Pooka, aka Furby Meets Donnie Darko
My intention was to find a Christmas-themed horror movie to put on while we decorated our Christmas tree. Specifically, a bad slasher-type movie. You know. Cheery gore stuff. But I let my husband pick the movie, and he failed at this. What we ended up watching was Pooka - and no, we didn’t decorate the Christmas tree. We were too entranced.
Because I don’t keep up with shit, I didn’t know that Pooka was an entry in the Hulu Original series Into the Dark, a collection of 12 holiday horror “episodes”. Pooka is the 2018 Christmas entry and its sequel Pooka Lives! manages to squeeze itself into the 2020 Easter slot. See the separate review for that one.
Pooka has a dreamy quality that draws you in with the tension of a rope of Christmas lights pulled tightly around your throat. It’s beautiful and startling and subtly sinister and though it lags sometime around the reveal, once the curtain is drawn back, I’m a Pooka fan. Oh, and the Pooka jingle is super catchy:
Pooka see, Pooka do
Pooka me, Pooka you
You never know what Pooka will do
Pooka loves
Pooka fights
Pooka laughs
Pooka cries
You never know what Pooka will do
The Official Summary:
A struggling actor takes on a seasonal holiday job as the mascot for the year's hottest new toy: Pooka. However, after putting the costume on, he develops two personalities - one for himself, and one for Pooka.
Short:
This Christmas, Do You Fear What I Fear?
The Metaphor:
The Self-Centered Nature of An Abusive Parent / Spouse
The Creature:
If you didn’t know, a Pooka (Púca) is a Celtic mythological creature. Think “faery”. Harvey, a 1950 black-and-white film starring James Stewart is the only other ready film reference I have for what a Pooka is: a sort of mischievous shape-shifting spirit that can only be seen by those who believe in him. Harvey is a warm, whimsical caper in which the titular Harvey, the Pooka, is never directly seen by the audience (only in a portrait where he’s shown as the six-foot rabbit he is) and we are all the better for it. 10/10 would watch and recommend. Mini review, yasss
When it comes to this Pooka, I’m not sure if it’s a proper Creature Feature or not, as the audience knows going in that it’s a man in a fur suit (albeit with possible supernatural qualities as indicated by the camera work, genre, and music). The point is that the real monster is the person inside. If a serial killer dresses up as a clown, it’s not really the clown archetype that’s doing the murders, right?
Moving on.
The Pooka is a six-foot-tall Furby-esque mascot suit with bunny ears, a frozen expression, and two large headlight eyes that flash either blue or red. Blue indicates the nice Pooka and red signals that Pooka will be naughty. It’s said that Not even Santa knows if Pooka’s going to be naughty or nice! There’s something quite eerie about our protagonist slipping on this suit, disappearing into the Pooka as the fuzzy head settles down over his own. It’s the way the camera pulls back and forces the audience to look into the Pooka’s eyes and recognize that Pooka is the focus now. The person inside is no more. And we have no idea of what it will do next.
There is no Wilson. Only Pooka.
The Plot:
A struggling actor (our protagonist, the shy Wilson Clowes) lands a job as the one and only mascot of what turns out to be the hottest toy to drop on the market right before Christmas. The Pooka is all the rage, and all Wilson has to do is appear as Pooka at a designated toy store. There is a Pooka dance: arms up, together like a triangle, out like an offering, and then fly like a plane. And the theme song! Kids absolutely love it and Pooka is the must-have toy of the year. This success gives Wilson the opportunity and the confidence to approach Melanie, a single mother who he’d spotted at a Christmas tree sale with her young son. His neighbor is an older woman with flair who lives alone. She is his first friend in the story and tells him that this is his moment. He appreciates her, his new boss, and his new girlfriend for the company that they’ve given him. Before, he’d seemed so alone.
Then there’s Pooka.
There are many great transitions in this film - not just scene transitions, but tone. When he first puts on the Pooka suit alone, something shifts that we can’t see in the Pooka’s expression. Its eyes go red and suddenly he’s trashing the apartment. But then Wilson walks in - almost right into the scene - to find the destruction. He has no recollection of being in the suit. Later on, as he’s visiting with his neighbor, he hears pounding from his apartment. He excuses himself and, full of dread, returns to his apartment to find that it’s his own hands that are bloody, though it was Pooka we saw punching the walls.
Wilson ignores all of these things. These huge, flashing red lights and flags. He continues to pursue a relationship with Melanie and to go as far as to promise that Pooka will arrive at her son’s birthday party.
Here’s where I have to talk about the score. There is an unsettling quality that permeates Pooka. At times it’s hard to put your finger on but as the story progresses you might realize that every frame of calm between the scenes of sudden violence is woven with a dreamy, placating, lullaby. The scene transitions are interesting and almost abstract, the space between each character tense, and then the music carries that tension quietly over its sometimes slow, waltzing, pace. It becomes a mental game of musical chairs. What’s going to happen when the music cuts out?
I don’t usually notice scores in films; I’m just not that person. But Bear McCreary added such a subtle dread to Pooka that even scenes where nothing ended up happening had me looking through my fingers.
Spoilers Ahead:
I really enjoyed this one, so if you’re even a bit interested, I’d say go give it a watch.
