The Pyx (1973) Review
7/10
A woman’s body on a Montreal pavement, dressed, with a crucifix reversed around her neck. A detective begins working the case forward. The film at the same time begins her last week running toward the same moment.
The 7 is for a structure that most films with four times the budget wouldn’t attempt. Two timelines, one moving forward from the death and one moving toward it, cut against each other for ninety-three minutes and meeting at the fall.
What holds it back is a third act that resolves into occult material the first two hours had been implying more effectively than the ending states.
A low-budget Canadian occult picture from 1973 has no business being this smart about structure, and for an hour The Pyx had me completely. Then the robes come out, and the film I’d been admiring turns into every other black-mass movie. I’m still recommending it, because that first hour is better than most thrillers ever get.
The Two Timelines
The investigation runs from the body outward. The other strand runs from six days earlier toward the body. Neither is a flashback in the conventional sense, because both are presented in the present tense and neither is subordinate. The film also refuses to signpost the switches. There’s no caption, no dissolve and no change of stock, and the audience learns to read which strand they’re in from whether Elizabeth is walking or being discussed. That’s a considerable demand and is met.
The effect is an unusual kind of dread. The audience knows where Elizabeth’s timeline is going, watches her make ordinary decisions that lead there, and at the same time watches a detective assemble the same week out of evidence.
What the structure permits is the film’s best trick: the audience is frequently ahead of the detective and occasionally behind him. He finds a name before she meets the person, then she reaches a place he hasn’t identified.
The neighbor is where that pays off best. He interviews a friend of hers in one strand while the friendship is still ongoing in the other, and the audience hears the same woman described in the past tense and then watches her being present.
The other payoff is a telephone number. He finds it in her flat and calls it, and the audience has already watched her dial that same number and speak to whoever answers. That turns a routine procedural beat into something considerably worse. The telephone scene is my favorite thing in the film. When he dials, my stomach drops, because I already know who’s going to answer and he doesn’t. That’s dread built out of nothing but editing, and it’s worth more to me than any of the occult business. The cutting between them is also doing thematic work. She’s a person and he’s reconstructing a person, and the film keeps placing a living woman next to a file about a dead one.
The transitions between the strands are also done on objects instead of on dialogue. A crucifix, a coat, a pyx, a doorway, and the film moves between timelines on something physically present in both. That keeps ninety-three minutes of alternation legible.
Two timelines converging on a known event beats a flashback structure, because neither strand is subordinate and both are in the present tense. The reader holds a person and an investigation of that person at the same time, and the gap between the two is where the work happens.
Let the reader be ahead sometimes and behind at others. A structure where they always know more becomes patronizing and one where they always know less becomes tiresome. Converge at the single event you opened with. The film’s first shot is the meeting point. That means every scene in both strands is moving toward something already seen.
Karen Black
Elizabeth Lucy is a heroin-addicted sex worker in Montreal who’s Catholic, has an ordinary friendship with her neighbor, and is aware of what is being asked of her before the film explains it. Black plays her without any of the tone that part usually receives. She’s practical about the work, matter-of-fact about the addiction, funny with her friend, and the film doesn’t organize her around either condition.
She also wrote and performs four songs on the soundtrack and they’re good. A woman singing her own material over footage of her own character is an unusual arrangement and it produces a closeness nothing else in the film manages.
The songs are placed as source music and not as score, coming from a record player in her own apartment. That means the film’s most intimate channel is something the character chose to put on.
I find those songs the most affecting thing in the picture. Hearing Elizabeth put her own record on in her own apartment makes her death hit harder than anything the plot does to her, and I’d have happily traded a scene of the investigation for another verse.
This arrives between Five Easy Pieces and The Day of the Locust, in her strongest period, and the performance is better than either of the films she’s remembered for from those years.
Christopher Plummer is the detective and the pairing is the film’s other asset. He plays Henderson as unshowy, methodical and Catholic himself, which the film uses when the case starts requiring him to take the occult material seriously.
Montreal in Winter
It’s shot in Montreal in cold weather and the city is doing a great deal of the atmospheric work.
Stone, snow, low light, a bilingual environment where characters switch languages mid-conversation, and Catholic architecture that the plot eventually requires and the photography establishes from the first reel. What the location provides that a studio couldn’t is the sense of a city with an old religion still physically present in it. Churches, iconography, a priest who’s a working professional instead of a symbol.
