Tom (Jason Vail) lives a routine for a life. Every day he wakes up, jogs, then meets his wife and daughter for breakfast. His days are filled mainly with office tasks, exhaustedly carrying on with a spent relationship with his childhood best friend Dan (Nicolas Wilder) who works in a cubicle next to his. “We don’t hang out anymore,” quibbles his friend, upset when he rejects the idea of an all-nighter of, in his own words, “cheesy hard-flicks.” This is all innocuous at first, perhaps only a bit suggestive of a less bleak best friend fixation a la Chuck and Buck (2001), but proves ultimately essential to the film’s only thrilling moment towards the end.
Gut pivots around the life of a listless man whose days unfurl so tediously that Elias’ mechanics feel nothing but excess feats to an otherwise perfectly minimalist piece. If one can so extravagantly overkill minimalism, Elias has done it. The film’s locations here are verses, repeated with intent and shot to a certain beat that is unmistakably Cronenbergian. For the most part it works: the film’s opening scene first finds a man in berserk, blood spattered all over his body; then the same man in his morning outfit jogging homeward and cheerily conversing with his family at breakfast. In the space of a single minute, Elias breathes dread to this character, something that is squandered as he carries on to cross-stitch sub-plots into a blandly executed why-dunnit.
If you come in to Gut and are reminded of Harker and Dracula and Graham and Lecter (pairs who, let me tell you, have dirtier talks than everything that E.L. James will ever write), it isn’t because you fall under a certain mania. Tom and Dan’s relationship certainly goes beyond that of best friends, and it is equally endearing and dreadful to see their bond reignite through an obsession as morbid as snuff films. Their fallout is inevitable. The film, moving forward the two characters’ introduction, is essentially a slow uncovering of what-leads-where and where-leads-what. Somewhere in the middle, you just lose interest.
Perhaps it is where Gut lacks the most. The screenplay, written by Elias, feels like a rough draft of a more technically and dramatically sound film to come out a few years later. (It has been years now and Elias have been at work at the kickstarter-backed feature film Ayla, starring Wilder and Tristan Fisk, who starred famously in The Soska Sisters’ American Mary. Quite a premise, and I sincerely hope Elias delivers.) The trouble with Gut, then, is this: a film being an outcast to genre convention and traditional dramatics is more than usually a positive description, but none of that essence seems to apply to the film. It finds its beats swaying in between its minimalist lull and harmless pastiche, and somehow finds that enough cause to settle.
If we talked about the United Kingdom, obesity amerikabulteni.com cost of sildenafil rate in the UK is extremely high. Now, the condition online order viagra can be best handled with the help of Silagra pills. Moreover, herbicides and minerals like green tea are bulk viagra uk also mixed with the products of Anti Allergic Drugs. It cheap cialis view for info hinders free radicals from causing oxidative stress. In the end, however, only one question comes to my mind: if Cronenberg is not Canadian, can one imagine him crying foul, mouse-eared and all?
Videodrome says static noise.
One thought on “Gut”