The Girl with the Cutter & Golgota Double Feature Review from TetroVideo!
Mikel Balerdi is best known now for his feature debut, Larva Mental (see review here) and his short film contribution to the anthology film Vore Gore (see review here). This time around he is back with the double feature of The Girl with the Cutter and Golgota.
The Girl with the Cutter is inspired by a true story. The film takes place in 1990 by way of a title card but according to Domiziano Cristopharo:
“Around November 8th of 2008, photographs of an unknown girl, most likely of German heritage and appearing to be in her early twenties, started circling around the tubes, starting with some shitty site no one cares about and ending up on Something Awful. Judging from the content of the photos, said girl just may be the most hardcore cutter in existence.“
In the title credits, the film is listed as being a tribute to Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor, and theorist, Lucio Fontana. He was the founder of Spatialism, which focuses on the special qualities of sculpture and paintings with the goal of breaking through two-dimensionality of the traditional picture plane. This bit of knowledge is important to appreciate the film.
The story follows a temporally tormented woman (Cofi Valduvieux), who battles the urge to cut herself. She avoids calls from her father, and spends her time fighting voices in her head that are portrayed as muffed and demonic sounding voices that are not in English (as far as I can tell). She also has visions of a demonic version of herself coaxing her to cut herself. We see her cerebral anguish via flashes of what appear to be images of real lacerations.
She attempts to take her life by injecting pills, but instead she ralphs them up on the floor and passes out. She studies anatomy books to figure out the best way to harm herself. She even attempts to enjoy an ordinary life by going to a coffee shop, but to no avail. Once she orders food and a hot beverage, she is given a knife and fork. The knife sets her off and she hastily leaves.
With her mental suffering mounting, she franticly hacks her hair off with a box cutter, including parts of her scalp as evidenced by the Dawn of the Dead coloured blood. Things escalate from here.
It is important to recognize the tribute to artist Lucio Fontana. His artwork depicts paintings with lacerations in them, which mirror certain cutting sequences in The Girl with the Cutter. Throughout her self-mutilation activity, she envisions herself as almost a textured canvas, symbolic of all her mental scars as well as her healed mutilations depicted by immense scarring. The cutting of her body is visually evocative of some of Fontana’s work, but in a more viscerally violent way.
The Girl with the Cutter is an experimental art film shot full frame with predominantly classical music as the soundtrack. The visual style is almost VHS, stylistically distorted, as well as other visual distortions which lend to the symbolism of her mental degradation. The film is unspoken except for audible demonic sounding voices which are not in English and this screener from TetroVideo did not provide subtitles which was unfortunate. I ended up having to translate the title card’s textual contribution myself online. However, regarding the demonic voices, I was unable to translate due to no subtitles, even in Spanish. Here is an example of a transition title card in the film:
Spanish: “Quizas llueva mucho tiempo y pueda sentir el rocio en mi piel, quiza me llene de ilusiones en una luz que jamas me deje de inundar.”
My translation via the interwebs: “Maybe it will rain for a long time and I can feel the dew on my skin, maybe it will fill me with illusions in a light that never stops flooding me.”
The Girl with the Cutter is a respectable underground experimental art film.
Moving on to Golgota. The word Gotgotha (or Calvary) is the name of the hill where jesus was crucified. It also means a place of suffering or sacrifice, which is a suitable title for the film. Unfortunately, Golgota did not resonate with me at all. It’s merely a shock gross-out film with no substance. So, if that’s what you’re into then you’re in for a disgusting delight. Surely there will be an unwholesome audience for such video nasties, but I, do not fall into that category.
The movie is told through a series of title cards per hour. It’s 6 hours in the life of an unknown woman (but told in about 25 minutes). I will articulate the happenings of this gross-out video via the hour titles as follow:
Hour 1: A woman is depicted masturbating with various sex toys.
Hour 2: The woman gives a blowjob to an unknown gentleman, complete with sloppy noises, concluded by slurping up the high fructose porn syrup!
Hour 3: Her hand goes down throat and heaves white chunky chuck repeated in a toilet.
Hour 4: We see a close-up of her buttocks, as she starts spraying translucent sepia-coloured devil’s coffee out her anus. This continues with chocolate thunder. She picks up the blobs of faeces and gobbles it down. This is the point that your dear writer realized that this style of vile video isn’t for me. She continues by munching on shit for what seems like forever. Mind you, it appears to be chocolate syrup or some such palatable material. She then sits in foetal position, presumably self-reflecting her life choices.
Hour 5: She masturbates with a shit covered body.
Hour 6: She shaves her pubic hair to prepare in preparation for some self-mutilation. Armed with a surgical curved needle and thick black thread, she begins sowing up her joy trail. The end.
Folks expecting a gorefest with Golgota will be disappointed. However, if you’re just into gross-out flicks for the sake of being gross with no obvious narrative then perhaps Golgota is for you.
The Girl with the Cutter and Golgota are forthcoming as a double bill from TetroVideo.
Directed by: Mikel Balerdi
Produced by: Domiziano Cristopharo
Cast: Cofi Valduvieux
Year: 2021
Country: Spain
Language: Spanish (No subtitles)
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 1h 17m
Distributor: TetroVideo