The bilingual dialogue also serves the plot. Elizabeth switches between French and English depending on who is in front of her, and the film uses which language she reaches for to show which version of herself is being addressed. Very few English-language pictures use Quebec as itself, and this is also one of them. The French isn’t subtitled in several scenes, characters are bilingual as a matter of course, and the setting isn’t standing in for anywhere.
This was made at the beginning of a period of Canadian tax-shelter production that generated a great deal of forgettable work, and the interesting thing about it is that the money produced something with a local subject instead of an imitation of an American film.
I’m glad the tax-shelter money went somewhere useful for once. I’d take this frozen, bilingual Montreal over a hundred backlots dressed up as New York, and the untranslated French leaves me feeling like a stranger in the city, which suits a film about a woman nobody fully knew.
A setting where the theme is physically present costs nothing and does everything. This film needs Catholicism to matter and shoots in a city where it’s on every corner. The alternative is characters explaining a belief system, which readers discount.
Leave some dialogue untranslated. A reader or viewer who doesn’t follow every word is in the position of somebody in an unfamiliar city. That’s often the correct position.
Use a real place as itself. A city standing in for another city is a budget decision that removes the only thing a location was offering.
The Occult Material
When the plot resolves around a black mass, a stolen pyx and a man who requires a specific kind of participant, the film weakens.
For most of its length the occult element is implied through objects and behavior. A reversed crucifix, a missing container, a group of people who are polite and won’t answer questions, and the restraint makes it unsettling.
The pyx itself is the best of those objects. A container for consecrated hosts, stolen, and the film establishes what it is and what taking it means without any character explaining the theology to anybody.
The last twenty minutes stage the ceremony, and staging it removes it. A black mass depicted is a room with candles and robed people, and the film has nothing to add to that image that it hadn’t already achieved by implication. Seventy minutes of reversed crucifixes and polite people who won’t answer questions had me properly uneasy, and then Hart shows me a room full of candles and robes and the unease drains away. I’d have kept the ceremony behind a closed door and let Plummer’s face do the rest.
The Exorcist arrived the same year and took the opposite approach. That’s instructive. That film shows everything and works because the depiction is physically specific, and this one shows a ritual and works less well than its own first hour.
The difference is what’s being depicted. A child in a bed with a documented set of physical symptoms is specific and a robed gathering is generic, and a film can show the first at length and can’t survive showing the second.
Why Nobody Has Seen It
It was a Canadian production in 1973, had almost no distribution outside Quebec and a limited American release, and existed for decades in poor prints.
That history is the whole reason it’s unknown, and it’s a common shape. A film with a unusual structure and a strong central performance, made outside a major industry, with nobody whose interest it served to keep it available. Harvey Hart also spent most of his career in television, directing episodes across two decades, and this is the one feature of his that anybody still argues about. A director with a single distinctive film is the standard shape of a career outside a major industry.
The structural idea in particular has been reinvented several times since by people who had no way of having seen this. Converging timelines around a known death is now a recognizable approach and this is one of its earliest sustained uses.
What that shows isn’t injustice so much as how distribution determines influence. A technique is credited to whoever used it in a film people could see.
Memento, Irreversible, 21 Grams and a dozen television seasons since have all worked variations on converging or reversed chronology, and none of them owes anything to this, because nobody involved in any of them could plausibly have encountered a Canadian film from 1973 that had almost no distribution of any kind and which then survived for several decades only in poor prints.
Priority isn’t influence. An idea belongs, practically, to whoever used it where an audience could encounter it, and that’s a distribution fact instead of a creative one. Nothing about this should discourage the work. It should discourage the assumption that being first matters.
Restraint before depiction. This film establishes something through objects for seventy minutes and then shows it, and the showing is the weakest part. An unusual structure is the most durable thing a small production can attempt. It costs nothing, and it’s the reason this film is still discussed at all.
Should you watch The Pyx?
Yes, and I’d push it on anyone who likes a puzzle. The 7 is for the two timelines closing in on that body on a Montreal pavement, for Karen Black in her strongest period singing her own songs over her own scenes, and for a winter city where the religion sits on every corner. It stops at 7 because the last reel shows what it should have kept implying, and that mistake costs it the 8 it was earning.
