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Overview

What the hell is wrong with us!

The very first episode of this podcast (well, the first movie we watched) was a movie so screwed up, we questioned our own humanity. And then there's this gem - Amer.

I vote it to be the weirdest one we've watched yet. Do you agree? Check it out and I bet you do.

But, to be fair, it is exactly what we set out to do with this podcast. We want to bring to light movies that many haven't heard of. I know - you're our people, and there are plenty of you that HAVE seen the movies we talk about. Good for you.

But for the casual horror fan, a movie like Amer may never get on their radar. Now, SHOULD it be on their radar is a debatable point.

But if you like art house movies, this will be a favorite. If you have been enjoying the other gaillo movies we've watched, this will be a favorite.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1426352/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amer_(film)

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Transcript

S06E06 - Amer

All right. So we'll just get rolling here season six, episode six. And we always try and come up with a little quick teaser for the show. Something you know. Haha. And let's move on and talk about it. So here we go. How about this for Aimer? This has got to be hands down the weirdest freaking movie we've watched in all six seasons.

There you go.

Could be I suppose it's certainly, it's certainly an art house film. It is much more about the feels and the visuals than it is the story or certainly the dialogue.

Oh yeah, that, yeah, definitely more about the visuals because I think there's 10 words in the whole movie. Maybe 11. So yeah, it was an interesting one and you definitely can't blink and look away 'cause there's no dialogue to follow. And the scenes. Okay, we'll talk about all that. So we'll talk about it all. Let's

So this is Amer, it was done in 2009. It is a French and Belgian film. The creators are both French born both of them had moved to Brussels and met there. But the film was shot in the Riviera, so technically it was produced by people who are Belgian, but they were actually French originally.

It was written and directed by a married couple Helene Ctet and Bruno Forni. And to the best of my knowledge, they are still married and every

movie didn't rip apart or anything

yeah, every project they've done has been both of them.

Interesting.

They've done 12 pieces. The first five were shorts with Amer being their first major length motion picture.

Of those five shorts, two of them were award-winning, and then after Amer, they went on and did the letter O in the ABCs of death.

For Sesame Street

French, Sesame Street.

if you haven't seen the ABCs of Death, then yes, that's exactly what it is. It's Sesame Street. Then they did another full length film that was very similar to this called The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears.

In that it was difficult to follow. I don't think it was as well done as Amer, but it was still interesting enough. And then they did another movie called Let the Corpses Tan, which is based off of a French novel and they have a new full length spy film that was released this film called this year called Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

It comes out on December 5th.

Oh wow. That's some variety.

Yeah, it is. I think if you're gonna look at it and say if there's anything that ties all of their stuff together, it seems to be Italian cinema. It's really interesting because we talk about Ty West and how a lot of his movies are like a careful, loving homage to the slasher films of the seventies and eighties.

When you're talking about Katt and Forni, their films are all very lovingly done. Dedications to the GIO movement from Italy. And we'll get into it more, but this is a legitimate GAO film just not filmed in Italy. It was filmed on the French Riviera by French people

Yeah. You know those French, Belgian they quite often do Italian movies.

yeah. Yeah. They were trying to come up with the money for am r. And they couldn't find enough funding in Belgium. So they went back to France and turned up two French producers, Francois con and Eve Kon. And they had only come up with about a third of what they needed. And Francois Con was like, I've seen your shorts and I know how much money you were, do you had, and it was amazing what you could do.

Just go ahead and do it and I'll fund it and then I'll collect on the backend. And the total budget on this was 880 euro about,

Wow. Which is still pretty low even for 2009. That's pretty amazing.

Yeah. And I don't have any box office numbers, like how well it did at the box office, but it did like the festival tour and it garnered 13 nominations winning seven of those. And it, that's includes CJ and ER and so by Southwest and Fangoria they went around and, picked up nominations and wins there.

So

Wow. Nice.

yeah,

Yeah, it definitely has that feel of we won a million awards, but we're not gonna make a ton of money at the box office.

yeah, and I think one of the things that. Like the audience for this movie are hardcore Jio fans, so if you just love Dario Argento, if you love Lucia fci, if you love Mario Bava, you'll love this movie.

Ab Absolutely a hundred percent. And it even stretches the bounds in a few ways from those other ones. Like a lot of movies, it's a nice homage. I love these movies, but I'm gonna do things just a little different in these areas and make it a little different than some of the past stuff.

And they do it really well. It's intriguing.

I think it's far more surreal than you get with most Italian jio film. It's there's, there are definite times and if you've watched it a couple times, you start to pick up on, what's clueing you in. But there are times where it's just like a hallucination and it's they never tell you that.

You just have to figure that out on your own.

Yeah. And most of the Jio films we've watched, there's always a section like that. There's this a scene or a section or one or two. This is like nonstop beginning to end. And you're always like, I have no idea where reality is or not. It's like somebody was doing some acid red Alice in Wonderland and wanted to make a horror movie,

there's not a lot out on this either, and it's hard to find first, like primary sources because it was done in 2009 and anytime you see them in interviews and things, they're discussing their more recent films, so they aren't talking about this.

And that's about the time when YouTube was just getting started.

I did find a couple articles critical articles that I referenced throughout, and like one of them was really good. When we get to it I'll talk about it more, but. Because of the low budget and because of their savviness with working with low money they rehearsed with the actors a ton before they shot, and then they shot every scene on digital video because that's basically free.

Just to get like camera placements and everything down. Then when they were ready to go, they shot on 16 millimeter film, which they blew up to 35 millimeter film to give it that extra grainy quality that you would get back in the seventies.

I was gonna say, yeah, it had that look of it, it felt like a seventies ish movie from just the look of it and the color the color. There's, the end, there's, I have a comment, but the color was almost a little drained in a lot of it. Like you're experiencing the world through a filter.

Uhhuh. There's really only four prominent actors in the whole thing. That number's only four because you see the character Anna, at three phases of her life. So there's three different actresses playing one character. And I'm gonna mention some of them here. You're not gonna know anything any of these people do 'cause they're all French actors.

One's Italian, but Cassandra Foray played the young Anna. This is the only film she's done. So the little girl, I mean she did a great job,

She's just wonderful.

but this is the only film she did. Charlotte, Eugene gbo played the adolescent Anna. She went on to do eight more films. And you gotta remember, this was 15 years ago, so even young Anna is probably 23 now.

Marie Bose played the adult Anna, and she's only got five credits in IMDB with Amer being like the middle one in her career. She had two before and two after.

And they did a really good job of making her and the mother look similar. When she was growing up I got it confused for a bit and I was like, oh wait, hold on.

Yeah. And it was really cool because the three girls too, all, not girls, but all three people who played Anna legitimately could have been, that could have been the same person over several years.

Yeah. Good job on that.

Lame, which is how they refer to the mother. She was played by Bian Carmilla damato, and she's Italian.

And. I couldn't, I can't confirm that. But like all of her earlier work was Italian. She's got 21 titles in her cv, including four Italian television series. So I think it's, I, I'm pretty sure that's her country of origin. Harry Cleven was the taxi driver and he's Belgian and he's been in 49 pieces and he's directed 13 of them.

Wow.

And then Jean-Michel Vol played Lapper, the father, he's been in 83 pieces, so he was in a ton of stuff as well. You have a couple very senior actors, just very tiny parts.

