New horror from de Van
French writer-director Marina de Van is a feminist visionary in the often misogynistic world of the horror film. As a screenwriter, she fashioned two of François Ozon's more interesting and disturbing early films, See the Sea and 8 Women.
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French writer-director Marina de Van is a feminist visionary in the often misogynistic world of the horror film.
As a screenwriter, she fashioned two of François Ozon's more interesting and disturbing early films, See the Sea and 8 Women.
She garnered attention as a director in her own right with 2002's In My Skin, an extraordinary work of body horror about a woman who becomes radically alienated from her own flesh, treating it as an enemy. The film gave a uniquely female twist to familiar themes from David Cronenberg (Shivers, The Brood, Rabid) and Roman Polanski (Repulsion).
In Don't Look Back (2009), de Van posed fundamental questions about female identity: Is it forged through one's own efforts or through men's desires? She did so with aplomb: The central character begins the story as one woman (Sophie Marceau) but changes halfway into another (Monica Bellucci).
In her latest, the violent gothic horror yarn Dark Touch, de Van tells the story of a prepubescent girl named Niamh (Missy Keating) who witnesses her entire family slaughtered by a vicious killer. No one believes her when she insists the killer isn't human, but her family home itself.
Or is it? Dark Touch, which has received mixed reviews, suggests the murderous force at play comes from within the child herself, in her anger, resentment, desire, confusion. The film is full of shocks, but to de Van's credit, it never fetishizes violence.
(www.mpimedia.com; $24.98; not rated)
Other titles of note
George Gently, Series 6. Martin Shaw (The Professionals) returns as the weathered British police detective George Gently in four new feature-length mysteries based on the novels by Alan Hunter. Set in the late 1960s, the films dramatize the radical changes that swept the world during the decade, showing how they changed our concepts of law, order, and justice. The four-disc set is due Tuesday. (www.acornmedia.com; $59.99 for DVD or Blu-ray; not rated)
Crimes of Passion. One of the finest of the recent TV imports from Scandinavia, this Swedish murder mystery is set in the 1950s and centers on a fascinating triumvirate of characters led by a headstrong young woman, Puck Ekstedt (Tuva Novotny), a doctoral candidate in European literature specializing in crime fiction who finds she has a knack for solving real crimes. Her paramour is only interested in medieval church art, so she teams up with his childhood friend, a famed police detective (Ola Rapace), to solve murders strange and grotesque. The relationships are beautifully drawn, the acting is superb, the locations breathtaking, and the mysteries scrumptious. (www.mhznetworks.org; $39.95; not rated)
The Wolf of Wall Street. Imbued with some of the same ferocity that distinguished his earlier films, Martin Scorsese's latest entry skewers the Wall Street culture of greed and corruption that led to our fall from financial grace. (www.paramount.com/movies/home-media; $39.99 DVD/Blu-ray Combo; rated R)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Out for the first time on Blu-ray, Sam Peckinpah's violent 1974 classic stars Warren Oates as an American drifter in Mexico who jumps at the chance to make a fortune - by delivering the head of his friend to a criminal boss. It's available directly from Screen Archives. (www.screenarchives.com; $29.95; rated R)
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