As per the thread title, you could also go here for your answer.
-Tom
P.S. But it’s not a gory movie at all, Mr. Burky. It’s definitely not that kind of horror movie. You could even argue it’s not a horror movie.
I watched this with my wife last night. The realism part of me was constantly wondering why they were doing what they were doing…if you’ve lost your guides, you’d look for food and shelter instead of wandering around the jungle. The rest of me enjoyed the fever dream, which queued in for me fully around the same moment as one of the posters above mentioned, where the two were separated in the jungle, then in the next scene were together.
Something that was really neat in my experience of the film was my wife’s reaction. When they go to that small village with the giant rusty shack to pick up their first boat ride with their first guide, my wife sits up and says “I’ve been there.”. Turns out that when she did relief work in Thailand, that was the village she was stationed in for a few weeks. That’s the real place, and that’s what the people there really look like (at least as of 2002 or so when she was there.) This film might be a fever dream, but there’s a lot more reality to at least some of the film than you might guess.
there’s a lot more reality to at least some of the film than you might guess
Ok, that does it. The next little boy that approaches me is getting a big kick in the face, just in case he wants to rip out my intestines.
Correct on both accounts.
The movie went downhill fast the minute Psychotic Mom stepped out of the cab to find Triad Guy and her husband didn’t slap her and haul her home. The whole scene reminded me of an RPG cliche wherein the party is at its wits’ end about finding somebody/something in an unfamiliar environment, so they turn to the local mob boss with predictably grim results.
It’s not that it’s unrealistic behaviour (which I wasn’t expecting to begin with) - just escalatingly stupid and annoying. Virtually every single character is shown to be cluelessly bumbling along a fixed path that’s designed from the get-go to lead us to the village of little savages, where we’re left with… what exactly?
Curse you, Tom. Curse you for not only making me watch this film with your teasing, spoiler-free opener, but also for making me stand alongside a moran like fOrMAt (a poster with a name almost as ridiculously spelled as my own). While I feel I “got” the movie more than he, I certainly didn’t get it as well as you did.
And Emmanuel Beart’s face is too eerily reminiscent of Octomom’s for me. /shudder.
moran
Uh, what shall I answer to that? Urmom? Whatever.
fOrMAt
Sigh. You give way more importance to my nickname than I do. It was the first nickname I used back when I was a teenager and made my first contact with the internets, and I stuck with it. You can spell it foRmaT, foRmat, formaT… I don’t care. The amusement you get from that says more than enough about you.
While I feel I “got” the movie more than he
Congratulations.
It’s a strange (and brilliant and unsettling) movie, but I’m not the least bit surprised by some of the reactions in this thread. My feeling is that unless you “get” the other two movies referenced in the thread’s title (Apocalypse Now and Don’t Look Now), you’re not likely to “get” Vinyan as a whole.
Hey, now you guys should go watch du Welz’ last movie. Kidding!
-Tom
I think the big part is that I like to get absorbed into the narrative, and from what you’ve been posting about “getting” it, I’d have to take a step back from it and start analyzing it like a college course requirement.
What I like about Tom is that while he subjected me to this movie (at gunpoint! Over the forum! Totally!) he’s not being all snooty and looking down his nose at those of us who didn’t like it. Which I guess says more about my experience with folks who like movies like Vinyan than anything else.
Plus, we can totally agree that Ginger Snaps was the bomb, yo.
I was fortunate enough to be able to watch this without even looking at the DVD blurb based on Tom’s recommendation, and I really liked it. Not having a clue as to what was going on or how it would play out made the increasingly dreamlike tone of the film much more palatable than it would have been had I gone in with any sort of expectations. The cinematography was excelled only by the film’s incredible use of sound. Watching it with the surround-sound system cranked is something I’ll never forget (particularly the opening scene and the bits in the city where the sound added immensely to the chaotic sense of danger).
What I liked most about it has already been pointed out. The rich white people think their loss is somehow more profound than is the case when a brown person experiences loss, and the entire movie was Thailand saying, “fuck off. You are not special snowflakes, you are outside the bubble that normally insulates you from reality, and you are entitled to exactly what everyone else here is entitled to, which is jack shit. Deal.” Watching that dude trek around with his insane wife, knowing from the get-go that their marriage was already over, would have been heartbreaking in a traditional “find the lost kid” flick. Here it was amusing in an utterly macabre way because their little drama was playing out against a backdrop so full of real, stark, endless life-or-death drama that it became a laughable sideshow.
I don’t think we were supposed to care about these people, or their struggle, or even their lost kid. I think we were being shown a trite Hallmark card fluttering down to hell on its way to the inevitable, and this one was all about the scenery.
I love the way you put this. I don’t know if I agree completely, but I don’t care because this is such a cool post.
Your point about going in without expectations (“not having a clue”) is key, and not just for this film. I want this to be the case for every film I see, and I’m pretty anal about that. Sometimes it makes me a boor, but that’s okay. Getting to see a film like Memento in the theatre without knowing a single thing about it, because a close friend hustled me to the theatre before I could hear the buzz, makes up for that.