Yeah. Yeah. And, we see that a lot in some of these sometimes, Bella Lago, he did that a lot later in his career, but partly because he couldn't get the work he wanted. And, people hired him for this, but it was, he did like some of the parts, the one I was telling you about, where he was playing the Van Helsing character, he liked that one a lot.

Vampire Hunter, who wouldn't hate, who wouldn't like that.

yeah.

This was shot in 39 days and it's probably because they rehearsed everything so tightly beforehand that they could just sit down and go,

And really most of the scenes we're one person. So it takes less coordination and trying to, oh, you had a good part this time, but you're, yours sucked. Not so much of that.

This was one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite films of 2010 which isn't surprising. He's really into that whole jio grindhouse kind of genre of the seventies.

Yeah. If nobody's ever noticed, te Tarantino tends to do offbeat movies.

Yeah. Yeah, he does. The word aimer means bitter,

Okay.

Which I think seems appropriate because Anna is bitter throughout the whole film, it seems. And one of the guys one of the articles I referenced was by a guy named Anton Batel. It was from Sight and Sound Magazine and he was pointing out that her name is a palindrome and it's three letters long, and the film was based in three sections of her life.

And everything from the beginning like influences the end. So it's going backwards and forwards at the same time. I thought that might be stretching it, but maybe not. It's very artsy film,

yeah, and it lends itself 'cause I've got a couple things I wrote down for pet theories or thoughts on it and I looked up Amer and an alternative meaning is invigorating and fulfilling and I said, oh, that fits what I, one of the things I was thinking of, I'll get into as we go.

The other definition I came across was somebody had said, Amir is the name of a gin in Islam, but that's spelled a MIR. And the gin in question is a household gin. So

Gin like alcohol, not gin as in beast or creature.

No, like the creature.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah. Aimer is a gin that lives in your house. It's not necessarily malicious, but you have to be polite to it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. You have to be polite to them. You don't wanna upset them, but they live in your house and you can't get them out. But yeah, that's all the pre-press that we have on this

And that makes sense. It's, it, honestly, it's a small movie in many ways with the actors, the settings and everything, but it's not a small movie when you watch it and think about it. So it definitely is not one you'll forget.

No, not at all. And it, so there are movies on occasions where yeah, you're gonna wanna see this a second time and like just after you're done watching it turn around and watch it again. I don't think that's the case with this one.

It takes a lot out of you. I think it would be hard to go watch it a second time right away,

yeah. You watch it once and sit with it for a while and then go back and watch it

cognac or something.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. This film starts. And when I get to the end, I have notes at the end. The other guy who wrote the article that I'm working on, that I've worked with was Don Donato Toro. And he goes through and he like lists all of the various influences they received, that, you can tell from watching the screen.

And I have 'em listed at the end, but the very first thing is they do this whole thing with Sergio Leone with the eyes. That's how the, that's how the film starts. It's just this closeup of eyes and it like bounces around while the credits are going. And the music is just so 1970s.

Yeah. All three sections that have music, it dead.

And then while the credits are going, they start showing you just like random slices of other scenes throughout the movie, kind of James Bond esque, where it's Hey, this is gonna be coming up, but you won't remember it unless you've seen it once already, and then you're like, oh, I remember that.

Right James Bond in a real stretch.

yes. Yeah. Yeah. The House is a character throughout this film, which I always appreciate it when they do that. And it's really funny because, there's some films that we'll watch that were like, the house should be a character, but they don't quite do it quite right.

Those are usually the US remakes of better films.

This one, the house is huge. But they are very conservative with how much of it so you only see the parts that are critical to the story, and they do a great job of ingratiating it into the story. So there's the downstairs room where the grandfather was at, there's the kitchen, there's the stairs, there's the servant's quarters, the girl's quarters, and the mother's quarters, and then the outside.

But the house is way bigger than that

Yeah,

all of.

if nothing else, any filmmakers, just pay attention to all the angles and the way they shoot some of these scenes, because each scene is. Its own little crazed in some ways imaginings and what they're trying to get across in the story, which it's not a typical plot and story at all, but each scene is something bigger than itself.

It's just it blew me away watching the movie, trying to wrap my head around all of what was going on because it seems like there's not a lot, but there's so much more in there.

Yeah. And I do wanna point out, it is a French film, so of course it's ridiculously sexy throughout the whole thing. However, what it does really well is that for and like sex is a huge theme in this film. There's very little of it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you see what One Boob two boobs me

there's very little nudity. It's that.

Tantalizing thing that they do in this movie, as opposed to actually showing you stuff. They will show you the hem line of a skirt, really zoomed in or someone's bare navel and it's it's not pornographic, but somehow it almost feels like it is.

And the one scene where they were showing on the, I think it was the corpse, and they were coming around and you saw like a whole boob, it didn't feel erotic at all. It's like when they show something, it's not erotic and when they're not showing something, it can be extremely. It's just really and since you mentioned that, one of my things I wrote down early on was this whole movie to me at this point seems like.

Some girl doesn't understand sex and the whole movie is her perspective imagining, or not imagining, but perspective on what sex is in different stages of life. And I was like, that could be what this is about. I changed it a bit near the end, it's a theme that seems to play throughout the movie in different ways.

It is. And you could say that the film is a girl's complex relationship with sex and dying

And three points throughout her life where something traumatic happened that influenced that references back to those points.

yes.

So that's what, somebody went through and actually timed them.

Like the first scene is like 26 minutes. This is a 90, like on the dot 90 minute horror film. So congratulations. That was dead on. But so one of the things that I really enjoy reading the article by RO and his is on a website called Offscreen Donata ro, but he went through and he like broke apart each section and said what they are, what the theme of the section was, which I thought was really brilliant.

So you have the father's eyes and the mother's eyes and Anna's eyes in this whole beginning and he was saying that, the first thing is Anna showing the power and the danger of looking at things, which. Really is like the theme here because she's constantly spying on things. People are spying on her, and in the end it's someone looking at her from a strange perspective that causes her to run off and see the horrific thing, which like shuts her brain down.

Yeah. And I, and that's, I was thinking about that. It's the sex thing. It's like she saw these, her, the death at the same time she saw people having sex and it just broke her brain. And it was, and the rest of it was how that affected her life later and things, but again, all of these could be part of it or none of it.

And there could be other things too. It's just one of those movies grab agra. I felt like putting on a beret, having a stiff drink and a cigarette when I was watching this, I was like, I don't think it could feel any more French to me, honestly.

Yeah. You don't realize it when it starts out, but basically what has happened is the grandfather of the household has passed away and his body is lying in state. He has his daughter lives in the house, and her husband and their daughter Anna. And then glia, gr there's a housekeeper. Yes. And she is one of those practitioners of the old arts.

And so she is constantly trying to prepare the grandfather's body in the way that it should be done in her eyes and the daughter hates it.

Yeah.

And so that's the tension that's going on, and the movie starts with that, with, anna being outside and hearing the mom and the dad behind a closed door arguing I can't believe she keeps doing this. And she's Anna's looking through the keyhole. You still don't exactly know what's going on in there except the door opens and the mom comes out. She's not happy to find Anna there in her hand. She has what looks like a set of beads and a dead bird wrapped in a white handkerchief.

