LUCIDMEDIA

Toronto After Dark – Must Love Death

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Friday, 21 August 2009 15:26

It started with Must Love Dogs, which I think was about a woman that solely decided on the quality of man based on whether he liked dogs. A couple of years later, a pair of film editors recut Steven Spielberg’s killer shark movie to appear as a jovial, Free Willy like romp through Amity Island in “Must Love Jaws.” Now we get Must Love Death, a bizarrely remarkable combination of Saw-like torture porn and cutesy John Cusack-starring rom-coms. Even more strange is that Must Love Death is a German film with a German cast, but set in America with English dialogue. It seems as if student filmmaker Andreas Schaap has purposefully set out to create a film that boggles the mind by fact of its existence, and if so, mission accomplished. Like chocolate and peanut butter before it, Must Love Death brings two great tastes together.

What immediately strikes you about Must Love Death is its audacity. It would seem that Schaap is trying to back at the U.S. a little for years of German stereotyping in American films. Or maybe it’s just that southern and Brooklyn accents better hide the Germanness of the actors than having them attempt to speak with more of a straightforward “American” accent. The film was also shot in Germany, but well-placed camera positioning and stock footage play sleight of hand to make you think its New York. It was at least as convincing as movies that use Toronto as a stand in for “The city that never sleeps.”

But that’s just infrastructure, the nuts and bolts, the film would win or lose based on whether Schaap can make the audience believe in the torture porn/romantic comedy combo. Can the two truly co-exist peacefully in the same movie, or will one water down the other? Perhaps they will reject each other, like a mismatched organ implanted in a body that can’t handle it. But oddly enough, the back and forth of sunny romance and  deep woods hillbilly torture game show shenanigans work together like people have been perfecting it for years.

It’s a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Norman (Sami Loris) gets dumped by his girlfriend and in a desperate bid to end his life, he volunteers to be a willing victim of a snuff film. But when he meets a new girl, Jennifer (Manon Kahle), in a literal case of being hit by love or at least love’s car, Norman decides that maybe life is worth living. That is until he thinks that Jennifer is still seeing her cantankerous, blowhard ex (Philipp Rafferty), to which he decides to take that fateful trip into the woods. But the torturers are not content to simply let Norman hang by the neck till dead, and instead draw him into their ghastly game of “Torture or No Torture.”

Switching back and forth between the two genres has an unusual effect, but it definitely keeps you on your toes as. As Jennifer sits in a diner in the city, she hears Norman’s song about her playing on the radio. Cut to Norman, trapped in a hillbilly shack in the woods, having his fingers broken one by one and getting nails hammered into his forearm. Eventually Jennifer decides that Norman is her one and only, so she races to be reunited with him. Too bad that there might not be too much left of Norman by the time she gets to him.

The unusual complementary nature of the genres actually breaks the curse of any production labelled “torture porn” by actually making you care about the characters. Norman seems like a perfectly affable guy and Jennifer has a kind of Phoebe Buffay vibe going for her. Jeff Burrell and Peter Farkas as the torturers are excellently macabre and humorous, but I was actually pretty invested with the film’s romantic couple. How weird is that? You almost never root for the good guys in either torture porn or romantic comedies, but in Must Love Death I was actually hoping love would conquer all. And casting German actors that can’t do American accents as German tourists? Brilliant! Must Love Death is truly inspired, and the fact that it came from a film student makes it even doubly impressive. Combining black humour and hardcore horror, the film manages to find the best of both worlds and cast off the clap trap of each to create something a little more unique. The film’s a little choppy at first, but about 15 minutes in it’s found its rhythm and any of the uneven stuff at the beginning is long forgotten and what you remember is the satisfying conflux of not just the to genres, but of timing and inspiration that allows the filmmaker to break through and make his mark. Andreas Schaap is definitely one to watch. And Must Love Death is definitely one to see.