Fantasia 09 Review: MUST LOVE DEATH

[Our thanks to Matthew Grinshpun for the following review.]

Norman (Sami Loris) is a loser. His romantic life is an unremitting parade of catastrophes, his dreams of songwriting glory are hopelessly distant, and he is haunted by a nagging wish to turn his handgun on himself. He is about to do just that when Jennifer (Manon Kahle), a perky blonde waitress stuck in her own particularly dire straits, comes careening into his life. Actually, she runs over him with her car.

So begins the romantic arc of German writer/director Andreas Schaap's first feature, Must Love Death, a foundering attempt at a romantic comedy / horror hybrid that slowly devolves into a failed, if slightly amusing, diptych.

Throughout the intentionally campy development of Norman and Jennifer's relationship, the film cuts back to a cabin in the remote woods of New Jersey. Norman, in an unsurprising turn of events, finds himself holed up among a group of like minded peers, plotting a suitably mutual end to their lives. Only, as it turns out, these seemingly innocuous suicides are the disguised hosts of a sadistic kind of home-made game show, and our hero is their next contestant.

As the film's parallel plots come to a head, we learn how the newly besotted Norman falls back into his old pattern of despair, landing him in that New Jersey cabin. Unfortunately, by this point, we generally don't care; the slowly building tension has long since given way to an utterly senseless detour involving Norman's love for a TV show, modeled on Star Trek, that happens to star Jennifer's (gasp) true boyfriend, an exaggerated douche-bag known as "The Foxx" (Philipp Rafferty).

As Schaap explained during the Q&A session following the projection, his film was completed as a no-budget film school project, and the idea of bolting together romcom and gore was born of his and his
girlfriends' divergent tastes in movies. While there are aspects of Must Love Death that are startlingly professional (the German-speaking actors' pitch-perfect imitations of American English come to mind), the amateurism shows through. As if to compensate for the flagging character development, we are repeatedly sent back to that forlorn cabin, where, for a German film that openly aspires to the mantle of "torture porn", the action is relatively tame. At his worst, Schaap confines himself to some cringe-inducing, but by no means novel, manipulation of his victim's feet and fingers. This, thankfully, is not Saw.

Like most recent début horror productions, Must Love Death builds its cred through open references to the genre's past glories. The film opens to a stark shot of rebounding breasts that will be
intimately familiar any fan of Phantasm, and a sword unsheathed from Pulp Fiction comes to save the day. But Schaap's clichés add up to less than the sum of their parts. In attempting to fuse together two very different kinds of movie, he leaves us with a chimera.

Review by Matthew Grinshpun.