A ruthless businesswoman and mad scientist, Dr Ruben, is abducting young women as part of a gruesome bio-hacking experiment to reverse the ageing process. It's The Fountain of Youth designed to ensure she lives forever and makes a fortune selling the idea to daft, rich people! Our story starts with Mia (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen) and her husband Thomas (Anders Heinrichsen) as we eavesdrop on their strained marriage. Mia enjoys BDSM and aggressive roleplay, but Thomas doesn't.
Thomas is as similarly ruthless as Dr Ruben - he dabbles in financials, successfully enough to be investing in her madcap scheme. We witness some bitter exchanges between the two as they both feel they have the upper hand and clearly disagree on her methodology. Thomas disappears one day. Mia finds a picture on his laptop of a human arm with a ‘branding’ on it and goes off to investigate, having tracked his whereabouts via Google Maps.
Bad move, Mia. When she gets to the facility and breaks in to find Thomas, Dr Ruben's henchmen (The Dog and The Pig) grab her, strip her naked and brand her too - throwing her into an underground lockup from which there is clearly no escape. She discovers that the Youth Supplement is extracted from the stem cells of human foetuses. In order to ensure a constant supply, Dr Fruitloop forcibly impregnates any women they can grab via artificial insemination and keeps them locked up until they can produce! We discover, in the end, dozens of women in various stages of pregnancy, all locked up in cages.
Dr Ruben tries very hard to convince Thomas that he didn't care much about Mia anyway and that the work is much more important - and would help him too, as he could reduce his age (and hopefully the size of his nose)! In a moment of weakness, he agrees to help her. This is the point at which all hell lets loose in terms of graphic violence, with not much left to the imagination. We witness The Dog and The Pig going to work to quell any dissent from the women, who have no idea what is happening.
What follows is a gore-filled rampage through the facility. Blood, guts and death follow as the girls find a way to break out and get their revenge. Mia confronts Thomas, who has by now, sensibly, realised the error of his ways and priorities as they all join forces to wipe out those responsible for all this madness.
The film includes several highly disturbing sequences - forced insemination showing women strapped down and treated like livestock, the aforementioned branding where a woman is held down as a red-hot iron is used to brand a serial number into her skin and The Dog and The Pig engaging in various acts of sadism, including beatings and psychological degradation. There are various scenes involving needles, surgical tools and the aftermath of ‘extractions’ performed in unsanitary, terrifying conditions. Then comes the eye-for-an-eye revenge violence, including stabbings, blunt force trauma and Mia using the tools of her imprisonment to dispatch her captors in fascinatingly bloody fashion!
So yes, not for the faint-hearted! It certainly questions the line between entertainment and Torture Porn. On the other hand, I'm betting the cast approached it with tongue-in-cheek! Along with the special effects team, they likely had a bit of a laugh doing all this. Signe Egholm Olsen was clearly enjoying her role as the sinister Ruben and was very convincing. The players depicting The Dog and The Pig were clearly having fun too, portraying a couple of not-very-bright paid-muscle types, carefully selected so that the characters enjoy their jobs a little too much!
It's dark and the sets are grimy, dirty, foul and unpleasant - even for cows or dogs to endure, let alone women in this ‘human farmyard’. Anyway, if you fancy some loony escapism and can stomach all this madness and gore, go for it. It's a bit of an education and probably in my top (or bottom) five horror films of all time! It's horrible, but don't look away!
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