Wolf-Man Fantastic horror by Ken Russell “Other hypostases” is a visual philosophical parable about the search for oneself and life values, about the desire for knowledge and meaning, about wisdom and ignorance, where there are even no clear lines of good and evil.
Not standard in its basis, the film, delays from the first minutes, surprising with its emphasis on a variety of details. Attention is paid to the fiction, the romantic line, and the inner world of the protagonist, then jumps to the atmosphere and psychedelic pressure, replaced by a rich eerie video series of transformations, mutations and just a variety of atrocities, most often against animals. So representatives of the “green” such a movie is extremely not recommended, the rest, if there is interest and appropriate viewing age – mandatory.
The video sequence is full of all sorts of catching action, expressively passing through the entire plot canvas. The main emphasis is placed on the visual, and the film manages to capture attention thanks to the action unfolded on the screen. Shopping and successive images of hallucinations and visions, which embodied a variety of metaphors, ritual actions and mythical pictures of hell, terrible monsters with a bunch of eyes, and flowing rivers of blood, a riot of volcanoes and animal indomitable energy that beats from the inside. Ancestor Memory or Animal Beginning? The film is multifaceted enough that here many people can see a variety of things, interpreting what is happening before their eyes in different ways. Symbolism, psychology, self-knowledge - everything is closely intertwined with eerie patterns on the body transforming to horror.
Turning to the depths of his own mind, the protagonist opens the way to the inner beast, animal nature and uncontrollable rage. After all the surreal pictures and erotic scenes, we see a savage, unable to control himself, and has lost his own self. A wolf man, furiously rushing through an inhospitable world, struggling with any hostile entity or possible manifestation of aggression in his direction, looking for food and lost not only in the world of modern technology, reason and logic, but also inside himself, falling into the abyss, hoping to gain knowledge or get out the deeply buried memory of the hypostases of mankind.
Convincing play of the actors allows you to penetrate the characters with all sorts of feelings. William Hurt has even been nominated for a Golden Globe as Breakthrough of the Year, and in the film, he gives his best. Bob Balaban and Charles Hayd represent in the film very similar outwardly friends-colleagues of the character Hurt, but with external similarities, the types play quite different and interesting in their own way. And if we talk about the cast, we can also say that here the first role of Drew Barrymore in a big movie, but it is clearly not worth buying: very episodic roles, without clear camera angles on her persona and the complete absence of any role for the plot. So if we take her early works, then “E.T.”, “Cat’s Eye” and “Flaming the Eye” deserve incredibly more attention.
And yet history no longer concentrates on the excessive drama of endless self-digging, but on the horror elements and the savagery of their manifestation. And at the same time an impressive makeup on the visual part. All scenes of skin mutations can cause goosebumps and turn away in a nasty grimace, eerie-looking episodes with the use of high-quality makeup acquire extremely realistic features and make you fully believe what is happening, and occasionally appearing graphics for all their simplicity successfully complements surreal frames of visions, as impressive for their visual part.
It is impossible not to mention in the film a lot of strong monologues devoted to the problems raised and carrying an important semantic load, making the film not only scary, but also smart. They can be disassembled by quotations, and you can delve impressed into what is said, drawing your own conclusions. To acoustic perception is added a sound series that cuts to the edges of the soul, which eventually turned out to be in the Oscar nominations for the sound, and this applies to both the musical accompaniment and the noise effects as a whole. Thus, the film captures not only the rapidly rich visual content and its diversity, but also due to the sound design of the scenes and the project as a whole.
Dominating interests in life can lead the hell knows where, and in everything you need to know the measure and dosage, because in the pursuit of knowledge and discoveries, you can easily lose yourself and your loved ones, forgetting that in the world of cruelty, debauchery and indifference, strong and true love always wins, capable of doing unimaginable miracles. A gorgeous film and a perfect horror film, a real work of art that has the right to be loudly called a masterpiece!
10 out of 10
Original