Amer (2010) - film review

At three key stages in her life, Ana is assailed by conflicting feelings of fear and desire.  In childhood, she is seized with terror when she witnesses an old woman perform a bizarre death ritual whilst her parents yield themselves to a horrifying bestial act.  As an adolescent, she is aware of the power she exerts over young men as she flaunts her nascent sexuality for her own amusement.   As a mature woman, she returns to her childhood home and soon falls prey to a mysterious masked man dressed entirely in black.  The nightmare that ensues will be the fulfilment of her destiny and her most primal desires...

Through the lurid excesses of Giallo, a distinctive style of Italian horror film that was hugely popular in the 1970s, directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani compose a distinctly unsettling and succulently sensual exploration of female sexuality.  This is Cattet and Forzani’s first feature, although they have previously distinguished themselves with a number of short films, notably La Fin de notre amour (2004) and Santos Palace (2006).  With its eccentric use of colour filters, manic zooms, extreme close-ups,  and seedy inter-cutting of slasher-style gory excess with suggestive sexual imagery, to say nothing of its spine-tingling electronic soundtrack, Amer appears to fall between respectful homage and outright parody of the Giallo format.  Whilst it runs the risk of resembling a plotless pastiche of an out-dated genre, the film has an indefinable mesmeric quality and an abstract poetry that makes it a rich and rewarding viewing experience.   This is subjective cinema at its most extreme, a journey through the twisted labyrinthine passages of a warped consciousness, a shadowy wonderland of visceral carnality where terror and desire are not merely bedfellows but two facets of the same sensual reality.

Amer is so drenched in the familiar Giallo motifs that it feels like its directors have taken a sharp razor blade to the films of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava and performed a Frankenstein-like assembly job, knocking up a gruesome baroque monstrosity that is as brilliant as it is insane, and far more than the sum of its parts.  The film’s morbid preoccupation with life-sustaining and life-creating bodily fluids owes something to David Cronenberg, furnishing the film with enough Freudian imagery to inspire a dozen Ph.D. theses, whilst its surreal flights of fancy pay homage to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch.  This is definitely not a film for the squeamish or the easily offended.  Whilst Amer embraces Giallo in all its wild fetishistic glory, it transcends both the slasher and psycho-sexual genres and is a powerfully authentic statement of the twin traumas of sexuality and mortality.  With its psychadellic stylisation and sliced-and-diced composition, Amer has a dreamlike texture that is both visually arresting and highly unnerving.  One of the weirder erotic horror excursions in recent years, it plunges us into the realm of the purely sensual and confronts us with the distillation of our darkest fantasies and deepest neuroses. If the film does not leave you  feeling shaken, disorientated and violated, you should watch it again, preferably alone, in an old dark house...

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