Horror in Short: Récompence (2010)
Récompence (2010)
Studio: Film Bizarro
Release Date: September 2010
Directed By: Ronny Carlsson
Cast: Mariette Lilja, Sven-Erik Andersson, Ronny Carlsson & Nathalie Bergenstråhle
Review By: Annie Riordan
Swedish filmmaker Ronny Carlsson is a masochist. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. After reading one of the nastier and more blatantly asshole-ripping reviews that I’d written for a dismally torturous DTV, the kid actually sent me an email requesting that I review his short film Récompence on the condition that I be brutally honest and eviscerate the entire thing from balls to brows if it displeased me. It’s not very often that I get requests from pretty young boys who want to be abused by me, so of course I accepted. I’m not stupid. What arrived from Sweden a week later was, alas, not at all what I was expecting. I’m really very sorry, Ronny. I liked your film.
Shot for less than $1,000 (I have no idea what that equals out to in Swedish krona), Récompence is the simple but timeless tale of a soul lost in purgatory, thrown violently out of life and unable to find the way to a true hereafter. Inspired by such films as Carnival of Souls and Merhige’s Begotten, Récompence employs a fatal car accident as its catalyst. A young woman, covered from head to toe in mud and blood, emerges from the undergrowth and staggers zombielike into the forest primeval. She finds herself drawn to a wraithlike creature who observes her from a respectful distance and who casually disembowels himself while she watches, evoking an odd mixture of disgust and desire within her. Unholy communions, discarded photographs and a trinity of reaper-like beings all come into play, leading the girl farther and farther away from her memories of life and closer to the white robed and masked figure, with whom she eventually merges.
I love near death experience inspired shit like this, I gotta admit. Carnival Of Souls is one of my all time favorite films, and I was frankly unable to watch Merhige’s Begotten (said to have been inspired by an NDE following a car accident) in its entirety because it literally made me feel like I was either going to go bugshit insane or vomit myself inside out. Lucky for me, Récompence falls neatly right in between those two, borrowing the best elements from both but never crossing the fine line between homage and outright theft. Filmed in black and white, it’s overexposed to the point of nearly being a negative print, an effect that makes an already disturbing tale all the more disturbing. There’s no spoken dialogue, only a soundtrack of solemn piano music and unsettling sound effects. Clever camera angles and a lead actress with startlingly ghostly eyes and no qualms whatsoever about getting totally naked make this more than watchable. Girl’s got an actual body too, no scrawny ribcage-showing bulimic American bullshit goin’ on in these woods, that’s fo sho.
I was honest to God expecting a painfully amateurish effort with wooden actors reading off unimaginative script lines with all the enthusiasm of a constipated court reporter reading back the minutes of a dry exchange about copyright laws. No such stuff here. I’ve seen lots of crap. Lots and LOTS of crap. I’m not even bragging – a lot of that crap really hurts to watch. Cheapshit, embarrassingly untalented, badly written pseudo-artsy and/or derivative, painfully unoriginal slasher-esque shit that is neither entertaining nor recommendable. Récompence just isn’t one of them. Sorry Ronny, but you show true promise, and I’m just going to have to recommend that people with a chance to see this film do so without hesitation. Deal with it.
