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A stranger breaks into the house of a couple, ties up the husband and, having a whole weekend at his hand, plays a slow game with the woman, a game of threats, fear, obedience - and intimacy.
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The home invasion horror taps into a particularly raw nerve in the horror psyche, where do we feel safer than in our home? To take away the safety and security we take for granted can be truly terrifying. Where else can you hide when you are already a prisoner in your own home? Many films over the years have taken stabs at this concept, from Dial M For Murder to A Clockwork Orange, Funny Games to The Strangers or You’re Next. It’s a wide and varied bunch and Deadly Virtues tries to take that angle and mix in other themes like adultery and domestic abuse and then just some good old fashioned exploitation. The result is an extremely mixed bag.
Friday night, a man approaches a house. Pulling a piece of paper with a key wrapped in it from his pocket, he walks up to the door and lets himself in. As he enters the obvious sound of two people having sex can be heard from upstairs. The intruder takes his time heading up the stairs, pausing to pick up a woman’s shoe and smell it. He scopes out the upstairs, walking into what is obviously a child’s bedroom, then checking the bathroom before pausing outside of the master bedroom. He opens his backpack and retrieves an intricately knotted piece of rope, tied into a tight ball in the middle it is clearly a weapon. He enters the room and interrupts the couple’s rough sex by clobbering the husband Tom across the head with his rope weapon. The wife, Alison, runs out of the room and downstairs and grabs a cricket bat but it is to no avail, the man chokes her unconscious. Tom is dragged to the bathtub and intricately bound with rope leaving totally incapacitated. Alison finds herself similarly tied up very tightly in the kitchen essentially being hung from the ceiling. In this horrifying predicament the intruder expresses his intent- he wishes Alison to spend the weekend treating him as her husband in order to save the lives of both her husband and herself. The intruder begins his torment and humiliation of his prisoners, using Tom’s severed fingers as motivation to make Alison do as he pleases. However, as this intruder begins to pry into the private life of this couple, he makes some unusual discoveries which could completely change everything.
I wasn’t yanking your chain earlier, Ate de Jong, the Dutch-born director of Deadly Virtues also directed the bizarro fantasy comedy Drop Dead Fred back in 1991 as well as the Patrick Bergin starrer Highway to Hell. It’s been a sporadic career for this auteur and it would be interesting to see how he ended up directing Deadly Virtues. Sporadic might also be a good way to describe elements of this film as the story can’t decide if it’s an exploitation film, family drama or some odd hybrid of the two. For the first 30 minutes or so this is definitely an exploitation film and a very unnerving one to boot. The intruder humiliates Alison slowly and deliberately, the camera lingering on the details of her torment such as when a bondage suit is found in a closet and Alison is forced to put it on while being photographed. While not especially graphic it is difficult to watch because the camera stays close to the subject throughout her forced submission truly giving the film that sickening sense of a 70’s exploitation flick. However as the couples’ captor starts to take at their photos, watch home videos and notice a child’s room with no child in it, the game makes a very sudden change. This is where a large tonal shift takes place which unfortunately is ill-served by the story’s built-in time limit of two days. That means the second and third acts start to rush through the various twists and turns the script was largely saving up to that point and unfortunately it’s the climax of the film that suffers worst. A character goes from victim to deranged lunatic so suddenly it undermines a lot of the more subtle work the film had put into the setup. It suddenly becomes a rush to give the viewer a very conventional horror ending which is a definite disappointment because there are things to like about this film. In fact the closing of the film is such a hackneyed “stinger” that I would not be surprised if it elicited an audible groan in many viewers like it did for me.
Megan Maczko as Alison puts in a performance far better than this movie deserved. A great deal of credit for why the earlier exploitation scenes work so well are due to her natural and extremely sympathetic performance. Maczko is given the space to be more than just a shrieking victim, her performance has a lot of nuance filled with little flourishes that make the viewer feel for her all the more. The most subtle and accomplished aspect of the film’s changes in tone all come from this actress who can hold the eye and performs with a great deal of confidence. Edward Akrout as her tormentor is also an interesting premise, at first a depraved sadist with an interest in rope and the tying of rope, his character too goes through changes as he discovers more about this family he has invaded. Born in Paris and then travelling and living in various countries in Europe and beyond his accent has a slightly mixed foreign property that makes the unnamed assailant seem all that more of an outsider. While not given the room to breathe that Megan Maczko was he still puts in a fine performance despite the increasingly impatient story barrelling towards it’s predictable conclusion.
Deadly Virtues is such a mixed bag it is very difficult to know whether to recommend it or not. Exploitation fans might find themselves bored by the second or third acts while others might be so put off by the first 30 minutes they might not want to invest in the rest of the movie let alone the trite, disappointing ending. Praise must go to the two main actors for giving their all with the material given and first time writer Mark Rogers had good ideas here just not quite yet possessing the tools to give them the story those ideas deserve. Maybe let’s not do a Deadly Virtues 2 though ok?
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