Again, great post.
-amanpour
“That’s a polite word for what you are.”
Calvaire for the next Movie Club pick!
Okay, probably not.
Also, I second the good Mr. Murawski on the awesomeness of the Hallmark card fluttering down to Hell phrasing.
The wife and I just got done watching this movie, and I have to express the same setiments that others have in this thread, and say I did not like this movie one bit.
First, it was very, very, very slow. In fact, I was glad to see at least one of the main characters die at the end. It gave me a little satisfaction in that something horrible happened to them as payback for making me sit there for 1 1/2 hours watching nonsense.
Second, lots of problems in this movie. The jumping out of the cab and looking for the Triad made no sense at all. My wife and I kept asking ourselves “Why not ask the person (Kim) who videotaped the initial footage?” I think any rational person would do that and the husband who was rational would have. Another problem was putting trust into people who you know are people that will probably kill you without even thinking. Yeah, lets hand our passports over to some Triad guy. Yeah, lets give the guys all our money because money = leverage and without money you are screwed. The mom becoming the leader of the cannibal lost boys even though she couldn’t speak Thai…etc etc etc…Just a ton of absurdity in this movie.
I do have some questions. Who was the adult the kids strung up and sprung a “gotcha” moment on the couple? Why didn’t the couple go directly to the village on the tape rather than hit that first island. What was that Kim character all about? Was she into the slave trade or something? There is a scene where the ship captain and the guru guide are in the village and a kid takes a bite out of the guru guys arm but in a later scene they are sitting there playing poker but don’t seemed phased. What happened with that?
I saw the references to Apocolypse Now, Lord of the Flies, Don’t Look Now, and Deliverance and I love all those movies by themselves, but mashed together like they are in this movie, just made me scratch my head confused and just plain pissed off.
Only read the OP in the case of spoilers, so apologies if this has been discussed.
I also like horror movies when they go for a more “sociological ethos” more than just individual fears. In my mind, Gojira is the atomic bomb, Friday the 13th and it’s ilk are the expression of a new kind of conservatism (hypocritical, false) coming into culture (kids with no parental supervision go into the woods, they do drugs, they have sex, they die, with the exception of the well behaved girl. At the same time, BOOBS GALORE) and it’s no coincidence most of the baddies on japan horror are women.
But mostly, Tom keeps pimping CHUPACABRA TERROR, and that makes this one a must see for me.
Now, the long wait until it shows up in my dvd stores…
Well that was a weird movie. I got it based on Xtien’s comments in a 3x3 on the Qt3 podcast recently, so I knew nothing about it except that it contained an unsexy sex scene and it used nudity in a memorable way somehow. (The subject of that week’s 3x3).
Tom: On reading your spoiler post above, how did you come to the conclusion that they lost their child while on vacation? If they lost him on vacation then why are they still living in Thailand? Were they still on the same vacation? Also, if they were on vacation with their child, how come they didn’t also drown in the Tsunami? He had to have been separated from them somehow, and they never explain how. In the end of the movie, it seemed like the wife blames the husband somehow about losing the child, but since I don’t know what context the child was lost to the Tsunami, I have no idea why she would think it was his fault.
It is entirely possible that I missed a line in the movie that explained this, though. They spoke very softly in this movie at times and were hard to understand.
Also: What on earth was going on in that other woman’s hut, the one who tried to seduce the husband? He comes back later and peeks in, and there’s a few women, turning around slowly, naked, displaying themselves for the kingpin dude, but the woman is also there, and she can be seen sort of heaving up and down while still fully clothed. Is she supposed to be masturbating in that scene? Or having sex with someone below her?
I just figure it was the movie’s intention to keep that intentionally vague, since the husband didn’t get a good look into the hut. And that makes the audience uneasy. Truthfully, I didn’t even know that this was supposed to be a horror movie, since I never read this thread until today, after I watched the movie.
It was an interesting film. I wouldn’t ever recommend it to anyone, but it was a worthwhile experience for me.
That is an excellent one-sentence review that echos my sentiments. I dug it, but don’t know a single person who wouldn’t punch me in the face after watching this on my recommendation.
This is why I’m thankful I know Kelly Wand and Tom Chick.
-xtien
The exact quote is “You let him go”. It’s been a while since I saw it, but I think it was sort of ambiguous if it was actually the wife saying that, or a guilt-ridden hallucination on the part of the husband when he’s really losing his grip on things.
Either way, coupled with the wave imagery Drastic pointed out, I think the impllication is that the he lost his grip on the boy who got swept along by the waves, while he managed to hold on to something.
Vinyan wasn’t really working for me, and then it hit me and I connected, and then I lost interest again.
