The First Part of "Lost Records" Has A Bloomin' Good Twist At The End
Or: How I Learned The Power of a Subversive Nosebleed
Fair warning: spoilers ahead.
I didn’t expect to enjoy Lost Records: Bloom and Rage quite as much as I did, but in the days since I reached the cliffhanger ending of its first episode (subtitled Tape 1: Bloom) I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Lost Records is made by French developer Don’t Nod, and if you’ve played their other titles — especially their 2015 megahit Life is Strange — you’ll know exactly what you’re in for: a coming-of-age story where the protagonist will frequently be asked to make decisions that can send the story down any number of branching paths. There’ll be a soundtrack full of lovely lo-fi indie music, a cast of painfully earnest characters exchanging cringey (both in the good and bad sense) dialogue, and at some point there’ll be a supernatural twist that will act as a clever-if-unsubtle metaphor for the protagonist’s struggle to transition from childhood to adulthood.
For the most part, Lost Records did not subvert those expectations.
The plot is basically “Stephen King’s It for the riot grrrl era”. In the summer of 1995, awkward loner Swann Holloway meets a trio of fellow outcasts and forms an inseparable friendship group — a Losers’ Club, if you will. In the winter of 2022, the women reunite in a bar on the edge of their small town, brought together by a mysterious summons involving a Very Bad Thing that happened all those years ago, and which they swore to never speak of again…
Tape 1 is a surprisingly sedate affair: more focussed on deepening the relationships between its compelling characters than pushing the action forward. Eventually, though, the inevitable supernatural twist does make an appearance. After pretending to invoke a curse in a clearing in the woods, the girls return one night to discover that the clearing in question has been replaced by a giant hole in the ground: an Abyss, bathed in bisexual light and pulsating with ominous intent. Kat, the small-but-feisty member of the group, believes the Abyss will grant their desires if they make it an offering. “I’m fucking dying here,” she tells it. “Get me out.”
From there, things quickly reach a climax. Emboldened by their encounter with the Abyss, the girls stage a guerrilla punk concert in a parking lot… only to have their parade rained on by Dylan, Kat’s older sister, and his boyfriend Corey — the bully whose harassment brought them all together in the first place. All of this is too much for Kat. She blows her top, and as her voice gets louder and louder, we see flashes of the Abyss as her eyes seem to glow the same shade of purple.
And then her nose starts bleeding.
Aha, I thought. Now we’re getting to the spooky stuff.
Think about it — how many sci-fi stories have you seen where someone with psychic or supernatural powers ends up with a bead of red under their nostril because they pushed themselves too far and now their brain is melting? It’s a pretty common occurrence. Even Don’t Nod has used it before, with Life is Strange’s time-travelling heroine Max Caulfield. So I was all geared up to see Kat levitate some cars, shatter some lightbulbs, or make someone’s head explode like that one bit in Scanners.
Instead, she has a coughing fit and collapses.
Turns out, Kat’s comments about dying weren’t just teenage angst at small-town life. She’s been living with leukaemia — and, in Dylan’s words, she’s “running out of time.” Dylan and Corey bundle Kat’s limp body into a truck and drive away, as Swann and the others stare on in horror, and Tape 1 ends with a cut to black. It’s a masterful twist; one that works because it plays with a trope we’ve seen so often that we forget it’s a trope.
It also works because the narrative avoids any of the obvious foreshadowing that usually precedes a twist like this. We don’t see Kat have any unexplained coughing fits, or staring worriedly into a handkerchief like a Victorian woman with consumption. The only clues we get are a vague allusion to the fact that she’s “homeschooled” and her parents are overly protective — hardly evidence for such an earth-shattering revelation.
There’s still plenty of time for supernatural shenanigans when the second part (subtitled Rage) comes out next month. We still don’t know much about the Very Bad Thing that broke these friends apart, or the consequences of their meddling with the Abyss. We don’t even know whether or not Kat is alive in the future timeline. For now, it’s just nice to see that the team at Don’t Nod haven’t rested on their creative laurels, and that they’re having fun subverting expectations in a genre they helped to invent.
And now… a poem.
I wrote this after seeing a poster in the gents’ toilets in the Showroom Cinema, which is one of my very favourite places in Sheffield.
The man in the oversized suit
looms from the wall
as I dry my hands,
brandishing a microphone
as if he wants my opinion for a vox pop
(or perhaps a talking-head interview).
He’s the one who always told me
to “stop making sense.”
I don’t see why I should start now.