The main character (we dare not call him a “hero”) is Milos (Srdan Todorovic), a former Serbian porn star whose old films are so famous that he has earned unending prestige – including with his loving wife, who yearns for more aggressive intercourse, and a young inquisitive son who shamelessly sneaks into his dad’s video stash for an education in sexual habits. The story is a straightforward one, but moored by negative energies lurking in the distance.
The fact that it comes right off the screen with very well-made – and even well-acted – intentions only hardens the silence we choose to offer it. The fact that this notorious little film from Serbia dares to exploit this trend with utter cognizance is the least of our concerns. But now we must deal with films so utterly reprehensible that they defy classification, as if they were formulated in a vortex that recognizes nothing of moral limitations and everything of the depravity running amok in our collective existence. Some examples, to their credit, resonated beyond their technical implications when their ideology was sound enough others – many, many others – simply existed as exercises in their own cynicism. In their absence rose a standard of chaotic evolution that gave birth to the likes of “Saw” and “Hostel,” in which the human body became an object of gratuitous slaughter. Their art is eclipsed by the dated essence of their tension, modulated to what must seem like painfully dull proportions. For that, those individuals earn both my astonished bewilderment and my sincerest condolences.įor so many of the modern viewers of extreme horror films, the likes of the classics – “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “The Exorcist,” “The Shining” – must mean so little by comparison. But for those who will look at Srdjan Spasojevic’s nihilistic plea against the pornography trade and find it engaging outside of the nightmarish cruelty, I salute them: not only do they have the stomachs to stare back at the frames with deadpan focus, they also have the distinction of being the byproduct of irreversible damage to the senses. Shocking brutality in itself was never enough – it was only the final outlet of the terror, a reason we were so terrified by the idea of evil villains capturing those who were running and screaming in the opposite direction. Perhaps that is because I was trained in the more tempered observations of film directors who found horror in the ability to make you jump without expectation, or shrink into your seat while the notes of the screenplay played your emotions through equal measures of silence and dread. There exists a hard, bitter audience for the likes of “A Serbian Film,” one of the most graphic depictions of human suffering I have ever seen committed to the screen.