SXSW Review: THE LOVED ONES

There was a time when Australia was a blossoming new haven for great films. Fortunately, that time has not passed. In fact, Australia is continuing to produce great filmmakers making great films and THE LOVED ONES is yet another in-your-face fantastic example of the kind of edgy, boundary-pushing cinema devoted movie geeks can expect from the land down under.

Written and directed by Sean Byrne, THE LOVED ONES is a horror movie for true fans of the genre. This movie simply fucking rocks! Sorry for my “French” but, if you love excellent genre movies that provide the perfect mix of fright and fun, no apologies and just enough innovation to be fresh without being pretentious… you’ll love THE LOVED ONES.

The film stars Xavier Samuel (soon to be immortalized by teeny-boppers in THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE) as Brent Mitchell, a troubled teenager haunted by the memory of a family tragedy he feels guilty for. With the high school dance approaching, boys and girls are pairing up for the big night. When Lola (Robin McLeavy) approaches Brent about the dance, he refuses her shy invitation in favor of attending the dance with his casual girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine).

The day of the dance proves an emotionally difficult day for Brent, leading him to go blow off some steam at a nearby cliff. What Brent didn’t expect was that this solitary reflection would result in his abduction and gruesome torture. THE LOVED ONES is a tense tale of teen-aged relationships, all wrapped around a psychotic serial killer story.

I’ll refrain from spelling the details out too clearly for fear of spoiling the film, but you could conceivably describe THE LOVED ONES as a sick and humorous science fair experiment, combining high school horror films such as PROM NIGHT with the crazed obsession factor of MISERY. This is not your average Hollywood high school slasher flick. It is so much more.

Xavier finds himself the doomed object of a murderous admirers bloody affection, kidnapped and help prisoner in the killer’s home and forced to endure the killer’s sick ritual of true love. Meanwhile, the dance goes on and Brent’s chubby friend Sac (Richard Wilson) unexpectedly scores with the attractive but morbidly dressed-in-black Goth girl Mia (Jessica McNamee).

As the night groans along with drunken teens, Brent’s girlfriend Holly becomes concerned and sets out to get help finding Brent. Her search will reveal a startling trend of killings that have been repeated throughout her teen-aged life and her boyfriend could become the newest victim.

The tone of THE LOVED ONES is one of utter shock, darkly funny and often extremely intense. The suspense is masterful leading up to and during the relentless agony inflicted upon Brent. THE LOVED ONES features a killer(s) that benefits from a slight TEXAS CHAINSAW/PSYCHO sort of family element. The violence is graphic and bloody, but more importantly its intense.

Byrne builds layers of renewed hope within the audience’s minds as they experience his torture over and over, each time expecting his escape or rescue, only to be rewarded with more brutal torture. Oddly enough, as extreme as these scenes can be, the audience ends up laughing throughout the scenes. This is where the dark humor plays its most crucial role, balancing the horror on screen with the slightly off key absurdity of the killers’ personality and the performance given from that terrifying thespian.

Few horror films of late have had such a strong and lasting impression on my viewing experience, but THE LOVED ONES is easily one of the best horror films I’ve seen in the last decade. Every element of the film is carefully crafted to please the often hard-to-please genre fan, but is not so far removed from the mainstream standards that general audiences won’t enjoy the film. Perhaps the only complaint I can muster for the film is that the relationship between Sac and Mia is either not defined well enough or perhaps not entirely necessary, but it doesn’t truly remove anything from the overall experience.

THE LOVED ONES is suspenseful, funny, creative and relatively scary (based on your tolerance level). The film ends with a crowd-pleasing bang; features fine performances and directing, editing and even some fairly impressive cinematography. If nothing else, the audience will leave the theater with their eyes and ears assaulted and their cinematic radars finely-tuned to Robin McLeavy’s future performances… and maybe her image in their nightmares.

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars