Review of Horsemen (2009) by Brian E — 07 Oct 2009

It's upsetting that once you've seen modern thriller classics like 'Se7en' and 'The Silence of the Lambs' - you ask yourself "is it truly worth watching another serial killer film?" Of course there are more notables and potentials like 'The Cell', 'The Killing Gene', 'Zodiac' and 'In Dreams'.

Our latest seemingly ambitious attempt is Jonas Akerlund's 'The Horsemen'. If you know the name Jonas Akerlund, you may be a worm of 90's pop culture, seeing his controversial MTV music videos for The Prodigy's 'Smack My Bitch Up' and The Cardigans' 'My Favorite Game', which entail how daring of an up-and-coming auteur he was making a name to be.

He then pulled his pants down and spread his cheeks in the name of his debut 'Spun' - which his impressive style carried a rather typical and idiotic drug tale. With 'Horsemen' - he seemed to have abandoned a little from his non-linear style to carry a potential serial killer story: four individuals are to be brutally murdered in a pattern representing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The film starts to unfold through some of the most ridiculously cliche patterns of a serial killer film - a detective who neglects his single-father-raising-two-children life at home to pursue his workaholic nature of solving mysteries.

But then, the story gets good - real good. It hooks you with some borderline disturbing twists and unsettling imagery, then at the very end - falls incredibly flat on its face with a laughable result.

Still, I feel the film is certainly more than worth sitting through solely on the intenseness of the film's more suspensefully dark moments. A shitty ending doesn't naturally tend to "ruin" a film for me if there's much enjoyment leading up to it.