For 30 years, the Gérardmer festival has taken the temperature of fantastic and horror cinema. And if it’s cold around the lake, the thermometer will soon implode in the halls of the small resort in the Vosges.
Every year in January, it’s party time at Gérardmer, one of the coolest and most relevant film festivals on the circuit. For five days and five nights, you can discover a dozen films in competition, retro films, curiosities, docs, special nights… And in an overexcited atmosphere, a faithful audience comes to commune in front of trashy horror films or magnificent, unclassifiable works, as over the years It follows by David Cameron Mitchell, 2 sisters the Kim Ji-woon, Dark Water by Hideo NakataMorse de Thomas Anderson, Bone Tomahawk Craig T. Zahler ou Saint Maud the Rose Glass…
This year, the thirtieth edition is co-chaired by Bérénice Bejo and Michel Hazanavicius, with a jury composed of Catherine Ringer, Alex Lutz or Gringe. On the program, tributes to Kim Ji-woon and Jaume Balagueró, an all-nighter, covers (Murders under control, The Host, Night of the Living Dead, False pretenses…), a doc on David Lynch’s relationship with The Wizard of Ozpreviews (Knock at the Cabin or Project Wolf Hunting) and competition. A competition section launched with the very anemic Blood de Brad Anderson (The Machinist), the story of a nursing mother, Michelle Monagham, whose child suffers from a strange addiction to human blood that he must ingest in large quantities or die. The film, under the influence of Stephen King, describes vampirism as an addiction, but hesitates between big family melody and horror film, and accumulates the agreed scenes, despite some interesting ideas.
GORE AND PONYTAIL
With German film Piaffe, the German Ann Oren tells the story of an introverted young woman, noisemaker in the cinema, who sees a ponytail growing on her lower back. It is a poetic, feverish, fetishistic work, with a succession of scenes that are both surreal (the sexuality of ferns), sensual, a disturbing fable on the discovery of the body and the fluidity of gender. Big shock.
But the slap of the festival is the Korean film Project Wolf Hunting which begins as a high-tech thriller with 47 criminals transferred from Manila to Seoul by elite cops in a huge container ship. It looks like a Jerry Bruckheimer production, with psychopathic killers looking like K-pop stars. But very quickly, the director squirts the hemoglobin and we discover – forbidden – that the body of the average Korean contains at least 50 liters of blood and that the explosion of skulls, with tools as diverse as varied, is the national sport. . It’s already unbearable, but the screenwriter brings us as a bonus an invincible monster from the holds of the ship, which pulverizes everything in its path and which likes to tear off the limbs of its victims before using it as a club to stupefy them. others… It’s openly gore and pop, a bit basic and repetitive but ultra-fun.
K.O. technique !
Gérardmer, until January 29
By Marc Godin
