I
was persuaded to go out of my cinematic comfort zone to go see a new indie
horror movie: a genre that I really loathe.
This British one, the second feature directed by Ben Wheatley from a
script he co-wrote with his wife Amy Jump had garnered rave reviews that
included ‘The most original, unsettling and cerebrally menacing British film of
the decade so far’. And that’s not the
words of some obscure fanzine, but the august ‘Financial Times’. So more than a little reluctant I sat in the
dark intrepidly at ‘O’ Cinema (my local art-house theater) waiting to be horrified. And on that level I was not disappointed, as from the whole sections of the movie that I could see when my hands were not
glued over my eyes, it was the bloodiest screen violence that I have (almost)
seen for years.
It
opens in a very suburban home where a married couple, both ex. military personnel
are bickering with other as they prepare for a dinner party. Jay had not worked for eight months since he
botched up some sort of job in Kiev and has lost his nerve. Now broke, Shel his wife persuades him to
take up the offer of Gal his best friend, and dinner party guest, to do another job
together. As the plot unfolds we
discover that the two of them are actually professional hit men, and the contract
they accept is to murder three men for reasons that are never revealed.
As
they start the job it becomes apparent that Jay is more than a little unhinged
and turns out actually be quite psychotic.
I guess not necessarily such a bad thing in his chosen line of work, but
it is one of the reasons that this very tough-to-follow plot then goes totally
off the rails.
We
came out of the movie terrified and completely drained but also totally
confused as to what actually had happened.
Turns out that when I did my research to write this blog, we were by no
means alone with this reaction. Roger
Ebets wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times ‘this movie may leave you scratching your head way too much when it’s
over’… too true. And the critic in 'The Hollywood
Reporter' summed it up beautifully when it described it as a ‘what the hell’
climax that will really baffle.
So I
think in all fairness I am going to recuse myself from giving this movie a
rating. I have the impression that if
this is a genre that you like, then this edgy low-budget movie is one for
you. But what do I know? I’m kind of fixated not on the dinner party
in the first scenes that lulled me into a sense of false security that I was watching just a
regular domestic drama, but I couldn't stop thinking about what actually goes on at the Wheatley household to
inspire husband and wife to write this script.
Hmmm!
