'The Loved Ones', another reason school dances suck!
[Kurt and I are playing catch up tag after our times at FanTasia. The Loved Ones has been on the festival and market circuit for well over a year now. Sadly, I missed it at FanTasia but have caught up to it now to tell you it is worth catching up with...]
By now you should know the premise of the film. We see Brent Mitchell six months after a car accident that claimed the life of his father. Brent was behind the wheel at the time and the anguish and grief have taken a toll on his soul. He buries himself in his ear buds cranking out death metal. He wears a razor blade on a chain around his neck which he uses to self-harm. His mother is a shell of her former self as well and doesn't want Brent to get behind the wheel of a car ever again. The only thing that keeps Brent connected to the world around him is his girlfriend Holly. But someone else has their eyes on Brent. The end of the school year has come around and the year end dance is that night. The card carrying school loner Lola asks Brent to the dance. But he gently declines her invitation; he is already going to the dance with Holly. No harm, no foul, right? Wrong. Dead wrong!
The Loved Ones marks the first time Aussie director Sean Byrne gets to direct one of his own feature scripts. Though its not without it bumps it is still an excruciatingly entertaining horror film than runs at a brisk and bloody pace from the word go. It will have you squirming in your seats as Byrne draws every last gasp of life out of his victims. He has proven himself capable of creating great tension in his film and punctuating those moments with brutal acts of horror. Despite the hiccups, it should be a crowd pleaser wherever it plays.
Where Byrne excels in his film is making the violence as excruciating as possible without going so far visually. With the use of excellent sound design there is as much heard in the horror of the moments and there is seen. It stumbles at times with the shenanigans between Brent's friend Sac and his date to the dance Mia but he still manages to draw out those tense moments or make us hold our breath in anticipation of what is coming next. We are rewarded for out endurance, as thinning as it may be by films end. Byrne may not have decided to show much, by horror film standards, it doesn't make The Loved Ones any less demanding to watch. And the nod to Misery, intentional or just my interpretation of it, hopefully you'll catch it as I did, will get a good reaction out of whatever crowd sees it.
I understand what Byrne was trying to do with the side story involving Sac and hot Goth chick Mia, dropping their escapades in and around the dance to break up the tension and offer up some relief, they still felt a bit dodgy and clumsy at times. I get the connection with Mia and her family to Lola and her family and how Byrne wants to tie it all together. Perhaps those moments with Sac and Mia could have been scaled back a bit or edited in better. It is where the film felt clumsy and a bit of a pace breaker for me.
But the real star of the film and the reason to track The Loved Ones down is Robin McLeavy. In a feeble attempt to coin a phrase for the horror genre she is the real 'horrorine' of this film. Ugh. I feel dirty. I'll suck on a bar of soap and dip my keyboard in hand sanitizer later. But for real, she is the reason why this film is so gosh darn good and stands out above your standard crop. A sociopath of the highest order her Lola understands how to manipulate her father. After all, what daddy's little girl wants, daddy's little girl gets. And what does daddy want? Daddy knows he shouldn't have. But they make for a truly creepy couple from all sorts of perspectives. But Lola is the driving force behind the exploits of this mad pairing, and seemingly for some time as well. McLeavy only has a few films under her belt but she is the energy driving this film forward and her performance places immediately among the upper echelon of horror queens. And she comes with her own tiara too. Bloody convenient.
It was last year's Audience Award Winner at TIFF yet it hardly made a dent at this year's edition of FanTasia according to contributor Lauren Baggett. It is a shame because this film certainly deserves as much love as can be given to a horror film. Crazy as it sounds it has yet to open in its native Australia; instead it has been travelling the festival and market circuit since its debut at TIFF last September. Here's hoping the run in Australia is successful and that more will get to see this little gem of a film in the near future.
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