VINYAN
Stars - Emanuelle Beart, Rufus Sewell, Julie Dreyfuss
Director - Fabrice du Welz
Memorable Quote - 'It's not him.'
Review: The opening scene is unbelievably tense, but beautiful, and then it all breaks into that calmness: genius. However, I found it quite hard to understand from the outset - without subtitles, all those accents are quite challenging. Then in the taxi and the clubs, there's so much extra noise it's also hard to understand what they are saying. We are soon faced with a terrifying ladyboy who may very well be leading this couple to their death, but they follow him anyway... hmm. I think the stupidity factor is going to appear very quickly here. And good God, it soons becomes especially irritating that you just can't hear. Thankfully that issue clears up after a while, but when it does you soon begin to realise that everything has a very creepy undertone. The woman on the boat watches them suspiciously, then looks away and starts to cry out - what about? Their guide is brutally murdered by the ever so slightly amazing Mr Afro, aka Thaksin Gao. Children throwing stones are throwing them at a corpse. Beautiful floating lanterns symbolize angry, restless souls. The men are involved in the sex trade. It all builds up a picture that makes you wonder if this couple really know what they're letting themselves in for.
The journey on the boat, passing the forest, was well-filmed, and very pretty. The only thing is that everything seems to be build up with no release. I would say the only two real points where the build up is justified are the docks scene, and the burning building scene. The rest - the creepy noises, the low-pitched humming, etc etc, builds up to nothing, leaving you not very scared at all.
The dream sequences are just plain crazy, basically. They're all very weird and yet often quite pretty, like Jeanne's little paintings etc in her sketchbook. However, as things slowly turn from bad to worse you can't help but feel they've brought it all upon themselves. If you let these conmen know you have more money, they will want the rest of your money. If you turn completely crazy and set things on fire etc etc, they will simply ditch you. That's just common sense. As emotionally charged as the dock scene is, it is overshadowed with a feeling that this woman is destroying her life purposefully, rather than the other men destroying it for her. I also get the feeling that the nudity and sex are there for the director, not the storyline.
When it really starts to get freaky is when Paul's visions begin to come true. I don't know about you, but nothing says 'run very far away' to me like the sight of a wild gang of children stringing a man up and pelting you with his teeth, catching another man in a trap and burying him alive, and generally following you like a little horde of cannibals. Seriously, what where they thinking? Run the hell away!
Still, even with the build-up, the ending was a little far-fetched, I think. It was a fantasy, not a real story. Yes, it's true that you could explain all this away with psychological readings, but for many reasons I don't buy it. Why kill him and not her? Why allow the children to kill him? Why become one of them instead of actually looking for your son? While it seems that she was deranged, she always realised before that the children were not Joshua, so why should it be possible for her to imagine that several hundred children are all the same boy? Mm, not really all that scary a film thanks to this sort of thing. You find yourself wondering where the hell this is going instead of actually feeling scared.
So-so, in the end, but with wonderful filming and beautiful scenes. Which is sad, because it means it could have been so much better. Anyway, I guess it was nice to see Beart doing something else, since Manon des Sources and the Three Musketeers movie. 2.5/5
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