Yeah.

And none of this is very explicitly explained. You really have to pay attention and you have to have a little knowledge of this era and those type of things to start with. The bird and then the salt for a minute. I'm like, what the hell? I'm like, oh, duh, click, it's not explicit at all.

Don't blink, like I said.

they will not hold your hand. But along those same lines, like you start this movie and you're like, I don't even know what they're talking about here, but if you're patient. You eventually find out,

Saying they don't hold your hand is minor. They don't not only hold your hand, they show it to you through this warped lens of chaotic craziness going on and you have to decipher it. It's like one of those puzzles where it's 3000 pieces. It's the same picture on both sides, but it's rotated 45 degrees on the back and you're trying to put it together.

That's what it feels like

Yeah. She tells Anna to go to her room and Anna is defiant and there's this great joos shot of Anna's eyes, and then the moms, and there's a little zoom, and then Anna's eyes, and then the moms and the little zoom, and then the Anna's eyes. They go back and forth like that.

and a lot of the scenes are like that, where they're extended, where it's kinda like almost uncomfortable that they're not moving on yet.

So the mother goes to unbutton her, unbuckle her belt, like you are seriously in trouble and Anna is hypersensitive to sound. So she like plugs her ears while it's happening, and then she runs away and runs up the steps, which is really all the mom wanted in the first place. So she's not chasing after her with a belt or anything like that?

Yeah. And even the belt's disturbing. It's two

Two hands.

hands almost. Yeah.

She opens the room to her bedroom to find Graziella the housekeeper lying on the floor of her room and Graziella gets up and then goes out an adjoining door into her own room, which is right next to Anna's. But she does this thing which. You I don't know if you still see it or not, but you used to see it back in the day and like Italy or up in the mountains, where you would have these women, older women who would dress head to toe in black lace.

You can't really see their face. You can just see glimpses, and that's exactly what this woman's wearing.

Yeah and I also took that as partly Anna's perspective as a kid and not really understanding what's going on and why some of it looked so weird, because I don't know if you read any of the synopsis out there for this movie. They all suck so bad. They're horrible. It was like a woman sees a strange black figure in her youth that follows her into adulthood.

I'm like, did they watch the same movie?

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I was so happy to find these two articles that were like really well done. I was like, oh, okay. Here's something I can like tether to,

Yeah.

So she goes over and looks through the peephole, which is like her thing. And she's looking into Graciela's room as her mother comes in and she's you should just pack your things and leave.

And they're, she's yelling at her, and that bothers Anna. So she plugs her ears, so you don't really know what she said. But at the end when she unplugs her ears, she's and go make the girl some food. She's hungry. And so Graciela takes the bird and the handkerchief. And while Anna's watching, she crushes it to the point that blood starts to run out of it.

And that's when Anna puts the key back in the hole and then locks. She's got a little hook to lock the door just to make sure that creepy old lady is not coming back in her room.

Yeah.

She walks over to her bed and lies down on the floor where Graziella was, and there's a small pile of salt under her bed.

She

first, I wasn't even sure what that was. It took me a bit to figure it out, especially after she's kneeling it and getting the cuts and I'm like, oh that, that's not good.

rock salt. Yeah. So she opens this chest and it's full of dolls. I can't see a thing full of dolls and not think of incident in a ghostland anymore, which is just that movie ruined me

Yeah.

for she pulls out this sachet and she smells it, and while she's putting it back, the key that she's stuck in the keyhole falls out and she looks over and now she's being watched.

Graciela is watching her. And in Siia they did this too, where you would hear this labored breathing with no real body attached to it. No one that you will, you get that. Now there's this little kind of labored breathing that's happening. Anna casually approaches the door. She takes her sweater off, then hangs it on the doorknob so that Gracie can't look at her. Then she takes the key and goes over and locks the main room to her bedroom. But then we cut to her eating what looks like sirloin tips or something with garlic cloves in it.

Yeah, but the, again, the way they're portraying it you're like, what are they eating? What is this? And again, it's like a kid's perspective shown through the film.

She's like flicking the garlic cloves away and then she gets some meat on a knife and brings it up and there's a set of eyes reflected in the knife looking at her. And then the camera pans back and there's a portrait of her grandfather over the fireplace behind her and it was his eyes looking at her.

Yeah. A lot of good camera work going on, this whole

Yeah. And I think that's a great way of doing it too. If you're gonna shoot it in film, do go ahead and do everything in digital first, then you know exactly where your marks are and what your angles are and things like that without having to burn through film to do it.

Right? Oh, yeah. But then again, honestly, how many people are using film? Most people just use digital all the way,

yeah. Graziella comes out of the back room where the grandfather's body is lying in state and she turns and heads up the stairs and we get a viewpoint of Anna sitting at the table as seen through that black lace. Like Gracie. We are g Graziella watching her. And then the father comes out with this medallion on a chain and he sets it on the banister.

And this camera, the camera moves spirit can you hear that kind of breathing as it moves up to the door where the body's at, and then the screen goes black and it cuts to Anna opening the door to her bedroom and she turns on the light and she goes inside and locks herself in.

The thing with the father, they don't even really make it clear who he is. So again it's paying attention. 'cause I'm like, oh, is this like some boyfriend? Is it, he coming the pool boy coming after hours or something,

hey.

And honestly, it doesn't really matter who it is in the long run.

He is super immaterial. He is a, in all honesty, he's a figure of terror,

Yeah.

at one point in time. And their relationship, I'm sure never goes back to what it was considering how things end up. But,

Right.

So she goes into her room, she turns on the light, she locks herself in, she pulls back the bed clothes, and she looks at the door to Graciela's room.

And as she turns out the light, there's this shadow like of a figure that falls across the door. It scares her and she turns the light back. Then she sits up and hears her parents in the room next door arguing. And she's gonna step out into the hall. But as she opens the door, Graciela's door opens. So she close back in and locks the door, and then she goes out onto the veranda, outside out, she has like glass doors that go out onto the balcony.

And she does that. She's crossing across the outside of the building, and she gets to where her parents are, her parents' room, and her dad's massaging her mom's back. He's relax, it's gonna be fine. And she's no, I don't wanna use a necklace. I think a brooch is more sophisticated. Blah, blah, blah.

And then Anna runs by, and like her mom catches that movement outta the corner of her eye and just gets up and automatically she's at 11, she's mad. She walks over and looks, but there's nobody out there because Anna's too fast

Yeah. Yeah. And the mother definitely does not seem to be the best of persons,

now. And.

But again, is it the kid's perspective

And it, you also have to consider, it's a really stressful point in her life where, her father's died and she's got this weird witch living in the house messing with this dead body. Come on. There is a great architectural shot where they have the veranda and she's running on the veranda, which is down screen, and then you see the patio that's the next floor down and she runs up that next.

It was a really cool shot.

Yeah. Agreed.

She goes back in through the front door and goes to where the room where her grandfather is lying in state and she doesn't seem to be afraid of the dead body at all.

Right?

Doesn't, she even messes with the makeup. She gets it on her fingers.

typical curious kid doesn't really know what's going on and understand it and experimenting, it's like when babies stick everything in their mouth, she's exploring the world.

