Sheitan

Accent Films

Distributed By MRA

Available to Rent in Australia: 13th December

Director: Kim Chapiron

Starring: Vincent Cassel (Irreversible, Ocean’s Twelve, Derailed)
Monica Bellucci (The Brothers Grimm, The Passion Of Christ, The Matrix Revolutions, The Matrix Reloaded)
Roxane Mesquida (Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy)
Language: French with English Subtitles

Sheitan is a strange and powerful excursion into horror. It mixes both the traditional horror genres with a very modern twist. The film begins with the quote “Lord, do not forgive them, for they know what they do,” and introduces us to a rather unlikeable group of French teens, Bart, Ladj and Thai getting smashed in a dance club. After a bottle to the head of one of them, they leave for the country with a couple of nice looking young girls for a good time, but things soon begin to get bizarre.

At first this may seem like another Teen slasher flick or even a redneck horror film, but there is much more to Sheitan. Even when these motifs are used and explored they are deconstructed and portrayed in novel and new ways.

As the youth reach their location, they have an encounter with a group of goats, while these animals seem innocent enough, the focus on the large black goat seems a premonition of the darkness to come. They then meet Joseph, a very creepy character with huge, dirty teeth, he seems unduly friendly, even perversely so. He seems to spend a little too much time wanting to squirt the milk from the goats udders in everybody’s mouths ! He shows an undue interest in Bart and yet seems sexually ambiguous towards all of them in a deranged sort of way. The house itself is a broken down, ramshackle mansion on a dirt road located outside a tiny village whose residents are portrayed as inbred and truly disturbed.

The house is beautifully filmed to produce a sense of unease and edginess, it is filled with the dolls and the tools to make them. The filming throughout Sheitan is impressive, a lot of handheld and close-in photography creates a real sense of seeing the world through the eyes of both the youth and at times, Joseph. There is a strong sense of claustrophobia and paranoia created by the way in which even everyday objects are portrayed.

Joseph leads them all to a local warm spring for a swim and we get a truly politically incorrect and perverse scene. The locals join in and we get naked inbreds, one of the girls tickling a dog in an extremely questionable manner, the locals playing rape and so on. It is quite an astounding scene but it begins to set the stage for the violence to come. As a piece of hair is torn from Bart’s head, the scene turns ugly and the violence that has been percolating under the surface erupts.

As the film progresses, the Christmas Eve dinner begins to see things unravel as racial slurs abound, passions flow and madness ensues. This leads us to the dramatic climax of the film which has some marvelous twists and turns, including a rather nice surrealist hospital scene.

Sheitan is certainly an acquired taste, some will find the inbred demented country folk offensive and other will simply see this as all too surreal and not a little mad, director Kim Champiron claims the idea for the film was fuelled by a drug experience and this doesn’t surprise me one bit ! Vincent Cassel as the madman Joseph is a truly inspired piece of character acting and lifts the film way above what it could have otherwise been.

There is something new and exciting about Sheitan, it deconstructs traditional horror genres, even mocks them and yet creates a truly compelling, amusing and frightening horror experience.