Rating: C
Dir: Guillaume Campanacci
Star: Magen Mattox, Montanna Gillis, Guillaume Campanacci, Tad Brown
Campanacci has graced these pages before, with Whenever I’m Alone with You. This is his feature debut, made close to a decade earlier and on a budget of under five thousand dollars. Given this, it looks pretty damn awesome: mostly shot in moody black-and-white, to the extent I half-expected a caption for Chanel No. 5 to pop up every few minutes. There are occasionally colour inserts, and there’s also a contrast on the soundtrack, which switches from heavy synths to silence. I may have reached for the remote to make sure I hadn’t sat on the ‘Mute’ button. More than once. The question is, how far can copious quantities of moody style take you? The answer might not be feature length.
Storywise, this is a heavy homage to Les Diaboliques. Leila (Mattox) is in a nastily abusive relationship with Alain (Campanacci), to the extent she attempts suicide. In the aftermath, Alain insists she gets a room-mate, and the person selected is Sandy (Gillis). As the two women bond, and Sandy comes to realize the monster Alain is, they hatch a plan to get rid of him. The murder is relatively easy. Disposing of the body, much less so, and they end up dumping it on the beach. Yet when they check the news, there’s no report of any body being found. More imminently, Alain’s drug-dealer (Brown) shows up with increasing frequency, looking to collect from Leila the money his customer owed.
Interestingly, we recently watched Les Diaboliques for our upcoming October feature, 31 Days of Classic Horror. It’s a better film, not least because it unfolds chronologically. This chops up the time-line to an almost random degree, which I found more irritating than engaging. True story: I accidentally hit back on my remote, and it proved almost impossible to find my place again. I may have missed a scene or two; or repeated them. But it probably didn’t matter much – having seen Les Diaboliques, I was fine. Nor are Mattos and Gillis as good as the actresses in the French original. Though that’s not surprising, and this pair can likely hold their own against Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani, from the abomination which was the Hollywood remake.
Despite the LA location, this feels so French it might as well be wearing a beret and waving a baguette. It’s not as successful as Whenever I’m Alone, perhaps because it has less to say, perhaps because our recent watching of its main inspiration left us with a sharp case of deja vu. However, given the limited resources and Campanacci’s lack of feature experience, it’s by no means terrible, and it’s certainly one of the most stylish debuts I’ve seen this year. I’m glad he has found more of his own voice going forward, rather than a fairly blatant copying of someone else’s work. Especially when the source is one of the ten best horror films of all time, according to IMDb ratings.
The full film is available on YouTube, where it has racked up an impressive 27 million views.