Tigers Are Not Afraid

Tigers Are Not Afraid (IMDB says 2017, but it got its US release just this month in 2019)

Dir. and written by Issa López

Starring Paola Lara, Juan Ramón López, Nery Arredondo

There are a few things which seem to be irresistible to critics. Simple elements which warp normally sensible people into raving delusional supporters of mediocre garbage. One is seeing films at festivals, before anybody else, with an excited audience that feels very special just to have this opportunity. Another is making movies about adult topics, but set from children’s perspective, so we can juxtapose the innocence of youth against the grimness of the adult world. Still another is magical realism, which makes even the shallowest narratives seem mysterious and symbolic and potentially important. And finally, topical, ripped-from-the-headlines settings which empathetically document real-life woes and consequently feel very capital “I” Important.

TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID has all four, which is the only explanation I can think of for the rapturous reception it received from all quarters, including people who should have known better. I mean, people have been comparing this to Del Toro, LOS OLVIDASOS, fuckin’100 Years Of Solitude. It’s a full-blown psychosis, and it seems like I’m the only one it hasn’t touched. It brings me no joy whatsoever to report this, because who likes trashing a little indie movie, especially a foreign one made by people who I have every reason to believe are perfectly sincere about using their movie to address an ugly real-world truth which is too rarely featured in cinema, or at least too rarely from this perspective? I don’t wanna be that guy. But integrity and the fact that I am obligated to review every movie I watch during October compels me to confess to you that either A) I have finally fucking lost it, and watching so many awful Z-grade horror movies has warped my brain so badly that I can’t tell good from bad anymore or B) this movie is painfully dull, borderline insulting hokum which in no way merits a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score or even its somewhat more moderate 75% on Metacritic.

It does, I'll happily concede, have a worthwhile scenario: it concerns the orphaned children left behind after their parents are murdered in the endless, poisonous drug war which has consumed huge portions of Mexico and Latin America more generally. The city is unnamed (it was shot in Mexico City), but it barely matters because the movie mostly takes place in spaces which have essentially been abandoned by the population at large (who barely appear) and are now home to a Lord Of The Flies underworld of gangs made up of abandoned, homeless children. And I do mean children; we see a few teenagers, but mostly these are elementary-school-aged kids, barely more than babies in some cases. Of course, “elementary school” is not a great indicator in this case, since street life offers a very different kind of education.

We enter this world through the eyes of Estrella (Paola Lara, in her first feature film), a young girl on what she will discover is her last day in school. It's not a good one. A shower of gunshots nearby forces the kids to cower on the floor, and a well-meaning teacher tries to give her comfort by placing three wish-granting sticks of chalk in her hand. And the day gets worse – a supernatural trail of blood follows her, and when she gets home, she finds her mother has vanished. When she wishes on the magic chalk for her to return, she is rewarded by a visit from her mother's ghostly, zombified body, wrapped in a plastic body bag a la SICARIO. With no one to care for her, Estrella is forced out onto the street, where she meets a gang of orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramón López, also in his first film role), a tormented, angsty Jeremy Sisto type, in, uh, a 10-year old's body. He's always staring off into the middle distance moodily, and is too cynical and disaffected to feel anything but irritation at taking on a newcomer. Still, she tags along with him and his gang, and gradually comes to be involved in their conflict with a very adult gang of killers who are (semi-spoiler, if you've never seen a movie before) seeking a stolen cell phone with incriminating information about their leader, who happens to moonlight as a smarmy political candidate. This arranges the plot into something like a crime thriller, albeit one that crops up only where it's absolutely narratively necessary; the movie is much more interested to following the kids as they play, fight, and try to entertain themselves and survive without any resources.

