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flashy_mcflash posted:Saw a very good sci-fi/horror last night from Xavier Gens (Frontiers, Hitman) called The Divide (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535616/). It's got a great, bleak look and a really excellent cast featuring Michael Biehn, Milo Ventimiglia, and Michael Eklund. It's about a group of survivors living in a basement after a nuclear attack. Wonderfully claustrophobic and some fantastic effects that feel really real. Really looking forward to this after I saw the trailer recently. I likes me some dark and gritty post-apocalyptic fare. Feels like it could've been a prequel to The Road. I've been wanting to see Michael Biehn get a meaty role in something big for a loooonnnng time. I hope this revitalizes his career somewhat, he's been in such huge iconic movies but I'm not sure what happened that he never quite hung onto his success. How's his performance?
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Oct 27, 2011 07:43
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 16:31 |
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 One of my favorite psychological horror films is Finland's Sauna. It has a political backdrop of Russia/Sweden marking the border to create modern Finland after the Cudgel War of 1595, but the war aspect of it is only a subplot. The main plot is two brothers, one a scholar and the other a soldier dealing with trauma from the atrocities of war, trying to escape the memory and guilt of an atrocity they committed. As they trek out to mark the border they find it runs through the center of a village in a swamp, which has a mysterious sauna that inexplicably draws the brothers toward it as they start seeing strange visions (saunas are a huge part of Finnish culture and there's a belief that bathing in one can 'wash away your sins'). Its main flaw is that it's short - just under 80 minutes - but that may even be a benefit because it's easily digestible to people who might not have checked it out. Still, I feel there could've been more of the political B-plot to flesh it out to at least 90. The cinematography is gorgeous (find it in HD if you can, it's totally worth tracking down), the acting is great, the story is really cool, and it gives you just enough information to figure things out for yourself. It's heavy on symbolism the way a psychological horror should be so it doesn't give away too much. I put it on the level of Let the Right One In as far as Nordic cinema I really enjoy. For whatever reason it's renamed in some places as 'Filth' or 'Evil Rising', but Sauna's the original name. There's a BluRay copy with optional English audio but I think it's import-only. I'd love a North American release. 
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Sep 24, 2014 10:19
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