Fantastic Fest 2011 Review: Rabies
by JC De Leon
Film festivals can, at times, subject those that attend to films of a familiar nature. So many times we will sit down for a film where we think we’ll know all of the steps that are about to unfold. Such is the case with Rabies. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: So a group of kids go into the forest for a trip and encounter a homicidal maniac along the way and…Yeah, it all sounds pretty familiar, but Rabies does that thing we all hope to see when we sit down to watch a horror film at a festival as great as Fantastic Fest — it brings something different to the table. This is a much deeper film than the festival notes would indicate, and one that comes on stronger and stronger as it gets going.
In what’s being billed by the programmers at Fantastic Fest as “basically a bad day to go to the park,” it’s evident that those are some of the truest words ever uttered about a film at this festival since the phrase ‘Chaos Reigns’. When a brother and sister — Ofer and Tali — run away from home in the middle of the night, they go to a forest nearby where Tali falls victim to a trap laid by a homicidal maniac. When Ofer searches for help he runs into a group of people who he asks for assistance, but they’ve got problems of their own with a corrupt and kind of handsy police officer.
From Israeli directing team Navot Pupushado and Aharon Keshales — representing a country that hasn’t had a very loud voice in the genre filmmaking world — Rabies does a great job in showcasing just how quickly man can descend into madness when pushed to his limits. When they could have taken the easy way out since they already had a serial killer in their film, they didn’t. While isolation creating a descent into madness isn’t the most original idea, they certainly make the most of it with brutal and unrelenting violence. A few of the sequences have a nice mix of being shot both intimately and from afar.
This horror genre debut from Israel certainly brings a lot of promise with it, drawing from a well that many have long considered dry. It’s not without its faults, though; at times the pacing may appear to be pretty slow, but this is the epitome of a slow build that thankfully has several payoffs. This isn’t a film that should be overlooked simply because it’s got of a bit of a cliché plot synopsis. Rabies will lull you into a falsely dismissive state, but in the end you’ll be glad you took a chance on this film from two directors in Israel.