Yeah. The body's surrounded by a bunch of candles. There's beads and a dead bird wrapped in a napkin on his chest. Anna walks around. She bumps into this bowl and looks right to the body, like that's gonna wake him up or something. But nobody seems to notice. And then she notes that there's incense burning and they zoom in on the incense.

You can see his fingernail clippings are in there. So some more of that witchy stuff to help the spirits move on. And she keeps checking on him the whole time. He doesn't move. He's just sitting there. He's just dead. And she's looking for something to take. She's a little thief, is what it really boils down to. She checks the drawer. There's like a pocket watch there, but it's not really what interests her. And then there's this jewelry box over on the other side of the room, and that really gets her attention. And there's a mirror with a black cloth over it. But then just as she notices this, the door opens and her mom comes in and she's freaking out and climbs under her bed, climbs under the bed, which has a pile of rock salt underneath it. And she's kneeling in it in her bare knees and her elbows, and it's cutting into her skin. And her mom is freaking out because, oh my God, that old lady moved this bed again. It's so heavy. How did she do that?

The fucking bird's on here and the beads and all this nonsense. And she just throws the bird on the floor. Anna just plugs her ears and bleeds a little bit as she's sitting there. And then her father comes in and her mom's you need to throw that lady out in the morning. Now that he's dead, there's no reason for her to even be here.

And then they leave. Anna climbs out from under the bed and steps on a dead bird.

Now at least she had shoes on.

Her grandfather is wearing a brooch. It's a little bee that her mother must have put on there, and then she goes over to the jewelry box and starts rifling through. It, doesn't really see anything that she wants, and she takes the cloth off the mirror, which is a big no-no in, in those practices.

Now they also at one point showed Anna's window open. I didn't notice in the grandfather's room if they left a window open. And they did close the door. Typically, they wouldn't close the door, and they would leave windows open so the spirit isn't trapped.

Yeah. She looks over, she looks in the mirror and there's something like shining like a beacon in his hands and she walks over and it's a pocket watch on a chain. And she wants this is what she wants, and the body is stiff with rigor mortis. She can't get the fingers to move. So she looks up and there's a cross on the wall.

She takes it down and uses it to pry his fingers apart, like breaking them.

And the description of it makes it sound totally different than the way it comes across being filmed. It's very much art house, so you're not disgusted, engrossed out by it or anything like that. It almost is intriguing to watch more so than not,

yeah, it all, honestly, it's the fact that she's a little girl, actually on the one hand, in description wise, makes it worse, but while you're watching it makes it more fascinating.

Absolutely. Yeah.

so she does, she breaks his finger, he drops the pocket watch, she picks it up, and then she puts his finger back like nothing to see here.

Total stick.

Yeah. And then she opens the pocket watch and I have in my notes, we never get to see what's inside, but we do. But she like opens it in her eyes, get wide and it's that that gold briefcase kind of thing from Pule fiction.

Speaking of Tarantino.

Yeah. But she gets grabbed from behind by G Graziella who puts a hand over her mouth and she is struggling to get away.

Legitimately. That would terrify me.

But that type of event happens later too. That same thing, somebody grabbing her from behind. That's a common thing in the movie. For everyone watching it. For what do all this symbolism mean? What's it mean to have multiple people grabbing her from behind,

you could dice this 12 different ways to Sunday when you're gonna have a different meaning every time you do. So everyone is gonna see, it's gonna see something else. She grabs that cross and just starts beating Grecia with it until she lets her go. And at this point, the grandfather's eyes are now open

Because they didn't have weight on it or anything.

She runs out, heads up the stairs, trying to get to the sanctuary of her own door, which she locked because she went out onto the balcony. She didn't go out the door, so now it's locked. So she opens her parents' door and they're in the process of having sex and. Her eyes get wide and literally there's like broken glass looking like her psyche is fracturing.

Yes. Yeah. And it, like most of the sex scenes in this podcast is just a weird one. There's nothing neurotic about it. And again, it's from her, a little girl's eyes.

Yeah. And they go like full RGB it'll be in just green and then it'll be in just blue, and then it'll be in just red.

Yeah.

And she just starts screaming. I think she falls over and drops the watch, but it's hard to tell because everything is like her face, like this close and like they're like turning the camera 90 degrees and stuff.

It's just really hard to tell what actually is going on as opposed to what her brain is doing to her.

Yeah, we de we have.

Yes. She finds herself lying on her bed in a, under a red light. Water is dripping from somewhere and she turns on the lamp on her dresser and it's blue. And the watch is sitting there on the dresser. And this very much felt like Dario Argento. In fact, that sight and sound article that I talked about no, I'm sorry.

It's the RA article. He actually has scenes and there is a scene in Saperia with her sitting on the bed with red and blue. And then he has the scene from AIM or underneath it. It's, I don't wanna say it's lifted directly from it, but it certainly is blocked a lot like it.

Yeah. And that's part of the what makes it feel that way and what they do in those type of movies. It's, like a hair metal band. There's certain way chords sound and if you're not doing chord sounding this particular way with a certain fuzz, it's hard to say you're a hair metal band,

they also like, and we'll get to it here in the next section, but they also are like doing this specifically as an homage to, Argento Suspiria and stuff. They're like saying, this was a great shot. We're gonna mirror it here in our movie as a way of tipping our hat to you.

yeah. And I'm sure if you dig, there's probably other shots with other movies that they,

oh yeah, they, like I said, the guy lists a bunch of 'em out,

yeah. Nice.

She opens this watch and she's, and that gasping noise starts again and liquid is seeping under. It looks like it's seeping under the door from Graciela's room, but when the camera pulls back, it seems to have been coming from the bed. And so the girl's mattress is what she's convinced.

She's wet the bed and she grabs this bedding and starts to clean the floor. But the amount of liquid that's on the floor is way beyond what anyone would actually be able to urinate at all.

And that's another scene that comes back later too, that repeated in a different way.

Yep. Now she realizes the water's dripping onto her bed. It might not have been her after all. And she gets up on top of the bed and she's looking and it's dripping into her face. And then the shots interspersed with like shots of a human body quivering on like a wet surface of some kind. And the water's turning gel-like, and then it turns into maybe rock salt. She slips and the lamp falls, and she drops the watch, and Graciela is watching her through the keyhole and graciela is lit in green, so the entire room is red. Graciela is lit in green, which on the one hand could speak to the noxious, witchy nature of her, but it also brings out remarkable contrast so that you can't miss the green eye.

Looking through that red door.

And also when the bi I took all this to be her thoughts of her parents having sex and the dead grandfather are all mixed up in her mind and they're all becoming one type of thought is how I took that.

Yeah. It just turns into a flat out nightmare now. The watch wraps itself around her ankle and around the bed, and.

again, it sounds like a typical horror movie where you're doing a jump scare and, but it's not filmed like that at all.

Yeah. And Graciela has pushed the key through the door. She's like opening the door and the hook's there, and she's jimmying the hook off. She comes in and she's got this claw. She reaches out for Anna, and Anna manages to kick the leg off the bed.

That was impressive.

Yes. And she is running over to get to the door out onto the porch.

And she goes to her parents' room and she's mama. And when she looks in, her parents aren't in there. Her grandfather is lying on the bed and he sits up and his hands unclasps and he reaches out towards her, and all of a sudden she's in her own bed. We're back to regular color. Her father's caressing her face.

