Format: DVD from Rock Island Public Library through interlibrary loan on gigantic television.
I don’t enjoy the torture porn subgenre of horror, and I don’t seek out gore for the sake of gore. My preferences in the horror genre are more psychological than anything else, and while I don’t tend to shy away from gore, for me, it works when it’s plot-necessary. I think it works better when it’s used in small amounts and when it’s implied. So movies that involve any amount of torture are always going to be ones that I hesitate to watch. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve waited this long to see highly acclaimed Aussie horror film The Loved Ones. I knew enough of what I was getting into to wonder if this was going to be extremely troubling.
The Loved Ones is a film that contains some gore elements but also tends to keep the most brutal aspects off camera. It’s also a film where the torture is extremely plot-relevant. In fact, that torture is very much the point of the film. Normally, this would be a reason for me to wonder what I was doing through the entire short run time, but in this case, what happens is surprisingly tasteful for a horror movie from a first-time feature-length director.
Brent (Xavier Samuel) is a high school student who when he sees a bloodied man walking on the road, gets into a car accident that kills his father. Some time later, Brent is asked by fellow student Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy) to the end of school dance, but Brent tells her he is already going with his girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine). On the night of the dance, still dealing with the guilt of the death of his father, Brent heads off on his own and decides against killing himself, but is attacked and captured.
He’s been captured by Eric Stone (John Brumpton), Lola’s father. Their house is decorated in a facsimile of the dance, and it is clear that Lola has set this up to deal with Brent spurning her for his girlfriend. Brent has been tied to a chair and he discovers that in addition to Lola and her father, they are joined by a woman they refer to as Bright Eyes (Anne Scott-Pendlebury), who has clearly been lobotomized. This does not bode well for what might happen to Brent.
And it certainly doesn’t. Brent is tortured in a variety of ways, including having his feet pinned to the floor with knives. Worse, Lola shows him her scrapbook, which contains evidence of her past captives, all of whom she has dealt with in similar ways. The torture includes Lola carving her initials into the victim’s chest and eventually lobotomizing them with a drill and boiling water. There is also clear evidence of an incestuous relationship between Lola and her father.
The reason that The Loved Ones manages to claw itself up from the torture porn subgenre is that Brent, for all that he endures, fights back and is smarter than his captives. What happens to him is horrifying, but he fights through the whole movie against the horror that he is faced with, especially the clearly psychotic Lola.
The truth is that The Loved Ones is a straightforward film, and it pretty much has to be, since it runs only about 84 minutes, with a bit more than five of those being the end credits. We’re going to dive right into the story and a lot of it is going to be what happens to Brent—and giving credit to the film here—it implies a lot of the horrors and keeps them just off screen.
Oddly, we also spend a decent amount of time with Brent’s friend Jamie (Richard Wilson) and his date Mia (Jessica MacNamee). A lot of this seems to be to set up Mia’s father as a cop who can eventually be sent after the missing Brent, but there’s a surprising amount of time watching Mia try to get into Jamie’s pants on the dance floor, the two of them having sex in his car, and comic moments where the family dog is clearly smelling pot on Jamie when he picks her up for the dance. This feels like padding, put here to make sure that we’re hitting feature length.
If you’re not a horror fan, this is not a film you were going to be interested in the first place and you’re not going to find a lot here that interests you. If you like the genre, this is inventive in terms of who the villain is. While it doesn’t shy away from violence, it also keeps the worst of it hidden. It’s not one I’d watch a lot, but I’m happy to have finally caught up with it.
Why to watch The Loved Ones: Most captive stories go in a different direction.
Why not to watch: There’s some padding here for a film that is really short.
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