(Junichi
Kajioka plays the artist)
This is a beautifully shot, tense and
ultimately puzzling thriller with a good dose of horror thrown in... (Review by
Patrick Compton)
Dark
Highlands, which is featured on the Durban
International Festival, is written and directed by Mark Stirton (showing again
at Suncoast 6 at 14h30 on Sunday, July 28).
This is a beautifully shot, tense and
ultimately puzzling thriller with a good dose of horror thrown in as an
enigmatic Japanese artist is pursued by a hooded maniac in the Scottish
Highlands.
This is a virtually dialogue-free movie
that will probably be given cult status because – apart from the cat and mouse
action – audiences will struggle to make much sense of the human predator and
his motives.
The film is divided up into various
“iterations”. My dictionary says that an iteration is “the repetition of a
process or utterance”. Make of that what you will.
In a prologue, a man attempts to commit
suicide in a weird way in his tent on the Highlands. He fails, but his method
(a mixture of pills, vodka, cocaine and suffocating plastic over his face) seems
to transform him into something else.
The movie then shoots forward 10 years and
the same creature, now identified as a hooded gamekeeper with goggles, a
shotgun, a drone and what seems to be an invisible attack dog, strides the
(beautiful) Highlands once more.
The artist (Junichi Kajioka) is just
getting stuck into some innocent landscape painting when the gamekeeper
strikes. For some reason, never made clear, the artist’s tormentor allows him
to live while chomping up other hikers unlucky enough to cross his path.
The film’s climax is bloody enough, and
there’s a vestige of dry humour in the final scene.
What does it all mean? Goodness knows, but
it’s a good watch as well as having the virtue of brevity (85 minutes). - Patrick
Compton
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