Panic Fest 2023 Review: BEATEN TO DEATH Takes Viewers on a Brutal Journey

Beaten to Death doesn’t spend any time introducing viewers to its world.

The film opens on a beautiful image of a blood-drenched man walking toward the camera, away from the setting sun before dropping viewers “48 hours earlier” to a scene of the man being pummeled by another, much larger man. The larger man pauses his assault and gives a short monologue on how the bloody pulp of a man in front of him reminds him of the arrogant young men he knew in the military.

It’s a compelling opening that promises gore, tension, and excitement. On the whole, the rest of the film delivers, but there are narrative structure choices that hold Beaten to Death back from pure adrenaline-pumping greatness.

Jack (Thomas Roach), the man being beaten, manages to kill his aggressor through pure luck: he’s close enough to a beer bottle on the ground to grab it, and escapes into the rural Australian country. He makes his way to a nearby home and begs for help, which, after some back and forth, he’s granted by the gruff and intimidating Ned (David Tracy), but only for a moment. Without spoiling the film’s surprises, it can safely be said that the entirety of the film tracks Jack’s attempts and failures at escaping an increasingly horrific and hopeless predicament.

The violence that’s surely the film’s main selling point is vicious and effective, sometimes even more so in scenes where you can tell that co-writer/director Sam Curtain had to work around budgetary constraints. An early scene shows Jack being stabbed in the eyes, and while the first is hidden behind his assailant's hand, the second is shown from within the eye as we see the knife approach and puncture the sclera.

Shortly thereafter the screen goes black for an extended period of time and we’re treated to the bone-crunching, flesh-ripping, and muscle-squelching sounds of Jack being brutalized. These sequences are difficult to stomach in a way that’s catnip to extreme horror fans.

It’s around this time that it becomes clear the film is running on two timelines. We see Jack’s attempting to surive sometime after having lost his eyes, leading us to wonder how he escaped, and in the immediate aftermath of his blinding.

It’s a bold choice, especially for a film built on simplicity, and it works; there’s real tension built by the question of how and when these two timelines will meet up. But the introduction of flashbacks that become a third timeline late in the film draws away from the immediate sense of danger and tension of the other two.

These flashbacks attempt to build an emotional connection to Jack, and his wife Rachel (Nicole Tudor) who is initially introduced as a corpse in the opening. But they fail to create any emotional stakes and eventually over-explain the unexplained situation that perfectly opened the film.

Beaten to Death delivers on its early promise of visceral violence and is sure to please gorehounds. Yet the oddly structured narrative draws away from the inherent tension of its simple story by overly emphasizing an emotional core that’s not necessary for this kind of film, and literally taking time away from the thrilling horror viewers came to see.