October 7
#7 Deadgirl (2008)

Two best friends, Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and J.T. (Noah Segan), skipping school and fleeing bullies, break into an abandoned mental hospital–one which looks uncannily like the abandoned mental hospital right next to my in-laws’ house, by the way–with the intention of causing some unsupervised havoc.  At first it proves an exhilarating means of exercising control and freedom that they cannot find in their daily lives; that is, until they wander into a menacing, shadowy basement, which might remind the viewer of Brad Anderson’s superior Session 9.  Here they encounter a vicious dog, one whose inexplicable presence is one of a handful of unexplained aspects to the story (the ever-lurking dog, present but largely unseen for much of the running time, seems to serve more as metaphor than reality, enhancing the fable qualities of the film).  The two are chased by the dog into a barricaded section of the hospital, and here they find, in a morgue-like room, a naked young woman covered in a plastic sheet.  She is held tight by chains, and a gag is in her mouth.  Although by all appearances–yellowed skin, sunken features–she’s a corpse, they’re startled to find a breathing disturbing the sheet.   Almost immediately J.T.’s fascination turns to possessive lust.  Rickie is repulsed and frightened, although there’s a glimpse of a similar lascivious impulse: both boys are obviously virgins, and it is made clear that, at 17, they remain in a pall of paralyzed fear in the presence of the opposite sex.  Rickie runs, leaving J.T. alone with the body; and it’s then, we learn later, that the girl tries to attack J.T., and he fights with her, breaking her neck.  Yet she cannot be killed.  She’s undead, though they never say the word; a zombie, most likely, but J.T. simply calls her “our monster.”  By leaving her chained, in this place no one else is likely to discover, they can do whatever they want to her.  Rickie won’t.  J.T., on the other hand, not only uses the girl to exercise all the control he’s ever lusted of having over a girl, but also begins to loan her out to another friend.  For all his guilt and revulsion, Rickie cannot distance himself.  Neither can he tell anyone.  An attempt to free the “dead girl” is aborted when she proves to be lethal unchained.  And the moral quagmire is further complicated when it’s proven that her condition can spread by bite (although not, curiously, by sexual intercourse; perhaps because Romero never had anything to say on that detail, and almost all zombie movies must follow Romero’s Laws).  Meanwhile, inevitably, Rickie’s unrequited love for a girl who was his first (and possibly only) kiss is dragged into this dangerous game–as is the girl’s  jock boyfriend.

All of this is handsomely shot, with an excellent soundtrack and some thoughtful editing: despite the extremely disturbing nature of the plot, Deadgirl does not belong to the same strain of “extreme” horror currently pushing the limits of what can be shown on screen (largely from Europe and Asia).  Directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel prefer instead to give only subliminal flashes of violence, with a jolt of the soundtrack followed by a shock of blackness.  And even though the “dead girl” is never clothed–and is being raped and brutalized throughout the film–some nauseating makeup and creepy camera angles guarantee that none of this is eroticized or overtly exploitative.  Deadgirl unfolds as a dark coming-of-age tale with elements of genre horror.  When it keeps its focus on the real-life horrors of adolescence, it can be quite powerful. 

Unfortunately, however, the metaphor at the heart of the film is burdensomely problematic.  The symbol for gaining control and exorcising teenage sexual frustration is the raping and beating of a bound-and-gagged woman.  The fact that she’s a zombie often seems relatively unimportant (though J.T. uses this as an excuse, from our point of view we are watching nothing but a rape); and that our protagonist, Rickie, has any indecisiveness at all is a hurdle too high for the film.  The filmmakers want this to be a story about teenagers battling their fears of powerlessness, but the weightiness of the “r”-word overwhelms the proceedings.  There is nothing wrong with using rape as a metaphor in fiction (and, yes, we’re often told that rape is about power), but it is such a potent element that it throws all others out of balance, and the film struggles to define itself as anything else.  This accounts for the awkward changes in tone, with some late-in-the-game attempts at black humor that feel forced, obligatory but somehow out of place.  The same goes for the supernatural horror, which requires a grand guignol climax that seems somehow dishonest here, though admittedly it’s more restrained than it might have been.  The directors are playing with fire, and more power to them–the horror genre, at its best, goes to uncomfortable and taboo places–but they have raised the stakes too high to indulge in either perfunctory moments or whimsy. 

The ending itself is curiously unsatisfactory and somewhat underdeveloped.  It’s also dispiriting, as much for being obvious as for its disturbing implications (which, to its detriment, are left largely unexplored).  I am not sure what the filmmakers are saying about male sexuality and desire, if they have anything to say at all.  Contrast this–unfairly, perhaps–to the resolution of Let the Right One In, which, in the simplest stroke, offers revelations about what we’ve witnessed and where the characters are going.  Deadgirl is almost claustrophically small-minded in its own denouement.  The film has struggled to be more than just 100 minutes of a zombie getting raped, but ultimately its virtues are subsumed, and it is not much more than just that: some guys raping a girl, and one guy who doesn’t know what to do about it.  It’s handsome but immobile, like a fresh corpse resting on a table.