Review: "Deadgirl"
Some of the movies I've seen thus far at this year's festival begin to drop out of my mind even as I leave the theater. This one, though, has stuck with me. I found it to be intriguing,haunting, and very well-executed, yet the material is very troubling, and it's not by any means the sort of thing you can easily summarize to a non-genre fan unless you want to be labeled a disgusting mutant. Short description: "A couple of disaffected teens find an apparently savage and deathless girl chained up naked in the basement of an abandoned insane asylum--and one thing leads to another." And that "one thing" is rape.
But of course the teen who first embarks on his own downward spiral sees it differently. The girl is undead, and apparently virtually mindless. And no one knows she's down here, and no one is missing her. She's a thing. She reacts, but doesn't interact. There's no mind there. And he can do what he wants to her.
And then he begins to tell his friends.
The other teen finds this abhorrent--but he doesn't stop his best friend. Because at the same time, he just might find these possibilities a little more enticing than he wants to admit.
While the premise is fantastic, in the sense that on the face of it it's out there in Cloud Cuckoo Land, the filmmakers sell it skilfully, and the plot has a strong internal logic of its own that in fact has some grounding in reality. You might want to say that real people wouldn't do such things. But when you're young, angry, poor, have virtually no family of your own and no real prospects for a future of anything other than pumping gas, and everyone looks down on you--how WOULD you react to something like this? The more active of the two teens has an essentially nihilistic world view and no fear of consequences. And through him, we become aware of a strange element of class struggle going on. His ongoing rapes of the dead girl--there's no delicate way of puting it--are not entirely about sexual gratification. They're about feeling powerful at last, of being in control.
I don't want to say that the filmmakers set out to present a Marxist critique here, or that they necessarily intended to load the movie with messages. But you can read a lot into it. "She's just a dead girl." That may not be far from "She's just an illegal alien", "She's just a runaway", "She's just some black chick." There are always reasons and excuses, and the worst actions are often accompanied by the dehumanization of the victims, or even by blaming them for what they have coming.
The performances by all are very good, particularly when the best friend has a monologue describing his first encounter with the dead girl. The latter is played with exceptional bravery, I think, by Jenny Spain is a role that had to be emotionally demanding (she is completely nude throughout, although by no means is this eroticized). The asylum setting is exceptional and the directors succeed in creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.
The movie can easily be accused of misogyny, but I think that's an easy way out. It is definitely disturbing, but not just for the sake of shocking the viewer or messing with his or her mind. It's hard to watch at times, but if you don't dismiss it out of hand as a simplistic old-fashioned rape/revenge flick, you might find it thought-provoking in its own exceedingly odd way.
Recommended, but it is definitely not for everyone.
But of course the teen who first embarks on his own downward spiral sees it differently. The girl is undead, and apparently virtually mindless. And no one knows she's down here, and no one is missing her. She's a thing. She reacts, but doesn't interact. There's no mind there. And he can do what he wants to her.
And then he begins to tell his friends.
The other teen finds this abhorrent--but he doesn't stop his best friend. Because at the same time, he just might find these possibilities a little more enticing than he wants to admit.
While the premise is fantastic, in the sense that on the face of it it's out there in Cloud Cuckoo Land, the filmmakers sell it skilfully, and the plot has a strong internal logic of its own that in fact has some grounding in reality. You might want to say that real people wouldn't do such things. But when you're young, angry, poor, have virtually no family of your own and no real prospects for a future of anything other than pumping gas, and everyone looks down on you--how WOULD you react to something like this? The more active of the two teens has an essentially nihilistic world view and no fear of consequences. And through him, we become aware of a strange element of class struggle going on. His ongoing rapes of the dead girl--there's no delicate way of puting it--are not entirely about sexual gratification. They're about feeling powerful at last, of being in control.
I don't want to say that the filmmakers set out to present a Marxist critique here, or that they necessarily intended to load the movie with messages. But you can read a lot into it. "She's just a dead girl." That may not be far from "She's just an illegal alien", "She's just a runaway", "She's just some black chick." There are always reasons and excuses, and the worst actions are often accompanied by the dehumanization of the victims, or even by blaming them for what they have coming.
The performances by all are very good, particularly when the best friend has a monologue describing his first encounter with the dead girl. The latter is played with exceptional bravery, I think, by Jenny Spain is a role that had to be emotionally demanding (she is completely nude throughout, although by no means is this eroticized). The asylum setting is exceptional and the directors succeed in creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.
The movie can easily be accused of misogyny, but I think that's an easy way out. It is definitely disturbing, but not just for the sake of shocking the viewer or messing with his or her mind. It's hard to watch at times, but if you don't dismiss it out of hand as a simplistic old-fashioned rape/revenge flick, you might find it thought-provoking in its own exceedingly odd way.
Recommended, but it is definitely not for everyone.
posted by Purukivel at 10:24 AM
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