Recent Viewing: Cutterhead / I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu

Cutterhead

Dir: Rasmus Kloster Bro

A multi-national crew is cutting a new tunnel for the Copenhagen metro and Rie (Christine Sønderris) has been sent to take pictures of the workers and do puff piece interviews for a PR campaign. While she's watching Ivo (Kresimir Mikic) and Bharan (Samson Semere) change one of the cutters there is a fire in the tunnel and the three are trapped in the pressurized chamber that houses the cutterhead. With oxygen and water both running low, they try to decide if they should wait to be rescued or attempt to escape.

There is something almost inherently tense about a confined thriller like Cutterhead. The fears behind it are primal; claustrophobia, the idea that with each breath you are eating up an increasingly finite resource. In this case that is only added to by the literally as well a metaphorically high-pressure atmosphere, which means that even though the door can be opened, the physical effects of doing it quickly might debilitate the person chosen to leave the capsule. The first act establishes a quick but comfortable dynamic between the three characters, Rie may be doing her job, but she appears to be interested in the processes and to like the two guys, who we quickly establish are friends as well as co-workers. This, of course, is all strained by the situation.

This isn't the most eventful film, a lot of it involves the crew simply waiting to be rescued, but the little moments of levity, paranoia, and of betrayal are all well played and these small moments, as well as the sense of time passing and the space feeling ever smaller and more dangerous adds up to a growing, grinding, tension—think The Descent without monsters. Things do shift somewhat for the third act, though the thrills remain claustrophobic and intimate, with the last ten minutes, in particular, taking a dark direction, leading to a final scene that is tense and airless in an entirely different way to the rest of the film.

This isn't a showy feature debut from Rasmus Kloster Bro, but it does demonstrate an ability to take a limited set of ingredients and find a way to stretch their inherent heart in mouth qualities across the film's 84 minutes. If you're claustrophobic this will be a nightmare, but even if you aren't you're likely to feel Cutterhead gripping your nerves more and more as it runs on.

★★★½

I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu

Dir: Meir Zarchi

Shot in 1976, first released in '78 and finding a wider audience in grindhouses and on video in the early 80s, I Spit On Your Grave has been notorious for four decades. Meir Zarchi's original film still stands as one of the most powerful and visceral rape-revenge films ever released. A sequel was first mooted in the mid 80s, but that film dropped the link to I Spit, and became Savage Vengeance. Between 2010 and 2015 a trilogy of increasingly terrible films, begun with a remake, was fairly successful in the direct to video market. It must have been that which finally got Zarchi the green light to make this, his first film since 1985's dreadful Don't Mess With My Sister.

You get the sense that Zarchi had a certain pent-up energy as a filmmaker. In his early 80s when making the film, and having not directed in almost 35 years, there is a feeling in the rampantly excessive 148 minute running time that he is simply using this one last opportunity to dump every idea he's had about this series of films since 1978 on to the screen. Unfortunately, most of those ideas involve copying his previous film very, very slowly, introducing overblown religiosity to the villains, and a broken timeline to tie the plot in with the original.

Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) has just written a book about her ordeal and her vengeance. Taking a break from promotion, she's having lunch with her daughter Christy (Jamie Bernadette). In the car park after lunch, two 'fans' pull up and while Jennifer is signing her book, kidnap them both, setting off a chain of events that take Jennifer back to the events of the first film and end up with Christy fighting for her life and fighting back.

Things start as they mean to go on: slowly and with terrible dialogue. The original film is recapped in a laughably written radio call-in show with Jennifer responding to questions about her memoir (curiously it's not here that we discover that she was cleared by a jury of any crimes she committed in the vengeance section of the first film, which is a stretch). We also discover that Christy is the world's most in-demand model, and that she just turned down a million dollars to shave her head and pose topless for a magazine cover. This is all delivered in clunky lines by Keaton and an at this stage fairly wooden Bernadette.

Things get turned up to eleven once the kidnapping happens and we meet what is at first a gang of three, all related to Jennifer's tormentors from the first film, there is Johnny's wife Becky (Maria Olsen), Scotty (Jeremy Ferdman), who is the cousin of Andy and Kevin (Jonathan Peacy), who is Stanley's brother. Maria Olsen, in her mid 50s, is clearly too young to have been Johnny's wife (she's roughly the same age as Zarchi's kids, who make cameos to reprise their brief roles as Johnny's children). More puzzling is Scotty's assertion that he grew up around Andy when he was obviously born, given the film never indicates that it is set any other time than when it was shot, at least 10 years after the events of the first film. This, along with other revelations, makes the timeline very difficult to unpick. All three of these performances, along with that of Jim Tavaré as Herman (who we're told is Matthew's Dad, despite the fact he's several decades too young for that) are overplayed to the hilt, with Olsen and Peacy seeming to be in some kind of contest to see who can chomp more scenery.

This would be less of a problem had Zarchi not written a lot of drawn-out dialogue for the villainous characters, but the speeches go on and on, running over and over the same two ideas: that the relatives want 'justice' and that God is going to help them extract it from Jennifer and Christy. The fact that Camille Keaton, so great and unaffected in the first film, never manages to find that same performance is probably down to the writing as much as her work, but she is visibly unenthused and appears to know the dialogue isn't up to par (and that there is too much of it). Only when Jennifer is told to dig her own grave does Keaton find a moment with an ounce of the resonance the 1978 film had throughout. 

The structure of the film is clunky. Not only is it brutally overlong, but the pacing issue isn't simply that a scene here or there needs to be cut, it's that every moment is twice the length it needs to be. There was apparently a lot of back and forth about whether the 2010 I Spit On Your Grave should be a sequel or a remake. In some ways Deja Vu, as suggested by its subtitle, is an attempt to square that circle. The first 50 minutes or so are a direct sequel, then we move into a section which is a fairly close remake, with Christy in her Mother's role. The rape scene can't help but be upsetting and it is in this section that Jamie Bernadette's performance comes closest to matching Keaton's power in the original. As with that performance, it's probable that there isn't much acting involved here, there's a certain level at which what we're seeing is just what's happening and it's not easy to watch.

The third act moves into the vengeance phase. Again the film is fighting with itself over being a sequel or a remake. One revenge sequence directly mirrors a famous scene from the '78 film, which only diminishes this one, because the fact we've seen it before, the cartoony nature of the actor's performance up to that point, and the extended running time means it never captures the shock and horror of its antecedent. Zarchi tries to introduce some twists into the narrative in the last half hour of the film, but he only succeeds in adding more terrible monologues, hammy performances, and timeline confusion to the mix.

I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu is more than a disappointment, while it's sometimes weirdly reverent of the first film, even to the point of the director reprising his cameo as a church organist, it also feels like its rejecting much of what it meant. It's almost a desecration. When characters repeatedly literally spit on the graves of deceased characters you can't help but feel it represents a certain aspect of its attitude to what has gone before. The original film is a grindhouse classic, but it's more than that, it's still a truly impactful and provocative work. Deja Vu never achieves that, Jamie Bernadette does what she can and, mainly in moments where she doesn't have to wrestle Zarchi's dialogue, has moments that impress. On the whole, though, the film is by turns too silly and too boring to even approach that kind of lasting power.

★