TIFF Review: VINYAN

There is a scene in Fabrice Du Welz's new film where the white folks, stranded in the jungle without guide or means, are viciously ridiculed, teased and denied the simplest of sustenance: a small ball of rice. It is a moment of uncomfortable horror in the so-called global village, a moment of extreme retribution for casual western exploitation of so many southeast Asian countries. Vinyan, the title of the film, is loosely translated as "drifting soul" and it can be applied to the film in several meaningful and stimulating ways. Those few who were enthusiastic about Du Welz's (criminally underseen) Calvaire will recognize the rice-ball scene as his budding auteur moment. While the films are miles apart in setting, language, and tone, there is no mistaking that they are the product of a master horror filmmaker rising to the top of his game. I said after reviewing AJ Anilla's Sauna that if I see a better horror film than that one in 2008 that I'd eat my shirt, who knew that I would be having to set the table less than 24 hours later! Taking the large Tsunami's as the divine hammer for a sinning population, Vinyan is both poetical and political; those who take it literally are bound to get a little stuck with the film. Taken as a visceral meditation, it is a sublime success.

The film starts off thrumming and pounding on the audiences senses. A close up of unidentifiable static turbulence and titles so large they threaten to swallow the audience, it is not a surprise that the cinematographer was the same fellow who shot Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. The camera eventually comes into focus to reveal the static to be air bubbles frantically trying to get to the surface of the ocean. Jeanne (a radiant Emmanuelle Béart) rises from the drink to greet her equally attractive husband, Paul played by Rufus Sewell. Curiously, she offers him a pair of shoes she found in the marketplace. Not really what he needs or even want, but perhaps they will do. An interesting bit of foreshadowing to one of the films audience straining narrative pathways. Du Welz's intent seems to be to challenge the audience while simultaneously alienating them. Paul and Jeanne have lost their son 6 months ago in the Tsunami that wiped out a lot of the southeast Asian coastline, and they have lingered in Thailand with the thin hope that he may still be alive somewhere. At a charity even, a woman has a video of the extreme poverty of the villages along a river in central Burma. Jeannne is convinced she has spotted her child in that video. Despite protestations of her skeptical husband, it is not long before Jeanne is wandering through the seedier parts of the red light district looking for a Triad contact to get her into closed off Burma. What follows is a decent into the heart of darkness, into the void where the void most certainly looks back. The allure of violence and sexuality that attracts westerners to Bangkok is woven throughout the proceedings as well in the form of primal sexual hum particularly in a curious inversion of the form of the foreign aid worker encountered by the couple.

I find it curious that the Thai mobster leading their party into the jungle deals with the death of his wife at the hands of the Tsunami radically different, a stoic acceptance, rather than the hubristic denial from the white folks. Du Welz comments on how the cost of different races are still measure differently on the global scale. As the couple go further in the jungle, it is not even clear if they encounter ghosts, or have become ghosts themselves, in an uncharted part of the word were arrogant, desperate folks are not likely to return. In a way Vinyan is the spiritual remake Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's fabulous daylight horror Who Can Kill a Child? with inflections of the aggressive spirit arthouse French cinema of Haneke and the visceral intensity of Aja and Noe. Du Welz blends the best of all these things, while tapping into a dark reflection of the power and force of need in small children that is into something very much his own, universal and also very much of our times.