Ruptured Review: The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

Country of origin- Belgium/France 

Year of release- 2014 

Directors- Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani           

Stars- Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener  

The film follows a husband who returns from a long business trip to find that his wife has gone missing from their apartment, leaving it locked from the inside. The rest of the film is focused upon him searching for his missing wife in their apartment complex, and that’s literally it in terms of plot. You may well be thinking that this rather simple plot has a great deal of potential to create a claustrophobic mystery thriller or even a psychological horror feature, and honestly you would be right. This plot, on paper anyway, is good, and if it wasn’t in the hands of the buffoons that made this pile of shit it could have created a very watchable film, however in the case of this film, that is not the case.

The film is made up of a series of unengaging and purposefully incomprehensible tangents that provide the viewer with nothing but frustration, and boredom. The characters within these tangents are nothing but a collection of moody/whiney cardboard cut outs trying their upmost to appear ‘dramatic’, while providing nothing in terms of performance but an urge within the audience to kill. The films script was clearly written during a break in a third rate art lecture by some Giallo fan boy who thinks their being outre by writing scenes and dialogue that have literally no purpose with or without context, and have tits, blood and knifes in them.

But to be honest, these issues almost pale in comparison to the huge elephant in the room when discussing this film, and that is the editing of Bernard Beets. The only good feature of this film is its stunning cinematography, which is brilliantly crafted and shows true dedication and artistry on the part of Manuel Dacosse, and this majesty of visual art is ruined by the editing. This film has some of the most sickening, choppy and pointless edits I have ever seen. The endless amounts of meaningless hard cuts and swirling visuals gave me an actual headache, and could easily trigger a seizure, so be warned. The editing try’s to appear as artistic, instead it, like the rest of the film just comes off as an empty soulless attempt by a pretentious art student to emulate the great Giallo directors of years gone by.

My final issue with this film is its desperation to try and be a 1970’s Italian Giallo film such as The Girl Who Knew Too Much, or my personal favourite The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. This film so desperately wants to be one of those films, but what it fails to realize is that those films at that time were made great by something this film totally lacks, tension. The great Giallo films of the 70’s were generally fantastic at creating atmosphere, something that is lost on this film as it ignores that and just tries to be an aftershave advert made by an art school dropout who can probably tell you what the inside of his own colon smells like. Overall, this is a dull, empty and obnoxious film that in its attempts to emulate classic Giallo films, simply cheapens and pollutes their artistry and legacy. I am going to give this film a 2.5/10, and I am only giving it that much because of the superb cinematography that is totally wasted on this trash.