Fabled

Although Fabled has been floating around the film festival circuit for a few years, it’s getting a bona fide release (limited) and is also slated for a DVD blitz in the near future. This offbeat psychological thriller, written and directed by Ari Kirschenbaum, focuses on the mental disintegration of a man who is convinced that a werewolf is out to kill him.

I was hoping a werewolf would kill me about 20 minutes into this unforgivably unexciting art film. Self-indulgent and maddenly vague, Fabled follows Joseph Fable (Desmond Askew), a drone in a dead-end job whose life is sinking in the quicksand of a cheating girlfriend (Katheryn Winnick), a thoroughly unprofessional psychiatrist (Michael Panes), a smug, disbelieving drinking buddy (J. Richey Nash) and a lost dog. These things all contribute in driving Joseph over the brink of madness, but when he does go insane all he basically does is sit there in his spartan, cheerless flat holding his head in his hands.

You see, on top of the errant girlfriend and the missing pooch, Joseph thinks that maybe he might have “done something” — vexed by flashes of a crime he may or may not have committed, Joseph dips deeper into depression by taking a lot of pills and washing them down with alcohol.

The word boring really doesn’t begin to describe the tedium of this cinematic snooze-fest, and it’s too bad it came out that way — the idea of drawing the main story together with an allegorical fable of a wolf victimized by a tenacious crow is interesting. It unfolds through a British child’s crisp voiceover and follow-the-bouncing ball subtitles, like a storybook onscreen. The question as to whether our hallucinating hero is the wolf or the crow is, at least, answered in the film's final frames… Had it not been, I think I might have been driven mad myself.

Although there is a payoff of sorts, Fabled really isn’t worth the investment in time it takes to get from beginning to end. Unless you are in the mood for punishment, turn tail and stay as far away from this so-called horror movie as you can.

Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson