Im Sang-soo’s follow up to The Housemaid (2010) details the decadent, bitter and corrupt lives of an exceedingly wealthy modern-day South Korean family and their desperate attempts to control the insular world around them as it slowly falls apart. Cruel, deluded, manipulative, selfish and calculated, Sang-soo’s cast of scheming millionaires is an unsympathetic gallery of caricatures that are as vacuous and cold as the vast interiors they constantly inhabit.
There’s the callous and slightly insane grandfather, who’s well aware that everyone is waiting for him to die, so holds on to life out of spite. The controlling mother who even stoops to secret surveillance in order to keep her family in place and shift the balance of power. Her philandering husband who married her for money and spends most of his time seducing the female staff. Their sensitive daughter who pines for a more fulfilling existence that hopefully doesn’t involve being poor, and their emotionally inept son who has become the public face of their dubious business transactions.
Into this fold comes a relatively naïve and subservient, newly appointed personal secretary, who becomes conflicted over what he feels is morally correct, and his dutiful service to the family and his eagerness to be accepted. Can he resist the lure of money and power? Or will he become instrumental in bringing one of South Korea’s most powerful families to their knees?
After an interesting and inventive use of time lapse during the impressive opening scenes, director Sang-soo certainly establishes how adept he is at expertly filling a frame. But his brilliance at filming shiny floors and fancy furniture wasn’t enough to hold my attention with a narrative that is less than gripping, and left me feeling somewhat drained and indifferent after the film’s 115-minute running time. One aspect that I found particularly distracting was the sudden use of stilted English dialogue that randomly pops up throughout the film, creating seriously odd moments of wince-inducing unintentional humour. There’s a bit of Shakespearean plotting from time to time, a bit of Greek tragedy here and there, elements of a corporate thriller thrown in for good measure, unconvincing melodrama and a vague murder mystery towards the end of the film that’s never fully fleshed out and only seems to serve an over-the top-climax.
The Taste of Money seems to be trying very hard to be a shocking, subversive, controversial and unrelenting expose of Korea’s ruling class, but the result feels more like a glossy, heavy-handed soap opera with all the complexity of a four-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Cast: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp
USA 1984
91 mins
Released in 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a wide-ranging critical and commercial success, establishing the faltering young studio New Line – nicknamed ‘The House that Freddy Built’ – and revitalising the career of writer/director Wes Craven, as well as introducing the cinema-going public to the enduring horror/comedy icons, Freddy Kreuger and Johnny Depp, who together must have inspired a significant demographic of fancy dress and Halloween costumes. Returning to the original film in the wake of the increasingly bizarre sequels, culminating in Wes Craven’s meta-mad New Nightmare and Samuel Bayer’s dourly unnecessary 2010 remake, I was surprised by how much fun it is. For some reason, I had retrospectively given the original film a patina of respectability in the light of the daftness of what was to come, but that daftness was right there from the beginning, and Nightmare is best enjoyed as a pulpy B-movie that sneakily delights in its own absurdity.
Although Robert Englund is credited in the opening titles as playing ‘Fred Krueger’, he really is Freddy from the get go. Forget any contemporary neuroses about the ubiquity of paedophilia; Freddy, the disfigured knife-clawed child murderer, is a cackling, malevolent clown figure who delights in the fear and disgust he causes his victims. His costume is circus-tent red and green, and in an early appearance, his arms stretch out from one side of the street to the other, both ludicrous and genuinely frightening. He’ll happily lop of a finger for a giggle, and his murders are gruesome jokes on his victims, involving peek-a-boo chases and Johnny Depp’s Greg getting sucked into the pit of his bed to be spewed out, like the gushing spill from the elevator in the Overlook Hotel. ‘You’re not gonna need a stretcher,’ a cop tells the rushing medics. ‘You’re gonna need a mop.’
Heather Langenkamp as Nancy, Freddie’s target and adversary, has a goofy awkward innocence and a weird dreamlike nonchalance. Everyone in the film behaves with an odd dreamy logic, though the dreams themselves are never really that dream-like, with the exception of the gooey staircases that melt under Nancy’s running feet. The dreams are more like Hollywood-digested Freud, with the boiler room as the steamy, ready-to-blow site of repression, rage and dark history, in stark opposition to the pastel-coloured suburban life on show. Freddy himself is a product of Nancy’s parents’ crimes, and they are as much a danger to her as Freddy, with Ronnee Blakley as Nancy’s booze-drenched mom and B-movie legend John Saxon as the absent police detective dad.
Ultimately, Nancy will try to inhabit Freddy’s sado-comic world and play by his rules. Anticipating the Home Alone antics of Macauley Culkin’s Kevin, Nancy improvises a series of Wile-E-Coyote traps – a hammer falling from a door, exploding lightbulbs – but these manoeuvres and her attempt at psychological release will be dubiously effective against a cartoonish figure who, like all cartoon heroes, simply won’t die.
Directors: Adam Wingard, Gareth Evans, Jason Eisener, Eduardo Sánchez, Gregg Hale, Simon Barrett, Timo Tjahjanto
Cast: Adam Wingard, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kelsy Abbott
USA, Canada Indonesia 2013
96 mins
If the first V/H/S film was a tentative but flawed attempt to breathe some life into the well-worn anthology format by combining nostalgic longing and creepy storytelling, this second instalment represents a coming-of-age of the most over-the-top kind: like the unruly brother who bursts in the door at the most importunate moment, V/H/S/2 is loud, brash and brilliant.
V/H/S/2 is also released on DVD & VOD from 14 October 2013.
Veering from the sublime to the outrageous, V/H/S/2 is a terrific combination of talent and ambition. Most of the stories are not only technically impressive, but also combine terrifying scares with laugh-out loud moments. Without spoiling any of the storylines, suffice it say that the four segments vary from alien abductions to strange cults, with eye transplants and zombies in between. Standout segments from Gareth Evans and Jason Eisener impress and astonish in equal measure, however, the talents of other directors (especially Adam Wingard’s tender Carpenter tribute) must not be ignored. V/H/S/2 is an engaging, brilliant sequel, which deserves a huge audience to enjoy it loud and big at the cinema – an almost perfect Saturday evening film.
This review was first published as part of our FrightFest 2013 coverage.
Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland
UK 1975
84 mins
So here it is again, resurfacing once more, this time in a handsome restoration, apparently the most complete version there is ever likely to be*, after a 40-odd year journey from cult oddity to classic status. In 1972, Robin Hardy’s film was very much the bottom half of a double bill with Don’t Look Now (there’s a night at the movies!). Heavily edited and under-ballyhooed, The Wicker Man seemed destined to sink without trace. Later, after decades of late night viewings, Hardy’s film began to be seen, together with the messy, oddly beguiling Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971), as being in the vanguard of a British sub-genre that never blossomed, a road not taken – call it the folk horror film, or horror pastoral. Today, that sub-genre seems to be on the up again, at least for as long as Ben Wheatley’s got anything to do with it, and so it’s a good time for The Wicker Man to be back on our screens.
If you haven’t encountered the film before, it goes like this: Edward Woodward plays Police Sergeant Howie, a devout Christian officer, tasked with flying to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison. Upon arriving at Summerisle, however, he finds his efforts frustrated by the locals, who variously deny that the girl is missing, or that she existed at all. As he tries to find out what lies behind these contradictions, he is appalled to discover that he is surrounded by practising pagans, whose belief system has held sway over the island since the 19th century, and is currently overseen by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). The fields are filled with copulating couples, the schoolchildren are being taught about phallic symbols, and the whole island seems transfixed by a cult of fertility, except, as he discovers, the previous year the crops disastrously failed. Could the islanders be planning to sacrifice Rowan to appease their gods? As the May Day festivities approach, and with no help coming from any quarter, Sergeant Howie desperately resolves to find, and rescue, the girl.
The restored ‘Final Cut’ version of The Wicker Man is released on Blu-ray/DVD in the UK by Studiocanal Home Entertainment on 14 October.
If the presence of Christopher Lee and Ingid Pitt, who pops up as a librarian, suggest links with the Hammer tradition, The Wicker Man largely plays against them. Lee, here, gives a much more nuanced and playful performance than he was generally required to deliver in a cape. The film is contemporary rather than period, location shot rather than studio bound, and benefits hugely from found imagery and the use of non-pro actors. It builds a sense of nightmare from an accumulation of creepy details, mostly seen in broad daylight, and a ripe vein of folk weirdness that seems miles away from Hammer’s dusty castles. And moreover, it is, oddly enough, a musical of sorts: besides the incidental score by Magnet, we have the locals in the Green Man bursting into Paul Giovanni’s largely saucy numbers at the drop of a hat, and maypole dancers and fire leapers accompanied by catchy little ditties (the song ‘Gently Johnny’ has been restored for this version, sung, distractingly enough, by a Neil Gaiman lookalike). This is before the landlord’s daughter and island’s Aphrodite, Willow (Britt Ekland, and body double) has her finest screen moment, tunefully testing Woodward’s faith by writhing naked against his door. This kind of thing didn’t happen in your average Amicus production (more’s the pity…) While its influence has grown over the years, The Wicker Man still has the feel of a film apart, an island detached from the mainstream.
‘Only as a comparative religion’ is schoolteacher Miss Rose’s (Diane Cilentro) blithe reply when asked if she teaches Christianity in her classes. And that’s very much the name of the game here, as Howie’s dutiful, establishment religion is repeatedly contrasted with the shag-happy islander’s unorthodox beliefs. However, Anthony Schaffer’s** script plays sly games with our sympathies. A young audience in post-hippy 1972 would be expected to find much to like about Summerisle’s horny paganism, and a lot of fun is had at Howie’s expense as he boggles at the rampant sexuality and freaky-folky business on display. In this cut, we see him in church at the outset, singing hymns and taking communion, and these images recur later on, the church rituals looking cold and empty against the pagan rites, with their animal eroticism. For much of the film he looks a bit of a fool, especially when resisting the advances of Willow, trembling in his brown pyjamas. But… slowly our sympathies turn; the locals may be colourful, but they’re also evasive, mocking and increasingly sinister. Howie may be a humourless, self-righteous stiff but, largely thanks to Woodward’s performance, he’s also human, and admirably driven, on the side of the angels. At the climax of the film, the islanders swaying rendition of ‘Summer Is Icumen In’ seems brainwashed and deranged, while Howie’s ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, by contrast, has some kind of powerful dignity. Take your pick, you heathens!
*If you’re curious, the ‘Final Cut’ is the version Hardy assembled for distributors Abraxas in 1979, now cleaned up and looking decidedly spiffy. For those only familiar with the short version, this means a little restructuring, plus a brief bit of Howie on the mainland, the song ‘Gently Johnny’ as mentioned above, and a sequence introducing a kilt-wearing Lord Summerisle on Howie’s first night on the island. For my money this scene telegraphs the rest of the movie a little too much, but hey, it’s nice to see it.
** Incidentally, the title credit actually reads ‘Anthony Schaffer’s The Wicker Man’. Offhand, I can’t think of any other film that credits the screenwriter this way. Odd. And well deserved.
Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Janet McTeer, Klaus Pohl, Julia Jentsch, Ulrich Noethen, Axel Milberg
Germany, Luxembourg, France 2012
113 mins
Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is not a documentary, but a dramatisation of the best-known episode in the life of the German-American political theorist. In 1961, while she was a professor at the New School in New York, Arendt went to Jerusalem to report, for the New Yorker, on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, following his abduction from Argentina by Mossad. Wary of the judicial process, suspicious of the Israeli government, Arendt refused to prejudge Eichmann. And perhaps she allowed herself to take her contrariety too far.
First, she seemed to go too far towards exculpation of Eichmann, in order to put across her big idea about the banality of evil. We have now all become used to this idea as part of the landscape of cruelty and suffering: in the modern world monstrous things are not usually done by monsters, but by ordinary people. But the dramatic crux of the film is Arendt’s even more controversial criticism of Jewish leaders under Nazi rule, which she took far enough to look like blame.
So she blamed her fellow Jews and exculpated the Nazi – er, maybe you’ve overthought that one a bit, Professor Arendt? Was this stubborn devotion to truth, or was she carried away with her own ideas?
There are some flashbacks to her youthful engagement (philosophical and physical) with Heidegger, the Nazi-in-waiting, and some other mildly awkward episodes in her personal life. Dialogue is spoken in the actual languages supposed to have been used by the people portrayed: mainly German, with interludes in English, while archive film is incorporated, surprisingly smoothly. This portrait of an intellectual woman is handled more calmly and seriously by von Trotta than one can imagine it would be by a British filmmaker. Glamourisation, conjecture, pathos, symbolism, and messages are eschewed.
Arendt is let off lightly, but I guess it’s tempting to side with her when the alternative might look like siding with the Israeli government and the people who tried to hound her out of her job. Not really an edifying episode in intellectual history, but an interesting story told with appropriate restraint.