There's nothing overwhelmingly original here, but that's a workable enough premise, at least offering a semi-exotic mix of topical misery porn and light fantasy elements. The problem is that the pleasures here are almost exclusively conceptual. It's a movie that very much resembles a movie with something to say, without ever actually getting around to saying anything. It frankly feels calculating and manipulative, preying on our natural sympathy for suffering children and using that to paper over how shallow the characterization is, let alone the transparently functional narrative. It's a film that has sympathy, but no real ideas, and certainly no real examination of its premise. The characters are paper-thin, the thriller elements are threadbare, and the fantasy –let alone any phony claim of “horror”—irrelevant.

The lack of effective genre elements is damning, but since the movie spends most of its time as a drama, it’s really the superficial characterization that dooms it. No offense to the child actors, who are doing the best they can with what they have, but their dialogue oscillates between gratingly precocious and insufferably cutesy, with no internal logic to guide it.* Shine's silly tough guy demeanor could be made interesting – perhaps it is his “tiger suit” that he puts on to feel brave, constructed from the stilted pop culture it so closely mimics. But the movie makes nothing of it; by its estimation this is perfectly natural behavior which needs no further examination (for the record, Ramón López does as well with the role as any human could have). Likewise, it stubbornly refuses to engage with Estrella's emotional state beyond the most superficial terms. Sure, she's sad, she's scared, she's angry at the people who did this. But surely there are subtler, more interesting feelings here too, especially for a child, who doesn't have the experience to know what to do with them. What does the sudden, disorienting plunge from unquestioned security to complete vulnerability do to her? How does her outsider status in the group affect the way she sees herself and her role? The movie doesn't ask. In theory, the magical realism ought to be a perfect way for us to symbolically get inside her unexpressed inner world, but the only use the movie ever finds for its fantasy elements is to throw something vaguely spooky at Estrella. Little flying dragons, the ominous trail of blood, a handful of moments where she sees ghosts. You know, to communicate that most intangible and ephemeral of human emotions, “being anxious that gangster want to kill you.” How ever would we depict that without tiny computer animated dragons?

It is, in a word, shallow. It poses that children deal with this kind of unbearable trauma by escaping into fantasy. And then, that’s it. That’s the film’s only card, and once it’s played, there’s nothing else to it but a rote, half-hearted thriller plot which sort of happens in the background, though not as far in the background as the supposed horror elements, which make up maybe five minutes of the total runtime. In fact, despite the fact that there’s a zombie on the goddam poster, this very much feels to me like one of those movies that the director wanted to make, but couldn’t get funded until she pitched it as a genre flick, so she obligingly crammed a little bit of second-unit zombie crap in there and spliced it into the story every so often to paper over the fact that it is in absolutely no way whatsoever a horror film.

This puts the film in an unfortunate contradictory position; it badly wants to be a searing indictment of the intolerable current socio-political situation, complete with some ham-fisted jabs at cynical politicians and corrupt cops. And yet, it needs the schlocky genre stuff to be a story worth telling, or at least, a story which many people would seek out. But throwing a frankly laughable crime-thriller plot into this kind of realist miserabilism is a bad fit, making the drama seem phony and making the genre stuff seem ridiculous. How the fuck are we supposed to be scared of a gang of killers which consists, apparently, of only four guys, all of whom are consistently unable to wrangle a cell phone away from five scared 3rd-graders? And for that matter, the earnest journalistic urge to call attention to drug war orphans and their grim and separate underworld can't help but force us to think a little bit about how this would work, at which point huge plot holes start to open up. Shine won't give up the stolen cell phone, even though holding onto it puts everyone in desperate mortal peril, because it has the only picture of his mom on it. Awww. But dawg, you realize that shit is in the cloud, right? You can have a photobucket account in 20 seconds for free. He clearly understands the phone and how it works, using it like a pro when he needs to. The fact that this obvious solution never comes up is a matter of strictly dramatic expediency. And for that matter, how is he charging this thing? It's just lazy writing.

