Pennywise might be currently terrifying audiences in It: Chapter 2, but scary clowns have been part of popular culture for decades. From Punch and Judy and the Joker to Poltergeist and American Horror Story, entertainers and filmmakers have long used clowns to provoke unease and scares. In more recent years, the scary clown has bled into real life, with viral videos and rumored sightings of mysterious, sinister clowns lurking in suburbia creating their own mythology and hysteria.
The new film Wrinkles the Clown sets itself up to explore the ways that the clown has become such a figure of fear, and in particular, about the myths that surround the clown of the movie's title. However, what emerges is a movie that that stretches the definition of "documentary" and ultimately ends up becoming part of the ongoing mythology of Wrinkles.
Wrinkles first became known via a 2014 Youtube video that showed a clown crawling out from under a girl's bed while she slept at night. Around the same time, stickers and cards began appearing around the town of Naples, Florida, showing Wrinkles' creepy masked face and a phone number. This number led to a voicemail, in which the gruff Wrinkles invited callers to leave a message. And sometimes Wrinkles himself would pick up. As the years have gone by, rumor has spread that Wrinkles is a 65-year-old ex-clown who is now available for hire, for parents to scare their naughty kids into behaving.
The movie, which was directed by Michael Beach Nichols, has two distinct sections. The first focuses on the phenomenon of Wrinkles and presents the first interview with the man who claims to be him. His name and face are not revealed, but we see enough. He is an aging man who lives out of a van, and spends his days fishing, monitoring the hundreds of weekly calls to the Wrinkles hotline, and donning the Wrinkles costume to terrify children. He talks about his past as a kids' entertainer and his decision to dedicate his later years to scaring kids. He also addresses the charges that he is psychologically abusing children; he states that he is just doing a job, and that any accusations should be leveled at the parents who hire him. This section also features various kids who are fascinated by Wrinkles, who both love and fear him, and aspire to be clowns themselves. There are interviews with child psychologists, parents who use Wrinkles as a discipline threat, real-life friendly working clowns, and a folklore expert who explains how Wrinkles fits into modern mythology.
While this first section is interesting, it does feel a little unfocused. Nichols doesn't generate any real narrative, flipping between the kids, the adults, and Wrinkles himself without a sense that the film is going anywhere. The kids don't really provide any insight, and the "experts" aren't given enough screen-time to properly dig down to the roots of the Wrinkles phenomenon. Wrinkles himself ultimately just comes across as a bored old man, and we are left with various unanswered questions, such as how exactly parents "pay" for his services. This section is very watchable, but it's hard to escape the feeling that we're watching a 30-minute movie dragged out to nearly three times that length.
But then, around the 45-minute mark, the focus of the films shifts. The film becomes less about a weird old man, and more about the power of myth and the ease with which anyone can spread disinformation in the social media age. The movie looks at the various recent clown sightings that have taken place in cities across America, and the genuine fear felt by some parents that there could be anonymous, masked figures lurking on any street corner, waiting to scare their children--or worse. This part of the movie not only focuses the narrative of the film, but also makes us view the preceding half in a different way.
Nichols definitely took a risk in the way he constructed this film. It has an interesting structure that ultimately makes sense, but it doesn't change the fact that a sizeable section feels unfocused and underdeveloped. And while this is a deliberate decision, an earlier shift into the second section might have helped keep frustrated viewers on-board, while still letting the "twist" pay off as intended. Nevertheless, the filmmaker deserves credit for playing with viewer expectation and by allowing his film to actually become part of the Wrinkles story and not just an objective overview. Which seems fitting given the subject matter. Like Wrinkles himself, the film is mischievous and deceptive, and is guaranteed to entertain and frustrate in equal measure.
Reviewed at Fantastic Fest 2019.
