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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 67.37%
Worth A Look: 18.95%
Average: 6.32%
Pretty Bad: 7.37%
Total Crap: 0%
3 reviews, 77 user ratings
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| Evil (Ondskan) |
by Chris Parry
"This flick will be a long time guilty pleasure."
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It's tough to peg the new Swedish film Evil as a specific genre. Though it has moments of hilarious comedy, gripping drama, and stomach-clenching violence which keep it from being easily pigeon-holed, I find that it's best described as Dead Poets' Society: The Post-Nazi Years.Erik (Andreas Wilson) is nothing but trouble. The product of a violent home where his punch-happy stepdad likes to settle disagreements with a couple of dozen lashes of his belt, teenage Erik has picked up on the habit of ending arguments with his fists instead of his brains, and when he's kicked out of school he finds himself sent off to boarding school. You might think that the upper-class students at a toff-nosed boarding school would be the kind of people Erik should be around if he's to learn how to learn... but post-Nazi Europe has left a little bit of its own penchant for violence in the children who survived the battlefield.
Erik wants to keep his head down, improve his grades and get back home, but the upper classmen at his school have other ideas. Having established a tradition of random beatings, intolerable abuse and an almost homoerotic desire to degrade others, these future leaders spend their days humiliating those of the 'lower classes', dishing out violent punishments, and all the while being ignored by the old farts running the institution - nazi sympathizers and all.
But Erik's not about to sit back and take the abuse. and that's when Evil warms up to the temperature of the fourth level of hell.
Remember the violence in Braveheart? Remember that feeling where you knew you'd been worked into a frenzy that you'd be guilt for in the morning, but you REALLY wanted Mel to slam his sledgehammer down across that English bastard's spine?
Welcome to Evil. If there's a movie I've seen this year that gives the audience more of what it wants, I haven't seen it. Rather than go on a Ghandiesque tirade about how violence is wrong and only makes people fear you, director Mikael Håfström uses violence to demonstrate its wrongs, but also cedes to the fact that if you don't stand up for yourself, you'll never beat a bully, and indeed you just let the bully multiply by not calling him to task for his wrongs.
Andreas Wilson is amazing in the lead role of Erik, brooding his way through the film in a way that has you absolutely scared of what he's capable of, but also rooting for that little tinge of intellect that breaks through when all else is rage. Critics will assail Håfström for giving in to the violence that he so obviously opposes, but they'll have missed the point entirely. Håfström's lead character does all he can to avoid violence, but sometimes that violence is not against you, it's against those who can't defend themselves. What do you do in that situation? Do you stand back and preach peace, or do you enforce it?
Evil is a great film, though it's not without its flaws. It does run long, and dilemmas are sometimes solved a little too simply, but credit the director with taking the audience to a dark place, before throwing them a rope and allowing them to go home without slitting their wrists in depression. It's Fight Club in a boarding school. It's Dead Poets without the superhero teacher. It's Good Will Hunting with a lot more bloodletting.See this movie... just don't take a date.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8229&reviewer=1
originally posted: 09/29/03 10:43:26
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Vancouver Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Vancouver Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Leeds Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Leeds Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Atlanta Film Festival For more in the 2005 Atlanta Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
10-Mar-2006
DVD: 27-Jun-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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