Reviews

Making a good horror flick is not easy, and I'll never make a statement saying otherwise. There's a certain.. artistic awareness and comprehension you need of the genre to even be able to make satire of it. I've seen the film Found on which this was based upon (a film within a film), and, while my edgelord 18 year old self loved the film for its gore, and shock value, I've come to respect the performance and twists, even the outta nowhere coming-of-age story it presented on a seemingly rather low budget. Now, as my googling capabilities have determined, the film was both written and directed by the dude who did special effects for Found, and it was even financed by a kickstarter which is really neat. The problem is, I don't think he had the first clue about what made the.. uh.. original a pretty decent horror film.

Having stated before, I'm a pretty hardcore edgelord. No gore in film is enough to make me feel uncomfortable, and I've seen just about all the practical effects can offer. What my uncreative little frontal cortex understands of filmmaking is, the moment you show your goriest scene in the first few minutes, it kinda loses it's edge later on.

Focusing on the plot- it's the exact same serial killer story you've seen every time since Jack the Ripper felt like he appreciated the confines of a womb. Kid gets put in an absurdly aggressive home with mom and sister tormenting him emotionally and sexually and one (1) decapitated rabbit propels him on his crusade of vengeance. Now let me get this straight- the acts of murder can be done so well in a psychological sense, adding to the mental state of the killer as the story progresses, as can be seen in Angst (1983), with the whole plot advancing from it. But Headless just throws that outta the window and gets you a good old fashioned skull-fornicating with a ladies head. Okay. Someone optimistic would say, yeah okay, now is this sets a base for his future adventures- will he descend into even more depraved waters, does the head symbolize the duality of man or his conflicting consciousness of murder, empathy and need for love? Does he want to stop, or reach some metaphysical goal? Let's continue. He kidnaps another lady and in an expectation subverting twist he cuts her head off and fornicates with it. Now you're thinking: okay nice one, you got me, now what other messed up stuff can you show me? Take a big bloody guess what the next 4 murders heavily feature. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom showed less poking into someone's brain with a tool. The flashback scenes would be great if they didn't feature the absolute cheapest pseudo-Freudian reasons for his trauma your unborn child has seen a million times already. Yeah, I also remeber when my mom kept me in a cage and my sister took a leak on me, but when I broke out, the spooning I did was not related to her eyeballs. The cinematography was nice and emulates the 70's horror film alright.

As a long time von Trier fan, I believe it's pretty obvious he made this film primarily for himself, and secondly for the dogmatic fans of his own work. Sure, on the surface it is a sort of a black psychological (divine, *wink, wink*) comedy, as some of his previous films can, as well, be seen. However, there is a layer beyond the physical, even more so the psychological aspect of what is portrayed.

I'll assume anyone reading this has already seen the film so I'm putting spoilers on.

It is my firm belief that the entire film is a metaphor for stages of life of an artist or at least a creator in some sense. As good and realistic, if you will, as the portrayal of the mental states Jack is in, what is beyond his actions is the most fascinating part. Jack often refers to his work as art, and incidentally, the "incidents" represent the stages of an artists creative mentality, the way von Trier saw and perhaps experienced. It starts with, in the context of the chapters in the film: 1.Impulsive creation, art in the moment, that one breath of inspiration that sets an artist on his path. 2. Seeking perfection, obsessing over every possible detail, trying to achieve the ultimate form of art. 3. Transgressive and controversial art, imagery designed to shock the audiences, that I believe also self-referential. 4. Love and hate of one's own work, reaching a climax of creativity, at the point of giving up and exposing ones self. 5. Burning out, making art just to get a new high, experimenting just for the sake of it and finding no new joy in this process.

Throughout the film, at one point, we get a flash of most of von Triers past work, ranging from The element of crime (1984), towards Nymphomaniac (2013), which I believe closes up his ode to himself and his life's work, showing that narcissistic side again, with a possible message of the end of his artistic endeavors, but also pride in himself as an artist and his career -and possibly a large "f you" to the Cannes Film Festival, represented by the house he finally manages to build, with the "body" of his work, while also being a word play on the nursery rhyme. The epilogue is a very comical, almost cartoonish parody of the Divine Comedy, in which Jack (von Trier) is Dante, in which he shows emotion for the first time in a Citizen-Kane-like moment, but instead of his happy ending he falls into the deepest part of hell, possibly referring to von Trier's own mental state.