I hate complaining about plot holes; I think it’s generally lazy criticism, and anyway they tend to be bothersome only when film is already not working for some other reason. A movie that has you appropriately entranced need not bother with logic, so I usually try to focus on why a film has me bored enough to notice plot holes, rather than the holes themselves. But I bring them up here because I think it helps illustrate the way the film struggles to establish a clear identity for itself. Several reviewers have postulated, for example, that this should be read as, essentially, a fairy tale for adults. Which, fine, the very concept of a “fairy tale for adults” is already a little insulting, but some people obviously get off on that, who am I to judge. If that’s so, grousing about logic is missing the point. But the minute you call it a fairy tale, you are irrecoverably giving up on the idea of muckraking realism for a cause, and that is, frankly, where the movie's actual passions seem to lie. You can have brutal, journalistic naturalism, or you can have symbolic whimsy; crudely sewing the two approaches together is self-defeating. And of the two approaches on display here, the naturalistic drama is far and away more effective, which makes you resent the constant intrusions of “fairy tale” material that doesn't seem to arise naturally from the premise, and in fact often feels like an active detriment. At one point, a kid's stuffed tiger comes to life via disconcerting computer animation and interacts with our heroine. Why? There's nothing, like, symbolic happening here. It feels like an affectation for its own sake. Likewise, Estrella's “three wishes” which are doomed to turn out badly. If we're not meant to take this literally, as a simplistic plot mechanic, well... how should we take it? It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a thing that would be in a fairy tale, I guess. But in a fairy tale, at least it would have a moral, the obvious “be careful what you wish for.” Here, I don’t see how that message has any bearing. The final wish, in particular, seems like such a transparently manipulative, arbitrary setup that it made me actively angry. This is not using magical realism to communicate mysterious hidden realities; this is just using it as a lazy crutch to set up a tearjerker moment which would otherwise have to be more subtly written.

I will grant that the movie eventually works up a suitable climax, which does manage to tie its thriller plot into its vestigial horror imagery, at least narratively, if not really thematically. It's as cheap and calculating as everything else here, but at least it's marginally satisfying, and I was, I suppose, invested enough in the story by this point to be glad of that. It's a dithering, facile movie, but it's not a terrible one, as far as these things go; I think I resented it more than I really disliked it. If I hadn’t read all those glowing reviews beforehand, I’d probably be willing to write it off as a mediocre but well-meaning little tearjerker drama, one that doesn’t really work but deserves credit for trying. But I think it’s gotten plenty of credit for trying already.

* I should be said that it’s always a tricky business to evaluate dialogue that’s been translated into subtitled; it’s possible this plays more organically in its original Spanish.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s something they say, and the movie is very much about how kids deal with fear by escaping to fantasy.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Mexico
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Very, very light ghost movie trops
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No, although we hear about a tiger attack
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, ghosts
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	I find the little animated Tiger quite creepy in a live-action WHINNE THE POOH kind of way.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever you think about Del Toro, this shit isn’t as easy as he makes it look.

This is exactly the kind of movie that makes one wish for a half-thumb; I felt like giving it just two was too harsh, because it's nowhere near as hapless as, say, THE BEING. But three makes it sound like a vague positive, and I can't quite go that far either. Think of it as two thumbs and a pinkie.

A Certain Kind of Death

A Certain Kind of Death (2003)

Dir. Grover Babcock, Blue Hadaegh

I think you’ll have no choice but to agree with me when I state plainly that I’ve seen some pretty fucked up movies. Gory stuff, THE WIZARD OF GORE, BRAIN-DEAD, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, you know the type. Psychologically disturbing stuff; SALO, AUDITION, and so on. And just sleazy, sick filth with no redeeming intellectual qualities whatsoever (HUMAN CENTIPEDE, FACES OF DEATH, etc). I never watched A SERBIAN FILM, but not because of its sicko reputation, more like it just didn’t sound that interesting to me and I never got around to it. Maybe I will someday, maybe not, but I can’t really imagine there’s anything in there that would genuinely shake me.  I’ve been watching this crap since high school, there’s not really much I haven’t seen. I mean, you name the perversion, I’ve probably watched it. Sasquatch rape - check. Italian woman jerks off a bored horse named Pedro -- check. Sanctuary of 1000 testicles -- check. Alice Krige chainsawed apart with barbed wire -- check. Orson Welles voicing a Transformer -- check.  Sometimes it gets a little gross or unpleasant, but I mean, up til last year I couldn’t really remember a movie that had come along and genuinely intimidated me.*

