By Keri O’Shea
Whatever happened to the ‘new wave of French horror’, then? I guess the wave just broke. After dominating the horror scene just shy of a decade ago, turning everything, everywhere into a blue-filtered torture fest overlaid with religious anxiety and women in very functional underwear (okay, I’m paraphrasing, but still…) it seems that the enfants terrible of that frenetic burst of activity have lost their way, or at least a lot of their funding. Truth be told though, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury since the get-go. When the whole world seemed to be entranced by Inside (2007), I saw it as deliberate and clumsy button-mashing which took the old apparent truism that pregnant women are the pinnacle of vulnerability and then protracted that agony for ninety minutes. However, I loved Livide (2011), a fantastical, rather beautiful tale which has far more in common with Pan’s Labyrinth than Martyrs – plus a good balance between deference to films which had gone before, and its own striking novelty.
Which brings us to Among the Living (Aux Yeux Des Vivants), a film which has apparently ‘rested’ for some time since it was made, but is finally about to get a DVD release. Ours not to reason why these things take so much time on occasion, but anyway, the opening scenes certainly appear familiar. There’s Beatrice Dalle again, there’s an unhappy domestic scene again – and as the moments pass by, we understand that the heavily-pregnant maman is displeased with her lot. Her husband is a whisky-swilling layabout who seems to enjoy sitting in front of lowest-common-denominator science shows on TV, and as for her son, little Klarence, we soon glean that there’s something not quite right about him. So, before too long, maman goes apeshit (of course), decides motherhood isn’t for her, stabbing herself brutally in the abdomen (of course), which prompts father and son to retrieve the foetus (of course) and head off into the outside world to ‘make a new family’.
All of this feels rather like a showreel of the Most Shocking Moments from Inside, which neither engages nor shocks, anymore. I appreciate that films can often be under pressure to put some significant ‘hooks’ in the opening scenes, but seeing a pregnant belly being split open again – well, that whole anatomical horror has been done, and in more convincing detail. (Also, if I was going to split hairs further, I’d say that if you really want that sort of anatomical detail then you might want to remember that – as awesome as she is, and criminally underused here – Beatrice Dalle has now reached her half-century, and would be an unlikely mother-to-be.) After this sequence, though, the film changes tack quite dramatically. Skip forward to a new scene…
We have, for the moment, forgotten the dysfunctional duo from earlier: now, we’re pitched in with a group of floppy-haired teenagers, and it’s the last day of school. They’re little rebels, these lads, launching into a food fight as soon as we get a good look at them, before deciding to cut class, heading off into the idyllic, sun-drenched French countryside instead. Sure, they try to burn down a farmer’s barn for a laugh, but it’s all just hijinks. They escape, then head to a place called Blackwoods – a disused film studio, and a place which accordingly looks quite good on camera. Things take a turn for the worse when they espy what seems to be a kidnapping situation: a masked man has arrived on the set with a gagged woman in the boot of his car. The boys find their collective conscience, and decide to help. This throws them into the path of the father and son from earlier – and Stuff Happens.
Woo, boy. Okay, what can I say that’s positive about Among the Living? There are definitely good aspects – it’s just that certain other things overshadow these. As alluded to above, then, this is a typically well-shot, well-lit and well-framed movie. Bustillo and Maury clearly have a painterly eye and they show this off to great advantage throughout. The settings used, particularly in the first half of the film, are very evocative and look frankly great on camera. It’s also a very well acted film, with kudos to the trio of young actors who have been given a lot to grapple with here; in places, the script can feel like a rather clunky take on teenspeak, but who knows? Perhaps things have been very much lost in translation.
The serious sticking point with all of this, however, is that I don’t think you can merge foeticide with Boys’ Own Adventures. Tonally, Among the Living is a gamble – and it’s a gamble which just doesn’t work. Having gone through the motions of a torture porn intro, the film turns into The Goonies – and can you, hand on heart, imagine an outcome where the Goonies or The Monster Squad are pitched into a world where pursuit, torture and murder are real possibilities? If you have some love for the kind of kids’ fantasy adventure which you may have grown up on in the 80s, then this is a question you’ll need to square with yourself before seeing this oddball film. (I’d imagine that the BBFC would have a few raised eyebrows at the spectre of violence to minors as well, but maybe it’s okay as long as it’s not sexualised… what a time to be alive!)
And, speaking of sexualisation… where do Bustillo and Maury get their ideas about women, exactly? Nothing I’ve seen of them so far has convinced me that they’re anything other than giggling schoolboys who’ve found the ‘human reproduction’ section in an edition of Biology for Nine Year Olds. We have so far an unconvincing line-up of maternal monsters, hysterics, feckless (pregnant) victims, and then the babysitter here – oh, my. I’m usually the first to point out that men are and have always been absolutely capable of penning interesting, convincing female characters, but here’s the exception to that rule. Attempted shock tactics, blatant misunderstandings and ultimately very unconvincing developments.
Ultimately, this film is so frustrating simply because for every step forward it takes, it takes two back. I’m really happy to see a group of boys as the lead characters, but the fee you pay for that is that you see just how deeply conservative, not progressive, so much of French horror is – where families get picked off in order of how non-nuclear they are, for instance, or where women are knocked up, slutty or heroically maternal enough to get bloody in a white vest, despite having been given next to no characterisation along the way. Bustillo and Maury clearly have great strengths, but now that their trump cards have been presented more than once, I’d love to see them branch out in some other direction.
Among the Living is released on DVD by Metrodome on 7th March 2016.