Review of A Serbian Film (2010) by Zuzanna D — 22 Dec 2011

Retired porn star Milos attempts to lead a normal life with his wife and young son. Milos is plagued by his pornographic past which becomes a burden on his new family lifestyle. Before he can fully shake this past he gets offered a final job by an eccentric auteur director who promises an experimental art house porn film that'll push the boundaries of cinema and will set Milos for life financially.

From the first day of shooting we see that the film has incredibly dark and bizare overtones. This involves the mistreatment of women and a young girl as a voyeur to these acts. The full extent of the film isn't revealed to Milos who is advised to just take it as it comes. It's only when the eccentric director screens a film he previously made to Milos, which contains a scene described as 'new born porn' (a scene that will no doubt go down in history among the most shocking films of all time). It doesn't take long before the film and Milos descend into madness where some of the most outrageously shocking and vile acts are forced upon him.

There are two ways to see the film. One as the director intends is an allegory of Serbian politics in which all the atrocities are metaphors and not to be taken literally (similar in vein to Pier Paolo Passolini's Salo).

The other way to see it is of a horror movie that attempts to push the boundaries as far as possible and leave you a quivering wreck.

The second way is how the film actually only works. If the directors intentions were to create a non-literal metaphorical approach then it mostly fails. The overly outrageous splatter and the ridiculous nature of the film make any real artistic statement hard to gage in. The atrocities depicted in Salo are hard to watch but the message the director tries to convey are clear and intellectually done. In A Serbian Film it just seems like the director is using his 'get out of jail' card.

However, taken as a boundary pushing horror film it is quite something. It's a far better horror film than most modern American horrors. It shocks, it surprises, it twists and turns in ways you couldn't imagine and it's superbly handled in that it's never baggy and it's depiction of a mans descent into madness is something I could imagine Paul Shcrader would be proud to have written. The performances are all perfectly fine and the general feel and tone of the movie always feels spot on.

That being said, A Serbian Film will only work with hardcore horror fans fed up of typical horrors who want to see something that really pushes the boundaries that's yet very well made and never feels shoddy (something that The Human Centipede tried but couldn't maintain).

To the casual viewer, this is just exploitative and wrong.