MUBI

Finally a fresh and innovative film this year!

Amer (=bitter) is an experimental horror film without dialogue and without narrative. It focuses purely on audiovisual sensations and atmosphere. Basically it’s a distillate of those highly stylized type of scenes in horror cinema which show the internal subjective experience of the protagonist. It’s all pure sensation, psychosexual signs and signifiers.

The movie is made up of three parts which chronologically show impressions of a girl’s experiences in three different moments of her life: First there is childhood, which comes in form of a really really creepy ghost story involving her black-hooded grandmother and the dead body of her grandfather. Next the tension eases up as the girl reaches adolescence, gets out of the dreaded house into the sun and discovers men. The third part is adulthood, in which she decides to return to the house she grew up in and is menaced by an unknown assailant.

This film certainly isn’t for everybody. It is not a giallo as I had read somewhere. There is a lot of homage, a lengthy Suspiria sequence and the soundtrack is a compilation from Italian genre films. However, this is an experimental film infused with the distinct type of Belgian surrealism that can also be evidenced in another favourite of mine, Olivier Smolders’ “Nuit Noire”.

5 out of 5 stars.