1998, France
The view from inside a car at dusk: the sun setting; darkness enveloping the forest; the forest enveloping the car.
Moody nature scenery transitions to the interior of a theatre as children scream, terrified and invigorated by something unfolding before them, and again cuts abruptly to a woman being strangled, as Suicide‘s Alan Vega provides a sparse score that builds and threatens.
This is our introduction to the strange personal space of Sombre, Philippe Grandieux’s French serial killer film that owes as much of a debt to Chris Petit’s Radio On as to Gerald Karg’s Angst or Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven.
With a grainy, schizophrenic aesthetic, the camera jumps and shakes as serial killer Jean (Marc Barbé) traverses the countryside, roughly following the route of the Tour de France, stopping occasionally to pick up hookers or other amorous women so that he can rape and kill them.
Characteristic of all the relationships that will be depicted here, we are never given any conventional emotional cues and often wonder whether a rape or murder is even occurring.
When, by chance, Jean picks up a stranded woman named Claire (otherworldly ’90s indie staple Elina Löwensohn) in the middle of a rainstorm, she proves to be more trouble than Jean bargained for – not because she resists him, but because she doesn’t.
Her willing collapse into the arms of death completely freaks him out, and it is he who tries to run away.
As he is drawn into her life, he discovers from her promiscuous sister that Claire is a virgin, and his murderous compulsions are confused by this dichotomous choice of victims.
But when he traps them both in a hotel room, fondling them each in turn, it is Claire he chooses to take out into the night, leaving her sister tied up on the bed.
He takes Claire to a loud, chaotic party and watches as she gets drunk, dances, laughs, and makes out with strangers in front of him.
The more she sheds the virginal, stoic image that attracted him, and uses him as an excuse to release her animalistic urges, the more he becomes changed and possibly stabilized – a transformation that frightens him.
Her inappropriate emotional reaction to her situation is messing with his head; does she want to die, or does she think she can quell his homicidal itch?
When he abandons her on a country road, demanding that she go back to her life, she adopts a fantasy where he plays the role of a lost love, while he continues to collect victims, burying his face in their battered crotches as though desperate to scramble back inside and escape a world where one of his victims could fall in love with him.
While the film is deliberately paced and certainly, as its title suggests, sombre, it stands next to Angst as one of the most effective depictions of a serial killer.
For fans of the macabre, the film is not especially nasty; its violence lies largely in its camerawork and editing, which are also at times prone to moments of serene stillness.
A review I read once described the film as being devoid of human emotion; on the contrary, I found it so full of emotion – often conflicting emotions – that what results is an intense catalogue of emotional responses without a definite narrative context to identify them.
For those who can tune in to its atmospheric pace, Sombre will leave a lasting and dizzy chill that only gets better with age.
hexafu 