AKA Livid
DIRECTED BY: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
FEATURING: Chloé Coulloud, Félix Moati, Jérémy Kapone, Catherine Jacob, Béatrice Dalle, Chloé Marcq, Marie-Claude Pietragalla
PLOT: When a student nurse and her companions break into an enigmatic patient’s mouldering mansion, they spiral into a horrifying mystery while being stalked by reanimated corpses, a marionette vampire, and a brain-sucking sorceress.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Livide undergoes a continual genre metamorphoses from teen slasher, to haunted house film, to morbid steampunk thriller, to otherworldy fantasy. If that’s not enough, the underlying concept, while not purely original (though the story fresh) is completely off-the-wall.
COMMENTS: When Lucy (Coulloud) takes a job as a nurse’s assistant, her mentor takes her to a sinister, ancient estate where an elderly comatose patient named Mademoiselle Jessel (Pietragalla) has allegedly hidden a fortune in treasure somewhere inside the gloomy edifice’s crumbling walls. Lucy returns with accomplices to search for it. The trio unwittingly awakens an ancient matriarch who turns out to be a sorceress—and a brain-sucking vampiress.
Mademoiselle Jessel’s very habitation is in collusion with her. The manor is nearly a living entity and becomes a central, personified lead in the film. Baroque and timeworn, intricate, creaking and groaning, and full of decorative complexity, the edifice resonates from a terrible secret enclosed within.
The house is monstrous and overwhelming, with winding corridors, door-less rooms, portal mirrors, and darkened, cluttered spaces filled with the aberrant memorabilia and paraphernalia of Mademoiselle Jessel’s moribund life. The mansion has its own plan, in malignant collaboration with an undead menagerie of taixdermied creatures.
There are menacing shadows, disturbing movements, and a feeling that one is not alone within these walls. In fact, Lucy and her compatriots are not. The residence’s creaking floors, locked doors and disintegrating walls alternately conceal and release unmentionable abominations upon the hapless intruders.
Trapped in the house with all exits inexplicably locked behind them, exploring eerie room after eerie room, Lucy and her cagey cohorts are drawn into an alternate reality behind a magic mirror. As they frantically scramble for a means of escape, the three friends are pursued by animal and human corpses reanimated as ghoulish marionettes. Meanwhile Lucy finds herself entwined in a vintage riddle which she must solve in order to keep her soul.
Livide is a visually stunning horror film, utterly fresh, and free of all clichés, cheap tricks and tired gimmicks. From the mummy-like, comatose Mademoiselle Jessel, her finger nails grown long as talons and her face obfuscated by a grotesque oxygen mask, to the dreary, decaying mansion in which she is entombed alive, Livide is a morbid cavalcade of ghastly settings, objects and characters.
Intricate sets, elaborate, horrifying makeup effects, along with cryptic objects and props accentuate an original and bizarre genre-bending story. Livide begins as a mystery, evolves into horror and concludes as grisly fantasy. The film’s claustrophobic optical signature enhances its uncanny and eventually surreal feel.
Livide is the ultimate haunted house film, but it is also a diabolical odyssey. Dark, striking, slick, inscrutable and arty, but conventionally filmed and superbly produced, Livide proffers moments of sheer terror accented with otherworldly wonder. A visual extravaganza of the dreadful visions and horrible ideas lurking in the hearts of all proud horror aficionados, Livide unnaturally speaks to something locked deep down inside of us. Livide is an absolutely bitchin’, smashing, slam-bang groovy movie all the way.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: