Livid (2011)
March 11, 2022 10:39 AM - Subscribe

When Lucy, a caregiver, is assigned to the rich, but comatose Madame Jessel, she hatches a plan with two friends to find riches inside the house.

On Lucy's first day as a trainee in-house caregiver, she visits Madame Jessel, an old woman who lies in cerebral coma, by herself, in her large desolate house. Madame Jessel, a former dance teacher of repute, supposedly possesses a treasure somewhere in the house, Lucy and her friends William and Ben decide to search the house in the hope of finding it.

That night, they get into the house, which reveals itself to be increasingly peculiar as they search for treasure.
posted by miss-lapin (5 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Trigger warning for child abuse.

While it boasts a 90% rating on the Tomatometer, only 49% of the audience enjoyed it.

According to Anton Bitel of Sight and Sound: combines a unique spin on the vampire myth with the fairytale surrealism of Lewis Carroll (via Svankmajer's Alice), the danse macabre of Copplia (via Argento's Suspiria) and the imagistic poetry of Franju's Eyes Without a Face.

Currently streaming on Shudder.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:42 AM on March 11, 2022


Forgot also trigger warning for suicide.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:43 AM on March 11, 2022


Between this, For the Sake of Vicious, and all of the French new wave horror, Shudder is bringing the fucking pain right now.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:38 AM on March 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


Ohhhhh I haven't seen this in years, and finding a copy was difficult to begin with! This film is up there with Del Toro's "Cronos" as far as setting up bizarre alternate vampire mythos, and is profoundly weird as it gets further and further into it. Looking forward to catching it again and seeing how it holds up to my memories..
posted by FatherDagon at 2:27 PM on March 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm just speculating based on the Dimension card (Dimension being the Weinsteins' horror imprint), but my guess is that a lot of studio interference happened to this movie. Straight up, this story is a mess. It feels like disjointed parts of at least four unrelated movies cut together into a narrative that only sort of makes sense. It is effective in places, but overall, it reads like a reconstruction of a movie you watched late at night while you were really trashed and bummed out about something, or maybe a couple of movies that run together in your mind.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:55 PM on March 11, 2022


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