We're back with the latest set of five fucked-up films. I've arranged them from worst to best this time, because these five ran the gamut from "almost worthless" to "stunning cinematic achievement" with three stops in between. As always, I watch these so you don't have to.
Antichrist (2009): Lars Von Trier directed and wrote this quiet, dark story about a husband and wife whose young son dies, turning the wife into a basket case and the husband into a cold, condescending therapist. They decide to go out into the woods, to their one-time vacation spot, so she can explore and conquer her fears. This one is half slow burn and half shock piece, with some majorly disturbing visuals. It says a lot without a ton of dialogue about the lines between love and hate, pleasure and pain, innocence and guilt. On a more literal level, it's about people losing fights with their demons and pride coming before the fall. It's a hard line to walk when you try to be gross-out and thought-provoking at the same time, and for me, this missed the mark. I'll allow that it makes its points well and doesn't beat you over the head with them. It just tells a simple, sad story that touches on a lot of universal themes. I just can't recommend it- not because I was scarred, but because it was a predictable unpleasant slog apart from the occasional pornographic and/or extremely violent scene. Truth be told, those brief and intense moments are the only thing that landed this movie on "most disturbing" lists. It wasn't fun to watch or even interesting, but there was a commendable elegance to the story and its message that kept it from being a complete waste of time. I guess a D+ is where this one ends up.
13 Sins (2014): In this American remake of a Thai thriller, we follow the story of Elliot, who is little different from Craig in "Cheap Thrills": recently fired, drowning in debt, needs money to start a family. While Craig's ticket to the good life is a heavily intoxicated David Koechner, Elliot receives his escalating dares on a mysterious cellphone, with the late George Coe (RIP, Woodhouse) telling him he's on a game show and under constant surveillance. The payouts rise much faster in "13 Sins" than in "Cheap Thrills", but the tasks are also more gut-wrenchingly evil and difficult. Other than that, it's kind of the same movie only less funny, entirely unsexy, and more twisted. It's dark, but not haunting. It's clever, but not thought-provoking. It's got Ron Perlman, but in a role that encourages the viewer to take him seriously, which I'm pretty sure can't be done. And it does something I can't stand: a character says the (rather obvious) theme and message of the movie verbatim. It made me roll my eyes in "Martyrs", a film with much greater ambitions, and it doesn't work any better here. Mildly entertaining and occasionally cringe-inducing, but nothing original or special. C-.
Jacob's Ladder (1990): Tim Robbins stars in this reality-bending story as Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran who, like Billy Pilgrim, has become unstuck in time. Nobody from his battalion in Da Nang can remember anything about their last night in action, and many of them are regularly pursued by demons in their present-day lives. Unless those demons are hallucinations, or unless all of Jacob's fellow soldiers are all lying to him. Or unless any of a million other possibilities. For extra gut-wrench points, Jacob also has to deal with a divorce from a woman he still loves, a new girlfriend who is less than patient with his crazy, and the accidental death of his son, played by Macaulay Culkin. That brings me to the next notable thing about "Jacob's Ladder": check out this murderer's row of moderately famous people who were bit characters here before they went on to bigger things- Ving Rhames, S. Epatha Merkerson, Jason Alexander, Eriq La Salle, Kyle Gass, Lewis Black, and Culkin. Simply stunning. While the acting, cinematography, hair, and wardrobe is all very 1990 and embarrassingly so, the method of storytelling and (for lack of a better term) the mindfuckiness of this movie was well ahead of its time. I didn't think it was a keep-you-guessing movie. I thought it was just about Agent Orange, paranoia of the government, and PTSD, which was impressive in and of itself because PTSD wasn't really a thing in 1990. But it blindsided me and zoomed out my perspective multiple times, and I was always happy my predictions were wrong. Really good work, apart from the 1990 hair and 1990 stereotypes of blacks and Jews in New York City. I'll give it a B.
Kynodontas (or Dogtooth) (2009): Finally, we get to a film that delivers what I'm looking for. Instead of blood and gore, Greece's "Kynodontas" sets up a ludicrously insane premise, commits to it fully, and then just lets the characters live it. A mother and father of three have raised their now-grown children to believe that the world outside their fenced-in manor is uninhabitable, full of untold danger, and they aren't safe anywhere but home. It focuses on the beyond-naive, childlike personalities of a grown man and two grown women, raised in an alternate reality and never taught to question it- or, indeed, to think at all. The acting of the son and daughters is really quite remarkable in that the characters only have three emotions each, all of them in their most juvenile form: terror, glee, and puppy-like unconditional trust. Their faces remain guileless and without a trace of nuance for ninety minutes. They tussle and chase each other like toddlers one minute, then exchange pseudo-sexual favors for trinkets the next. It's like a prison movie, except the inmates don't know they're in prison and they love and adore their captors like gods. It goes to some shocking and taboo places- of course it does- but the movie's real accomplishment is establishing, then exploring, the set of conditions that allows the three main characters to grow to adult age without ever being close to truly human. Fascinating, compelling, original, and utterly alien. I give it a B+. It could have been an A, and one of the best movies this project has led me to, but I felt like the premise had potential to be infinitely twisted, and the twistiness was all too finite.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011): This one's been on my list since I started this series of posts, but I was saving it because everything I read had me convinced it would be one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen. Having seen it, I now wish I'd saved it for last. "Kevin" works on a different emotional axis from the other highlights of this series, and on that axis, it's a goddamn masterpiece. It stars Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as Eva and Franklin, the parents of the titular character, and we see Kevin at three different phases of his life: a silent, defiant toddler, an increasingly vulgar and hateful young boy, and finally as the sometimes charming, sometimes casually violent adolescent. We know from the start that Kevin does something horrific, as the film isn't chronological. We see Eva driving toward flashing police lights. We see her trying to remove red paint that somebody splashed all over her house. We see total strangers curse her out in public. Interspersed with those scenes of the fallout, we watch Kevin grow up into a psychopath, his hate and rage focused almost entirely on Eva while Franklin remains convinced he's normal. Thanks largely to Jasper Newell, who plays 6-8 year old Kevin with a startling lack of humanity, you feel like you're in the room sharing an uncomfortable silence with the characters for most of the movie. Director Lynne Ramsey fills every setting with red at one point or another: with paint on the house, with police lights, in a grocery store in front of shelves of tomato sauce, or even in flashbacks to the Tomatina festival to show a pre-motherhood Eva as a happy, young, well-off world traveler. The red makes the film physically hard to watch; as the characters deal with their own internal trauma, the constant of the color burns your eyes as if to warn you away from watching through to the end. This boldness turns individual screenshots of the movie into works of art, even without context. After each interaction between Kevin and Eva you're more tense and less patient, wondering what form Kevin's hatred will take as it goes from a simmer to a boil. The climax and resolution are extraordinary, and like the other truly worthwhile films this project has shown me, it left me with one horrifically beautiful and indelible image. Marion hits bottom in "Requiem for a Dream". The final shot of "Inside". The kiss goodbye in "Funny Games". And now, Kevin's curtain call. It's these moments that I'm looking for whenever I start to watch a potential fucked-up film. It could have wound up anywhere from A to F given the content, but this movie is everything I hoped it would be. The plot structure, cinematography, casting, acting, and even the sound are all deserving of the highest praise. I'm giving it an A. Along with the aforementioned "Inside", "Requiem", and "Funny Games", we have a new entrant in the top tier of disturbing cinema.
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