Kritiken

Shocked by Palms in all the wrong ways, and feeling betrayed by a director whose early work I had taken considerable stock in, I intended to puzzle out the reasons for Dumont's descent into gore and hard-core... With its stilted, unconvincing performances, delivered largely in a language (English) Dumont avoided in interviews because he lacked mastery, and set in a landscape at once alien and unoriginal, Twentynine Palms felt like a forced anomaly, a freakish excursion into the unknown.

It's a sociopolitical horror film that felt agonizingly from the heart in 2003, a twist on American icons of masculinity, on the glorious western expanse mythologized on film, on our mega-cars and military heroes.

Wild places do things to people, and movies have been exploring this confrontation between civilized human beings and their natural roots for decades. Twentynine Palms extends this exploration with psychological and physical brutality that, nonetheless, is spellbinding to watch.

At the very least, it's an experience guaranteed to leave viewers shaken, if not exactly grateful.

Twentynine Palms might have been titled The Screamers—and not just because David telegraphs his orgasm with a Tarzanic bellow. Eros inevitably merges with violence in Dumont's world. The filmmaker shifts gears for a denouement that combines aspects of Deliverance and Psycho.

Sex, like violence, can be vulgar, pretty, fantastical and emotional—it can also be political. More times than not, though, it’s a private exchange and Twentynine Palms poses many interesting questions to people who violently react to its images.