¡Qué horror! 2012
Candidate # 31
CHAINED
(August 2012)
Now, for those
of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.
“But what about
his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.
Fine.
The Jennifer
Lynch Scorecard:
I wasn’t overly
fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena,
but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance,
so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror! 2009
list.
While I
appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still waiting
to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production, Despite the Gods.)
And now, we come
to Chained.
In the past
year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial
killer thrillers, Chained stands out
because while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing
Carl Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply
just wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really
about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and
the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the child’s
mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance
star, Julia Ormond).
There’s a
searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s
94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’
oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.
As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing
script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping
into the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re
witness to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of
their motivations.
This is a
disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that
plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.
Here’s hoping Lynch
keeps on keepin’ on…
(Chained OS courtesy of
bloody-disgusting.com.)