But wow, did this one come out of the blue. Obviously, you don’t watch a documentary called A CERTAIN KIND OF DEATH and expect a lighthearted romp, but holy fucking shit. There are things here which you will not be able to unsee. The film has a frankness about death which is so shocking that it may well change the very way you think about the concept. It shook me absolutely to my core. It’s gotta be among the most casually horrifying things I’ve ever seen. Why, you ask? You sure you want to know?

The film starts with coroners in an apartment with a dead body. The apartment is cramped and mundane; squat ceiling and white walls and cheap furniture, unexceptional in every way except that there’s a human corpse in it. The body is sitting on a toilet around a corner, obscured in an recessed alcove behind a wall. The coroners are taking pictures and picking up evidence; this is a daily occurrence to them. Then the camera lingers on a closeup of the corpse’s foot. It’s sticking around the corner and barely visible along with a part of the leg. It’s horrible -- a purple and frayed mess of partially decomposed flesh, a repulsive parody of life, with just enough human features remaining to be unmistakable. This is within the first 30 seconds of the movie.

Join the government, go depressing places, meet depressing people.

The workaday officials making notes as they walk around the apartment seem utterly unaware that they’re working in the middle of a nightmare. They’re professional, maybe even a little bored. It’s physically hard to look at the screen while that foot is there, but here they are, wandering around jotting things down in a notepad, somehow maintaining their calm while the presence --and good lord, the smell-- of that thing --that thing!-- hangs over everything like an ominous black cloud. How can they possibly do anything but run screaming out of this room and never look back? You’ll have just long enough to ponder this question before

They cut directly to a frontal view of the body.

The body is wearing a faded plaid shirt, but nothing else; it’s slouched back on the toilet seat, arms hanging resigned at its sides. Its eyes are gone, and the nose it barely in evidence, but the teeth shine white and sharp against the fetid purple flesh of the face. It’s impossible to tell it this was once a man or woman, but even as the features decay and liquify there’s no mistaking that this was once a human. Insects buzz around, flitting in and out through freshly carved holes in the flesh, mocking the inert hands to brush them away.

I gotta be honest with you, amigos, I was not prepared for this. My first, instinctive reaction was actually to reach over and attempt to cover the eyes of my filmgoing companion, to protect them from seeing what I had just seen. Never had that reaction before.

So yeah, this is a pretty brutal movie. But not because it has a particular desire for shock value; instead, it simply has a frankness about death which makes you realize just how squeamish most film are about the subject. This is a movie about death which is not going to cut away when things get uncomfortable, not going to tastefully edit anything out, not going to retreat to metaphor. It’s going to take a clear, steady look, and ask that if we’re genuinely interested in talking about this topic that we do the same. It’s not lurid. But this is reality. That death you see in the movies, where they get last words and slowly close their eyes? That’s a fiction. Death in real life is random and gross; its filled with fluids and bizarre, ambiguous details and when it’s over, you’re left with a pallid, meaty block of dead flesh that gradually becomes a habitat for the insects and microorganisms that will break it down into a brown goo. That’s what happens, that’s what’s gonna happen to us all, and if we’re serious about it we have to admit that it’s kind of rare that someone really forces us to confront that fact.

Don't be fooled by the yellow gloves, that's not Space Ghost.