I spent a while getting caught up in the questions of what rational person would do the things they’re doing, or allow them. It wasn’t exactly the movie’s fault; it wasn’t like “NO, DON’T GO IN THE BASEMENT, THE KILLER’S DOWN THERE!” I don’t know if this even makes sense, but the movie was doing a great job of showing me people I totally could not understand. Some part of me had a fuzzy understanding that this couple isn’t behaving rationally, but that’s not unrealistic. Still, I wasn’t any closer to relating to them.
When the boat is gone and Jeanne just jumps off the dock, and Paul has to fight her just to pull her back, it just sort of clicked. I’m hesitant to explain this, because I don’t want to project themes onto the movie that aren’t there or steer the conversation off on a tangent about me or my beliefs, but it was in that scene that it just sorta clicked and I understood that this was what hopelessness looked like. Probably already distorted on its way to madness, but this was just pure, unmitigated hopelessness. Here’s where I get wacky on you guys, but you know, I’m a “religious guy” or whatever. Given what I believe, whether it’s because you believe I’m a complete sap or because of the grace of God that I am given faith or anywhere in between, when I sit here and watch this, I’m thinking “by the grace of God, I will never be this lost, this hopeless, this helpless.” And who am I to say that’s even true, maybe if I lost a child I’d be an even bigger wreck than these people, forsake all beliefs, whatever. Please don’t misinterpret this as me thinking I’m a better or stronger person or anything like that. But in the life I live now, again, chalk it up to delusion if you want, right up until some future point at which I lose all hope, I cannot imagine losing all hope.
And Jeanne jumping off the dock, that’s just when it really clicked that this is what hopelessness is, and it’s terrifying and irrational and real and I’m glad Vinyan gave me a glimpse of it. I stopped wanting Paul to knock her out, throw her over his shoulder, and drag her back to civilization.
For me, that was the climax, in a way. From that point on, there wasn’t anything more hopeless. There wasn’t really anywhere farther for Jeanne and Paul to fall emotionally. There was just the beautifully shot but inevitable march through the jungle to their death.
So, uh, yeah. Good recommendation that I will probably never recommend to anyone else.
Great point Schmidt. Thanks for sharing your perspective. Obviously it didn’t click personally with me the same way, but you’re right, the moment she jumped in the water was also the first time that I truly understood where she stood, mentally, and their state of mind was crystal clear. Definitely the highlight of the movie for me too, since it got weird after that and slipped more into David Lynch territory, which I don’t enjoy as much.
“Grenade of a movie indeed.” I agree with just about all Tom said, and coming to this so far after its release, I feel like I have nothing to add (except a bit of incredulity aimed at the detractors, who I think were looking for a more facile and obvious “horror” film… which this most certainly is not) but I did want to comment on a few things.
There are two important sentences in the film: “You wanted a child, we gave you a child.”" and “You let him go.” Each describes the passage the parents must undergo in the film in order for them to be resolved with their son’s death.
Jeanne’s passage is obvious, I think: she finds her peace, not by acknowledging Joshua’s death (obvious from the first minute of the film) but by adopting the orphans of the Tsunami. Her passage isn’t about hopelessness: it’s about the way irrational, primal hope can pervert. “You wanted a child, we gave you a child”
But it’s Paul’s I find more fascinating. One of the things that is most profoundly effective about Vinyan is the refusal of the director and screenwriter to ever once explain the circumstances of Joshua’s death… but Paul’s guilt in the film (both when he’s drunk and when he’s hallucinating) seems to indicate that both he and Joshua were swimming when the tsunami hit, and he let go of his hand and let the wave carry him away. Paul is also the character who starts the film having tacitly acknowledged his son’s death, and for the entire film, any hope he shows is a charade. “Joshua, come back!” “You let him go.” .
Together, I think the movie’s ultimately not about hopelessness or even hope, but about hopeless hope. If you have it, you’ll survive, but you’ll become something sick and primal; if you don’t, you’ll lose your sickness, but give up everything else that ever mattered to you.
As a couple asides to all of this, it’s worth noting that all of the characters in the film who are killed are ones who gave up on loved ones who “died” in the Tsunami. It’s ultimately unimportant if the children in the film are alive or dead: they’re avenging ghosts all the same.
Also, as mentioned, the cinematography and sound were really well done… but what blew me away most was the credits.
Finally, I want to point out that while this is a deeply unsettling film, it’s not “scary” and I don’t think should be characterized as a horror film. As Tom says, a big part of this film is about the incapacity of the privileged to truly comprehend the enormity of the world… but it’s the protagonists uncomprehending numbness to the horrors they witness that is ultimately and powerfully imparted to the viewer. They’re not scares you jump at and quickly forget… they’re unsettling images the full meaning of which bother and torment as you endlessly play them over in your mind, searching for a meaning that is almost, but not quite, there.
This isn’t a horror film. It’s not scary. It’s a psychological, cultural, sociological and even anthropological drama. It’s unsettling.
Thanks for mentioning it in the podcasts, guys. I’d never have seen it otherwise, and I don’t think this is a film I’ll forget anytime soon.