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MovieMail's Review
Vincent Gallo stars as the man on the run from special forces in wintry Poland. It's a stark thriller that proves it's impossible to pigeonhole the maverick director, says Michael Brooke.
It's always been hard to pigeonhole Polish maverick Jerzy Skolimowski, but his latest film is at once a radical departure and wholly typical. Almost dialogue-free (the script was a mere 35 pages), it's about a man plucked from his native country - possibly Afghanistan, certainly hot and dry - and plunged into the middle of wintry Poland and forced to survive on his own wits, barefoot in sub-zero temperatures.
Despite not uttering a coherent sound other than occasional cries of pain, a heavily bearded Vincent Gallo (Best Actor winner at Venice) is mesmerising in the lead, reducing himself to the purest animal instincts as he ruthlessly does whatever it takes to stay alive, even if it means killing others.
Early scenes of Gallo being waterboarded and wearing a Guantanamó-style orange jumpsuit, coupled with his physical appearance suggesting a Taliban fighter and the fact that his initial victims are all American, would seem to demand a political interpretation. However, Skolimowski has denied this, saying that the situation is merely a matter of dramatic convenience.
Instead, he's more interested in taking one of his trademark fish-out-of-water characters (Mike in Deep End and Jeremy Irons' exiled Polish builder in Moonlighting would recognise Gallo as a kindred spirit) and stripping his experience down to absolute extremes. He constantly emphasises the physicality of Gallo's situation, the snow and ice beautiful in long shot but potentially deadly up close.
The poster and trailer make it look like an action thriller, but this is highly misleading: as it progresses, Adam Sikora's ravishing images and Pawel Mykietyn's haunting score, weaving unobtrusively around heightened natural sounds, turn it into something increasingly surreal. The climactic shot of a white horse stained with fresh blood owes as much to painting as cinema, while an encounter with a passing female cyclist is positively Buñuelesque - few other directors would have dared bring off something so audacious, and yet so psychologically convincing.
Skolimowski claims that this is now his favourite of all his films, largely because it's the one time in his wayward career when he had total creative control from start to finish.
A stark and gripping thriller by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End), Essential Killing stars Vincent Gallo as Mohammed, a man taken prisoner by American forces after killing three American soldiers in Afghanistan. He is transferred to a detention centre in an unspecified eastern European country for interrogation, but when the vehicle he is riding in crashes, he finds himself suddenly free and on the run in a snow-blanketed forest, a world away from the desert home he knew. Relentlessly pursued by an army that does not officially exist, Mohammed has to confront the necessity to kill in order to survive.
