Your Flesh, Your Curse Review from TetroVideo!
Mark the words of the wise ol’ Creepy Man, TetroVideo are set to dominate and push their way into many homes over the next few years. Suddenly, there’s a blitz of titles coming up from this fledgling company and these films look like they are gonna be monolithic size raw slabs of nasty!
Take Your Flesh Your Curse, for instance. I headed into the unknown with this one. Severed Cinema fave, Domiziano Cristopharo sent me it to check out. Yeah, I know that man’s style, but this isn’t one of his movies. It was around back in 2017, picked up for distribution by TetroVideo, but straight away you can see how it fits into the asylum.
Opening with three rather tipsy young ladies wandering and laughing along a dark street, one of these girls happens to be our central character, Juliet White. What soon follows is a prolonged unflinching scene of rape and dunking of a face in a bucket of water by some fella who might have walked out of a cosplay convention and then decided to stop off and dip himself in some lady of his choosing. In a classy and inventive little touch to proceedings, as he draws tell-tale symbols on her naked flesh, the very things he draws appears across the screen, as some incredibly atmospheric music plays. What could this mean? A dream? A memory of abuse? Well, we shall see…
Back to Juliet as seen at the start, and then a tape of her father speaking directly to her via the screen. He sobs and shakes as basically he is apologising for all the ways he abused Juliet. “I hope you have found some peace in your life. Maybe I can help you with that.” he says. “Goodbye, Juliet. Daddy has always loved you.” thus he walks to the side of the camera and switches off, however we notice a gun in his hand.
“I was trying to forget you!” Juliet says in narration, “Fuck you!” She sits on her sofa, screaming, rocking back and forth, and swigging from a bottle. In fact, poor Juliet is a wreck, coating her past with substance abuse, amongst brutal and loveless sexual liaisons – for money.
“Every creature in this world is meant to die alone.” narrates the empty void which a long time ago would have been a human being, now just a shell sat in a field injecting her arm. “I should be dead…” Passing out and zoned into a vegetable state, she’s found by a passing stranger who figures the best way to resuscitate a young girl who’s in a field is by raping her – I don’t recall the St. John’s First Aid Courses I’ve attended in my life mentioning this method. Must be a new one. Not content with dipping his wick, he watches her crawl away, then slices her throat.
Our main girl is dead. Is that the end? Oh hell no, the film now takes a detour into another existence of shock. Juliet finds herself in the afterlife which, to her, is a terrifying place. Faced by a being who towers over her wearing a mask and whispering, she is told it’s time to live again.
I usually go one and fill in an epic tome when it comes to my reviews. This time however will be a little different. I’m not going to continue on and reveal any more of the story simply because I feel knowledge of such will dilute the massing power and overladen doom. Keep firmly in mind that Juliet dies a little over half an hour into the film, meaning there’s over an hour to go. The film is divided into chapters, by the way. As Chapter III ‘Forgiveness and the Spirit Realm’ begins, we enter into a punishing and twisting sometimes erotic pathway as she faces a lot of her past and her inner self linking to some of the scenarios we witnessed earlier on.
“Do you feel it?” asks the masked guide. Juliet replies; “I think I feel it.” Yeah, she has to feel quite a lot and live through so many things wearing so many different guises.
Marie-Louise Damgaard Nielsen is a fucking stunning acting force in this film! She is so real and powerful as Juliet White. The vast amount of emotions she uses is staggering as her character falls to pieces so many times and faces horrors so vile in parts, I would say she has achieved one of the greatest performances in an extreme horror film ever! I think she’s the perfect partner to the directing style of Kasper Juhl who painfully prolongs moments of impending sexual violence and can make lengthy scenes, where nothing much happens, so watchable by wringing so much from his cast. He also has the knack of making the movie appear to be sinking into a dark and barren grave; the colours and overall mood descends slowly into some places many will not wish to see.
The extremely talented, Anders Norddal Jendresen absolutely nails the accompanying music to perfection with such delight I thought about the soundtrack work by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Dreamy and nightmarish in equal doses, just like Your Flesh Your Curse.
Oh yeah, the workhorse who is called, Kim Sonderholm (Dead City, Craig, Cannibal Fog) pops up briefly, giving a standard quality performance.
For myself, the most outstanding set piece throughout Your Flesh Your Curse has to be the minutes I will simply call, The Field of Screams. I haven’t seen in a long time, one scene which captures desperation, paranoia, and the all-out shattering of a human as this one. Top medals and marks to Emma Nymann for this segment in the jigsaw puzzle which is, Your Flesh Your Curse. As a matter of fact, a crimson-fisted salute goes to actress Mie Gren who plays the much abused ‘Dog Girl’. The things you do for your art.
Your Flesh Your Curse is art. It’s a dark dripping framed display of so much intense emotions which all become in fact, a beautiful portrait of the soul.
Directed by: Kasper Juhl | Written by: Kasper Juhl | Produced by: Anders Norddal Jendresen, Kasper Juhl, Joey Caps | Cinematography by: Kasper Juhl | Editing by: Kasper Juhl | Music by: Anders Norddal Jendresen | Special Effects by: Janus Vinther, Christine Scheel Kvint. | Cast: Marie-Louise Damgaard, Kim Sonderholm, Paw Terndrup, Bill Hutchens, Emma Nymann, Mie Gren, Frederik Carlsen, Louise Gammelgaard | Year: 2017 | Country: Denmark | Language: English | Colour: Colour | Runtime: 1h 40min
Distribution: TetroVideo
