Review: The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears / Cert: TBC / Director: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani / Screenplay: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani / Starring: Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener, Jean-Michel Vovk, Birgit Yew, Sylvia Camarda, Sam Louwyck, Anna D’Annunzio, Manon Beuchet, Hans de Munter / UK Release Date: April 11th
One of the most bizarre films in recent years, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is directors Cattet and Forzani’s follow-up to Amer. It follows a man called Dan Kristensen (Tange – who looks like a cross between the Bounty Hunter from The X-Files and Peter Capaldi) searching for his missing wife.
After waking up with no recollection of what’s happened to her, he begins to investigate the mysterious old Belgian apartment block where they live, alerting a police detective (Koener), who begins to suspect him.
The search turns into a nightmarish journey as Dan encounters strange characters with equally weird tales as he starts to witness a terrifying world of sex and violence. Despite this, the film is not as pornographic or gory as you might think, with an overtly arthouse tone – Videodrome meets Delicatessen, with the surrealism somewhere in-between.
There are several shots of eyes in-between fast cuts, disorientating camera angles and overbearing, uncomfortable music straight from Irreversible. The film starts strongly, both intriguing and foreboding, but the rest of it is hit and miss. Some scenes are shown over and over again – particularly one with an annoying doorbell – and there is a sudden, self-aware sidestep into another story (at which point Dan knowingly asks ‘What has this got to do with my wife?’).
The experiments with colour, sound, stop-frame techniques and some leather S&M that Pinhead would be proud of all contribute to a thoroughly fascinating film that pays homage to ’70s European horror, but unfortunately the audience is often left confused and unsatisfied when the tension has started to build only for the direction of the story to be suddenly interrupted. A shorter, more focused film would perhaps be more satisfying but then again, this film wasn’t meant to follow the rules.
Expected Rating: 6 out of 10
Actual Rating:
