In short: Fear X (2003)

This is the movie that drove Nicolas Winding Refn's production company into bankruptcy in the director's first attempt to get a foothold in English language cinema without betraying his aesthetic interests.

And really, it's not much of a surprise Fear X flopped pretty hard, for where the film's basic plot description ("lost man played by John Turturro attempts to understand the murder of his wife by finding her murderer") suggests your run-of-the-mill vengeance thriller, the actual film is working hard to subvert the vengeance thriller with the power of the Weird and the metaphorical. Refn uses a rigorously composed visual style that hints at the surreal despite - or perhaps even because of - its rigidity. That style turns the quotidian into the unreal by the sheer power of hyperstylization, pretty clearly not caring one bit for mainstream interpretations of how "suspense" or "excitement" are built in a thriller. That doesn't mean that Fear X isn't suspenseful or exciting, for these seemingly lost elements reappear once a viewer has accepted the non-generic way the film is built, and just goes with it.

After a point (ironically shortly after the film pretends to become clearer and more "realistic"), it becomes utterly unclear what part of the film is a dream, or a hallucination, and what part "real" (as much as anything in a film ever can be real, of course); questions of truth and reality are, as they often seem to be in Refn's movies, completely dependent on one's interpretation.

To - depending on one's position on this sort of thing - either add insult to injury or cheese to your wine, Refn's film refuses the easy way out of an ending that explains anything at all. In fact, the ending Fear X delivers so steadfastly refuses to even show the audience an important part of what is or isn't happening (though there are enough hints to build one's own ending if one is so inclined) I can easily imagine a nice percentage of the film's audience actually hating the director for it. I for my part rather want to applaud him.

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Three Films Make A Post: GHOULISH! GORY! GHASTLY!

Drive (2011): Well, I doubt anybody needs me to fall in with the chorus of praise for Nicolas Winding Refn's film; its class, the excellence of Ryan Gosling's (with the rest of the cast certainly not to be ignored) performance and the quality of Refn's direction are self-evident. What isn't as often mentioned when talking about Drive is how perfect a fit Refn as a director is for adapting a James Sallis novel (despite the changes). Both excel at telling sparse seeming, yet complex stories who only look minimalist when you're not looking at them closely enough. Both men's work reminds of poetry, if you can imagine poetry that's as shockingly and horrifyingly violent as Drive becomes during its second half. I don't generally call films masterpieces (because I don't believe in them or the canonical order in art their existence implies), but with this one I'm really tempted.

Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan (2006): Despite its awkward title, Mike (Absentia - my write-up of that film will be coming up shortly) Flanagan's short film about a man (Scott Graham) haunted by his demons, a white room and an evil mirror is a really excellent piece of work. Tight, weird with a capital W, and as dynamically directed (and edited) as anything taking place in a single room - and, one could argue one person's mind - can be, it's the sort of thing I'm bound to enjoy. It's also the sort of thing that could only work as an independently produced short film - adding anything to it on a budgetary level or in the number of script pages would only reduce the film's tenseness and focus.

Red Balloon (2010): Another short film (available to see here), but of a very different style than Oculus. This film about the dangers of babysitting is slick in a Hollywood way where Oculus seems more personal, pushing all suspense buttons with professional care and craft. Actually, it's the sort of short that seems made as a demonstration that yes, one can be trusted with money for a larger production, and less because there's a story to be told for which the short format is ideal. It's hardly the fault of the two directors I'm temperamentally inclined to find exactly such a thing very, very boring, even if it is very, very well crafted (which Red Balloon is).

 

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In short: Valhalla Rising (2009)

It's the early Middle Ages, in Scotland. A mute, one-eyed man - called, if called at all "One Eye" - (Mads Mikkelsen) has been the captive of a small clan of people prone to sitting around staring into the emptiness of the Highlands for years. They use his disturbing prowess at fighting in ritual fights against other clans, but treat the man at best as a very dangerous animal. A boy (Maarten Stevenson) of the clan helps One Eye escape his chains, giving him the opportunity to slaughter his captors quite effectively.

Afterwards, One Eye and the boy wander through the hills until they meet a small group of violently minded Christians who are, as they say, on their way to the Holy Land. The man and the boy join the group, and soon find themselves on a ship bound wherever their hosts think that Holy Land might be. One Eye is given to visions with an undertone of doom, so he doesn't seem at all surprised when their ship gets stuck in an unnatural fog bank that envelopes the vessel for days on end. Some of his companions soon think that One Eye is cursed and leading them all into hell, but the man is not the sort of person one wins a violent encounter with.

After a long time, the fog lifts, and the group finds itself in a place that might be America, or hell. Obviously, danger awaits, most of it of a more spiritual nature, but there are also arrows.

An audience expecting Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising to be the movie equivalent to Viking Metal (not that there's anything wrong with that for me, mind you) will probably be disappointed by the film, as will friends of films with obvious and "realistic" (whatever that means) plotting that make themselves so clear their contents might as well be just read about instead of experienced.

Refn's film is quite unlike that sort of movie. It's more of a very violent art house film that shows enticing possibilities for more than one interpretation of its meaning, but isn't willing to play the meaning-reducing game of allegory. Which doesn't mean that there aren't elements of allegory to be found here - it would need a certain type of IMDB reviewer to miss the religious connotations - but that only seeing the allegorical possibilities would close one's view on other aspects of the film, and very possibly the part of the movie going experience that is about seeing and feeling. Large parts of the movie add up to more than mere allegory and make use of the fact that everything we see on screen can be a metaphor and something concrete in the reality of the film at once, leaving the viewer to decide on the film's meaning instead of shoving it in her face.

Much of the Valhalla Rising plays in the spaces between what's real and what's metaphorical, and I think it will work best for an audience going into it with a very open mind, willing to confront the tension between the film's gritty violence, the awe-inspiring bleakness of its locations and its indifference towards the expectation of how narrative or acting are supposed to be done on screen.

I for my part found Valhalla utterly fascinating, and Refn's insistence on making a movie that's not too readily accessible without being hermetic admirable.

 

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