Review of Essential Killing (2010) by Paolo R — 10 Apr 2011

Isolates a contemporary concern - the conflict in Afghanistan - then keeps pulling further and further away from the specifics until the audience is left squinting through their horn-rimmed spectacles, either in anticipation or outright puzzlement; it ends up more or less to the Middle East what Gus van Sant's "Elephant" was to American high-school massacres.

.. The generalised nature of the film results in an anti-hero who scarcely seems human as such - flashbacks fill us in in the vaguest of ways about his earlier existence as a Muslim and a family man, and only in the end credits do we learn his (heavily symbolic) name - and more like a crash test dummy, a Guantanamo Jesus, variously persecuted and bashed around in a fashion that meshes with both the Christ of Mel Gibson's "Passion" and Gallo's own, long-established martyr complex.

(I'm guessing that, when chased by attack dogs, the actor likely had those reviewers who went after "The Brown Bunny" on his mind.) Needless to say, I wasn't entirely taken in by Skolimowski's project here: I became aware that, as Gallo hungrily goes after a lactating Russian woman for her milk, a "Little Britain"-derived utterance of "bitty" from the cheap seats would only just make the sequence more absurd than it already is; the cold chill of the exteriors looks to have seeped into the narrative; and a percentage of the killing is so superfluous that the whole often feels like an exercise in getting us to empathise to any degree with a man like Raoul Moat.

It is, all the same, and Skolimowski works his soundtrack double time so as to compensate for the spareness on display elsewhere. That spareness - the insistence that this is what this character would do in this situation - is presumptuous and confrontational, to say the least, but undeniably striking, and in its own way true to the theme of exile.

When you're this busy just trying to survive, maybe there's no time for anything but the essentials.