- Directed by Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
- Written by Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
- Stars Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 42 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOTt4lUdK9A
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
It’s visually outstanding, with every single shot being bright, dark, colorful, surreal, or otherwise visually stunning. It’s to say the least, a visual work of art. The gore shots and weird body horror images are well done, but the complete lack of a coherent story makes it hard to sit through to the end. It’s beautiful, but even that gets old after an hour or meandering, incoherent, pretentious pointlessness.
Synopsis
Dan Kristensen disembarks from his airplane. We see various black-and-white scenes of bondage and knife-play as the credits roll.
He arrives home to find his wife, Edwidge, isn’t there. He gets drunk and goes looking for her, getting locked out of his apartment. Someone lets him in and tells him to come to the 7th floor.
There’s a strange woman up there who is shrouded in darkness. She says that her husband Paul recently disappeared. We get a flashback to her and her husband having sex and hearing strange noises. Paul drills a hole into the room and disappears up there one night. She tells Dan the whole story and then orders him to leave.
Dan goes up to the roof, where he finds a naked woman standing on the ledge smoking. Her name is Barbara.
Dan wakes up. A detective comes to see him in the morning. He tells Dan a story about a case he was on. A woman puts on blue earrings, and her husband takes photos of her being undressed by a man. He follows her obsessively, and things get carried away.
Dan thinks someone is in the apartment with him, but cannot find them. The landlord comes by and tells Dan that he’s on thin ice. He finds an audio tape and a drawing with the number 7 on it. This leads him to apartment 7 in the building, where he has a number of colorful and painful experiences.
Before long, he’s running around the apartment, naked, hiding from himself. From there it starts getting weird…
Commentary
I kinda started tuning out after the black-and-white slideshow woman was attacked by an animated man that crawled out of her hatbox and forced a pill down her throat.
It’s quite often hard to follow, and it’s not a language/subtitle issue. The film is meant to be surreal and just plain weird. About an hour in, I started comparing it in my mind to “Eraserhead” of all things, another film full of shot after shot of surreal, yet pointless nonsense.