LITTLE DEATHS

Three episodes. House & Home. Richard and Victoria are an upper-class couple in a marital crisis. To reignite their sexual desire, they usually invite homeless people into their home, promising them a meal and a hot bath, but in reality, they drug the unfortunate souls and sexually abuse them. The new victim is Sadness, a girl who, however, hides a terrible secret. Mutant Tool. Lucy is a former drug addict with financial problems, so she helps her boyfriend deal drugs and occasionally prostitutes herself. Lucy is also in treatment with Dr. Reece, who is experimenting with a new type of drug derived from the sperm of some mutants resulting from an experiment started in the Nazi period. Unknowingly, Lucy becomes the test subject for Dr. Reece's experiments. Bitch. Claire treats her boyfriend literally like a dog: she makes him sleep in a doghouse and for sex, she makes him wear a dog mask. He, tired of continuous humiliations, even public ones, devises a terrible revenge. Eros and Thanatos, love and death, an immortal pairing for every form of narration, sung by the poets of antiquity and still central in both fiction works and everyday reality, that of the crime news. "Little Deaths" is yet another incarnation of this dichotomy that seems almost inseparable, and to emphasize the main theme of this anthology film, the Anglo-Saxon translation of "la petite mort" is used, which for the French is a way of referring to orgasm. The peak of sexual pleasure compared and unified with death, with a small form of death, so as to also lexically merge these two sides of the same coin. To reflect on this subject, the three English directors Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, and Simon Rumley choose a morbid and explicit path, made of scabrous themes and truly strong images. An anomalous film emerges that blends horror with erotica, also touching other film genres (drama and science fiction), a film that probably aims to make people talk about itself and therefore does not leave anyone indifferent. "Little Deaths" strikes not so much for what it says but for how it says it, and one gets the impression that the authors involved had really had maximum expressive freedom. As often happens in anthology films, not all episodes are on the same level, although in this case we have two out of three strong ones, with a weak episode that is still not bad at all. The "culprit" is the second episode, "Mutant Tool," written and directed by Andrew Parkinson (remember "I, Zombie"? It was his!), which places at the center of the story a phantom drug derived from the sperm of equally phantom mutant creatures. The project is traced back to the Third Reich, and these mutants kept in captivity in a catatonic state, reminiscent of Wolverine in "Weapon X," exhibit a penis of disproportionate size from which the precious sperm "drips" continuously. This is the "cool" idea at the base of everything from which Parkinson wanted to build a somewhat confused story that throws in the criticism of pharmaceutical experimentation and the shattered ego of a former addict. Everything does not blend well, and several plot holes emerge that do not allow the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place when the story ends. Before and after "Mutant Tool" there are, however, two gems of cruelty that leave a mark. "House & Home," by Sean Hogan ("The Devil's Business"), has a classic structure, predictable if you will, with an anti-bourgeois moral. It is this rich couple in explicit crisis dictated by the lack of sexual understanding... and a pinch of perversion that makes it difficult for them to find the right spark in their marital relationship. Between the two, she is the one "wearing the pants": she is the mind, he is the arm of a sadistic game aimed at satisfying their perverse sexual instincts on the skin of the homeless. Practices of "pissing," cumshot, and carnal violence of a lesbian style anticipate the predictable reversal of roles in splatter sauce. The simplicity and mechanical nature of the story work well and give greater effectiveness to the narrative, which has its strong point in the scabrous explicitness of the rape & revenge dichotomy of love/death. It is on this that the third and final episode, "Bitch," focuses, perhaps in an even more effective way. A title too clear that in the hands of Simon Rumley ("The Living and the Dead"; "Red, White & Blue") becomes an existential drama steeped in perversion and cruelty. The "bitch" of the title is Claire (Kate Braithwaite), a seemingly quiet girl but in private a perfidious dominatrix who forces her boyfriend to disguise himself as a dog, sleep in a doghouse, and be anally possessed during sexual intercourse. He is humiliated, emptied, and at the enésima meanness, begins to meditate a terrible revenge that culminates in a terrible scene of "bestial love." The pace of this third episode is rather slow, but the theme is strong and the two leading actors are very good. The only criticism that can be moved to Rumley is a monotonous and unimaginative use of photography (all blue-tinted in post, with a couple of scenes in red... like that, without a real reason). Overall, "Little Deaths" is a successful film, capable of making excellent use of the central theme of the work, exaggerating it and aiming for a strong impact on the public. Surely not suitable for all tastes.