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Kraken examines revenge tale 7 DAYS at Sundance 2010!
7 Days.
My God. MY GOD.
So I was able to catch the amazingly disturbing, but beautifully crafted, 7 DAYS (directed by the artfully demented Daniel Grou) here at Sundance 2010. The movie starts out innocently enough; we get to know the Hamel family – father, mother, and adorable little girl, your modern day Cleaver family. After a period of sweet interactions between the three family members, pure dread for them, and us, springs on them from out of nowhere. In one of the most heart breaking, and realistically graphic murder scene recreations I’ve seen since something like Silence of the Lambs, we see a father’s soul utterly shattered as he clutches the brutalized empty shell of a body that was once his sweet little girl. It’s graphic, but necessary I think, to buy him the character capital he needs for us to follow him on the dark path he’s about to take.
The film then goes into a tale of meticulous revenge. The father Bruno (played by Claude Legault) decides to plan and execute a very specific and excruciating sort of revenge on the man who committed this heinous crime against his family. Dr Hamel has the know-how too. Let me put it this way, do not ever screw with a surgeon, he knows where all the little parts go in your body and how best to get to them.
The bulk of the film is centered on the relationship between Dr Hamel and the child murderer he has hanging from a non-descript house basement in the woods. He’s decided to torture the man for the week leading up to, what would have been, his daughter’s 8^th birthday. Now, immediately this description is going to make people write this movie off as another “torture porn” film. First of all, I’ve never understood people latching on to this one kind of story device, separating it and spotlighting as some kind of extreme form of exploitation and labeling it as “porn”. Listen, in a lot of movies characters are tortured in one way or another, either physically or emotionally; this movie explores both kinds.
This movie is also less about the act of torture on screen and more about the lengths a father is willing to go to excise the pain that he has inside him and how long he’s willing to live on the side of darkness to trade evil for evil for some kind of emotional release. Legault’s performance is pitch perfect in all of its subtleties as you see the moral roller coaster his character takes while he’s making the murderer of his little girl, pay for everything he has done, inch by inch.
The filmmaking itself is superb. The cinematography is solid and gives the film an overall tone of melancholy. Grou’s direction really places you right in the middle of the very intimate moments of this film. You can feel the father’s emotional pain, and you also feel every wincing moment of that pain being projected onto his murderous victim.
There is also the sub-plot of the police officer who is trying to hunt down the location of Dr Hamel while having occasional conversations on the phone with the dungeon keeper. The conversations are very straight forward and honest, and the officer understands what the father is doing, and almost supports it. The officer is trying to save the child murderer, not to save the murderer’s life, as he puts it, but the soul of Dr Hamel.
This is a top notch movie with great character performances that you shouldn’t miss, even if you have knee jerk reaction issues with some of the devices it uses to express the pains that are dealt with on the screen. Gore hounds will of course love this movie as well, as it has some of the most demented things on screen I’ve ever seen, but it’s done with a kind of class that makes every bit of it important to the story, not just for the bloody hell of it.
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and this sounds solid
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Hell yea. Lifeless body of a child? CHECK! Father driven to unimaginable lengths to exact revenge? CHECK! Cool name for the dude who posted this? CHECK!
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Can't beat a large slice of revenge. Sounds a bit like sympathy for lady vengence
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you're fucking out
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I think every caring father will be able to relate with the good Doctor and would wish to exact the same sort of revenge if anything similar ever happened to one of their loved ones. Count me in too :)
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pass.
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And you're not gonna win that comparison. Not unless there's some rain slickers involved.
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That's odd. 'Cause it's real fuckin' simple.
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There's been so many movies with graphic torture, it's run its course. I'm no longer interested in a movie with graphic torture, because its not going to advance the story in a unique or meaningful way.
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issues with torturing a fucker like that. I think it should happen in real life too.
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sounds like this movie is about showing cool ways to torture people, with a filmmaker trying to justify it, he's exploring the dark side of humanity, blah blah.
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Jan 24, 2010 5:27:23 PM CST
Kraken, here's the explanation of the "Torture Porn" label
by badmrwonka
in porn, no one really cares about the plot. it's a flimsy setup, it takes up maybe 10% of the film, and then you get to the sex.in Torture porn, like Hostel or what have you, the plot is virtually non-existent (young people go somewhere dark for some reason) and then you get to the torture, the graphic violence, the screaming and crying, etc.it's prurient, pure and simple. it appeals to people who are thrilled/scared/titillated by it, just by virtue of what it is, not the service to the plot. no other genre follows the "porn" structure so specifically, and matches it's meaninglessness more aptly.there you go.
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as realistic as the Irreversible head bash scene?
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That is virtually the same plot? Did that ever get released? I thought it sounded great, took forever for it to come out, and then I forgot about it 'til now.
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quality little flick. also kraken...shouldn't you be taking pictures and not writing articles? only joking
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Sorry, I love the description, but I don't think I could watch the details. I never saw Passion of the Christ for the same reason. And I used to like that sort of stuff as a teenager. Just me queazy now.
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A movie to me is entertainment, an escape from the sometimes disturbing world in which we live. If I want to hear about murder and revenge in such dark terms I can go listen to the evening news. Why would I go see it in a elevated darker form as "entertainment"? It just has no appeal to me.
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The Horseman is also a really solid revenge flick, but that film is more of a shotgun compared to the scalpel of 7 Days. I'm also not a big fan of the SAW movies because I do believe those have become more about the traps and less about any kind of real legitimate story or character building. 7 Days is the opposite of that type of exploitation. The torture is just part of exploring the pain of the characters involved. As a matter of fact, I'd say only 15% of the film has anything to do with actual torture on screen. I'd also argue with you about the HOSTEL films being without story or being about nothing else but the torture scenes. If it's something you don't like to see on screen, I completely respect that, but I can't agree that there is nothing more there but visceral titillation in Hostel. Add up the minutes of Hostel's run time that has to do with the actual torture and I think you'd be surprised how small a part those actual scenes play in the film's overall story. To me, Hostel is more about the escape, survival horror, not torture. All I'm saying is that if this isn't your thing, that's respectable; but I think it's dangerous to start throwing the label "porn" on any film or dismissing a movie as shallow just because it has a certain device in it that you don't like.
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and you WILL understand. this sounds good. HOSTEL i did not really care for, tho there was plenty of quailty t&a. HOSTEL 2, on the other hand, actually had a decent twist. the traps are the only reason to watch SAW sequels, and i've only seen 2 and 3. cue death penalty rants
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a few of this year's Sundance contenders are available on ON DEMAND, including 7 DAYS. just thought some of you cats might want to know!
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The french are making some of the most extreme horor made today. but the thing is, they do this extreme horror gory movie,s but there's a soul to them. they are actually making extreme gore movies with a theme to them. They have what Cronenberg in Videodrome called "a philosophy". And they do this without pretentions.You cna't get abetter example of this then with the french horror movie MARTYRS. Man, that movie is just unforgetable! It will ruin your mood for days. but it will seperate the men from the mancy-boys. And even the men will came out shaking.The funny thing is that horror is a genre barely accepted by the french movie industry. France produces hundreds of movies a year, but only 2 or 3 are of the horro genre. And yet, it's the genre that is showing the greatest vitality and ambition among french cinema.
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Actually, this is a movie shot and produced in the province of Quebec...
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pwn pwn pwn
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edited:
in kung fu movies, no one really cares about the plot. it's a flimsy setup, it takes up maybe 10% of the film, and then you get to the fighting.
No other genre follows the "porn" structure so specifically, and matches its meaninglessness more aptly. :-)
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I don't get into movies that tend to garner the "torture porn" label because the movies seem to be all about the gore rather than the story. That and, it's not something I'd enjoy.That said, when something like that is legitimately used to push the movie/book/comic/game/whatever, I can appreciate it. In a story like this (apparently based on a novel, not just a visually-shocking script) with legitimate reasons for a character's actions and some moral dilemmas, I can appreciate it. Perhaps I am not giving Hostel and the like enough credit. Still, while I find shoot-em-up zombie movies and games a bore and most horror-flicks a challenge to watch, a game like Silent Hill (dad trying to find/save daughter), movie like Silence of the Lambs (Clarisse trying to solve one case of a murderer by getting into the head of another), Se7en actually worked for me because the killings/sins were just part of the story and the bad guy's MO, and from the sounds of it 7 Days (about justifiable[?] revenge), the story is compelling that, if done right (somehow tastefully, perhaps?) and to make a point rather than just be exploitative, and make all the difference to me. I think it's the connection and motivations of the main characters that decides if it's ultimately for me or not. With Hostel or Saw, I don't necessarily get that. It might be splitting hairs, but one approach works for me, the other really does not.
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They speak french there, don't they? There's still that je ne sais quo to the movie, doesn't it?
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That doesn't mean American film & t.v. necessarily maintains a British je ne sais quoi, does it? I see your point, would have to see 7 Days and the movies you pointed out (thanks by the way) to see if there is a shared cultural identity between them or not.
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So, this *isn't* about everyone's favorite time traveller's further adventures? Dangit!
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America? You mean The United States, right? Because in fact, the most common and most spoken language in the American continent is spanish. And you know what, it was this close that you are not speaking german today, as the founding fathers almost passed a bill to have german as the offical language of the new country, due to the extreme anti-english feeling they had right after the independence (which still exists, if Hollywood blockbusters are any indication).
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... to the modern new french horror. It's pretty much like the korean horror movie,s in that you know that the people who made them are actually intelligent people with soemthing to say, and there's methode to all the violence, blood and guts thrown at the audiences. Yes, i dare say, sophisticated. It's as if french and korean horror filmmakers actually believe that the audiences are made of intelligent people.
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I love revenge flicks. I think it should be law that murdered victims families get to do this in real life.
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