Essential Killing

I must admit that the first time I saw ESSENTIAL KILLING, I was a little bit unimpressed by the end of it. But that's the thing about ideas, they have to grow in your own mind before you fully understand them, and that's the point of Jerzy Skolomowski's haunting film. Starring Vincent Gallo in a wordless, essentially one-man performance as a probable terrorist who is captured by the U.S. Government in an unnamed arab country, and then stored and tortured in Turkey. Turkey, the polar opposite to the sandy deserts of the earlier country. The terrorist escapes though, after a crash in the snow. He runs, taking a gun and killing a couple of his captors, and fleeing to the woods. This is the political statement though, the will of this man to survive, and doing so in a land completely foreign to him, injured, and without any food. In one of two of the film's completely breathtaking sequences, he eats some berries and gets really high, another experience that is completely contrary to his earlier form of life.

But this is survivalism, and as he becomes an animal, he becomes reactionary, killing, eating, running, surviving. While high, he hallucinates about his life in the Middle East, which is handled with something only describable as grace. Then there's another sequence I'd liken to the scene in FRANKENSTEIN, where a dejected monster comes in from the cold and is nurtured to an extent that is cut off based upon the implicitness of the invited.

★★★★ out of Five