He's are you feeling better? And that's it. That's all the more of the father you're gonna get. And the mother's just there being mad. She takes the watch. And then you have this classic Mario Bava zoom right into the mother's eyes, and then everything blurs. And we've left behind the first part of this film.

yeah. So I hope you were paying attention

Yes.

and got it all.

And now we get like shots of hands on skin and like a bare midriff. Things are purposely elongated out of proportion. And it seems to be young. And then there's someone's bare breast. And the, as the collage sorts it out, we realize that the. We're now seeing adolescent Anna an ant crawls out of her belly button, which I thought even shooting that would've made me slightly disturbed.

I'm like, how many takes did it take for the aunt to do that?

Yeah. The music resolves into this kind of nice, lyrical stuff. Adolescent Anna is standing there with her eyes closed, chewing on her hair. It says, ant climbs up her hem of her skirt and she kills it. And she's standing next to this makeshift fence, which is in the backside of the property that we saw in the first one.

She's out looking at the sea. RO labels this section as Anna two, the power of being looked at as opposed to the dangers of looking. This is the power that you have of being looked at. Her mother disrupts her whole re by putting a hat on her head. She's still this controlling figure in Anna's life, and Anna does not like it at all.

And this is all through the filming. There's really nothing said anywhere. Yeah. And it's not even overacting or strong acting. It's very subtle. All throughout.

Yeah. And as much of as much of a statement about Anna as the second section is, it's also a huge statement of the mother

Yeah.

because they're leaving the house that they were in the first section. They're walking down towards the town. They're both wearing sundresses and hats. They're dressed similarly in style, not in color.

Mother's in black, she's in a blue, I think. Yeah, I think she's in blue.

Yeah. Yeah.

The mother's carrying this thing, she's, they're holding hands as they walk along, and Anna very cleverly fakes a cough and then puts her hand back down so she doesn't have to hold her mom's hand. And the music here, and this is what I mean about taking stuff directly from GAO films.

The music here is a song called

Chie Ito, and it's Italian. So you know, I

That's fairly good.

by Stelvio chip Ani, it's from the 1974 GAO film by Massimo Delano called What Have They Done To Your Daughters, which is a film about a sex ring with school aged girls and then some guy on a motorcycle who rides around and murders them. And the fact that like they went back to this obscure Italian jio film and like that song, that's what we want.

Yeah,

I just think that's so cool.

and it definitely stands out because it's been pretty silent for the last 20 minutes, and then suddenly this pounding music starts, and I think it's even turned up a little bit more than you normally would get. So it definitely gets in your face, in your ears, and it sounds so seventies without being funk,

and it was so clean too. If you ever, if you look up the song on YouTube and listen to the original, like you can hear the age in it, but you couldn't tell that at all. Listening to it in Aimer, they like definitely went through and took out the pops and the cracks and

up

that. They're walking along and Anna is just feeling like she is, she's in the world to, she, her, she's the sun's on her face, she's feeling lovely. She's dressed well. And then there's people, there's like a guy standing on the side who's watching as they're walking by and you never, all the guys in this, with the exception of the boy Thers at the end, the, all the other people who are looking at them, you only see their eyes. You don't get to see their face or anything else.

Is this really what's happening or is it what she's imagining is happening? What she feels like, oh I'm the center of attention type thing.

That's a good point. 'cause on the one hand I would think, oh, the mother reacts, so like the guy is watching her, not her mother. And her mother notices that and then she stumbles in her high heels and then grabs her daughter's hand again to stabilize herself. But it's one of those kind of things where no mom notices this creepy guy looking at my daughter.

I'm gonna hold her hand. But that could just be Anna's thoughts about what her mother's doing. Oh, she was just jealous of me. So she decided to hold my hand again.

And the mother. The one part here, part of this whole walking thing with the car coming, she knows somebody's coming. She unbuttons a couple buttons on her dress. And it's that what you said, being looked at and definitely feels like she's competing with her daughter. Look at me.

Yeah. And again, it's also subtle, very amazing work here.

It is. And it is one of those things where so they see that guy and she takes your daughter's hand and they keep walking and the camera angles are so like Lolita, I don't know if you ever read that, but like very much here's this girl who's 1415 and the camera angles are shooting at are just like specifically to be provocative, but that's because in her head she is like this something everyone wants kind of

Yeah. So many of the scenes in this movie, you don't got 20 seconds of this to get the idea of what's going on. Now it's seven minutes of them walking with this going on, and you're waiting like it's building or you're waiting what's going on. And it's just what it is. It's not what you may think based on other movies.

Yeah, it's like Akko did the camera direction here.

We'll bring them back.

So a car's coming up the road as it gets closer, the mother lets go of Anna's hand and she undoes the top button of her dress and she notes when the thing comes by. The guy's looking at the daughter, not her. And so she is she is, she's yesterday's news. She's not the hot one walking down the street anymore.

And the one thing I couldn't quite. Fit. See how it all fit in was all the spiral traveling. The staircases were, had the spiral.

Oh yeah.

driveway was the spiral. And they focused on that. Watching cars come up and they were walking forever down this thing to get to the village, and I couldn't quite figure out how that fits unless you know your life is like in a spiral type thinking,

Or her sanity maybe.

exactly. Spiraling down.

They get into town and the town seems to be abandoned. There's some great light and dark use that the camera does here. But they're heading to a shop. And when they walk in, again, the man, just like the guy in the car, just like the guy on the side of the road, just his eyes. And he is definitely looking at Anna.

The mother's there to get her hair done. She gives a shopping list. And this is a European small town kind of shop thing where you show up and you give the guy the list in your bag and then you go do whatever the hell you want. He felt it for you.

Right.

You don't have to put a quarter into the cart to go shopping yourself.

You just give the guy the list and say, pick this stuff up for me.

Put a quarter in the guy if you want

Anna gives in the bag, we actually hear the mother's name mentioned. By the hairstylist. It is Mariana, but that's the only time ever, even in the credit she's listed as La Mer. Her name's immaterial.

And here with the whole thing it's, it took a minute to figure out what was she was doing, what she was going on, because it doesn't really matter. And so they don't really let you know or focus on it. You gotta figure it out.

Yeah, it was convenient for the story. I wonder if there are actually just like small local shops where you can go in and get your groceries and get your hair done in the

I think it's like Walmart

yeah. Yes. It's a French Walmart.

from the seventies

so she's like hair colored and she's no, just a blow dry. But we do note that her hair does have some streaks of gray in it. They show you that, a man behind the counter. You have the man standing in the road, the man in the car. We never see any of 'em. It's just their eyes looking lely at Anna.

And when Anna notes that her mom's hair's getting a little gray, she's got a little smirk I am the cool new thing. And she's staring out the door at the courtyard and it seems empty. And then creepiest of all creep, and again, this could be her perspective, but the shop owner tries to put a piece of candy in her mouth and then he says that horrible thing that no man should ever end, should ever utter.

Oh, you've grown up a lot since last year. No. Don't say that ever.

this is our PS A of the movie.

Yes. Don't say if you are a man. Don't ever say that to a teen girl.

I'll tell it to you later.

there's a boy standing

I'll tell to wait.

