Monday, 4 November 2024

Thanatomorphose (2012)

Well, if last night's The Substance was bonkers, tonight's film was crazy ape-shit bonkers! Streaming on various channels (including for free on Roku) this is a low-budget body-horror written and directed by Éric Falardeau and, what looks like, a group of his mates! If you watch the credits at the end, most is revealed!

Apparently it's become a bit of a cult movie and has won various awards, coming out of Canadian art-house. It stars Kayden Rose as a girl out for a good time, who has just rented a flat and has a night of sex with her abusive boyfriend.

She wakes up in the morning and her skin is starting to rot. Apparently that's what the French titular word means - decomposition. From thereon in, each day is the same, only a bit worse. It all takes place in her apartment and the viewer is never allowed out, so claustrophobic. As she decays and decays, various parts of her body and bodily fluids escape, fall off, seep and flow out. You get the idea - it's all about gore and (for some, no doubt) stomach-churning special effects. Seems like I'm immune!

Even before any of this starts, she does like to be naked, spends almost the whole film with nothing on and the viewer is able to see pretty much all of her. Inside and out. She likes her sex and even when she's falling apart later on she finds time and energy enough to get herself off fantasising about smashing in the boyfriend's skull with a hammer! (He gets his comeuppance in the end, by the way!)

They seem to have some mate also who's got a violin who pops up on a regular basis, between the silence and sound effects of the body-gore, to squeak a haunting string composition or two. Most of the camerawork is handheld as it sweeps around following our main character, who is called Laura. Apparently! All of the actors seem to be pretty second-rate, wooden, and the script is diabolical - but maybe that's part of the point of the creation too.

I'm not really quite sure if there's any kind of message in there - I think more so a lot of fun that this crowd have had putting it together, playing with special effects and creating a gore-fest. As usual, I tend to find this kind of film quite funny these days, but I'm sure many will be queasy! That's about it really. If you can't watch without feeling sick, then best not to. Great Halloween fun!

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