Sitges 2010: SLICE Review
Sex, violence and a string of incredibly gruesome murders drive Slice, the latest collaboration between Art of the Devil director Kongkiat Komesiri and Tears of the Black Tiger helmer Wisit Sasanatieng. Directed by Komesiri from a story by Sasanatieng, Slice was designed in part to test the new Thai rating's system and would go on to win a fistful of local film awards.
A killer stalks the streets of Bangkok, a particularly violent killer preying upon clients of the sex trade, the victims discovered dismembered and packed into a signature red suitcase. It's a big case, one that gets a lot bigger when the killer escalates his behavior and slaughters everyone present in a sex club, including the son of a prominent politician.
The case falls to Chin, a dirty cop with his fingers in every manner of scam and sideways deal. And as Chin becomes increasingly desperate to bring the killer in he turns to Tai for help. Tai? He's a former cop now in prison for murder where he supports his young wife on the outside by acting as a jailhouse hitman for Chin, taking out any undesirables who enter the prison walls. More importantly, Tai can't shake the feeling that he has some connection to the killer, a series of recurring dreams matching details of the real case with shocking accuracy. The key to bringing the killer down may lie in Tai's memory.
And so a trade is made. Tai is released and given two weeks. Bring the killer down in that time and freedom is his. But to ensure that Tai will do as he's told and not simply run, Chin takes his wife into custody. And so a surreal pursuit - one that occurs as much in Tai's mind and past as in the present - begins.
Incredibly violent and almost baroque in its level of complexity and 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to story telling, Slice fuses extreme imagery doused in blood and sex with a wistful sort of childhood nostalgia and regret for decisions poorly made. It's a story that dabbles in concepts of karmic retribution, repressed memory and decades long obsessions. There are so many things happening here, so many competing threads and tones to balance, that it's not entirely surprising that Komesiri isn't able to keep all the balls in the air all the time though when things click the results are often spectacular.
Komesiri's greatest strength here is his gift for the iconic image and stylized blood letting. His killer is a sort of faceless wraith, a force of nature tearing through victims while draped in a flowing red rain coat that covers him like a shroud. The mass killing in the sex club is quite simply astounding, a remarkably well staged and executed sequence that surely must have pushed the then freshly enacted Thai ratings system to its outer limits. Yes, this film received the most restrictive rating that the system allows short of an outright ban. And it earned it.
Komesiri's weakness, however, is a somewhat clumsy structure and jarring tonal shifts. A tendency towards melodrama is standard throughout Asia and that tendency is on full display in the repeated flashbacks to Tai's childhood. Which would be fine if it wasn't so incredibly disruptive to the main story line. We spend far more time in the past than is really necessary, the emotional point driven home much too bluntly on many occasions. The flashback sequences throw the balance of the film off and push the running time longer than is necessary, the emotional aspects of these scenes often played with an over the top weepy sentimentality that can come across as comedic rather than tragic.
Despite the film's flaws, though, Slice continues to build Komesiri's reputation as one of Thailand's most interesting and challenging commercially minded directors. He continues to demonstrate an impressive range matched by a scope and ambition that seems to know no bounds. Though it doesn't all work the parts of Slice that do are absolutely spectacular and there's a boldness to the film making that invigorates.
A killer stalks the streets of Bangkok, a particularly violent killer preying upon clients of the sex trade, the victims discovered dismembered and packed into a signature red suitcase. It's a big case, one that gets a lot bigger when the killer escalates his behavior and slaughters everyone present in a sex club, including the son of a prominent politician.
The case falls to Chin, a dirty cop with his fingers in every manner of scam and sideways deal. And as Chin becomes increasingly desperate to bring the killer in he turns to Tai for help. Tai? He's a former cop now in prison for murder where he supports his young wife on the outside by acting as a jailhouse hitman for Chin, taking out any undesirables who enter the prison walls. More importantly, Tai can't shake the feeling that he has some connection to the killer, a series of recurring dreams matching details of the real case with shocking accuracy. The key to bringing the killer down may lie in Tai's memory.
And so a trade is made. Tai is released and given two weeks. Bring the killer down in that time and freedom is his. But to ensure that Tai will do as he's told and not simply run, Chin takes his wife into custody. And so a surreal pursuit - one that occurs as much in Tai's mind and past as in the present - begins.
Incredibly violent and almost baroque in its level of complexity and 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to story telling, Slice fuses extreme imagery doused in blood and sex with a wistful sort of childhood nostalgia and regret for decisions poorly made. It's a story that dabbles in concepts of karmic retribution, repressed memory and decades long obsessions. There are so many things happening here, so many competing threads and tones to balance, that it's not entirely surprising that Komesiri isn't able to keep all the balls in the air all the time though when things click the results are often spectacular.
Komesiri's greatest strength here is his gift for the iconic image and stylized blood letting. His killer is a sort of faceless wraith, a force of nature tearing through victims while draped in a flowing red rain coat that covers him like a shroud. The mass killing in the sex club is quite simply astounding, a remarkably well staged and executed sequence that surely must have pushed the then freshly enacted Thai ratings system to its outer limits. Yes, this film received the most restrictive rating that the system allows short of an outright ban. And it earned it.
Komesiri's weakness, however, is a somewhat clumsy structure and jarring tonal shifts. A tendency towards melodrama is standard throughout Asia and that tendency is on full display in the repeated flashbacks to Tai's childhood. Which would be fine if it wasn't so incredibly disruptive to the main story line. We spend far more time in the past than is really necessary, the emotional point driven home much too bluntly on many occasions. The flashback sequences throw the balance of the film off and push the running time longer than is necessary, the emotional aspects of these scenes often played with an over the top weepy sentimentality that can come across as comedic rather than tragic.
Despite the film's flaws, though, Slice continues to build Komesiri's reputation as one of Thailand's most interesting and challenging commercially minded directors. He continues to demonstrate an impressive range matched by a scope and ambition that seems to know no bounds. Though it doesn't all work the parts of Slice that do are absolutely spectacular and there's a boldness to the film making that invigorates.
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