By Keri O’Shea
When a film’s press release name-checks Cronenberg and Buttgereit, it has immediately placed itself in a risky position; any movie mentioned in the same breath as these bastions of body horror has a hell of a way to go to prove itself, and you often can’t help thinking it’d be better if a film came in quieter, kept below the parapet and let its qualities speak for themselves. It would certainly have been better in this instance, as unfortunately Thanatomorphose, despite its cool title and interesting-on-paper premise, is simply not up to the challenge. Body horror, yes, but with severe limitations.
After a night of bruise-inducing sex which is refracted through a trippy, psychedelic array of filters and colours, we meet our nameless female protagonist (played by Kayden Rose) and find her fairly nonchalant about her injuries. She seems fairly unresponsive to most things, actually – her activity partner’s attitude towards her, her shitty landlord, her friend who seems desperate to become a slightly more considerate friend-with-benefits…that is, until her injuries, rather than healing, begin to mysteriously worsen. Soon her fingernails are dropping off, her hair is shedding – in fact, she seems to be decomposing. At first, she’s terrified – but soon enough she seems to being finding it all quite liberating. The worse she looks, the better she feels, and the more able she seems to feel to put things in her life order once and for all.
See, all of that sounds original and challenging, but the challenging nature of making that storyline effective is not borne out by the way it’s handled on screen. The vivid, promising opening sequence gives way to a long series of domestic scenes which, despite the sheer amount of nudity involved (more anon), I can only describe as turgid. I tried very hard, I looked very hard, but I found myself switching off. I would say that the first twenty minutes of this movie are make-or-break time; had characterisation occurred at this point, and had I been able to feel anything at all for the lead, then what eventually happens to her might have had the sort of impact you imagine is possible when you look at the blurb. Of course, it could be that the way in which our protagonist is kept remote from the audience is actually deliberate and intended to make a point about her relationship to herself, but that doesn’t come across successfully. I never felt sure whether the flatness of the role was aim or accident, but I was definitely repelled by the barrage of ‘girl walks around apartment’ sequences and didn’t feel that these moved the film along in any expedient way. Any film which takes place in such a limited space with a small cast really needs to go some in order to achieve what it sets out to do. Editing takes place through these scenes, sure, but the jumps forward keep us within the same mundane scenes. The pace soon drops away to nothing.
And yeah, the fact that Kayden Rose is naked or at least has her ass out in most of these scenes could, I am sure, also be intentional in the sense that the director and writer, Éric Falardeau, wants to make the point that her character is only ever seen as a sex object, or something. Except I can’t quite believe that. I’m very far from being sensitive to T&A in cinema, believe me, but the way it occurs here felt skeezy and unpleasant in ways which are quite hard to quantify, though I’ll try.
It’s not that the nudity is simply plentiful; it’s not that it so frequently seems like it has been crowbarred into proceedings with little or no justification; it’s not even that it is badly shot and edited. It’s all of those things, only lethally combined with the non-entity status of the character – the only character we really get, despite a handful of small roles. If any filmmaker is trying to make a point that this woman – or even women in general – have to literally go to pieces in order to reclaim their bodies, then this grand point feels redundant when it feels like the filmmaker is part and parcel of the problem which sees women in that way in the first place. This girl is rendered down into a collage of butt shots and passive utterances; if the intention was to present the audience with more than that, then it’s not there.
And yet, this is a film which seems to aim high. The psychedelic asides, though few and far between, and the fact that the film is broken into three named chapters, seem to be giving a nod to filmmakers like Noé and Von Trier, rather than more conventional horror fare. Nothing wrong with being ambitious, of course, but perhaps getting the basics right first would be best. There are some good things going on here; the make up SFX as Rose’s character begins to putrefy are genuinely rather good considering they’ll have been done on a tight budget, and the idea itself is good, which perhaps means that more ideas may spring from the same source in future. However, in Thanatomorphose the centre cannot hold, and the finished product itself goes from lividity to rigor mortis to decomposition.
Thanatomorphose will be released in the UK on DVD and iTunes by Monster Pictures on 25th November 2013.