No doubt, the first 5-10 minutes are absolute balls filmmaking. Fever dreaming, life in hell, terribly original homemade horror. Grandrieux uses the camera as an actual third character, an unreliable narrator, provocateur, and rapist. It looks dark and shabby and nakedly video. It's ugly, plain n simple. When not puppeteering for children, our protagonist moonlights as a serial killer with an interest in prostitutes. It's cold and psychologically bereft of insight. It's nearly perfect.
Cue the emaciated remains of Elina Lowensohn as an unsinkable redeemer-love object, and the film spreads its seems to reveal a soupy mix of utterly conventional sympathetic killer plot constantly interrupted by out-of-focus visual experimentation. Even Grandrieux's dedication to darkness wanes as the film plods on. Literally, the initial unrelenting murkiness is traded for a painfully eclectic variety of visual schema. Metaphorically, theme and tone gradually turn reflective, associative, psychological, intimate, and character-focused, as the horribly base mad-hell avant-porn of the film's first breaths is rendered predictably human and conflicted by the end. In short, horror is described, not exploited. A shame.
It doesn't help that the film is an absolute mess, over-filled with an amateur's ideas and as easily seduced by cheap "artsy" camera tricks as by any sense of coherent rhythm. I can't help but feel that for all the narrative "ambiguity" and visual flair, the effect is of an overall less experimental film. Upon finishing it I was reminded of how much greater was Lars Von Trier's overlooked The Element of Crime--a postmodern crime film equally as enthralled with its own motivations--for establishing a cruel consistency and letting it subvert itself, rather than yank the viewer every which way and call it a maze.
After too long in this murky hall of mirrors, one starts to see stars: Gaspar Noe fakes Dogme 95 in a mash-up of Bruno Dumont fucking Stan Brakhage to the tune of credit card commercial parodies and bad pop anglais.
And nary a blink is blunk when Grandrieux lamely re-re-appropriates Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1) for an epic post-club scene reminiscent of badly lit and under-rehearsed Blair Witch-era Cassavetes. But excessive referentiality is hardly this film's original sin, as allusions are only there if you will them. Sombre only looks like bits of so much better cinema because it commits to nothing but a constant flurry of nearly good-to-great ideas.
All of this is not to say that bits and pieces won't stick with most viewers. There's so much attempted here that at least some of it is jarringly effective. Eye-rolling scenes of true idiocy rub shoulders with disarming half-genius. And thankfully casual brutality remains throughout the film as unpredictable as it is constant. At the very least, there's real promise on display, and Sombre is certainly worth a look. More rewarding, I hope, should be the only film Grandrieux directed since, 2002's La Vie Nouvelle.
In the school of narrative ellipses unfortunately, the end product of this film is more Lynne Ramsay than Claire Denis. Or mostly milk. No chocolat.
1. A song far more memorably abused in the opening epileptic fit of Tony Scott's icy vampire debut, The Hunger.
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