Cannibal Review

And the winner of the Jack Kirby Award for Utter Cinematic Masturbation 2011 goes to…Benjamin Viré’s Cannibal! Benjamin, get up here and tell us how you did it!

The plot of Cannibal is as follows: Max (Nicolas Gob) is a weirdo living by himself in the woods. Every day, he practices his golf swing. One day, a stray ball lands near the body of a woman (Helena Coppejans) lying prone and apparently dead in the woods. As opposed to calling the police or ambulance like a regular Joe, Max decides to scoop her up and take her home. Turns out, the woman isn’t dead. Instead she regains consciousness and begins flirting with Max. She claims to have no name so Max calls her Bianca. Bianca sneaks off and kills folks by eating bits of them. Max decides to cover for her. SHE IS A CANNIBAL. BAD DUDES are looking for Bianca. Drama ensues. A climax develops. The viewer awakes from their slumber intermittently.

If you read my reviews regularly, you may have correctly come to the conclusion that I don’t mind art-house cinema. I like it when filmmakers decide to do things a little differently, to mix things up, to try something new without the backing of Hollywood. Hell, I’ll even watch a film where they’re speaking some weird-ass, non-English language and you have to read the words at the bottom of the screen. Cannibal does try to do things differently. It fancies itself as an intellectual horror-film. It thinks because it does a lot of scenes in blurry slow-motion, or because it includes a crudely written monologue about the psychology behind cannibalism or because it RANDOMLY GOES INTO BLACK AND WHITE FOR NO GOOD REASON in the final act, that it’s some sort of clever film.

It is not.

Cannibal is a compendium of incoherent scenes, loosely related to each other. The action of the picture is often so blurrily represented, it’s genuinely guesswork to say what is happening. The characters are both annoying and under-developed, making it a total impossibility to give an actual shit what happens to them.

Plus points? Well, Cannibal has few well composed shots and in the brighter daylight scenes, there’s a kind of super-contrasted look to the film that looks like an old photograph from the 70s, which is nice, but other than that, the film is complete pony, a massive exercise in style over substance – though in reality displaying very little of either. Avoid at all costs.