What a weird movie.
It's set up as a sort of All About Eve thing without the psycho-biddy undercurrents of similar horror films. It quickly becomes apparent, through the subject matter and early scenes, that we have a more psychotic artistic bent a la Black Swan or Whiplash. Then enters the intense body horror, the cultish art school, and the sudden threat of child rape, and you just don't know what to do with it all. It's too much muchness, I say, and all of it meaning nothing.
We begin with Charlotte, played by the skilled Allison Williams, a talented cellist who reconnects with her former mentor Anton. After her abrupt exit from Anton's music academy -- I say academy, but we don't see more than one student at a time -- to care for her mother, Charlotte was seemingly replaced by a new star pupil, Lizzie (Logan Browning). These two ladies become judges along with Anton and the faculty members Theis, Geoffrey, and Anton's wife Paloma in a competition to recruit new young musicians in Shanghai. Tension between Lizzie and Charlotte is palpable, but we aren't sure if it's jealousy, awe, or sexual desire.
Turns out, it's all of the above. The women become quick friends (with benefits) and embark on a bus trip tour through China. After a night of partying, Lizzie is clearly sick. In this sequence, we are drawn into the sensory world of their plight. She repeats her expressions of pain ad nauseam, literally, but nobody on the bus speaks English. The bus driver won't stop; they're in the middle of nowhere and he seems to be in a hurry. The music rises in pitch and volume. It would almost be funny if it weren't so terrifying. Just as I started to feel like I might get sick from watching, Lizzie vomits. And things get really crazy.
I'm going to try not to spoil too much of the plot itself, because part of the joy -- if joy is the right word -- of this film is letting it take you on some truly bizarre twists. After what feels like the end of a short film or television episode, director Richard Shepherd literally rewinds the film back several scenes, and then we revisit the entire sequence but with key moments filled in that completely change the narrative and characters involved. This happens later too, though the gimmick simply isn't effective after that first shock. We begin to expect that things won't make sense until they suddenly do via flashback, which is a cheap ploy to keep your audience paying attention.
Speaking of cheap ploys, the film is so over-the-top -- while still being reasonably grounded -- that I found it hard to take much of anything seriously. I wondered more than once if this movie is meant to be camp, especially given its grotesque ending. While the argument could be convincingly made that the film's excesses are its thematic significance, and the narrative's general plotlessness make this possible, I found that the film was working too hard to push buttons. Arguing its camp sensibility isn't really my interest here, because it's also a really difficult film to watch. The threat of rape and the underlying theme of child abuse as basic conceptual plot points make this entire affair really awful, not to mention that its leads can only overcome their trauma and brainwashing by brutalizing each other.
It's just hard to justify the artistic merit of a film that so blatantly pushes the message that rape-revenge is possible once you've butchered your body and all but conjoined with another victim.
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