Not that the movie is pushy about it; it’s just uncommonly clear-eyed about the world. You chose to watch this documentary about death, and this is what death is like. Honestly, it would be kind of ridiculous to watch a movie about this topic and not expect to see some images of real death, and yet, our media landscape has absolutely primed us to expect enormous discretion on the subject. Simply taking the romance out of death is kind of shocking in this culture. We’re so utterly horrified by death that we hide behind our poetry and polite language and mythmaking. We have euphemisms and visual metaphors; we say “the departed” or, “he’s no longer with us.” Yeah, well, maybe so, but a big chunk of him is sure still here. There’s no hiding allowed in this movie, no romanticizing. Death has happened to every living thing ever to exist, and it will happen to you. There’s almost nothing more banal, but facing it so bluntly after a lifetime of living in a culture so sensitive about the subject is utterly jarring, shattering even.

But of course, this is not a general documentary about death, it’s about a certain kind of death. The title does not lie. The kind of death in question is one wherein someone dies so utterly alone in the world that there is no one who is legally able or available to take custody of their estate and make necessary arrangements. People who die, and no one notices until someone complains about the smell or gets irritated that the rent hasn’t been paid in a while. This is a documentary about what happens next. You gotta feel for these poor souls. Even in death they’re so isolated from their fellow man that their remains go unclaimed, unwanted; something to be disposed of by disintered career bureaucrats because no one else wants to take responsibility for it. There’s a profound, almost unwatchable sense of loneliness and heartache that pervades this grim arrangement -- you so badly want these people to just have one last flash of genuine human contact, you want someone, somewhere to acknowledge that these were people with lives, with loves, worries, shames, successes. You want someone to acknowledge that they were unique, they were special -- they lived, it meant something. But no one really can, because no one really knew them; they’re like an ancient, forgotten civilization to us, leaving behind only worn artifacts as a testament to the fact that something once stood here.

In a way, the film shares a lot with fellow outrageously depressing documentary DREAMS OF A LIFE; both are, on some level, an exploration of the lonely lives of the people who somehow fell through the cracks, and died without seemingly any meaningful human connection left. But while DREAMS is focused on trying to understand the person at the center of its tragic mystery, A CERTAIN KIND OF DEATH is more interested in the process. What happens when there’s no one else to make decisions after death?

The answer is as fascinating as it is mundane: there are government people whose job it is to gather available evidence, try to find anyone who could take responsibility for making decisions for the deceased, and, that failing, to make them themselves as best they can based on the information available. Sometimes that information is in short supply: one man has died in a motel room, with little more than the clothes on his back (in fact, at the time of death he was stepping out of the shower and didn’t even have those). Apparently a drifter, there’s virtually nothing to suggest where this man came from, what he was like, what he would have wanted. So they wrap him in a plastic bag, throw away his few possessions, cremate the body in an enormous government kiln (which burns up to three bodies at a time, apparently sometimes dozens per night) and dump the ashes in a mass grave marked only by the year. In one of the movie’s most sobering scenes (which in this movie is really saying something), we watch as mortuary workers crush the cremated bones to dust with hammers, pour the ashes into a box, and dump the boxes --by hand-- one by one, into an otherwise ordinary grave. There are hundreds of boxes. Maybe thousands more briefly glimpsed back at their warehouse.

See that dust? Yeah, that used to be people.

It’s beyond shocking to see something like that, and writing it out makes it almost seem like this is supposed to be some kind of muckraking expose. But really, I don’t think it’s like that at all; I think the filmmakers actually have a lot of respect and compassion for both the dead and the living who spend their lives cleaning up after them. The government workers who do these jobs seem bright, dedicated, trying to do their best to honor the life of someone they never even met, someone who isn’t even survived by a memory. And they’re like you and I -- they’re naturally curious about these people, they want on some deep level to pull some little thread of genuine human contact out of the ashes, even as they take responsibility for picking up the pieces and solving practical matters. The movie is interested in both -- the practical decisions as to who is responsible for cleaning up an apartment after a body has rotted into an unrecognizable liquid or what happens to all that cheap furniture, and the emotional decisions about where a body is ultimately remembered and who and what the person was while they were alive.

