KNIFE + HEART: Wannabe-Edgy, But Ultimately Too Tame French Slasher

I love a good slasher. The more blood and guts, the happier I am. And who doesn’t love everything the French do? These are the people who have given us countless great filmmakers (Godard, Denis, Truffaut, Varda), and they’ve always excelled at extreme horror. Slasher has always been quintessentially American; summer camps, suburbia and underlying themes of sex without actually showing much sex because sex is bad, sex means death. Europeans tend to be more relaxed about nudity and sex.

So what if you took the American slasher and added a pinch of French extremity and a heavy dose of gay sex? On paper that sounds like a real winner for us horror aficionados who still ache for the messy and dirty B-movies rather than the new wave of ‘elevated horror’. Unfortunately, director Yann Gonzalez’s film is unfocused and to be honest, a bit of a bore.

Strap On Your Strap-Ons

The plot follows a sexy porn producer Anne (Vanessa Paradis) who is reeling from a bad breakup with her girlfriend, film editor Lois. Anne has made quite a name for herself in the gay porn circles and sets out to make her most ambitious film yet, drawing inspiration from real life murders she gets tangled up in. Unfortunately, her actors start turning up dead one by one. However, the show must go on and Anne’s obsession to find out the killer grows, but the cameras never stop rolling.

Knife + Heart starts off superbly. It’s stylish, sexy and provocative. It makes grand promises in the beginning to the viewer, seducing us with its neon-coloured nightmares and grainy vintage looks. Unfortunately, it all falls apart as soon as Gonzalez tries to take his narrative further than the traditional, simplistic slasher storyline. Anne’s hunt for the killer becomes boring and pretentious, bringing the film almost to a full stop. Now might be a good time to run to the toilet or get a refill on that popcorn, because you ain’t missing much on screen.

It’s not that Knife + Heart is a bad film. In fact, it’s quite adequate. It’s more like the scene in Lady Bird, where the titular Lady Bird is trying on dresses and her worrying mother tells her she wants Lady Bird to be the best version of herself and Lady Bird asks “What if this is the best version?” One would hope there was a better version of Knife + Heart, because it’s so close to being a magnetic film, but it’s let down by its overly ambitious script. It’s more than okay to just make a simple film, just make it well.

The Humour In The Kill

Who said horror can’t be funny? Knife + Heart, while being absolutely brutal and strikingly beautiful, is also surprisingly hilarious. It revels in its groovy 1979 setting and truly goes for the authentic bad gay porn vibe. Nicolas Maury as Archibald, Anne’s friend and sidekick brings some truly needed laughs to the film. At times, the film takes itself too seriously, forgetting just how absurd the events it’s portraying are, but Maury successfully injects just the right amount of hilarity amidst all the violence.

Visually, Knife + Heart might be one of the most interesting slashers. Gonzalez experiments with his use of color, light, and contrasts. It makes for a visually arresting and constantly interesting viewing; the frame is always filled with so much beauty, any shot in it could be hung up in the Louvre. The film adopts a dreamlike quality and Paradis’ pixie dream girl seems like a perfect fit here, the peroxide pixie cut and all. Anne is a fascinating character, thoroughly flawed and unpleasant. She’s an alcoholic who can’t let go of her ex, to the point where she attempts to rape her. Paradis plays her with a straight face, with a hint of aggression but always making her engaging and electric. It’s impossible to look away from her, even when you don’t necessarily root for her. It’s an unpleasant character done right; Danny Boyle would be proud.

Gonzalez’s love of film shines through in the film. A lot of time is devoted to showing the film process of Anne’s pornos. At times funny, at times familiar, and at times Knife + Heart portrays just how much effort into making a film is, even more when genitals and bodily fluids are involved. The set has a designated person to get the actors, ahem, ready and going if you know what I mean. It’s a funny gag, but one senses that the person is actually probably the most important person on set. There’s also a brilliant scene towards the end where Anne goes to a cinema that seems to show all her films on loop. An audience member tells Anne he’s seen all her work and her last film is her masterpiece. It’s a strangely sensitive and beautiful moment in a film full of so many extremes.

Ultimately though, Knife + Heart doesn’t keep up its edgy and shocking antics. It becomes more and more traditional with each killing until it starts resembling a knife that hasn’t been sharpened for a while; the potential is there but a little care is needed. The copious amounts of graphic sex in the beginning seem to only feed the need to appear edgy and different, the wild child of French horror. Knife + Heart will most likely get lost amidst all the better horror films from France. It doesn’t have audacity and soulfulness of Martyrs, it doesn’t have the bonkers approach of Inside, it doesn’t hit the sensitivity of Raw. Knife + Heart is a lot of bark, but no bite.

Knife + Heart: Conclusion

Knife + Heart constantly walks the very fine line between a comedy and a true horror. It at times excels at both, but rarely infuses the two into a coherent film. The ending might be a bit too predictable, a bit too traditional and boring to really register. It’s the stuff in the first half of the film that all the rave is about. Stylish and sexy, the first half is a real winner, but the film lacks an orgasmic ending to really knock this one out of the park.

What’s your favourite French horror? Let us know in the comments!

Knife + Heart was released in the US on March 15th.