Essential Killing (2010)

Dir. Jerzy Skolimowski

Ireland-Hungary-Norway-Poland

IMDB Link - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1561768/

[Note – There will be one or two slight spoilers in this review, but not sufficient enough to give away major parts of the film. This warning is just to let you, the reader, know this before you continue in case you want to see this film completely cold without any knowledge on it at all instead]

Plot Synopsis

A political prisoner Mohammad (Vincent Gallo) escapes custody and finds himself within the snowbound environment of an unknown country. While avoiding the American soldiers who captured him, he is grounded down into a being purely intent on survival.

Background Information

While director Jerzy Skolimowski returned to making films with Four Nights with Anna (2008) - after 17 years of pursuing a career in painting (as well as acting in other films) - 2011 for the United Kingdom feels like the year that he has had a resurgence, with both the theatrical release of this film and the rediscovery (and the first DVD release of after years of praise) of his British production Deep End (1970). As a film viewer who has almost his entire filmography – except this film and The Shout (1978) – ahead of me to watch for the first time, I hope that this leads to an accessibility of his work.

Positives

The film effectively strips down the action film convention – the film is effectively an art house action film, something which delights me as action tropes can be profound if used right – of the escape scene to its barebones. Not only is the film’s length slight to most, although it felt long enough for me to feel complete, but the concern of Skolimowski is simply the desire of survival in such a situation. While it originated from a part of real life politics, that American soldiers were using an airstrip near his Polish home to transport Middle Eastern prisoners, Skolimowski purposely wanted to avoid making a political film. In the sole interview on the UK DVD, he suggested that Gallo’s character could either be a good man or a bad one, but the ambiguity of the character (and everyone else in the film) is writ large.

The result is a film where survival as a concept is the only subject. Many films involving escapes, more significantly the longer ones where characters are in a natural environment for a long duration, do not really take into account the potential issues people may face in such a predicament, but merely simplify it into avoiding the group of people (or person) after the character. Here, you have Gallo sticking his hand into an ant hill and licking the insects off his hand for sustenance, one of many images that I have rarely seen in other films. The issues of how one survives in this predicament are the most important aspect in the director’s film. The result is refreshing, enforced by Gallo’s performance. Never uttering anything throughout the film except noises, he does an admirable job as the individual followed throughout the whole film. That as an actor he put himself through a physically stressful shoot to make the film is admirable too.  His performance also enforces another aspect of why Essential Killing is as good as I think it is in that that the barrier between the ‘civilised’ human environments and the physically messy and primal natural wilderness is squashed; while he is still a human being, one who carries a handgun with him throughout and uses anything to assist his survive, Gallo on screen acts out an individual who has been forced to act out his animalistic side, where the primary emotions are pain, hungry and the desire to flee from danger. Gallo shows this succinctly in his performance, probably the result of the physical strain of the shoot, such as spending takes on camera walking in the snow bare footed or having to scramble through the woodland.

The portrayal of the environment and what the film looks like also breaks this barrier between the two sides. The film does look beautiful, its snowbound landscapes striking in appearance, but it is still wilderness, of dirt mixed with snow. Everything in the film feels this way – the violence is messier and physical objects and liquids have a murkier texture and appearance to them (not just blood but also including breast milk at one point). Even when a heavy metal track is being played in a vehicle Gallo tries to escape in, it is not a ‘clean’ sounding metal track but a mass of chaotic noises. Within the serene environments, a haphazard nature to every within it is shown that feels more realistic but also adds artistically to the issue of survival within the narrative.

Final Thoughts

Essential Killing is a highlight for me for 2011, a year which promises to be one of the best but I have been slow to catch up with in terms of new releases. Even if I had seen a lot more films though, this one would still be near the top and a near-perfect film bar one or two small issues. Since its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, a small but growing amount of critical praise surrounded the film has lead me to become more and more excited about seeing it, and now having viewed it, it didn’t disappoint at all. As I’ve already said at the beginning of the review, I hope from this year onwards there will be a push for Jerzy Skolimowski’s work to be more available in Britain, as I wait in anticipation to see Deep End at least by the end of December. It’s also a bookmark in both the current trend of ‘art house’ cinema meeting genre and of the more pronounced trend of 2011 in director’s subverting and playing with said genre conventions, both in mainstream blockbusters and underground works (my top and bottom list is bursting with these sorts of films already despite being small). This one lives up to the ‘essential’ of its title.