"Are you feeling horny?"

From the very beginning, Horns is a film that doesn’t really seem to know what it’s meant to be. I’m always suspicious of a film that describes itself with more than two genres, but when you are a supernatural thriller incorporating elements of fantasy, comedy and romance, with a bit of drama to boot, it’s never going to go well.

The plot in itself is fairly simple. When the long term girlfriend (Juno Temple) of Ignatius Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) is murdered, Ig is accused of her death. After drunkenly smashing a few Virgin Mary statues, he wakes up with horns growing on his head, and people telling him all their dirty little secrets. When he realises that people will do whatever he tells them, he decides to use this power to try and figure out who really killed his girlfriend.

Horns is based on the book by Joe Hill, and unfortunately it stumbles into all the pitfalls of a bad book adaptation. It tries to be faithful to the source material, but in doing so it stuffs in so much irrelevant detail that you question the reason for whole scenes being in the film. Part of the issue is the overload of genres. It can be pretty jarring to have a massive genre shift between scenes, especially as this seems to happen with every scene change. Perhaps if it has stuck to one genre it would have been fine. Horror would have been a good choice, the inner desires of people are some of the most unpleasant things about the film, with sex addicts, paedophiles and the line “Stop being my son” already being in the film. Concentrating more on those might have helped with the issues, rather than comedy that mostly falls flat and a secondary romantic subplot that I still haven’t managed to figure out the point of.

As the film is set after the murder of Juno Temple’s character, Merrin, unsurprisingly there are a lot of flashbacks. These have the dual purpose of showing just how in love the two of them were and explaining exactly what happened to Merrin. The romance is cute and convincing. They met as children and have been together even since. A lot of the characters spend time trying to convince the audience how in love they were too. The probably isn’t a named character who doesn’t mention it, in a “how could you kill her” sort of way. As the film progresses, the flashbacks get more messy, and it makes the film hard to understand at times, especially as the content of the flashbacks changes each time Ig learns something more. The flashbacks also attempt to reveal most of the twists of the film, but most are so obvious you see them coming a mile off. Maybe two out of many twists are genuinely surprising.

_Horns _marks yet another film of Daniel Radcliffes done in an attempt to distance himself from the character of Harry Potter, and he seems to finally be getting somewhere. His acting has only improved since Deathly Hallows, and I was fully impressed by the range he managed to show here. The main issue facing both him and co-star Juno Temple is that neither can pull of a convincing American accent. Juno Temple could barely keep it the same between lines, slipping back to her usual voice with a worrying frequency. Daniel Radcliffe was better, only losing it majorly a couple of times, but still haunted by the fact that you are only able to hear Harry Potter when he speaks with his British accent.

Technically the film looked lovely, but when your characters spend half their time in a beautiful, mossy forest, it is pretty much impossible for it to not look good. The opening shot of Ig on the floor, beginning upside down and twisting round as he gets up, was a clever idea, but didn’t really work in practice. The special effects budget was obviously all spent on the big scenes later in the film, leaving any shots in the first half of the film looking laughably bad.

Overall unless you are fan of the source material, or of this sort of film in general, or just really like forests, you’re not going to find much you like. You can tell that it tries hard to make everyone happy, but in the end that just means that no-one is going to be satisfied.