I love a tight little script where everything that’s set up has a payoff. Like Die Hard - set ‘em up, knock ‘em down. Pooka has that quality. I will say that there are a few elements that are introduced that end up being red herrings, but good red herrings. Things that make you think “oh, maybe that’s what this is” and, yeah, you were completely wrong but it made you invest in the story to find out what the hell is going on. (Not to mention that Hulu’s sequel absolutely crushes it with a meta take on all those red herrings, literally giving the Internet what it wanted out of Pooka.)
When Wilson is auditioning for a role he doesn’t yet know is Pooka, the monologue he practices is from Dickens - when Ebeneezer Scrooge sees the Ghost of Christmas Future and is wondering in horror if there is anything he can do to stop it:
Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,
Answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?
Let’s get back to the metaphor.
Around the turn of the movie, as we are taken towards the climax, there are fewer bouts of unpredictable violence and more scenes of delusional, gory, visions that Wilson is having. By this point, everything has begun to fall apart. While at Melanie’s son’s birthday party, he assaults a kid while dressed as Pooka because the kid tells her son everyone knows about your dad. He afterward snaps at Melanie and is quickly thrown out of her home. The public has turned against Pooka, as all the dolls collectively stopped working, repeating on a loop look at all the pretty lights. His boss asks that he return the Pooka suit, which Wilson resists. He tells his boss that he needs to be inside it. The boss tells him that it was always just him all along, that there’s nothing special about the suit and he needs to let it go. Rather than do that, Wilson clings to the suit, going so far as to steal it. He’s desperate to reconnect with Melanie and her son. Desperate to be Pooka again, even when he’s beaten ragged and the head to the suit is stolen. He goes home and finds that his neighbor has died in a falling accident that’s blamed on her drinking, but he believes that it was Pooka, somehow. Pooka, this thing that he is and yet isn’t. He’s still wearing the Pooka suit, but he knows that Pooka is after him and everything he loves. To protect Melanie and her son, he races to the Christmas tree lot that he’d first seen Melanie in. She and her son were on their way there. Wilson arrives before they do and finds an evil Pooka there. Not a suit. A monster. They battle. Him in the suit, and the other Pooka a twisted mirror of himself.
After killing the evil Pooka, Wilson returns to Melanie’s house to find that she’s not there. That she’d never been there. He goes instead to a different house - one she’d been showing as a realtor, where he’d first asked her out. She’s there, as well as her son. It’s their house. Wilson sees himself in the photos on the wall, and that’s when we realize that he’s the absent father. He’s the one everyone knows about.
This redeemed version of himself, walking around in a ragged Pooka suit, is invisible to the family as the real him comes home. He’s well-dressed, angry, petty, and violent. He screams at Melanie and destroys the Christmas tree. She’s been through this before, we can tell. Her son, tears on his cheeks, watches his abusive father.
Wilson tells his son not to cry. That they’ll go down to the Christmas lot right that moment. They’ll get a new tree before they close.
Our Pooka-clad Wilson begs them not to listen to him. He calls that Wilson a liar, says that he’s only trying to make himself feel better. But they can’t hear him. They all get into the car, but not before Melanie tells him firmly that it’s the last time, and that their marriage is over.
Watching his wife cuddle his son in the rearview as he speeds towards the Christmas lights, seething with anger, despair, and self-pity, Wilson doesn’t see that he’s driving into oncoming traffic. He regains consciousness and the audience sees the final puzzle pieces fit together: the lonely neighbor was the woman driving the other car, who dies at the scene. His wife and son are trapped in his car that bursts into flames. He’s laid out on the road, red and blue lights flashing around him as two paramedics attend to him - one we knew as his boss, the other, the man who had assaulted him. On the road next to Wilson, also thrown from the car, is his son’s Pooka doll, which repeats endlessly: look at all the pretty lights, the last words Melanie said to their son.
Thus the abuser is unveiled. Not to his family, but to the audience and to himself. Unlike the Scrooge and Ghost of Christmas Future, he can’t do anything to change the fate of everyone around him he’s hurt. His Pooka-clad form looks down on him, resigned to this, as the defeated Pooka creature stands next to him.
It’s easy to imagine this dream as a sort of limbo, a concussion-slurry of images thrown together to help him come to terms with the person he is. A Donnie Darko kind of ego death, where all there is at the end is acceptance. Except there is no second chance to undo the carnage.
For a supernatural take, I’d like to believe that the Pooka does exist in this universe. Not just as the doll - because his son IRL did have a Pooka doll, so that wasn’t completely imaginary - but as a Spirit. Not to intervene and change fate - but to show the truth. That’s why it’s there with him at the end - it was never the evil that needed to be defeated. It was also not meant to be hidden behind the way Wilson had tried to. It’s Wilson’s eyes that the audience can see in the last shot, transformed, transcended, but not unpunished.
Review:
Pooka was nowhere close to being the dumb, bad, Christmas horror I was hoping for. If you’re sitting down for a Creature Feature or a horror slasher, you might have a bad time. Pooka is an insightful take on the terror of what having an unpredictable loving /hateful abuser in your life is like. I get why people aren’t totally on board. But if you want to watch a good Christmas horror movie that doesn’t hold hands with camp, then Pooka is totally worth the watch!
4 / 5