Piercing

Giallo Jukebox

Piercing
USA 2018 Directed by  Nicolas Pesce
Vertigo DVD Region 2

Okay, so let me start off by saying that, despite the title of this review, Piercing is not in any way, shape or form, a giallo. However, what it does do, like a fair few modern movies just lately since the resurgence of the giallo movie as a popular genre of home entertainment, is take certain aspects of the cinematic language of the genre to use on a film which, in this case, certainly isn’t an example of that particular form. This is often a successful choice with movies like Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here) successfully mining certain aspects of this cinematic legacy to enrich the experience.

Now I didn’t realise that Piercing would be going down this route when I bought it. I was basically laying to rest a ghost because it clashed with something else I wanted to see at last year’s FrightFest and I was awaiting a local cinema release only to find it didn’t get any kind of general theatrical release over here at all... which is a shame because at least then I would have known not to bother with this DVD release (oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?).

The other reason I wanted to see this is because it’s based on a novel by Ryû Murakami (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the other famous, literary Murakami) and I was curious because I’d read his book In The Miso Soup and also I kinda found interesting (though ultimately not great) another film I’d seen based on one of his books, Tokyo Decadence (reviewed by me here). So, yeah, this plus the promise of sexualised BDSM play invoked by the title and the film’s limited marketing combined with one of the lead protagonist’s/antagonist’s being played by Mia Wasikowska, who seems intent on picking very interesting roles and bringing something unusual to them, had me wanting to see this one.

So I popped this into the smart drive hooked up to my Mac (the one advantage of not being able to get an easily accessible Blu Ray release in the UK of this film) and the first thing that surprised me was the menu of this bare bones release. The main theme of one of my favourite Bruno Nicolai giallo scores, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, is used for both the menu and, bizarrely, various cues from this and other gialli and exploitation films are also used liberally throughout. So that’s one of the two main gialloistic elements used in this movie and I’ll get right back to the music shortly.

Preceding the opening logos we have one of those old style, distressed film stock “Feature Presentation” graphics to announce the film. This seems to have caught on with a few film-makers since Quentin Tarantino did something similar on Kill Bill. This is followed by all the company logos being on a distressed film stock and... it’s a pretty mixed message to be honest because as soon as the actual film starts, we are into pin sharp, high definition images in direct contrast to the style of those opening graphics. So I don’t know what’s going on there because the film is definitely not the kind of grindhouse experience you would expect from something introduced like that.

Now, I’m pretty sure the opening titles are a beautiful pan over what I suspect is a model of a big city skyline, with various scenes showing through the windows. And this is scored by what I believe to be Stelvio Cipriani’s score for What Have They Done To Your Daughters? Which got a big shout out on the soundtrack to the aforementioned Amer, too. That being said, although there is a long list of music credits at the rear end of the movie, I didn’t catch this one listed so... maybe I’m confused. Can anyone else confirm that this is definitely this soundtrack used in this and one other sequence on the movie... it definitely sounds like it to me. Back to the music again soon.

The film starts with Christopher Abbott as Reed, who is clearly a little psychotic as he obviously wants to kill his baby and nearly does that until the mother of his child interrupts him. He soon goes off to rent a hotel room and hire a prostitute, Jackie played by Mia Wasikowska, with the intention of murdering her and cutting up her body before putting it all in a bag for disposal. And when he is in the hotel room there’s a nice scene where we see him rehearsing the whole murder with certain sounds of what the murder should sound like... the slicing of flesh, the splashing of blood, the tying of the bag etc... thrown into the scene. Now, I didn’t have a shred of empathy with Reed’s character here, who seems to be the Walter Mitty of serial killers... neither with that of Wasikowska when you finally get a taste of her true character, but I have to say both actors did well with their roles and Reed comes off as a somewhat driven but reluctant psycho... which just made me dislike him even more to be honest but you can’t deny that Abbott does a good job here.

When Jackie arrives at Reed’s hotel room, to the strains of Goblin’s main them for Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red), you assume nothing will go as planned because, why else show us a rehearsal scene showing what should happen? And, yes, it doesn’t and once Jackie goes to have a shower, when Reed goes in to see what’s taking her so long, you’ll get your first real surprise of the movie. I won’t ruin this for you but I will say that, after Reed has taken Jackie to the hospital and waits for her outside, he has a conversation with his wife on a phone about the murder. Except, you know she knows nothing about it in real life so the conversation is obviously in his head. Things like the ‘talking baby’ telling him that he knows what he has to do at the start of the movie are pretty much a dead giveaway about Reed’s mental state through all of this.  This kind of takes the punch out of pretty much anything else that happens after this point where Jackie takes Reed back to her ‘red room’ and starts to turn the tables on him... in really obvious, unsurprising ways, it has to be said.

Okay, you’re probably getting a sense that I didn’t really like this movie now and... well... I did and I didn’t. The stylistic mise en scène and framing of those old giallo movies, the second element that this film borrows from that particular strand of cinematic heritage, is beautiful. People are sectioned off in sometimes overly tidy and crisp shot designs and even a split screen sequence recalling the early ‘American gialli’ of Brian De Palma is in evidence and goes a long way towards making up for the film’s short falls. The colours are beautiful too and I love those old scores being used... especially for the end titles, a lot of which uses a truncated version of the main theme from Argento’s Tenebre and I assume the accompanying pan through those same models (I’m still convinced they are models) of the cityscape is an homage to Argento’s ‘moving camera over architecture’ moments from films like that. Even if it’s not... it works for me. Of course, the cynical amongst us (I’m waiting for a comment from one of my friends after he reads this review) would say that the director has just got a bunch of old giallo tunes and thrown it at the film in the usual needle-drop manner and... I’d have to say I wouldn’t disagree with that either.

Actually, one of the big stumbling blocks about using music like this is the game the audience is suddenly playing about ‘what film does that come from’ as they are watching. However, I don’t mind this aspect but I do believe that the director really makes a bad call in a couple of instances in this movie because, sometimes, music can also have strong emotional baggage attached to it and such is the case here, in a couple of scenes where he’s used Piero Piccioni’s wonderful score to Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (reviewed by me here) which immediately brings up the sympathies of young lovers, tragically doomed which... well I may be wrong but I don’t really think that’s the emotion he’s going for in the scenes where he uses one of Piccioni’s most poignant themes, to be honest. Still, he’s not the first contemporary director to needle drop excerpts from this score into his film but... I think it could have been done with a more appropriate deference to the on screen images here.

So, summing up then... this film has beautiful performances by the two leads, stylish camera work and shot design, wonderful stolen music and... those are its main pluses. Alas, I can only assume this is a pretty good adaptation of the novel because, as a film exploring the kind of subject area touched upon here, it completely disappoints and never really goes far enough. The fetishistic sexuality and violence are never really pushed into the kinds of extreme territory you would hope they would go into to give a more accurate and less whimsical approach to this kind of exploration and, ultimately, I don’t think I could completely recommend this one to people unless you are purely in it for the music and cinematography. Ultimately, despite the strength and vibrance of those elements, it still manages to be fairly bland and unambitious as a film and I really was expecting a little more from it than what we got here. Even with Mia Wasikowska's customary off-kilter take on her character, this film really didn’t feel edgy in any way and I felt that, as someone who quite enjoys the odd film exploring extreme sensations and situations, I probably wasn’t the more virginal, vanilla target audience that I suspect this one was designed for. So not my cup of tea despite the spot on stylistic sensibilities inherent in the film’s DNA, to be honest. Piercing could have done with some boundary pushing, I think.