A Serbian Film (2010)

Directed by Srdjan Spasojevic
Written by Srdjan Spasojevic and Aleksandar Radivojevic
Featuring Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic, Lena Bogdanovic

A Serbian Film is supposed to be the most incredibly horrific film experience of this decade. Why am I not impressed, then?

Okay, maybe it’s because I’m jaded. The only films that have had any real effect on my psyche this decade are Irreversible, The Stoning of Soraya M, and 2 Girls 1 Cup. Those films made me stop and think about the violence and gave me a horrific rush of emotional and mental turmoil. And those aren’t even horror movies. I really get a kick out of sick movies; the gorier, the better, so I was extremely excited to see A Serbian Film, the latest thing out of the once-communist, now-democratic, self-deprecating nation that was once a part of Yugoslavia in Eastern Europe being hailed as a torture marathon that will blow your mind.

A Serbian Film is about Milos, a retired porn actor trying to be a good husband and father. But he needs money, and is willing to make another film for the eccentric Vukmir even though he hasn’t read the script and Vukmir is anything but trustworthy. As you guessed, the film he is asked to make is not traditional porn. In fact, it blurs the line so far between rape and sex (I don’t think there’s one satisfied woman in the entire film Milos makes with Vukmir, by the way) and snuff that it is indefinable, and frankly, not sexy at all. Unless you get off on watching people get anally raped. Then you’ll think this film is hot.

A Serbian Film is two things – a disgusting display of gore for gore’s sake and an attempt at some kind of social message (according to the director, anyway) that never comes through. All you’ll see is repetitive, fantastical, unrealistic degradation without the visual pleasure of real porn or the intense close-ups that warrant visceral reactions from the viewer (me.) Compared to recent movies also given accolades for their gore levels like Inside and Martyrs, A Serbian Film isn’t any more controversial or shocking except in the way it summarily makes every female (or male) in the film a possible fuck-hole.

Milos becomes a raging sex maniac through Vukmir’s administration of cattle aphrodisiac (which makes no sense) and ends up raping and hurting everything and everyone in sight. The end.

Because of the implausibility of Milos’s sex-crazed rage (he is, after all, an experienced porn star with no history of mental illness, and as far as reality goes, cattle aphrodisiacs will not turn a human being into a sex-crazed rapist), the movie just becomes silly and the continuing scenes have less and less impact until you just want the movie to either commit to real up-close horror (which it never does) or go away.

My largest problem with the film is not that it went too far; on the contraire, dear friends. It never went far enough. Some of the most talked about scenes (SPOILER AHEAD) include one in which a newborn baby is raped by a grown man. I was delighted and excited to see this scene. I wanted to be aghast and vomit a little in my own mouth. Instead I got a very poorly lit, poorly shot and poorly directed moment in which a plastic doll is taken from a woman’s legs and immediately held away from the camera while a man, his back facing us, moves back and forth. Oh, and you hear a baby cry.

That, my friends, is NOT what I call ‘fucking a newborn baby’. Despite the director’s constant insistence that the movie isn’t just about stupid gore and raping women cause they have buttholes, as he’s made a point of saying in several interviews like this one with Bloody Disgusting,

“Catharsis through really subversive, really strong art; that’s what people need because they’ve been desensitized because of the wars and it’s like they need some kind of cold shower through art to show them what really happened with their lives”

there is no real catharsis because there isn’t anything really new happening. This is the same movie we’ve seen many times before – a message saying that there’s not much difference between sex and rape for men – only women notice a difference, and that for men sex is usually about power and domination and fear. I don’t buy that message. I think its bullshit.

I also don’t think that a movie about raping people’s anuses and using the blood as lube is an analogy for anything happening in Serbia. That’s just – stupid.

Rather let me propose this: the writers and directors are juvenile, immature perverts who think rape is sexy. They also got scared by their own movie and at one point decided they didn’t want to go ‘too far’ because they would love it if it could play at film festivals. They missed an opportunity to make a fabulous grotesquerie about the modern state of human sexuality and pornography, but they declined to do so in favor of making women secondary characters with little or no say in the sex they have, and presenting men as rabid perverts hell-bent on hurting the women and children that they love with their penis. There is zero attempt at social or political commentary, or even any kind of commentary about the porn industry. That's too bad.

Watch it for the same rush you got from watching Human Centipede, but you won’t get much more out of it than that.

Rating: (2.5 out of 5):