Director: Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund
Year: 2015
Country: Sweden
Alternate Titles: We Are Monsters
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
After a successful business meeting, a woman is kidnapped and held hostage by a psychopathic killer and his henchman who begin to systematically beat her down and have their way with her, forcing her to resort to extreme measures to get away live.
Review:
Overall, this was a solid and serviceable effort. The fact that this one manages to get to the point immediately here with the abduction and eventual arrival at their lair happens quickly in this one. That turns the intensity up within the film as the dirty, bloodsoaked environment they begin to humiliate and torture her in that signals the kind of appropriate behavior which can be quite intense at times with the perverse sexual torture and degradation designed to beat her down. The escape attempts and times she fights back setup the final half where this picks up considerably with the brutality stakes featuring a depraved and brutal brawl around the house before getting to the main confrontation which is graphic, gruesome and designed to bring everything that’s happened to a satisfying resolution. These here give this one a lot to like that holds this one up.
There are some problems here. The main issue here is the unnecessarily humanizing attempts done on the lead villain here when those scenes don’t matter much. There’s no sense in him having a wife and son unaware of what’s doing when they’re never shown on-screen, all we end up getting is a single voice-call and all they end up doing is causing a break in between the torture showing how they find out who she is which is also a missed opportunity using that as motivation to kidnap her. The other minor flaw is the wrong-headed tone to the finale where this one tries to make her retribution feel cathartic in a sense yet comes off more as gratuitous violence. Since nothing she does is in any way an eye-for-an-eye mentality for what happened to her as theirs was sexual while she goes for straightforward brutality, there’s an off imbalance to this section but it’s not that big of a deal.
Overview: ***.5/5
A brutal and generally enjoyable effort that gets a lot to like while only featuring a few flaws, this one has plenty to like about it and manages to become one of the better examples of the genre overall. Give it a shot if these brutal, graphic revenge efforts are intriguing or you’re a fan of the creative crew while those that aren’t into this style of film should heed caution.
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