Final Cut by Charles Burns review – a book to be read and reread

A horror movie shoot grows complicated for a group of young friends in a rich story of anxiety and betrayal steeped in dread

Like his 2005 masterpiece, Black Hole, Charles Burns’s new graphic novel centres on a group of young people. At its heart are Brian and Jimmy, school friends who grew up making Super 8 horror movies together: homages to old pictures such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers that deployed copious amounts of lipstick, and which they still like to watch even now (the laughter at screenings is tinged with pride, for one of them at least). But while Jimmy is cocky and loud, Brian is quiet and controlling. The film they’re about to shoot when Final Cut begins is, for him, a deadly serious business. If he’s desperate for it to be more convincing than their youthful epics (though it, too, will involve an alien invasion of hideous blobs that resemble throbbing human brains), it’s also a way of coping with his seemingly fragile mental health. Creativity is a portal to sanity.

Art and life, though, are very far apart – and perhaps they don’t mix. Jimmy introduces a new friend into their group, a redhead called Laurie, who is to be the star of the film. Like Brian, she sometimes feels out of it; the struggle to communicate with other people, let alone to be part of a gang, is hard for her as well. But she’s also a kind of kryptonite in context. She is beautiful and her loveliness takes its effect both on Brian and on Tina, another of the group’s members. When they set off, first to a cabin by a beach, and then up into the mountains for filming, the reader knows things are going to get complicated. An atmosphere of anxiety and dread suffuses every colour-saturated frame. Burns has written a story of romantic confusion, but in his hands, betrayal takes several forms. Our minds play tricks on us. If human beings are often a letdown, perhaps art is even worse.

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