This film is certainly unique. It creates a dark and haunting atmosphere against a rural town in the 1950s. It keeps sneaking so many weird and unsettling images into its narrative that by the time the really weird stuff starts you're totally accepting of it. The film opens with a group of cruel boys inflating a hapless frog and then exploding it in the face of a woman, spattering her with blood and frog entrails. That sets the tone.
I was not in the right frame of mind for this. But I cannot utterly dismiss it either. I was taken by the filmmaker's vision, and I had to appreciate his imaginative approach to narrative. But I was expecting the violence to be a little more stylized--actually, it's quite bleak and nihilistic. This film belongs in a pantheon of indigestible films like SALO, brilliant movies to be sure, but hardly the kind of stories to tuck you in at night. This is a compliment, by the way, as SALO is one of my favorite films.
I was not in the right frame of mind for this. But I cannot utterly dismiss it either. I was taken by the filmmaker's vision, and I had to appreciate his imaginative approach to narrative. But I was expecting the violence to be a little more stylized--actually, it's quite bleak and nihilistic. This film belongs in a pantheon of indigestible films like SALO, brilliant movies to be sure, but hardly the kind of stories to tuck you in at night. This is a compliment, by the way, as SALO is one of my favorite films.