The most interesting story which emerges as various agencies pursue different aspects of the case revolves around an elderly man found dead in his apartment in just horrible circumstances. He did not go quietly. He’s naked and seems to have WARNING GRANDMA DO NOT FINISH THIS SENTENCE, IT’S NICE THAT YOU LIKE TO CHECK IN ON ME BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW I SAW THIS shit out most of his blood and internal organs in an unsuccessful attempt to make it to the bathroom. The room is splattered with a caked brown layer of blood and feces, and in the middle of it is the pale, emaciated, naked body of a very old man. A bad death. The apartment is dingy and out of date, weird, framed oil paintings cover nearly every inch of wall.

This all adds up to a situation just as grim as you might expect; it's easy to imagine this lonely old man, no social skills, no friends left if he ever had any. A recluse, a failure, someone hiding out from a life which was too taxing for him. But there are little details which are odd: on his table is literally everything the coroners need to identify what he wanted done in the event of his death; he has made fastidious plans for his burial arrangements, even photographing the location he wants to be buried in. He must have known he was dying and tried to prepare for it. But wait -- as they pursue the case further, they’re surprised to find that someone else is already buried in the cemetery plot he picked out for himself, near his parents. Did someone steal his grave? No, it seems he gave it up to a friend a couple years ago. What the heck is going on here?

Gradually, these odd details start to resolve themselves a little bit: This is not just a tragic, lonely old man who never amounted to anything. His “friend” was his partner since the early 70s; this was an out-and-proud gay man, living with the love of his life until AIDS claimed him a few years back. In pictures, he’s handsome, youthful; his partner, now buried in the grave he was planning to use himself, looks like the life of the party. If his circumstances ended up so grim, its only in contrast to the happiness he must have once known. It all starts to make a little more sense (especially those otherwise inexplicable oil paintings of muscular nude men) and this frail, pallid corpse lying in filth in a dingy apartment starts to become someone, not something.

Imagine if someone, by law, had to tag and remove every object from your home. What would they think, carrying your weird novelty sized silver cup out of the apartment you died in?

But of course, he’s also still a thing, and a thing that needs to be put somewhere. They all are. And a lot of the film is simply about the people who have to fill out the paperwork, make the phone calls, push the gurney. There’s an absolutely jaw-dropping sequence where a no-nonsense coroner takes a phone call from her kid while struggling to coax a bloated corpse into a mylar body bag. “Just wrapping up a body,” she explains as she grunts, lifting the dead weight. When she first glimpses the body, her professional enthusiasm is stirred: “Have you seen bridging like this before? It's beautiful! Textbook blunt-force trauma.”** These people do the best they can, and they really seem to be making an effort with each case. But when you’ve seen this much death, it’s hard to treat it with the same reverence those with the luxury of being far removed from it can afford. If you let it get to you, you could never do the job, you’d burn out. Hell, the reason this has even come to them is that no one else cares even a little. As one coroner points out,  "I can just imagine if we do find a relative, the response is going to be probably non-emotional: 'Oh, okay. Well, we always wondered what happened to him.' "

That’s a tough thing to hear, but their concerns are mostly practical: someone has to get in there and clean the carpets, someone has to deal with any remaining bank accounts, someone has auction off the furniture. As with anytime you deal with real-life stories, things aren’t always as clear-cut as you might imagine; ambiguities abound just as much as suggestive details do. When a coroner traces down the cemetery plot owned by one of the deceased, it turns out there’s already someone buried there, and no one seems to know who or why (this is a different one than the other story above. How often does this happen!?). The city officials don’t have enough information to press the case, and the cemetery managers just seem relieved that no one is going to sue them over their fuck up, they compromise and bury the guy somewhere else. Another corpse is found strangled, a noose made of wire hanger around its neck, which the corner inexplicably rules is accidental, the tragic result of the deceased trying to adjust his TV antenna --wha? That can’t possibly be a random accident, can it? And beyond that, what was this guy doing here anyway? He’s living in a rat-infested shithole, but his apartment is full of receipts; he doesn’t seem to have a steady job, but he’s been donating $200 a month to a local church. As a person, you’ve got to be desperate to know the answers, to try and find some kind of truth and meaning in the mess. But as a worker, you’ve just have to accept that most of this stuff is beyond our ability to know, but somebody is still going to have to clean up all this rat shit. And, sadly, no one will ever ask again.

