Post by moviemouth on Jul 31, 2020 5:48:35 GMT
A Serbian Film is sometimes referred to as the most disturbing and appalling movie ever made. The critics split on whether the movie is effective social political commentary satire or just using that as an excuse to be as sick as possible and pretend that is commentary so that the director doesn't come off like a sick maniac.
I am in between. The movie is well made and is very good at making you feel a certain way about what you are seeing. The movie is about a retired porn star who is the best at what he does. He has a family and wants to leave that past behind him. He then gets an offer to make a movie by some very shady characters who offer him a great deal of money to perform in their movie, but they won't tell him what is involved. His greed allows him to agree to the project. The movie he is starring in starts off very questionable when the first scene takes place at an orphanage, but this scene just goes normal and nothing much happens. He is deservedly nervous about where the scene takes place, but writes it off. The next day he returns and it starts getting a bit worse in where he is being performed on by a women he has been beaten and the sex act is being observed by a girl that I would guess is maybe 13 years old. She just sits there and makes sexual faces. There was also a scene before this where he is being performed on again while images of the same girl is licking a ice cream. He lets that pass, because it is just a video. After this he asks his cop brother to check out the filmmakers and the brother says that the director ran an orphanage and that he was a child psychologist and said he doesn't think there is much to worry about. The man then goes back to the film set and tells the director that he is done with the movie and then the filmmaker goes on to explain the importance of the movie they are making as an allegory for how we are all brainwashed and used basically as sheep by the world. He then shows the man a video of a man delivering a baby and then brutally rapes the newborn baby while we hear it crying.
That is when I stopped watching the movie. I had to look away during that scene. This movie does capture what it is going for, but it goes TOO far. The movie could almost be used as a psychological experiment where you have different people watch it and then watch their reactions as the movie progresses. I read what happens in the rest of the movie and while the infamous rape scene is the most disturbing scene in the movie, the rest doesn't sound much different. The movie is like an endurance test and whatever commentary the movie might have becomes useless because it starts feeling like it is shocking for the sake of being shocking and the commentary feels almost like a moot point. The director said it is also meant to be a response to political correctness and I sort of give the movie credit here. In a time extreme PC attitudes in the U.S. I think the movie deserves to exist and it deserves to exist and stands as a cry out for artistic expression, free speech in a increasingly un-artistic industry in a time where people are complaining about anything that could even slightly be found offensive. The movie made me ill and I refuse to finish it, but it should not be banned or edited in a supposedly free country.
Rating - N/A
I don't think I would had known what to rate it even if I had finished watching it.
On an ironic side note it is Hollywood that is preaching how we should all become better more considerate people, while they are all wallowing in their own depravity, greed and hypocrisy. I support artistic expression and freedom of speech to the highest degree. I will never support the immoral behaviors of many of the people in Hollywood. I believe that bad people can make great movies with important messages and I wish those people would have the integrity to look at themselves and change their behavior and admit their hypocrisy.