Sep 30 2008
Facing the horror of the unknown in Vinyan
The new English-language film by Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz, entitled Vinyan, has been leaving audiences sharply and passionately divided in their opinions about it, and to me that tends to be a promising situation for a viewer. I think it’s always good to leave a movie with things to talk or even argue about.
People are getting all twisted over it not only because it has the gall to kind of “recreate” the carnage of the 2004 tsunami that devastated much of Southeast Asia, but also because it locates, to a certain extent, an inscrutable atmosphere of pure evil in that region as viewed through the eyes of a “first world” culture.
Vinyan (which is a term referring to troubled spirits of the dead who lost their lives in a horrifying manner) tells the story of a European couple — played by international stars Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart — who initially thought their young son was tragically lost in that historic tsunami devastation. However, during a fundraiser to provide aid for needy third-world regions, they spot a child in a video clip that is a dead ringer for their own. Thus begins a harrowing Heart of Darkness-style journey into war-torn Burma to find him, and the couple soon learns the gut-churning “reality” behind cultures and nations that they once believed they understood and empathized with.
This type of unremittingly brutal trip into soulless horror isn’t anything new to Fabrice Du Welz. His previous film, 2004’s Calvaire (a.k.a. The Ordeal), did much of the same thing for backwoods Belgium. But I wasn’t too bowled over by Calvaire — it struck me as being a bit too derivative of the original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre — and admittedly even my relative openness to outré material gets a bit rankled by the apparent demonization of Southeast Asian cultures that may be going on in this pic (something that can only be confirmed or denied once I see it, I guess).
But there’s no doubt in my mind that Du Welz can crank out some haunting images, as Vinyan’s trailer and this opening clip reveal. The movie’s been picked up for distribution in the U.S., but no date has been set as of yet (it’s still in festival-touring mode).
