LIVID – Fantastic Fest Review

Can I just say I really, really wanted to like LIVID. I mean, I truly looked forward to eating this movie up, but instead, I found myself staring at my plate wondering what I had just been served. This is the second feature film from the writing/directing team of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, whose first outing was 2007’s INSIDE. Bustillo and Maury appeared to have started with an interesting idea, but somewhere along the path of production lost their focus, perhaps distracted by their own visions, which make numerous cameos that feel more like party crashers than official invitees.

LIVID begins as a story about a teenager named Lucy (Chloe Coulloud) who is training as an in-house caregiver. She travels from house to house with her trainer Mrs. Wilson (Catherine Jacob). The last house of the day is a large mansion owned by Miss Jessel (Maria-Claude Pietragalla), a successful former dance instructor infamous for for strict methods. Miss Jessel is bed-ridden and in a coma, the soul resident of the massive, ornate estate in disrepair. Mrs. Wilson casually reveals stories to Lucie as they tend to Miss Jessel, such as her only child Anna having been born mute and passed on many years ago, and the mysterious “treasure” which is said to be hidden somewhere in the house.

This treasure is the driving factor for the first half of LIVID, which has Lucie reluctantly leading her two male friends, Ben and William (Jeremy Kapone and Felix Moati), into the Jessel estate in search of the alleged treasure. For what it’s worth, this first half of LIVID is the half that works reasonably well, an atmospherically Gothic but straight-forward haunted house tale. LIVID invites the audience in to share the adventure of three nosy teens, snooping around a creepy old house, certain to unleash something dreadful. Unfortunately, this is what they unleash… something visually stunning, but dreadful to watch.

LIVID’s opening sequence sets an alluring tone for something out of Dark Shadows, with gray skies and massive waves crashing against a treacherous rocky shore. Rolling green hills in the distance with an ominously slow orchestral score (Raphael Gesqua) drawing the viewer in like a Pied Piper written with the pending doom of Poe’s pen. Once Lucie and the boys enter the house, the focus appears to shift rapidly to something more akin to a cinematic roadside attraction of visual oddities. As they explore the various rooms of the Jessel house, they stumble upon everything from strange things preserved in jars, mounted animal heads, creepy dolls and a number of other typical genre props used in countless horror films.

To be fair, and to repeat my earlier point, this is all visually stunning stuff, if not a tad generic and certainly not crucial to the story in many cases. LIVID looks amazing, as does the score deem itself worthy of attention on it’s own merit. The issue I have with all this is that it serves little purpose to the story and, in some unclear fashion, becomes the story. Once the reality of the situation makes itself known to Lucie and the boys, the gore comes out to play and Miss Jessel exposes her true self. The nature of her “true self” and the twists involving her daughter are grounds for spoilers, but I can say the potential is there, but the execution is terribly flawed.

The first half of LIVID is a based in the real world, with the realm of fantasy taking a bold and often intrusive spotlight in the second half. I could not help but notice the second half of LIVID is heavily influenced by the works of Guillermo del Toro, from the visual style, creature and prop design and even the movement and performance of the non-human characters. Many of these scenes stand alone as really cool, artistically impressive achievements, but when they’re all spliced together into a narrative as they are, the film that began as a fresh ode to Halloween-inspired films (the holiday, not the franchise) unravels into a broken, disconnected mess of ideas that fails to come together as a fully comprehensible story.

Perhaps LIVID will make more sense with a second, third or multiple viewings. Maybe this is a film that needs a decade or two for fans to digest before it’s appreciated as a once misunderstood genre classic. It’s impossible to say for sure, but for the time being, LIVID struck me as a film with massive potential but paid out primarily in disappointment. See the film, even buy the score, then make your own decision… I’ll be the first to tell you my opinion appears to be amongst the minority of those attending Fantastic Fest 2011.