Vincent doit mourir
***½/****
starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun
written by Mathieu Naert
directed by Stéphan Castang
BLACKOUT
***½/****
starring Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Motell Gyn Foster, Barbara Crampton
written and directed by Larry Fessenden
by Walter Chaw I’ve been angrier lately, angrier than I ever remember feeling in my life–and I was a teenage boy once. I am either more keenly aware of how broken the world always was, or the world is more broken than it’s ever been. Likely a little of both is true. I am frustration unrelieved. I am catharsis in eternal, trembling abeyance. The bad win and escape consequences; the good lose and lack the commitment to fight. The Earth is on fire, and only a handful of Scandinavian teens gluing themselves to paintings seem to have the will to do anything about it. I feel like I’m going to crack at every provocation, however minor or unintended. I wonder if I’ve lost my mind. It’s the old man’s fate to lament the growing incivility of every generation, but I didn’t expect to have so much rage going into my sixth decade. I didn’t expect to be the source of the incivility. I think the fallout from the cascading traumas of the last several years will continue to expose fault lines in our society for decades to come. Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes. There’s nothing special about us.
Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die crystallizes our collective unrest, the constant threat of violence underpinning our various interactions, and the gamification and weaponizing of public spaces, using a genre, horror, uniquely suited to rooting out toxicity in our diseased cultural biome. Old Chinese royalty used silver chopsticks to test for arsenic sulphide snuck into their food, knowing the poison would turn the silver black. My parents gave us silver chopsticks as a wedding present. I think about how silver is a component in film stock and how film, too, can be a warning, should we have the tools to decipher it. Vincent (Karim Leklou) is a schlub, paunchy, his eyes swollen and sunken and his affect irritatingly fey and ineffectual. He tries to make a joke about ordering an intern to get him a coffee, but he’s the only one laughing and, meanwhile, he’s succeeded in reminding everyone of the awkward power dynamics at play in his workplace. When the intern clocks him across the face with a laptop a few minutes later, one could hardly blame him. But then mild Yves (Emmanuel Vérité) from accounting stabs Vincent in the arm with a pen, repeatedly, gleefully, during a meeting, and maybe all is indeed not well. Vincent, I gotta be honest, is the kind of person I’d like to pop in the mouth, too, just to snap him out of whatever weird headspace he’s operating in most of the time. As the movie opens, he confides that his girlfriend has left him, and I’m astonished that he had one in the first place. When his therapist (Pierre Maillet) suggests that people are attacking him because he likes the attention, well of course he does.
But it keeps escalating. Anyone he makes eye contact with, even if it’s only for a second, attacks him with the intent to murder him: a child, the elderly, everyone. There are exceptions, of course, but how do you distinguish between the strangers who would like to see you dead and those who don’t? It’s funny how the everyday things minorities and women deal with become fodder for a horror movie when they happen to a white guy, even one as non-descript in his grossness as Vincent. Vincent goes into isolation, striking up an unlikely friendship with diner waitress Margaux (Vimala Pons), whom he first offends by offering an outsized tip for bringing his giant order out to him in his car. He goes home, stalks her on Facebook, returns the next evening, and ultimately spends the night with her when it turns out that Margaux is somewhat aroused by the idea that she becomes a dead-eyed zombie occasionally in his presence, wanting to murder him in his sleep.
I wonder if it doesn’t feel wonderful to be able to act out your pent-up aggressions without the threat of legal repercussion or personal animus–that you might emerge from your murderous fugue feeling as though you’ve had your best night’s rest since 2016. Living with Vincent, however, requires Margaux to continually shackle herself to beams or table legs so that if she does go feral, Vincent will at least have a fighting chance to escape. There are multiple approaches to the film: Consider the online chatroom where others similarly afflicted share stories and coping strategies; the comparison of Vincent’s plight to those of the suddenly jobless and homeless; the suggestions of mental illnesses and neurodivergence, and of class concerns and the exploitation of workers. There’s even the possibility that Vincent is provoking the attacks and that his megalomania is somehow causing the rest of France to share in his delusions of notoriety. I like the implication that in a world where everything is “like a movie” and celebrity is a valuable albeit no longer rare commodity, Vincent Must Die is a warning about getting what you wish for when every other person you’re hoping will recognize you is likely to snap like a dry breadstick at the slightest provocation. It’s brilliant, in other words, and riding the tube of this zeitgeist like a motherfucker.
I’ll say the same about Larry Fessenden’s latest, Blackout, a film I normally wouldn’t review, having interviewed Fessenden and one of the film’s stars, Barbara Crampton, and become friendly with both. I’m obviously biased in ways I can’t even begin to unpack. Blackout is a werewolf film in which the werewolf, Charley (Alex Hurt), “loses control” now and again, as he calls it, blacking out for a bit only to wake up bruised, bloody, and naked, covered in bits and pieces that are not his own. He has dreams of flight, and of violence, and rather than deal with his malady in a substantive way, he drifts from place to place, avoiding attachments–though because he’s charming and good-looking, attachments tend to find him anyway. I like the in-jokiness of the film’s pivotal location, “Talbot Falls” (Larry Talbot being the name of Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man), and I love how Fessenden structures his movie as a series of doomed-feeling conversations between friends, family, and old lovers helpless to save one another from the demons afflicting them. It’s the best film about mourning a person you love before they’re dead since Rob Zombie’s extraordinary Lords of Salem.
Hurt has a bit of father William Hurt’s eccentricity. He’s gangly, unconventional-looking, a little off in his delivery; watch him in a conversation with spooked local Miguel (Rigo Garay), who tells him that he’s seen a wolf man running around, murdering naked women in gorgeous Bernie Wrightson tableaux-by-headlight, and been reassured it’s just “Mexican superstition.” But, Miguel protests, the wolf man is a white man’s myth, not a Mexican one. Charley knows he’s talking about him, so he smiles a bit too wide and, in an unnerving editorial flourish, holds it for a beat too long. Charley is a complex, ambivalent antihero, horrified by what he becomes–an alter ego he tries to suppress with alcohol–but also amused by the fear he causes and more than a little drunk on his power over the small community that has rejected him and is now falling into insolvency before the economic catastrophes ravaging the connective tissues of the United States. Blackout is a laconic nightmare fuelled by the madness of our social unknitting. It’s Fessenden’s best, most freighted work since Wendigo. We’re all wolves, we’re all Little Red Riding Hoods, and there aren’t any more trails through the woods. It’s all woods–and it’s dark as fuck out there.