A train station in Italy. Two small children receive a furtive send off before boarding a train alone with their mother. Their father, a fugitive gangster, has decided that it’s time for the family to return home to France after ten years in hiding, but to finance the move, Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) needs to pull off one last job, a brazen theft in broad daylight in Milan. Of course, that theft only increases the unwanted attention from the police, and Davos’s flight to the border, and eventually to Paris, is a dramatic, dangerous and ultimately tragic grasp at freedom, which underpins Claude Sautet’s fantastic thriller about a once-powerful man now struggling for his survival.
Based on a novel by José Giovanni, written after the author’s release from jail, Classe tous risques (Consider all Risks) gets off to a dynamic start, with Davos’s getaway from Milan relayed in a terrific action sequence, involving cars, motorbikes and a boat landing on the French shore under the cover of night. But when the worst happens, Davos finds he must turn to his former partners-in-crime for help. His ‘friends’ in Paris now live more respectable lives, safe only because he took the fall for their misdeeds in the past, culminating in his exile. But now, years later, they are reluctant to pay their debts. Instead of becoming personally involved, they send Eric Starck, a young man-on-the-make (played by a terrific Jean-Paul Belmondo) to pick up Davos in the south of France and bring him back to Paris.
Davos, who should be more concerned with the welfare of his family, is quietly furious and turns to plotting his revenge, seeking payback for this latest betrayal – with the help of Eric, who goes above and beyond the call of duty to protect Davos and his children. From this point on, despite clear indications of the brutality that lurks below the gangster’s charismatic exterior, Sautet sets up a blend of moral ambiguities and dilemmas, making it almost impossible not to empathise with Davos – even if his actions can’t be condoned.
Classe tous risques is released in the UK as a BFI Dual Format (DVD/Blu-ray) edition on 24 February 2014.
Classe tous risques is a taut, original gangster film told with simplicity and a compelling directness, with bare-bones exposition and a neorealist touch. But there are also deeper, more thoughtful issues in play with Sautet’s no-punches-pulled exploration of the conflicts between loyalty and family, and the code of honour among thieves. The result is a tour de force, which is rounded out by a soundtrack by Georges Delerue and beautifully composed cinematography from Ghislain Cloquet. In one memorable shot, a woman that Davos and Eric encounter, having only just realised that she might be in the company of criminals, is caught between Eric in the background, while in the foreground, a telephone – a link to the cops – is separated from her by a pane of glass. Her moment of hesitation as she decides between right and wrong is exquisite.
It’s only a shame that Classe tous risques was utterly eclipsed on its original release by Belmondo’s other film, Breathless, coming out in the same year, and the ensuing excitement over the French New Wave. But the real mystery lies in why Sautet rarely returned to the underworld of gangsters and criminals during his career, choosing instead to focus on dramas set in the world of the bourgeoisie – films which, admittedly, brought him more success than this overlooked, but rich contribution to the genre.
Representing a true return to form for the Korean maverick filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, Pieta is a relentless, brutal and brilliant exploration of the human psyche set within the cramped industrial grounds of Cheonggyecheon, a regeneration project in downtown Seoul.
Gang-do works as a collector for a loan shark in the aforementioned industrial area, which is slowly turning into a slum. In the opening hour of the film he visits the various borrowers in their machine shops. If they can pay the instalments, there are no problems; but if someone can’t afford to pay, then Gang-do disables them in order to collect on the insurance policy that they were made to sign at the start of the loan. It’s a cruel method and Gang-do blankly goes about his business: crushing hands, chopping off limbs and even throwing people off buildings.
However, one day a woman turns up on Gang-Do’s doorstep, claiming to be the mother who abandoned him. At first he’s unmoved – he treats the woman as obscenely as possible in an ever-elevating number of tests – but she never waivers. Slowly but surely the two start some sort of kinship. However, this happiness is not to last long.
Out of this bleak ugliness, Kim Ki-duk fashions a tale that more than justifies the use of the title (translating as ‘piety’ or ‘pity’). His story is dotted with characters who come to terms with abandonment, not only through each other, but also through the ever-changing society they exist in.
Pieta is released on DVD in the UK by Studiocanal on 14 October 2013.
