¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019
Candidate #11
(January 2018)
"The victim has to be a prostitute, but what type? And she has to speak English. The terror must be in
English.”
Reed (It Comes at Night’s Christopher Abbott) is a man up to no good.
His meticulously murderous plans (which involve
rope, chloroform, and an icepick) go soaring out the window though when he meets Jackie (Mia Wasikowska).
That’s the basic set-up of Piercing, the sophomore feature of Nicolas Pesce, on the heels of
his audacious and disturbing debut, The
Eyes of My Mother.
Pesce adapts the script from the novel Piasshingu by Murakami Ryū, the man also responsible for bringing us Ōdishon, upon which Miike Takashi’s Audition
is based.
Let’s let that sink in for a moment, shall we?
“Look at your face… the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen, I just want
to hit you. Not just like a little slap on the cheek, I want to punch you with
my fist as hard as I can.”
Now, having established Piercing’s pedigree, I should make it clear at the offset that it
is not as viscerally unsettling as The
Eyes of My Mother, nor is it as shockingly violent as Audition (though it does
have its twisted moments).
And while there are similarities between the
narrative arcs of Piercing and Audition, Pesce’s adaptation is clearly
its own kind of animal.
“Imagine me lying here and you looking down at me. And these sheets
getting wet with all sorts of things.
“Just think about what that could be like.
“Think about it.”
Of particular note are the stylistic flourishes
Pesce deploys, among them, transporting the action to an unspecified setting
composed of a cityscape of miniatures, and utilizing some tracks from classic giallo, among them, Goblin cuts from
Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso and Tenebre.
(Pesce himself has described Piercing as “… very much my take on a giallo film.”)
He also subverts the audience’s instinctive
reactions to a pair of easy listening standards in two notable sequences in the
film, juxtaposing the overly familiar music against a canny use of sound to
evoke substantial levels of disquiet.
“I mean… odds say you should probably just kill her no matter what.”
So if all that sounds like your cup of red ant--and
so long as you keep in mind that Piercing
is not as extreme a horror title as
either The Eyes of My Mother or Audition--then you’d do well to check
this one out.
“You don’t have to be afraid.”
Parting Shot: I’ve never been a particular fan of
the Ju-On films that I’ve seen, which
have always struck me as far more interested in scares and shocks rather than
character and plot.
The English-language remakes helmed by Ju-On creator Shimizu Takashi weren’t
much of an improvement in that area either.
But with Pesce taking the reins on the Grudge reboot, I’m mighty curious to see
what he brings to the table.
(Piercing OS’
courtesy of impawards.com.)
No comments:
Post a Comment