Yes.

That'll

Maybe he needs to hear it.

yes.

There's a boy outside bouncing a ball against the window of the front door. And he walks into the shop and like walks up to lean in, like maybe for the kiss on the cheek thing.

You doing greeting and she's no, she wants nothing to do with him. And he is probably, it's hard to say 'cause girls mature before guys do, but he looks like he's about two or three years younger than her.

Y Yeah, he seemed like it. And again, this whole scene, I, if you don't take it as in it's what she's seeing, it's a really weird scene, but if you take it as a 13, 14-year-old girl's perspective it makes a lot more sense

Yeah. The mom's you go outside and just play but don't get, don't leave the front of the shop. And so she's out there being super cool and bored while the guy's over there bouncing a soccer ball off his knee.

impress her.

Yes. And there's lots of closeups while he's doing it. So again, with that, that burgeoning sexuality of hers, she's like noticing, his muscles moving and things like that, even though she doesn't seem at all interested in him.

But then she notes that he's looking at her breasts and so she crosses her arms in front of her breasts and he loses control of the soccer ball as one would.

That's a euphemism there.

You really lost control of the soccer ball on that one.

Yeah, that'll go over well

it rolls over towards her and when he comes over to get it, she just kicks it down a hill. And then they're off. They're running to chase after it.

and this is like a manga comic run. The way they film it. It's like animated manga comics.

blurred close up of their faces. You could hear them breathing. There's a hint of a smile on her face, like she's enjoying this. And then her hat blows off her head. She has to stop and get it. So the boy's gonna beat her down there and he gets down there to the ball and picks it up and looks at the camera and then wanders off.

And she runs up to where he was and stops and looks at the camera and we see what he was looking at. There's like a motorcycle gang hanging out, just parked there looking out at the ocean. And this one guy, one of the guys of the gang has a girl on the back, starts his motorcycle up and goes purposely really close to her when he goes by.

And then you have this really tense who sexualized scene with a bunch of young men on bikes staring at her, her looking at them kind of past them. 'cause there's one guy leaning on a wall like George Michael in a faith video and she's walking towards that guy and all these guys are watching her do it.

And yeah, I'm gonna say a bunch of guys on bikes. A guy leaning on the wall, she's walking towards him. Her mom comes out and slaps her in the face. That's what really happens. But the whole thing takes literally like eight minutes to shoot. 'cause there's so much bouncing back. Closeups of facial hair, facial skirt,

knows that she's walking provocatively and what she's doing. Yeah, she's testing it.

Yeah. So yeah, it was really long scene, really well done. But when you actually say it out loud, it's done. Mom slaps her in the face. Yeah. Mom slaps her in the face, grabs her hand, and off they walk and you see the house and the gates are closing shut and they're

Which was the weirdest shot in the movie. I don't know if they meant it to be, but it was jerky and almost looked fake, and it was the only shot in the whole movie that had that look.

I think it really emphasized, like from her perspective, she's back in prison

locked back up.

Definitely was a different looking scene to me,

and then we get some more of that blurry stuff and some body parts and things like that. And we're transitioning into the third part of Anna's life, which to Tara lists as Anna three, the danger of looking at oneself. And you have this crowded train, tram, subway of some sort. Like they are packed in there and she is.

but it, but they make it look like it's something else to start with. Until they pan out. So it definitely, the camera tricks you, but not in a a cheesy way.

right. Yeah it's done well. But yeah, it's a bunch of bodies close, pressed and, jostling around and skin on skin and stuff. But then, oh no, she's just right in the subway. But it lets you know her brain is, this is how she's experiencing life right now. And she's a full grown adult now.

She pushes her way through the body, through the people to get out and there's lots of closeups of like her arm brushing some guys and like scruffy faces and stuff like that.

If you watch every one of them makes it look like she walks by this guy and he is grabbing her butt going by this guy to get a quick kiss. Go. They all look like that, but it's the perspective and it's not really happening.

The other interesting thing is in this last section, you had all these guys who are just staring at her, like they're leering at her. And all the guys in here aren't actually seeming to look at her much, but all the interaction between them is her brushing against them. So it's like the hunted has become the hunter kind of thing.

It's, it

she's moved on like her mom and they just don't notice her anymore 'cause she's not young and viral again.

could be it's quite warm. You have beat of sweat running down. Of course there's gonna be a beat of sweat running down her skin somewhere and a close up on it. She puts on her sunglasses and she's looking for a cab and she ends up with the most French cab of all time. You have the cabbie standing there smoking a cigarette, completely ignoring the fact that a client is coming to him. And then she comes up and she's just as bad. She just drops her bags at his feet, then he stops and puts on his driving gloves.

actually had, I think those same driving gloves at one point.

You could have been a French cabbie, Steve.

I could have been, I need a beret.

So she gets in the cab and you have the, one of the most passive aggressive cab rides of all time now. Because like she gets in and the first thing that happens is her skirt's very short. Her skin touches the hot leather. It burns her skin. So she has to pull her skirt down. She's giving him the address to the house and a lot of times, and this scene solidifies it, you really wonder what's in her head and what's really happening.

Yes, absolutely. By this point you're catching on. Hopefully.

Yes. So like she's you. She has to ask him to put the window down. He's got a fan that he can blow around. And in her in her mind, he's looking in the rear view mirror and checking her out. And she's moving from one side of the seat to the other and his eyes continue to follow her. And like they get to a stoplight and he like, takes off.

So she's pressed back in the seat. She's got that forceful pushback. She puts a seatbelt on. They've emphasized how it's sliding between her breasts. And then she wants the window down on the other side and he just keeps accelerating her back into the seat instead of actually doing it. And then he puts it down.

And she's sticking her head out, but then she like, literally looks like she's falling asleep as she's lying back there. You like. Her seatbelt gets drug across her breasts and her dress tears open and she awakens as her breast is like out and all of a sudden she's like at her location. And none of that happened.

Yeah. So she's completely, everything is focused on thinking about sex and everybody looking at her for sex and stuff. So again, we could probably sit and dissect this movie multiple different ways.

We could, I don't know that anybody wants to actually hear us do this.

No, probably not.

She pays the guy and he goes out to get her bags and while the thing's up, he's got a bag up front and that's where the money went. And she's looking at it and I'm like, is she gonna take the money back? But no, she takes his comb, which is interesting.

And it becomes more interesting a little bit later. She also leaves her scarf in the backseat.

Yeah, I noticed that. Again they don't play it up a whole lot

They don't, but it actually becomes super important later on.

Yeah.

This gate has a, the gate to the house has its chain on it. She must have the key 'cause she gets inside and the house is the same house from the first two, but it is in a very sad state of disrepair.

See, you shouldn't have gotten rid of Graziella in the first

That's right. She kept the place running. But instead of walking up the driveway, she walks through the woods to get to the house. And you have this whole thing with plant life. It's just like reaching out to touch her. It's caressing her skin, it's grabbing her butt. It, I mean it's almost evil dead esque where like she's being sexually assaulted by a tree.

right?

Again, I don't think it's anything that she is finding distasteful, like she's just hyper aware of touch presently. Like she was hyper aware of sound in the first one.

Yeah. Good point.

Oh, and then the second one, she's hyper aware of people seeing her. And here she's hyper aware of everything touching her.

