It’s always interesting to see a director try something new. Josh Cox’s movies are often filled with romance and bittersweet melancholy. His camera is a tool to scrape out a feeling, a tactile sense memory of a time and place.
But with Muse he embraces genre filmmaking, the horror genre, to put a fine point on it. At only a little over four minutes long, Cox takes what he knows, sensuality and queer longing, and creates a time and place with mood and uses it to build a gothic tale of desire, murder, and longing.
Muse again sees Cox as the jack-of-all-trades, as the editor, cinematographer, writer, director, grip, stylist, etc. While not as fine-tuned as his other films, Muse nonetheless hums with an unpredictable delight. Cox wears his influences proudly on his sleeve as he draws from Hammer films and the films of Jean Rollin.
Cox has always been stylistic, but with Muse, he chooses to dip his toe into surrealism. His editing is more playful, the mood more fraught, and the costumes more lush and playfully over the top. Using filters to add a feeling of faded film vibes to the piece also adds an air of mystery. Mateo Correa, the protagonist of Muse would be a vampire if not for most of the scenes taking place in the daytime. So he is instead a frustrated artist riddled with confused desires as he wrestles with his inner demons and loses the fight.
Muse feels alive and prickly, such as when Correa’s protagonist makes out with a young Asian man, Fuji Ng. Cox’s camera feels like a peeping Tom as we observe the eroticism turn deadly. Unlike his other films, Muse doesn’t feel meditative or ripped from memory, it’s much more frenetic and enigmatic.
Cox is an obvious student of the genre as he peppers his shorts with old and familiar tropes. My favorite is the scream of a woman fading into the screech of a train. Only here, Cox uses the scream of a man to fade into the screech of a subway. It’s the little things that tickle me.
He trades in his usual rural setting for a more urban milieu. Not the first, his short Summer Day in Brooklyn followed two women in love with Brooklyn as the backdrop. Here, it is the Lower East Side, Cox using the buildings and the light to craft a damp coldness as if we were on the edge of the moors and not the East River.
Queerness and horror movies have always gone hand in hand back to James Whale and even beyond Mary Shelley herself. Cox plays with the longing in a world that has turned increasingly hostile towards queerness over the past few years. The way Correa’s desires are written on his face, even as he tries to be detached. As his urges are unleashed, his face is twisted in pain or ogriastic despair.
But he can’t stop what’s inside, even if it means his own damnation. The final frames of Muse show us the Cox we know, the romantic, but tinged with a new puckishness and boldness. The violence Correa unleashes is born not from sickness borne within him but from having to hide himself from the world.
The muse he pretends to have, a Black woman, played by Oumou Eden Traore, does nothing for him. His paintings, which she inspires, fill his book of drawings, but he can barely bring himself to look at them. It is the men he sees on the street who feed him and satiate him. It’s not self-loathing that Cox is exploring but how keeping your sexuality bottled up can stunt your artistic growth and lead you down a primrose path of frustration as you capture other people’s truths but not your own.
Muse is Cox’s bold new direction. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see where this takes him. As a lifelong defender of genre films, it pleases me to see someone dip their toe into the pool with such relish.
Images courtesy of Americana Pictures
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