Malefique Review
France appears to be starting on a good run of impressive horror films. Fresh on the heels of Haute Tension word began to circle about Malefique, a little film from 2002 about French prisoners and a book of black magic. Having just seen the film I say this: it deserves absolutely every kind word that has ever been said about I and then some. A smart, vicious little film Malefique succeeds fantastically well on every level. Bloody enough for the shock hounds, smart and nuanced enough for the Rod Serling set, driven by stellar character work from a strong cast and featuring top notch production values Malefique does not have a single weak point. Genre fans: track this one down.
The film opens in a cramped jail cell. A wild eyed man dips his hand into the eviscerated torso of a still-conscious man, smears the blood into arcane symbols on the wall, chants in Latin from a well worn notebook, but nothing happens. Scratch a note in the book, return to the body for more blood, add a symbol and try again. This time, success as the symbols begin to glow with an eerie light.
Jump forward in time to Carrere, a man being sent to prison for fraud promising his young son that he’ll be home on time for his birthday, that he’ll break out if need be. Carrere is taken to the cramped cell that will be his new home, where he meets his three cell mates. There is Marcus, the hulking transsexual, halfway through his transformation to a woman; Daisy, the emotionally stunted cannibal who spent his childhood locked in a pig barn and who now has Marcus sever his fingers so he can take ‘vacations’ in the prison infirmary; Lasalles, the prison librarian who never reads, believing that books told him to kill his wife long ago.
When a brick loosens above Carrere’s bunk the prisoners find a secret compartment in the wall, one which holds an old, battered notebook. Carrere begins to read voraciously and quickly discovers that what he believes was a simple journal is actually a grimoire, a book of spells and black magic incantations. Though the others disbelieve Carrere tries a simple spell at the insistence of the excitable Daisy who wants to see magic ‘like on TV’ and all are shocked when the spell actually works, sending a gout of flame up from the cell floor. The book’s author used his magic to escape, and if he could why can’t they?
Malefique succeeds so well on so many levels that it’s simply staggering. At its most basic Malefique is a chamber drama with better than ninety percent of the film occurring in a single room. Standard chamber dramas are hard enough to pull off, genre infused ones even more so – I’m still trying to put aside the bitter disappointment of Kitamura’s Alive – but this one works because the characters ring so true and because it finds a host of novel situations to create genuine tension. I’ve seen broad scale thrillers that do far less with far more than Malefique does here. When the film breaks out the blood it does so very convincingly with some truly novel and disturbing effects and when the deaths inevitably start coming they hit hard thanks to the tight focus and care given to character early on. But what ensures Malefique will have a lengthy life span is the film’s brains. A tightly scripted morality fable that would stand very comfortably with Serling’s best work on The Twilight Zone – though this is far, far bloodier than Serling ever was – Malefique goes far beyond the demands of shock cinema and becomes a surprisingly thoughtful piece on the nature of evil and the perils of desire.
Malefique hits DVD in the UK via the Fright Fest label in early November. Though the screener provided to me was a check disc only and thus didn’t include final art or any bonus features I have seen the final version of Fright Fest’s Dead Meat release and if this release even approaches the quality of that one it will be something special. As it is the film is so strong that even if it were released completely bare bones packaged in a brown paper bag it would still be very well worth owning. Very highly recommended.