Oh,

running through her senses.

she's gonna lick everything,

I don't know if there is a sequel to this one. She trips and falls and her puts her hand on this thing, pulls her hand away and it's this white kind of creamy sap on her hand. We know what that's an analog for, and the spider crawls across her shoulders. She's wiping it off and she gets to the house and there's this dead piece of meat rotting just outside the house.

I don't know what that was.

she leaves. It doesn't kick it off the veranda there, so I was like, that's a little weird, but

She does end up throwing it out later. But it's one of those kind of things like this is this, these are the memories that she has of this place.

Right.

And then there's this great silhouette shot of her coming through the door. And again, that shot is stripped right out of am Mario Baba film. Exactly.

All of the scenes throughout this section just ooze sexuality, like everything

without being explicit about it, it's, again, it's the weirdest thing. They did such a good job of that.

Yeah, the phone doesn't work. The doors don't latch. The wind makes a window pane break. It's all in bad shape. She heads up these familiar stairs. We've seen these before, and she's going past the portraits of all these old men that are staring at her. There's a hole in the ceiling. There's holes in the walls, and she goes out on the balcony and looks down at the road and the sea beyond.

And she just seems like police is punched to be there.

Yeah. And it's the same scene, viewpoint that we've already seen earlier in the movie.

Yeah, it was probably actually shot all in one day.

Probably.

They just cut 'em up. She's in her old bedroom. She's looking at her bedsheet. She opens her chest. She takes all these clothes out of her wardrobe and throws 'em in the chest and she's dragging it down the stairs. And there's like panes of glass falling out of poorly glazed windows.

And there are trash men here. And she runs up and catches up to them and she seems like polite, at least, if not a little flirty as she gives them this box, which has the dead meat in it that was rotting. And they just seem like they're like disaffected entirely. Like we had to wait for you For what?

I took this whole thing as she, again, is oh, they're so enthralled with watching me and my antics, and they're like, oh my God, hurry the hell up. From her perspective, you got every scene, you start thinking about what's really happening and how is this from her perspective,

yeah. And we're about to really jump down that rabbit hole. She leaves it and she goes to take a bath. The bathtub is surrounded by lit candles on the tray. Next to the tub is the cabbie's comb. And then she goes and turns on the water and nothing comes out.

But it's where she like goes through the wall to get to the, where this was it like they papered over the old door or something. It was very weird

she sits in the tub naked and starts to caress herself with the comb of the cabbie. And I don't know what it is about our podcast, but here is female masturbatory, scene number three,

right.

Involving the cabbie's comb, and then liquid starts to slide across the bottom of the tub towards the drain, like between her legs. And you might think it's coming from her, but then there's lots of it, and it's like filling the tub up

It's not the first time.

it's just a bath. It's just like the first time in the bedroom with the little girl. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah it's very, again, very weird 'cause you expect one thing and totally are not getting that

Yeah. And so she starts to, to bathe herself and then out of nowhere, some gloved figure comes up behind her and plunges her into the tub and is holding her down there to drown her. You're like, what in the world? Where'd this guy come from?

like they, the house has been waiting for her is,

yeah. She's struggling in the bathtub to keep from drowning. She manages to pull the plug. The water's starting to drain somehow. She ends up running outta the bathroom. She like frees herself and takes off.

so you gotta wonder what's really happening and what's in her mind. We've gotten trained into that thinking.

And it's the weird thing because she's inside and everything has gone blue, which is a pretty good signature. That's. We are now in her head. When she was a little girl having that nightmare, everything was red. So everything is like tinged a specific color. Now there's a shot of her standing on the ver veranda, calmly eating something, looking at the road.

And then it cuts right back to her being in complete blue. She's lying down under a sheet in her bedroom and there's a gloved hand that's touching her through the sheets. And it's like there was this section of sanity and now we're back to the insanity. Just this brief thing of clarity and now it's gone.

It becomes it. It starts merging a whole lot more, especially right with airway. You spent, 'cause she opens her eyes but doesn't react like somebody's standing over her because nobody is.

But she does note that she's starting to see blood through her sheets and she pulls her sheets down and her legs have been sliced up and there's blood all over her legs.

It doesn't really freak her out,

No, she gets up and goes over to the wardrobe, pulls on her sweater. And then winces as she puts some pants on. 'cause she's pulling them up, sliced up legs.

and I wanna point that out, and I haven't quite figured out what it means. Everything else in this movie until this point, she's wearing a dress all the way up to this point, and now suddenly she's wearing pants like a man and it's pants. The rest of the movie.

It's easier to kill people if you're wearing pants.

Yeah, I guess so. I just trying to figure out how, what that meant for her changing character,

yeah, she had been this figure of feminine desire throughout the whole thing. And at this stage she now becomes her worst nightmare where she is the figure that is chasing her through the house.

Oh, I thought you were gonna say she, she's Rambo.

So the cabby is outside, he's looking in windows. Somebody is putting on rubber gloves or leather gloves. And the cabbie is walking, up towards the house through a blue filter. One of the gloves is being pulled on in a red, one is being pulled on in a green and the gloves have a straight razor because of course

not the same as the driving gloves he had, yeah.

are very different.

The razor's already bloody. So maybe this is what cut her legs up. The cabby comes up and knocks on the door, and when she doesn't come, he takes the scarf that she left in the backseat of his car, probably as a way to get him to come back later. And he just ties it to the doorknob and he is okay, I did my part.

And then he goes to leave and he hears a noise. She's on the stairs and there's a noise upstairs. And she retreats back up the steps. She runs back up the steps. The cool thing is when she's going up the steps, they show the portraits of all the old men and the eyes have been cut out of all of them. Which is, a disturbing thing. And now she's outside, she's running through the forest and he is walking up the steps back to the open front door.

They really make it seem like he is the scary thing. But he's not at all. Again, it's her perspective here and who's the killer? You start thinking you know what, it's probably herself.

He walks up to the house, so he leaves the scarf there and then he walks back down and he gets to the gate and the gate has been locked and now he is upset. So he gets out his switchblade. And so now he looks like he might be a threat. Anna's in the woods. And it looks like this leathered glove hands go over her mouth and this razor comes up against her throat, and then it's drawn across the front of her shirt.

Yeah, if you ever wanna sexualize being kidnapped, this was the scene.

And the cabby hears something and he starts to move into the woods. He is following that sound and the gloves' hands are pulling Anna away, just seemingly like molesting her as they do it, they grab her crotch and her breasts through her clothes, but the cabby sees something move in the distance and he follows it. And then the razor is going across Anna's mouth and she's got the blade in her teeth and then it scrapes down her neck, and I think it might cut an ant in half again, reminiscent of her adolescent era.

Yeah, this looked a lot like an episode of Dexter.

The cabby gets close in this razor, slashes out and slashes his hand. Anna screams, he drops the knife and then the knife ends up in the hands of the killer who stabs him in the leg. And he collapses and gets drug off, apparently passed out. Maybe

Yeah. Again, a lot of it's hard to tell.

he's on a tile floor and the assailant is wearing like leather pants and is knelt on his arms so he can't move. And the next section is very reminiscent of Lucio fci. Very much and for those of you who've been listening, you're like, ah, is this really a horror movie? Here you go. You get this part right here. First you have the gloved hand sticking fingers into the slice in the guy's hand, and that's what wakes him up. And he starts to tear up. And then over the next five minutes without shying away, the razor just. Nice and close cuts through his face several times. So his lips are like in pieces with like gaps.

