A Bleaker Street

My friend Sam Gafford wants suggestions for bleakly devastating, soul scouring, hopelessly suffocating, sorrow-wallowing cinematic fare.

Here ya go, Sam:

Downloading Nancy (2008)

Nancy Stockwell – like any cancer patient exposed to harmful UV rays, carcinogenic toxins or really shitty genetics – received her first lethal dose of soul cancer as a child, when her uncle introduced her to the sadistic world of sexual abuse. With her underdeveloped reproductive organs ripped ragged by Uncle Fucka’s invasive exploratory procedures, Nancy is unable to bear children upon reaching maturity. Nevertheless, she marries and settles into a comfortable suburban life with her husband Albert, a successful corporate something-or-other whose fat paycheck allows Nancy to stay at home and play happy hausfrau 24/7, cooking and cleaning and slowly spiraling into misery.

You see, husband Albert is a lot of things – successful, driven, etc. – but he’s a piss poor human being. Cold, critical, aloof to the point of outright disgust. He seems like the kind of guy who would insist upon alphabetizing the cans of Campbell’s soup in the cupboard and who probably uses a ruler to fold the towels. White towels, of course. His only passion is golf, the sport of choice among the WASPy douchebag set, and his fussy wardrobe of khakis and polo shirts completes the picture of a perfect cold fish. As played by Rufus Sewell, he even kind of looks like a fish, all bulgy-eyed and puffy.

Albert should have married a frigid socialite with a taste for Gucci and a Visa platinum card where her heart ought to have been. Instead, he’s got Nancy, an embarrassment of emotional ups and downs. Nancy cuts herself, her forearms a mutilated mass of scar tissue. Her requests for sex disgust Albert. Her therapy is going nowhere. And she absolutely refuses to take Albert’s advice to “snap out of it.” With no one willing or able to understand her, Nancy turns to the world wide web, seeking solace in the numerous sordid chat rooms populated by the depressed, deranged and discarded.

It is here that she meets Louis, a troubled but sympathetic loner who agrees to give Nancy what she desires most: release. Nancy knows that the only thing that will make her life better is death, a carefully planned and elegant death in the right dress and with a shitload of hot sex preceding it. She wants Louis to kill her and give her the release from pain that she so desperately craves. And Louis is perfectly willing to do as she asks…until he realizes that he’s fallen in love with her.

Watching Downloading Nancy is comparable to staring at a cow skull bleached dry and white beneath the desert sun: it’s beautiful, but the longer you look, the more devastatingly heartbreaking it becomes. Maria Bello in the starring role of Nancy/Cow Skull is beautifully empty; dried out to a husk of her former self, emaciated, neglected, a walking cadaver lacking only the toe tag. She’s gorgeously unbalanced, taking pleasure only in the things that cause her pain and making us cringe with her efforts to elicit a response – any response – out of the people around her. We almost understand Albert’s reluctance to display her. Almost. Nancy is indeed no trophy. She can’t pose, she can’t pretend, and her few attempts to “snap out of it” are met with stern disapproval by the very man who insisted she do so to begin with. Nancy is very, frighteningly real, standing stage struck against a bleak backdrop, watching as everyone else plays their part, unsure of her own role, unable to speak her expected lines.

There’s a multitude of reasons to watch this mostly overlooked and unheard of film: the excellent cast, the cold and barren backdrops, the claustrophobic and panic-attack inducing atmosphere. You could probably duplicate the experience by locking yourself inside of an empty meat freezer and listening to Sartre’s complete works on audio narrated by Kevin Costner. No wait, I take that back. As bleak and hopeless as this movie is, at least it’s Costner free. That in itself is a reason to go on living.


Tyrannosaur (2011)

Drunken, unemployed widower Joseph (Peter Mullan) has just kicked his dog to death in an inebriated rage, thus ridding himself of the only friend he had left in the whole entire world. Alone, bitter, infuriated and self destructive, Joseph truly believes that his world is horrible, his soul damned and everyone else is to blame. In particular, charity shop owner Hannah, a plain, simple, Christian woman from a nice neighborhood with a nice life and tidy little problems that can be cleaned up with a single swipe of a starched white handkerchief. Joseph sneers at her attempts to pray for him and offer him guidance, thinking surely this plain Jane has never known a single day of pain in her sheltered, suburban life.

