and shortly before her release, Martin tells her he bought them a house in the country to get her away from the anxieties of city life. Unbeknownst to the couple, the house was previously owned by a now-dead master carpenter who never stopped working on the place except when he was engaging in his other passion in life, serial murder.

At this point, you probably think you know where this one is heading. The house is haunted by the killer's ghost, it will mess the couple up, they will get away from the house after 90 minutes of haunted bad vibes. Or, Alice will get even crazier, she will think the house and/or killer is telling her to do things, she will kill people because she's a fragile, damaged woman with a bad husband. The Carpenter is much smarter and stranger than that. 

Unlike most films with similar narrative beginnings, Alice is not afraid of the house and absolutely loves it. She thrives in the country, and her mental health improves. Instead of being ground down and manipulated by her shitty, philandering, condescending, misogynistic husband, Alice mostly ignores him and finds her own place in the world, fixing up the interior of the house as the carpentry crew Pierre hired remodels the outside, going for walks in the woods, hanging out with her sister Rachel (Barbara Jones), and getting a job in a paint store managed by total weirdo Mr. Mort (Richard Jutras). 

Alice also strikes up a friendship with an unnamed carpenter (Wings Hauser, veteran character actor, father of actor Cole Hauser, and victim of recent Internet death hoax), who only seems to work on the house at night, away from the day crew. Alice is pretty sure she is hallucinating this carpenter, but instead of being alarmed by it, she embraces it, and begins to hang out with him as he works. He also has a friendly habit of murdering with power tools any person who gives Alice a bad time. She thinks these murders are part of the hallucination, so she's not too alarmed. It's part of her mental illness, she accepts it, she rolls with it. 

Eventually, Alice and the carpenter develop romantic feelings and have an almost old-fashioned courtship, in contrast with Pierre, who sleeps with one of his students in cheap motels. Things come to a head when the student, Pierre, and Barbara all make their way to the house in rapid succession and encounter ... the carpenter. I expected the movie to cop out at this point and veer into predictable territory, but the movie stays true to its characters and its odd tone right to the end.

If you want a straightforward slasher or haunted house movie, you're going to be disappointed by The Carpenter, but if you want a smart, funny, unusual indie that skillfully blends disparate genres, you should check this one out. Lynne Adams (not to be confused with the American actress Lynne Adams, or yet another Lynne Adams whose photo is on this Lynne Adams' imdb page) is the highlight of the movie, but everyone does good work and no one ruins the strange tone.

Director Wellington made a handful of indie films after The Carpenter before moving to television. I haven't seen them, but their descriptions sound similarly offbeat and intriguing. He directed several episodes of Kids in the Hall's final season (some of the comedy moments in The Carpenter share a complementary sensibility), and his other TV credits include Queer as Folk, Saving Hope, Orphan Black, and Vikings. It's too bad he hasn't kept making movies like this, but it's a hard life for most people who want to work outside of TV.