The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is a tribute to Italian Giallo slasher films of the 60s and 70s. The film begins with a man returning to his apartment after he has been away on business for two weeks, only to find that his wife is missing. The man then tries to find his wife. He searches through her stuff calls, the police, and visits a mysterious lady up on the seventh floor of his building. But things take a turn for the worse when he discovers something that has mysteriously appeared in his apartment. The film then becomes a disjointed serious of dream sequences and flashbacks that become increasingly hard to follow.
The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is second film by the Italian horror duo, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Frozani. And let me just say that these two know what they're doing, the film is very well crafted, the blocking and camera work in this is some of the freshest I've seen in any film from the past few years. The cinematography (shot by Manuel Dacosse) is fantastic. The film is vibrantly colorful, has flawless lighting, and does a great job of getting you up close and personal with the characters in the film. The sound design is also insanely good. There's little dialogue in the film, (we get most of the information about the characters through what we see.) but the void the absence of dialogue has made is filled with some of the most detailed and complex sound design I've heard in a horror film.
But where The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears succeeds in style, it fails in story. With all of its jumping around, cryptic storytelling, and dream sequences it becomes nearly impossible to follow, (at least towards the end.) and thus the film fails to engage its audience. The story in itself wasn't that great to start with, and they never really add anything onto it, if anything they take away from where the story started by making it so confusing and to make it worse they don't do much to try and make you follow their film. Their are aspects of the story that are really good, (like the back story of the lady on the seventh floor.) but on a whole the story is alright at best, and a muddled mess at worst.
While not bad a bad film, The Strange Color of Your Bodies Tears could have been much better than it actually was. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Frozani both definitely have talent, they just need to work on focusing in on a single theme or story, and making it coherent. If they are able to do these two things the film they make will almost definitely be a masterpiece. But for now I'm satisfied with The Strange Color of Your Bodies Tears.
5.9