Cheonggyecheon is an industrial nightmare: a once thriving hub of small metalworks and other industrial shops now slowly being swallowed whole by urban renewal. Its inhabitants are equally lost: most have given up on their dreams simply to survive while others have never even had the chance to dream. Within this landscape Kang-do is at first the very exaggeration of evil: an unstoppable force who acts as some sort of angel of deliverance, whether he is collecting money or gutting fish for his dinner. However, it is with the appearance of his mother that the very first touches of humanity infiltrate him and his world. And it is this humanity which will create the tragedy that Kim Ki-duk so brilliantly brings about.
In the role of Gang-do, Lee Jeong-jin is a marvel to watch, his slow transformation almost impossible to tear away from. He is well matched in the intensity of his role by the actress Jo Min-soo, who brings a sense of disturbing mystery to the role of the mother who simply will not leave her son. It’s the very forceful nature of the relationship which makes Pieta one of the most astounding films of the year, ending with a final image that will stay with viewers for a long time to come.
A haunting, bleak but poetic tale told using stark cinematography and harsh lighting,the film may turn off some viewers with its violent and relentless nature. However, anyone who can get past its surface aggression will discover one of the more delicately crafted character studies of modern cinema, and a testament to the talent of director Kim Ki-duk, who continues to shock and astound in equal measure.
A young girl is missing, and a couple embroiled in a dark sex game while on a road trip are set upon by a ruthless gang. Things start to go wrong when the gang leader, cocksure thug Flynn (Derek Magyar), notices air holes drilled into the seats of his captives’ car. No One Lives is a genre-fusing gore fest, streamlined for an attention-deficit, post-everything generation. It seems driven by a desire to master and beat every horror filmmaker’s worst nightmare – over-saturation. Action film director Ryuhei Kitamura throws everything at David Cohen’s original horror-thriller script to try to create the unimaginable and the unpredictable, but can this really be done?
The story is a lively, partly cheeky conceit that asks: ‘What happens when a run-of-the-mill, backwater, violent crime operation – the Hoag family – meets a solo super-psycho just known as Driver (Luke Evans), who is fuelled with the strength and tactics of every action hero that has come before him?’ The film is also partly an exploration into Stockholm Syndrome territory, and the warped psychological connection that kidnapped Emma Ward (Adelaide Clemens) has with her abductor. While some scenes start to look at the curious empathy and dependence Emma develops, any complexity loses its charge by the finish. All of this rolls out at lightning speed, peppered with hard-boiled repartee, while Driver’s preternatural carnage is ludicrously orchestrated and slapped on. The pleasure of watching the film is in giving into this and cheering on the anti-hero, but the amoral love story we are invited to take seriously gets a bit abandoned in all the fun.
In Elysium Neill Blomkamp envisions another dystopian-nightmare future, only to once again get that bit too enthusiastic with his action chops. I had an uncannily similar experience watching his new blockbuster as his breakthrough District 9: initially enthralled by his irreverent, satirical eye mapping the story’s cinematic world, and then bitterly disappointed as that world goes up in quite unwanted flames. He torches the junkyard palace before we’ve had a chance to crane our eager heads inside. Blomkamp has been a ceaselessly inventive follower of the George Lucas and Ridley Scott sci-fi models of world-building, the concept of the ‘aged future’ – that longed-for, lived-in factor where those spacecraft hulls and droids look beat-up, functional, convincingly authentic. What he hasn’t learned from his sci-fi grandmasters is making the fire-throwing spectacle sit fluently with storytelling. And this time, the world of 2154-era Earth he concocts doesn’t seem nearly as personal, detailed or lovingly engineered as his boyhood hometown of Johannesburg in District 9.
Earth in 2154 is an endless stream of shanty towns and pollutant smog; the 1% have decamped to Elysium, a wagon-wheel-shaped chrome space-station in the sky, which resembles a five-star beachside resort freeze-packed for eternity. Driving home the WALL-E parallels, Matt Damon is the Earth drone-worker Max, nursing a lost love, and destined in Matrix-like one-true-saviour fashion to bring balance to these two worlds. He has a life-threatening radiation illness from his factory work and needs access to Elysium’s health machines, which can cure ailments by scrambling cells electronically. His journey to Elysium is hijacked by a band of Earth revolutionaries involved in corporate espionage against the Elysium executives, and the plot is set in motion. Jodie Foster is the stone-faced security executive Delacourt policing Elysium’s borders; Sharlto Copley, continuing his collaboration with Blomkamp from District 9, plays Kruger, her Afrikaner mercenary soldier, whose weapons include a samurai sword, and some cringe-inducing South African nursery rhymes.
