For those of you that don’t know: a ramekin is a small dish used for baking, or serving an individual portion of food. Ramekin (Clarke, 2018) is the first film in the “killer ramekin” genre, and it is, unfortunately, an exercise in hesitancy.
Ramekin follows a university student called Emily (Jamie Saunders) who moves into her recently deceased grandmother’s apartment to escape her noisy flatmates. In the apartment, she is faced with a ramekin that follows her around the house. When she takes it to the kitchen and returns to the living room, she finds the ramekin right back where it started. At first, the idea of a teleporting ramekin may seem silly. But if Lucio Fulci can do it with zombies in City of the Living Dead (1980), then director Cody Clarke can do it with a ramekin in Ramekin. I see no reason not to. That said, if you, as a director, are faced with making the first “killer ramekin” movie, then it better be wild, so as to not kill off the genre. Again, this might seem rather silly of me, making a big deal out of the first “killer ramekin” movie, but I’m deadly serious. When one conducts genre experiments in the field of cinema, one must undertake them with total conviction. Now, it seems to me that Cody Clarke is in no need of confidence. But what he lacks, as far as I can see, is conviction: Put simply, I don’t think Clarke took Ramekin serious enough as his own film. This may seem an odd thing to say about a film with a “ridiculous” premise, but it is not, I would argue, any more ridiculous than Withnail & I (Robinson, 1986).
(Note: Early on, the actors in Withnail & I found themselves laughing during takes, to which writer/director Bruce Robinson said: “Stop laughing – why are you laughing?” “Well,” the actors would say, “it’s funny, Bruce. You’ve written a very funny script.” Robinson would frown, replying, “Don’t laugh.” The point being that the actors stopped laughing during takes, played it utterly straight, and ended up making, in my opinion, one of the funniest films of all time. That said, I would never describe Withnail & I as a “comedy”.)
Let us return, then, to my major criticism: the fact that Ramekin is an exercise in hesitancy. It sets itself up very well as a kind of Giallo film, akin to Suspiria (Argento, 1977), or The House by the Cemetery (1981). It features a female protagonist, explores themes of matriarchy; is, broadly speaking, a horror film: it is shot provocatively and ends metaphysically, as it were, with reality and fantasy melding into one. These factors are all present in Ramekin, but they never, truly, come to fruition. It is a frustrating movie to watch because one always hopes the film will tip over into insanity (which I do believe it wants to), except it never does. In one scene, for example: a knife is raised, the screen cuts to black, and then we see the killer stood over a bloodless body, after which the blood is presented to the satanic ramekin as an offering—When I saw this, I said, out loud, “You can’t even argue you couldn’t do the blood effects because you didn’t have any fake blood – I’ve seen the blood! Why is it in a jug instead of the dead character’s face, or spurting out of a tube so as to simulate a pierced jugular?”
I have reached the conclusion, therefore, that Cody Clarke wants Ramekin to be Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman, 1973), but I’d much rather he go for scenes from Re-Animator (Gordon, 1985). And, actually, Bergman was never above using gore: there’s a terrific scene in The Passion of Anna (1969) where Andreas Winkelman (Max von Sydow) comes across a massacred flock of sheep, which proves to be one of the more disturbing scenes in the film (Liv Ullman’s whole character, aside, naturally). The point I’m trying to make here is that Re-Animator never forgets to grab the viewer’s attention. It may be rather crude in how it goes about this, but it is, ultimately, more interested in medical ethics and the world of academia, on which it is an interesting meditation—But only because of the gore, which acts as a doorway into the world of the film.
Ramekin is not a bad film; I wouldn’t even go so far to say that it’s a boring film. It is, unfortunately, a hesitant film: I feel as though Clarke is constantly treading on eggshells; but what actually was in those eggshells remains a mystery to me. Ramekin would have benefitted from having B-Movie King Roger Corman stood over Cody Clarke in the editing room, saying, “Cody, if you’re making the first ‘killer ramekin’ movie, you need to have a violent murder scene in all three acts, so that the audience knows you’re not messing around.” Unless the intention of Ramekin is to be a kind of cinematic troll, in which case, carry on.