Ultraviolence in cinema can quickly devolve into exploitation and torture porn. But administered artfully, and preferably with heaps of dark humor, such gore can offer soothing escapism. Even more so in times like these, when headlines are rife with dysfunction and death. Russian director Kirill Sokolov’s manic splatterfest Why Don’t You Just Die! arrives stateside at the perfect time, then, with its punk ethos and cartoonish carnage, taking place almost entirely within the confines of a single apartment, acting as a blood-soaked balm. With a vivid color palette and surreal slapstick indebted to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the film also oozes Tarantinian influence in its comically over-the-top violence, non-linearity and tension-infused sequences. And yet Sokolov’s kinetic debut feature manages to feel fresh and vibrant, even while offering nothing particularly new.
The exclamatorily titled film opens with nervous, hammer-toting young guy Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) ready to go all Raskolnikov on the occupant of a seemingly random flat. And though Andrey (Vitaliy Khaev), the bulldoggish man who answers the door, turns out to be a seasoned detective, that’s not why Matvey plans to cave in his skull. Instead, we find out Matvey is the boyfriend of Andrey’s daughter Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde) sent to violently restore her honor after she confides a salacious allegation against her hand-to-hand combat trained pops. But before he can get to smashing, Andrey balks when Olya’s mom (Elena Shevchenko) appears, and instead he’s invited in and is sat across the table from sausage-chomping Andrey, who smells a rat. The two men soon erupt into a feature-length battle in which everything from power drills to boxy TV sets are wielded as deadly weapons, which (as the film’s title suggests) impossibly seem to never actually cause death.
Matvey takes the brunt of this. By the time the young man is shackled to a bathroom fixture, the film seems straightforward enough, and it’s even a little difficult to imagine how Sokolov will manage to stretch what seems like a thin premise out to nearly 100 minutes. By inserting a triad of flashback sequences that flesh out the respective motivations of Matvey, Andrey and Olya, the director adds far more dimension to what’s otherwise a salvo of Iive-action Itchy and Scratchy level mayhem. A propulsive soundtrack and darkly comedic approach keep things light enough amid the elaborate gore in which blood ludicrously pours and sprays by the gallon, shotgun blasts send people awkwardly flying across rooms and guts are futilely held in with viscera-clotted fingers. The film’s central joke seems to be that nobody can die from any of this, until, inevitably, they do.
A preposterous, ultraviolent diversion that does just enough to avoid being one-note, Why Don’t You Just Die! makes for a lurid spectacle that’s deliciously welcome right now. The fact that it takes place almost entirely within a single flat adds a coincidental layer of relevance to our quarantined present, but this is a madcap project that has little to say about anything in particular and instead opts to gleefully indulge in its excesses.
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