But Hannah's life makes Joseph's look like a narcissistic's wet dream, and all of the chips on his shoulder are nothing more than the whines of self made misery shrinking in the shadow of her despair.

There's no happy ending, but there's hope, however distant and dimly lit. But all in all, this film will drown all of your joy like kittens in a bath tub.


Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
 You can read my full review HERE.

However, allow me to sum up by saying that there are few sights more disheartening than watching prim, cherubic faced, properly British Toby Jones ground down into angry powder by a bunch of oily 1970s Italian giallo filmmakers who live in an eternal fogbank of cigarette smoke and lies.





Enter The Void (2009)

Life is a pointless, torturous, merciless game that no one wants to play but everyone is forced to. Life doesn't give a single shit about you: it spits you out, leaves you alone to fend for yourself and then snuffs you out without a second thought, replacing you with a million more meat puppets who jerk and flail and cry, unheeded, until it is their turn to enter the void. And if you think that Death is the great release, the All-Knowing, All-Forgiving equalizer, think again. Oscar, a American drug dealer in Japan who has just been shot to death in a dirty bathroom after trying to flush his drugs ahead of the police, floats disembodied over Tokyo, watching how both his life and his death were molded and shaped by his childhood traumas and the poor decisions he made. And his own death continues to mold and shape the destinies of those he left behind, particularly his lost and lonely sister Linda. This isn't a story about redemption, but about the greatest fuck ups we as humans can commit, and never undo, and end up paying for life after life.

Precious (2009)

Oh god, this film makes The Color Purple look like a carnival colored musical by comparison. It's like being locked in a fungus-rotted closet in Harlem in mid-July with no toilet, no light, nothing to eat but silverfish and nothing to hope for but the sweet release of death. Here is an obese, poverty stricken, illiterate black girl in New York, silently failing school and suffering through her second unwanted pregnancy forced upon her by her own HIV positive, drunken shit of a father. But it's the scenes between Precious and her mother - a brutish, pig-eyed, manipulative bulldozer of a woman who encourages the rape and abuse of her own daughter and throws in some of her own too boot, when she's not busy conning social services out of the money that is meant to go to her own inbred grandchildren - that are unbearable. Just when you think you've seen the absolute limit of the horrific shit that Precious puts up with on a daily basis, you haven't. It gets worse, and worse, and even more fucking worse. And then it gets shittier, and bleaker and more hopeless and by the time it's over, you've made out a shopping list for Home Depot including a length of hose to run from your exhaust to your drivers seat, several rolls of masking tape and a Hazmat suit for the unfortunate soul who stumbles upon your dead body.

Mysterious Skin (2004)

Small town boy whore Neil is just itching to ditch the dusty little Apple Pie town he's spent his whole life in, receiving blowjobs from discreet middle aged men in the park for money. He's aiming for New York City and the glamorous hustler life, where a pretty boy can live high and experience all of the glitter and decadence that life has to offer. He follows his friend Wendy to the big city and shit gets very real, very quickly when the stark realities of loneliness, disease and rape decide to take Neil on a tour of life instead. Meanwhile back in the cow pasture, an asexual young man named Brian is seeking answers to a missing chunk of time in his childhood, during which he believes he was kidnapped and probed by extraterrestrials. There's only one person who can shed light on the event, and that's Neil. And when all is said and done, an alien anal probe seems much preferable.

Antiviral (2012)

Celebrity worship and the emptiness of the human soul have never been more bitterly or accurately displayed as Brandon Cronenberg (son of David) takes us into a not-too-distant future where human flesh is cloned, grown and sold to the public for sandwich stuffings, and celebrity illnesses are designer bling injected into any hardcore fan willing to pay the price to be infected with their idol's disease. Life is cold, personal identity is absent and death is the greatest cash cow in the world. This is so scrubbed white and bleach clean antiseptic it hurts to look at, all emotion removed and replaced with cogs and wires. Congratulations: you're famous, and you're now a deli stacker.