Fantastic Fest 2011: KILL ME PLEASE Review
Dr Krueger kills people. They come to his clinic alive and they leave dead. It's not that he's a bad doctor, it's that Dr Krueger's is a most unusual clinic, one devoted to death. You see, Dr Krueger believes in the right to die with dignity and his patients come to him for that reason. Should they prove to be of sound mind when they arrive Dr Krueger will attempt to accommodate their final wishes and shuffle them off this mortal coil in the manner of their choosing. And so his clinic is, inevitably, filled with a motley collection of lost souls, no-hopers who wish to die but lack the willpower to die alone.
It should be noted at this point that Olias Barco's feature film Kill Me Please is a comedy. A comedy about euthenasia. And a very funny one. This should be noted first because the entire concept of a euthanasia comedy is not one that appears obvious on the surface no matter what and should be noted second because Barco himself deliberately obscures his comedic leanings for the first half hour of the film.
No, Kill Me Please does not begin by being funny. It begins as a very serious film, one shot in black and white and loaded with the sort of pretentious melodrama that those who would drop large sums of cash to off themselves in a remote Swiss clinic might enjoy. Barco teases with the promise that he is making an 'issue movie' and just as you start to settle into that mode he gleefully whips the carpet out from beneath you and veers off in other directions entirely.
A gleefully dark and absurd comedy from the producer of Man Bite Dog, Kill Me Please almost plays as a sort of demented comedy of errors with Dr Krueger struggling valiantly to maintain his serious and dignified exterior in the face of mounting pressures from a financial investigator convinced he is a swindler, a local community who loathe him as a murderer, a staff prone to breaking down into tears when patients shuffle off and a patient community which is, shall we say, lacking in the social graces. Had Francois Truffaut made a Peter Sellers film Kill Me Please would have been it.
Despite its calm exterior Kill Me Please spirals ever upward into greater extremes of absurdly extreme violence in a series of set pieces played for deliciously tongue in cheek laughs. But as big as the visual gags get - which is very - it never loses sight of poor Dr Krueger as he struggles and fails (mightily) to maintain a sense of decorum. It's the big moments that draw the big laughs but it's Aurelien Recoing's performance as Krueger that really gives the film its soul. His is a quiet sort of desperation that takes a most unusual film and makes it into something exceptional.
It should be noted at this point that Olias Barco's feature film Kill Me Please is a comedy. A comedy about euthenasia. And a very funny one. This should be noted first because the entire concept of a euthanasia comedy is not one that appears obvious on the surface no matter what and should be noted second because Barco himself deliberately obscures his comedic leanings for the first half hour of the film.
No, Kill Me Please does not begin by being funny. It begins as a very serious film, one shot in black and white and loaded with the sort of pretentious melodrama that those who would drop large sums of cash to off themselves in a remote Swiss clinic might enjoy. Barco teases with the promise that he is making an 'issue movie' and just as you start to settle into that mode he gleefully whips the carpet out from beneath you and veers off in other directions entirely.
A gleefully dark and absurd comedy from the producer of Man Bite Dog, Kill Me Please almost plays as a sort of demented comedy of errors with Dr Krueger struggling valiantly to maintain his serious and dignified exterior in the face of mounting pressures from a financial investigator convinced he is a swindler, a local community who loathe him as a murderer, a staff prone to breaking down into tears when patients shuffle off and a patient community which is, shall we say, lacking in the social graces. Had Francois Truffaut made a Peter Sellers film Kill Me Please would have been it.
Despite its calm exterior Kill Me Please spirals ever upward into greater extremes of absurdly extreme violence in a series of set pieces played for deliciously tongue in cheek laughs. But as big as the visual gags get - which is very - it never loses sight of poor Dr Krueger as he struggles and fails (mightily) to maintain a sense of decorum. It's the big moments that draw the big laughs but it's Aurelien Recoing's performance as Krueger that really gives the film its soul. His is a quiet sort of desperation that takes a most unusual film and makes it into something exceptional.
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