Yeah.

It's a very long, uncomfortable scene

Yeah, we, yeah. You'd think the earlier scenes were long and uncomfortable.

Yeah. In the end, the gloved figure stabs him in the neck with his own knife to end his suffering. And I like how they even shot that. It was kinda like you'd see the skin erupting yeah. Very graphic.

Yeah.

And then Anna's lying on the floor somewhere and she opens her eyes and she like reaches up. There's that gloved hand and she reaches up and the glove is on her hand

Yeah.

and there's blood on the glove and there's blood pooling around her and. It really to me had this kind of audition feel

Yeah, you're right.

the whole movie was like this.

And then here you're in a solid horror film. 'cause there's this guy with a mangled face lying on the floor. She takes the gloves off, she slumps against the wall and there's this shadow looming nearby. And she gets back and you see this figure, the silhouette in all black with a mask over their face.

And she grabs the knife and starts to run through the woods. And she gets to the gate and it's all chained up and she can't get out and the figure is running behind her. But she runs through the woods and as she's running away, pretty soon it turns out she's chasing the figure.

Yeah.

And one of the reviewers referred to it as like an a robber roast chase where the snake's chasing its own tail.

That's a good, that's good.

Yeah. And the figure gets close enough to start to assault her and she manages to escape. And the chase keeps going. And then they're facing off right at where the fence was, where when she was an adolescent, she was just staring out at the sea and the figure's standing there and she's standing there and she runs up and punches that knife into his chest.

And when she does, her eyes get really wide and she gasps. And now we see her lying back on a slab and like the camera's pulling back her wrists have been slit.

That whole scene in the force with the faceless entity definitely fits the facing yourself. It, for everything else being so hard to figure out, this was like straight dead on what they were trying to mean here as far as I'm concerned.

This is Luke Skywalker cutting the head off of Darth Vader for the helmet to open up and reveal. Its Luke Skywalker.

Yeah, except the difference was that was a 32nd scene. This one's 10 minutes, 11 minutes.

And the next part is creepy. If you realize what it is. There are hands that are moving her body around and they're like getting her ready. They're like putting lipstick on her. They're like, but the motions of the hands and the motions of her, the position of her head are the same as her father's hands on her mother while they were having sex.

And so it is definitely that tie in with sex equals death kind of thing.

Yeah.

And the color's really washed out in this.

Yes,

The

for the very, very end.

but she's all pale. And as she's lying there, the color starts to come back in until it reaches like your regular vibrancy and then her eyes open for just a half second and then roll

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like the most she was ever alive was in death, and yeah. And then her eyes open yeah. And no, it's not like a normal horror where that signifies we're getting a sequel the,

I fully think she's dead.

Yeah. Absolutely.

and that's, it's funny too 'cause all the scars and stuff on her legs, none of that was there on her corpse. It was just two cuts, one to each wrist. So much of this movie takes place in the head of a dis, of basically a disturbed 8-year-old girl. And it follows her through life clear up until her moment of death as well.

Yeah, ab absolutely. And it's definitely not one to watch if you're like, let's get some popcorn and watch a horror movie. 'cause it's Halloween.

We talk about movies that like a good introduction to the to the genre. This is not it.

No, not at all. This would go on that list of, this is only for the hardcore people, this and Martyrs.

Yeah. This is definitely, like I said, it's an amazing homage to the Jio movement outta Italy. They went through and literally took, scene scenes out of other movies and dropped them into this. They used the same soundtrack, the same convention through the whole thing, but they still managed to make it their own and end up with this baffling, beautiful, disturbing piece when you're all said and done with the whole thing.

It's gorgeous in, in, in many disturbing ways, and trying to figure it all out. Yeah. Don't look for a plot. Don't look for a storyline. 'cause, don't expect dialogue to help explain it. It's almost as if you had an artist doing horror paintings their whole life, and you went to a gallery after their death and looked at the paintings in chronological order.

It's just snippets of real, their viewpoint of reality.

It is really funny, a little glimpse behind here. I was watching the film Steve had found a copy and I was watching it, and my player was not showing me subtitles. And so I'm watching it and I'm like my French is so it's, and I'm watching it and I'm like, I don't know what Steve's gonna do. And then suddenly I realized what I was watching, and I'm like, it's immaterial.

Yeah.

the mom's mad about something. Who cares what she's actually saying? And after that, no one talks.

Yeah. You can watch the whole movie without hearing what they're saying. Just listen to the French. Really. The one thing that this really remind me of, and if you've not read it I recommend it's the original Crow stories from James O. Barr, the graphic novel or the separate works, probably graphic novel.

Now the, because it's so intense, but all over the board, it's not a typical free flowing story, and the, it shows in graphic comic format, the crow's insanity the character, not the crow that brings him back, but shows the character's insanity of going through death and the loss of a loved one, but coming back for revenge.

This the way that. Book is drawn is a lot like how this was filmed,

I, and I will put this out there. I went to see. The Blair Witch Project in the theater with my father-in-law who thought it would be interesting because he'd seen all the hype about it. He was a very straightforward guy. Like A is to B is to C, and so on and so forth. He did not have time for the nonsense.

That is the Blair Witch Project. If you are one of those ridiculously practical people, you'll hate this movie.

Yeah.

So just give this one a pass

Right.

And I'm not saying that's not a bad thing, that's just, you know the way you are,

yeah, you won't enjoy it, so why bother? There's, we there, heck, we're on our sixth season, so there's 55 other 60 if you count bonus, other movies we've talked about, more than 60. Go check plenty of those out. This is if you're one of those people that like you has to see the most esoteric out there movies, ones that people don't know, that if we listed the most esoteric movies like this that we've watched, there's only a few places we could go where the people would know what we're talking about.

Yeah

yeah. We, I've been working on those lists. If I, we get all the way up and have this season on a list and I go to the Sinister Horror Fest, I wonder how many people are gonna recognize it because a lot of people recognize martyrs, which I was impressed with.

yeah. You're with your people when you're there.

Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. Alright, so there's Amer what do we got coming up next as a palate cleanse here.

It's not.

Oh, great. All right. You said clear at the beginning of this season. The, these shut, these movies by women are definitely not like a typical horror movie season.

So this one vaguely reminds me of Martyrs in that pretty disturbing. It's not as bad, but it's pretty disturbing. And there was a really bad American remake of it. Several years later, we'll be watching an Austrian film called Goodnight Mommy from 2014,

Ooh, okay.

and there was an American remake in 2022 that was bland at best.

Ah, okay. All right. Maybe we'll throw a, one of the public domain things in between to just to wash our palate cleanse before we dive into the heaviness again.

Yeah, this is not necessarily a fun film.

All right. Good. That's a good way to let's, right? We're, when we're filming this, it's right near the holiday Christmas, Thanksgiving season let's get our most disturbing films right during the Friendly Jolly Holidays.

Hey, happy holidays everybody.

Yeah, they're probably watching this in February or March. All right, man, it was a good one. Talk to you later.

it easy.