Rats (2016)

[StevePulaski]

Rats (2016)
Directed by: Morgan Spurlock

Rats are the subject of Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary.

Rating: ★★½

Rats has the hallmarks of all Morgan Spurlock documentaries. From his best work Super Size Me to his quirkier Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, even if the quality of his films is all-over-the-place, Spurlock nonetheless makes his films move with the fluidity and entertainment necessary - and almost directly correlated - to his subject matter. With Rats, however, he goes a bit beyond his typical trademarks and creates a film that elegantly infuses horror conventions with ordinary documentary filmmaking, creating what Discovery Channel - the network that has bought the rights to air the film - a "horrormentary."

Spurlock explores the vast scope of the four-legged rodent on a global scale. Initially, we meet the film's most interesting character - Ed Sheehan, a veteran New York-based exterminator for over forty years, who sits in a lowlit, dungeon-like closet, chomps on a cigar, and discusses exterminating rats in great deal. "For every human reaction to rats, the rats have a reaction," he claims. With flies and ants, if you spray pesticides or poison on a flock of them, most, if not all, will die shortly after. With rats, if one rat witnesses another gets its paws cut by steel-wool, get caught by a convention rattrap, or eat and croak off of a few poison chips, the other rats will see that, observe the behavior and the consequences, and decidedly change their direction.

Sheehan's insights are so elegantly explained, with his deep-drawl articulating words that just seem to bounce off the cold, concrete walls of the room he is in, that I hungered for more of his personal experience. While much of the film shows how New York City has long dealt with massive rat infestations, from on-foot exterminators pouring poison into rat boroughs across the city to taking the corpses of rats back to labs to test what kind of diseases they carry, we also see how rats are dealt-with and even cherished in countries like India and Vietnam. In Mumbai, we see how India deals with problems of rat infestations due to the buildup of filth in the streets in addition to devastating flooding that renders clean-up that much more difficult. In Vietnam, we watch a woman boil, skin, and puree rats into hearty dishes filled with lemongrass, black pepper, and chiles. You wouldn't even know what you're eating if you hadn't watched it been prepared.

Spurlock's all-encompassing look provides formidable, but his focus - similar to the way he looked at terrorism in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? and product-placement in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold - is a bit disorganized and shallow. Put simply, it feels exactly like the kind of film that would be shown on Discovery Channel, and at less than ninety minutes, lacks the depth and sustenance it needs to really become a memorable, even vital work.

The saving grace aside from the semi-frequent commentary by Sheehan is the film's aesthetic, which proves that even a story you couldn't see yourself captivated by can be levied and even boosted by a new attempt at telling such a story. The emphasis on the slithering sounds of rats squirming into sewers, in garbage backs, or wherever they can fit is truly terrifying, and some sequences truly make you feel as if an infestation is occurring in the privacy of your home. It's, by its very approach and stylistic attributes, about as much of a horror film as it is an informative documentary.

Such a profile on the rodent almost makes you feel Spurlock films the concluding piece of his documentary with a wry smile on his face, as he shows people in Indian celebrating the rat, cherishing it and feeding it as they claim that rats represent fallen relatives. One man's rodent is another man's reincarnation, I suppose.

Directed by: Morgan Spurlock.