Reviews

I was expecting just another jolly slashing-of-teens-for-pointless-revenge type of movie, but this is more than that. It becomes a rather awkward but powerful meditation on the nature of death and dying, and perhaps it takes a real-life experience to make sense of what the director is trying to do here. Death does have a smell. Dying has a smell. And it's a smell like nothing else. In the western world we are so divorced from death, which happens in antiseptic medical environments, that it is unusual for people not habituated to corpses (the police, the funeral home worker etc) to encounter the utterly unique and redolent stench of the dead body.

So up until the twist, here we have a by-numbers bump-them-off in gruesome ways procession. And then the explanation, a series of crashes, utterly transforms all that has gone before. The grotesque damage done to each person is re-contextualised as the consequence of injuries sustained when solid machinery and frail human flesh come into close contact. And this process - the primary horror film succeeded by the secondary prosaic explanation - shifts the relationship of the viewer to both parts. The obscene injuries we accept as de rigeur in slasher films become something utterly different when viewed as the product of a road accident, an everyday event across the world, and invests the latter with more significance as a result. This is not a trite twist, it is one which seeks to shift our perception of 'ordinary' violent death.

There are more than a few things in the movie which don't make a lot of sense. For me, the main one is why the RV driver is going around shooting the not-quite-dead when he is one of the victims. Does the heart attack provide any clue to this? But there is much to admire here, for all its flaws, as it strives to give a visceral experience for the viewer of the process of violent death and to convey something of the experience of being on the verge between life and death and of coming back into life. To do this via a metaphor which is grounded in the most mundane and most lingering element of a death, the sense of smell, is a neat way of envisioning what is nearest and furthest from us, death.

Many others have commented on this "homage" to all satires of a political bent and its hodge-podge of referenced dictators, and I can only agree. Pol Pot, Hess, Mussolini, Caligula, Winston Smith, they're all here, filtered through a film school montage of techniques and borrowings. It's all very unsatisfactory, character motivations are opaque and inconsistent, and the tone is uneven, uncertain if it is satirical comedy or mockumentary expose.

The ostensible message identified by other reviewers of the movie - that all resistance to tyrants by ordinary people is futile - is, however, less clear to me. Yhe very fragmented nature of the final ten minutes or so seems not to have been commented on either here or in professional reviews. To write it off as a descent into madness, as it has been, seems to ignore a certain poignancy and trickiness of the closing scene, where the daughter leaves her father in a flat on a council estate (looking like somewhere in South London), gets into the lift and weeps. Are we meant to conclude that everything that has gone before is the delusion of a madman, typing his story endlessly to the exclusion of the real? Or that the hypercoloured parody of the bulk of the film is a metaphor for the life that we Winstons live in apparent freedom but actual oppression? A block of flats, uniform, utilitarian, where people try and make a life for themselves lacks the drama of a North Korea or Cambodia, and the censorship and mental poverty may be invisible to us since we are not starving or sent to re-education camps or explicitly tortured. Maybe I am being too generous to this very flawed film, but the ending has left me with many questions than anything else in the movie, since it seems to require us to go back and look again at the rest of the movie. Are we so remote from this exaggerated, fictional country? Is it just a matter of degree?

How can a movie combine elements which are so striking with those which are so pedestrian and ludicrous? Seeing Chuck being a little girl was macabre. But so much of the middle action was utterly predictable. Best bad line - when the killer's identity is revealed, the girl squeaks 'You!'. As if anybody could be surprised.

And yet. And yet. It thwarts audience expectations by killing off the heroic and courageous, and keeping alive the whining weakling.

I found myself convinced that the entire genesis of the film began from the premise of the closing shot, and the action was an exercise in how to get to that - admittedly chilling - image.

Deeply flawed, but not without redeeming moments. And even the odd scare.