Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
I try to find the good in everything I watch. It may not always seem that way, but I genuinely do. Because of that, it’s not that easy for me to say that Sombre is an ugly film. It’s ugly to look at, ugly in effect, and ugly in intent. It’s the sort of film that makes me want to take a shower after watching it; I felt unclean, not unlike I felt after watching Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. It’s no coincidence that the two films cover much the same territory.
Ostensibly, Sombre is about a man name Jean (Marc Barbe) who follows the Tour de France in his car. As it happens, he also strangles women as he goes. It appears initially that he finds a victim, usually a prostitute, at each stage of the Tour and kills her either before or during sex, then dumps the body before moving on. This is displayed to us in the most brutal way possible—there’s no music, nothing really but the really awful noises of someone losing her life at the hands of a psychopath.