The great equalizer.

This would be a stunning look into a world most of us will never see (while alive) regardless of its artistic merits; to my knowledge, there’s nothing else even remotely this exhaustive and full of detail ever put to celluloid on this subject. But unlike DREAMS OF A LIFE, which got bogged down in reenactments and shmaltzy editing, A CERTAIN KIND OF DEATH employs an impressive artistry worthy of its weighty subject matter. Directors Babcock and Hadaegh apparently spent all their money and more than a year hanging around the scene to find footage they could use, and they are confident enough in that footage to let it speak for itself. There’s no music except for a brief rendition of “Greensleeves” over the credits. No talking heads. Neither Slash nor Neil Gaiman appear at all, obviously a rarity for documentaries. It’s very Maysles-inspired, no narration and no cutesy editing to tell you how to feel. They favor long, static shots, often employing an almost Kubrickian symmetrical framing technique that subtly transforms their grim subjects into coldly beautiful --even iconic-- portraits. Sometimes, they’ll simply let the screen fade to black, just to leave the last image lingering in your mind. It works. Their careful craftsmanship makes this the rare documentary which features both a fascinating subject matter and a genuine sense of cinematic artistry.

The end result is that his is an absolutely riveting documentary both about the people involved in and, in a subterranean way, about the very subject of death itself. And it’s made with the care and cinematic eye of truly masterful craftsmen. That puts me in a difficult situation, because this is probably the best movie I’ve ever seen which I can’t in good conscience really recommend to anybody. Should you see this film? No, you shouldn’t. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But if you are in the market to have your night (and maybe your whole week) ruined by a truly great work of cinema, this is the one. You’re unlikely to see another film this or any year as searing and wrenching as this one, and especially unlikely to see one which cuts so deep while still maintaining an unwavering honesty and avoiding the usual manipulations of artists less confident that the world as it is has plenty of its own ability to change you. Babcock and Hadaegh actually have a new movie out now, their first in nearly a decade after A CERTAIN KIND OF DEATH: it’s called SCENES OF A CRIME and it focuses on the 10-hour interrogation of a man accused of murdering his infant son. The New York Times called it a “disturbing picture of courtroom justice.” If it’s anywhere near as brilliant as this one, it’ll be required viewing for a guy like me, but, uh, maybe don’t judge me if I take a little time to recover from this one first, OK?*** Turns out real life is a lot more upsetting than the movies, even for a guy who assumed he’d seen it all.

*Then THE ACT OF KILLING came along. And out of the blue, for the first time in a long time, I remembered what it was like to be scared of movies. To really watch a trailer and think, “Jesus, I don’t know if I need that in my life. That looks like it might just show me some things that I genuinely do not want to see, and will honestly be happier remaining ignorant about.” I was genuinely nervous going in, and --it turned out-- rightly so. That movie is absolutely harrowing, bristling with a raw pain about the horrors humans are capable of on a level that I have never experienced in the cinema. I walked out thoroughly shaken to my core, profoundly disquieted by what I’d seen. But, I also walked out with something else, small at first but gradually growing: that sense of giddy joy you can only get having taken in a genuine work of artistic brilliance. I called THE ACT OF KILLING one of the best films in years, and I stand by that; if anything, its esteem has only grown in my mind as I’ve had time to mull it over and parse through the complex emotions it stirs. It was a very difficult film to watch, but not only am I glad I watched it, I’m almost excited to revisit it. This one, I don’t know if I’d be able to come back to, even as much as I admire it.

**Memo to TV people: this lady needs her own show.

***Worth noting: The DVD has an excellent FAQ section which addresses a lot of the questions you may have about how in the hell this was accomplished. Required reading to get the full story.