2010, New Zealand
David Blyth burst onto the scene with the one-two punch of controversial sexual satire Angel Mine in 1980 and revenge thriller Death Warmed Up four years later, and despite some detours into mainstream territory since (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?), he remains dedicated to exploring bizarre sexual peccadilloes through the lens of surrealism, leaning on turn-of-the-century dream work as well as citing the work of Bunuel as a primary influence.
Wound is a visually arresting film full of weird, memorable imagery, but it rarely makes rational sense, which is important to keep in mind going in.
Even the many video cameras that appear to be monitoring events throughout the film do not act as an objective, reliable eye through which the truth can be gleaned.
A closed-circuit camera system inside an Auckland house flashes from room to room as our protagonist Susan (Kate O’Rourke) answers the door to reveal her estranged father standing there, returning home from a stage career that has kept him abroad in London (in a later dream sequence he’s shown in silhouette reciting from Shakespeare’s The Tempest).
She’s left everything just how he left it, but as he wanders through the hallway thumbing dusty old paperbacks and knicknacks, he doesn’t feel any connection to all this ‘stuff’ – and it’s clear to Susan that she’s in that category of ‘unwanted stuff’ that weighs him down.
With a grave already dug for him in the backyard, she bashes him with a baseball bat and ties him up in her dead mother’s former bondage chamber (her mother – it will be revealed – was a dominatrix, until Susan set her on fire nearly a decade earlier).
Donning a plastic mask emulating a doll’s face (recalling Blyth’s earlier fetish films Bound for Pleasure and Transfigured Nights and even, strangely, Devo’s Boogie Boy) she confronts him about sexually abusing her as a child (“you wanted it!” he argues) before strangling and castrating him.
But she can’t let him go that easily; after all, she has a lifetime invested in reacting to this trauma.
This is the problem with closure – it doesn’t work; we become attached to the problem.
She buries him in the yard, surrounded by tiny foil-wrapped packages containing her own faeces (the ritualistic nature of this was admittedly my favourite aspect of the film).
She sits on the toilet having phone conversations with her dead mother, and then puts the resultant turd in a big freezer in the hallway that houses hundreds of others like it, all neatly and individually wrapped in foil.
“I’m taking the pills like Dr. Nelson said”, she assures her mother, “but the blackness just keeps creeping in. I can’t breathe. It’s choking me. It’s consuming me.”
Susan has an ongoing BDSM sexual relationship with a man she addresses only as ‘Sir’ who fancies himself not only her master but also her therapist, humiliating her on camera for an internet audience but also requiring that she submit detailed ‘condition reports’ conveying her innermost thoughts and feelings (the analogy of therapy and BDSM role-play is everywhere in the film).
Playing out simultaneously is the story of the juvenile delinquent Goth girl Tanya, whose introduction also comes via a video-recorded session with a condescending high school counsellor.
Tanya is adopted, and the records identifying her birth mother have just come in; of course her mother turns out to be none other than Susan, which isn’t going to be much help to a girl struggling with emotional problems.
Tanya seeks her out, and the result is a relationship that flits in and out of doubling and the dream-condensation of characters and locations.
Susan’s medical records indicate that her child (an incest baby) was stillborn in the same year as her mother’s death by fire.
While there has already been an assumption that everything Susan sees may not be real, things are confused by the fact that the film spends a significant amount of time with Tanya individually, which in cinematic language is supposed to be a grounding technique.
When Tanya suckles at Susan’s breast and drinks her menstrual blood off the floor, we know it may be a delusion, but when the camera goes with Tanya through school hallways, to a Goth nightclub, and to a train yard to see out a suicide pact, we are left wondering who this character is and whether her image has just crossed Susan’s vision peripherally somehow, adopting her into Susan’s disturbing familial fantasy (like Amy Reed in The Curse of the Cat People).
Susan tells her psychiatrist Dr. Nelson (Antipodean screen vet lan Mune) that her daughter is inside her, trying to take over her life.
She dreams that they are bound together in plastic wrap, like one body with two heads (echoed by the two-headed doll Susan finds in her father’s grave) and then cut asunder like Siamese twins being separated.
“She’s real, she wants to kill me!” she pleads.
But the therapist’s cold response is that it’s all in her head and he can change her medication – and would she address the camera directly please?
Or, better yet, he can call the crisis team to come pick her up and admit her.
Yes, that seems like a good idea.
End of session.
“But I want to talk about my father”, she insists.
“Yes of course, but not now. We have to stabilize you first. Would you please wait in the waiting room?”
She sighs. “I’m sick of the waiting room. I’ve spent my life in the waiting room.”
As her delusions accelerate, and various ghosts return for a final act, Susan submits – one last time.
Be not afeard.
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
– William Shakespeare, The Tempest
hexafu 