The story’s themes of class war and confrontation between the developing and developed world may seem unusually forthright for a crowd-pleasing studio tentpole. Yet, as in the storytelling strategies of much Young Adult fiction and their film adaptations, these factions of privileged and poor are still far too simplistic and sketchily imagined to say anything truly urgent politically. Blomkamp has a laudable aim, but a blander one compared to his parallels in District 9 between the prawns’ segregation and the disgraces of apartheid; he disdains the inequality and neglect of the few towards the many, but the notion of a future Earth’s proletariat striking to unseat Elysium’s bourgeoisie is too broad to reflect anything as uncomfortable as what unsettles us today. The concept does make perfect ‘sci-fi’ sense, but the impression is more of Blomkamp employing real-world details to ground a more outlandish scenario than following the classic sci-fi dictum that visions of the future are really just reflections of the hard truth of the present.
Damon, in his role as the story’s hero, offers his customary Everyman dignity, even when being verbally abused by robot policemen. But in a film with so many Verhoeven and Carpenter-like tongue-in-cheek touches, a tad more wit, or even some camp self-awareness, would not have gone amiss in this noble-hearted emancipator. Foster seems to taken such advice too far in the opposite direction, with her peculiar, Gallic-tinged British accent and sharp-shouldered posture an attempt to wrestle some personality into the most flimsily conceived character in the script. The contributions of these two prestige-oriented A-list Hollywood actors, locking horns for the fate of mankind, together encapsulate Elysium’s most dispiriting flaw: the sad locus of a project over-designed yet under-thought.
Cast: Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg
USA 2011
91 mins
The precocious and prolific Adam Wingard has not just one, but two films in the programme of this year’s Film4 FrightFest (22-26 August 2013). The rising indie horror director has been championed by the festival, which screened his wistful, affecting A Horrible Way to Die in 2011, followed by the anthology film V/H/S (for which he shot the wraparound segment) in 2012. This year’s edition of FrightFest sees the UK premiere of V/H/S 2, as well as the London preview of You’re Next.
V/H/S/2 is available on DVD & VOD from 14 October 2013.
With You’re Next, Wingard delivers a hugely enjoyable, thrilling, smart take on the home invasion sub-genre. After a terrifically creepy, brutal opening sequence, teacher Crispian takes his new girlfriend Erin to his parents’ isolated country mansion for the latter’s wedding anniversary. They are joined by his siblings: his obnoxious, successful brother Drake (mumblecore actor/director Joe Swanberg) with his wife Kelly; his younger brother Felix, accompanied by sulky, scornful girlfriend Zee; and his over-enthusiastic sister Aimee, who has brought along her new filmmaker boyfriend Tariq (played by House of the Devil director Ti West). Tensions rise over dinner as the smug Drake purposefully provokes Crispian. But as the festivities descend into a generalised shouting match, barbed comments are suddenly replaced by crossbow arrows, as the family comes under attack from sinister assailants wearing animal masks. As the besieged relatives devise strategies to survive the terrifying aggression, Erin turns out to be surprisingly well equipped to deal with the situation.
You’re Next will be released on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) in the UK on 13 January 2014.
The first part of the film is exhilaratingly tense, thanks to a tightly wound script and taut direction, enhanced by the surreal sense of dread created by the animal masks. With their inhuman appearance and no apparent motivation to their actions, the aggressors seem to be playing random, cruel games with their victims (in a way that is reminiscent of David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them). Once the reason for the attack is revealed, the film switches to a different kind of dynamic, losing that unnerving strangeness, although it remains ruthlessly effective.
While You’re Next doesn’t have quite as much heart as A Horrible Way to Die, it provides all the required blood, gore, thrills and jumps, which have been so glaringly absent from many recent horror films. Wingard demonstrates a real talent for directing action scenes, cleverly plotting and expertly choreographing them. The dialogue is sharp and entertaining, the characters believable and well defined, with Erin (an exciting performance from Sharni Vinson) adding a brilliant twist to the final girl type. Wingard and his writer Simon Barrett use the premise intelligently, integrating the personal relationships and family conflicts to feed the terror, and have fun playing with audience expectations. The most nerve-racking horror film to come out in a long time, You’re Next is a blast, from the viciously intriguing beginning to the humorously nihilistic ending.
Virginie Sélavy
Watch the trailer:
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
