The other side of the ice On Alison - a young girl overnight experiencing PMS and HGM - suddenly condescending insight and she, spitting on all dogmas and commandments, decides to kill herself on the wall / drown in the bathroom, because life is shit and she has absolutely no reason to live. However, instead of a strong embrace of Catholic hell, she is waiting for a journey to a certain distant dimension, shackled in ice, which is scattered with a small frosty crumb from the sun staring down dead. This otherworldly world, stuck somewhere in the dark Middle Ages, is not without success ruled by two wizards - dark Abraham and light Embolin. However, out of boredom, they are engaged in torture specifically for themselves sent sinners, including, in addition to six more, Alison. But when Abraham kills Embolin, changes his name to Presence, having been baptized again, but already with blood, and begins to cherish plans to take over the outer, our world beyond the ice, the angels recruit Alison, as she is chosen to confront through her the demons of darkness and half-darkness of Abraham and the magician himself, who are trying at all costs to tear apart the flesh of the intersecting universes.
If we start from the idea that any director must first be a good storyteller, and only then - an artist, a philosopher and an aesthete, then the American underground director Eric Stanze is hardly the first, in his low-budget creations relying not so much on cast form, but on content, often suffering from excessive provocativeness, affectation and malicious anti-cinematography, with an almost dyslexic film-language vocabulary. And Stanze’s second directorial work, the philosophical fantasy horror “Ice from the Sun” in 1999, was no exception against the background of his “Wild Harvest”, “Maniac Album” or “I spit on your corpse, I urinate on your grave”, because immediately what catches the eye when familiarizing with “Ice from the Sun” is a total author’s rejection of structurality, a clear narrative, plot linearity in favor of hallucinatory, avant-garde aesthetics, the revolt between Elijah and the meat of Elijah. The plot is discrete, it easily breaks down into the constituents of the film-language puzzle, with many lacunae filled with sophisticated visualization, catchy moralization (although morality is far from the generally accepted canons) and pornographic exploitation, thanks to which inhuman tortures are perceived inextricably both aesthetically and philosophically - the theory and practice of controversial martyric enlightenment from the Goddess, which exists in a non-Christian and semi-pagan paradigm from the point of view of the background from Stanze.
Meanwhile, a common place in all genre works, insisting on religious yeast and do not have specific references to horror, mysticism or fantasy (how not to remember the same "Constantine" - comic book, film, TV series - or "Prophecy" with all sequels), is the theme of the struggle of God and the Devil, the confrontation of their oprichniks - angels and demons - both for the soul of a particular person and the whole world. However, Stanze makes certain adjustments to this eternal conflict, according to a number of philosophical teachings, since Abraham, a reference to the Old Testament Abraham, does make a sacrifice in the name of God, himself eventually becoming God and changing his name to Presence, that is, the Present, which metaphorically punishes in the face of seven sinners the undrinking to the bottom painful past of mankind, and therefore Alison’s struggle with him is not only a struggle for the salvation of the future, but also a clash of the True God with his dark side. Given the abundance of unexplained conventions, one can come to the idea that “Ice from the Sun” broadcasts the notorious cosmogonic plot from the ancient Iranian chronicles about Ahur Mazda and Anghro Manyu, however, in all the teachings where dualism as the primary principle takes place, good and evil are looking for ways of harmony through mutual conflicts, because only in this way can any truth appear, claiming nevertheless a special significance, the more the image of the nascent Sun in such teachings is key and universal. Which, however, does not negate the invariable fact that Abraham/Presence physically tortures everyone who comes to him with his own fears. That is, the assertion remains unchanged that man, increasingly immersed in the inner world of reflections and substantial, irrational nightmares, himself becomes the creator of his own hell, inventing along the way the image of Satan, and therefore God. Then “Ice from the Sun” is read as the story of overcoming man himself, which, however, looks more like a deliberate simplification and rejection of the usual for the director paradoxical poststructuralist thinking, the method of oxymorons.
However, his unbiased dialogue with the viewer about God (who He is and what His true essence the director reflects more often than necessary, eventually coming to the disappointing conclusion: God in the person of Abraham, who for Stanza is His Real Face, cruel, perverted, mad, hostile; man be humbled!) The Stanze begins by talking about death. If what can be called “afterlife” is only a stage to the comprehension of knowledge, then Death itself is the desired knowledge, but there is also a state of “afterlife”, that is, the afterlife search for knowledge in this knowledge, and in Stanza’s picture this process of cognition of postmortem existence begins a person who had and lost faith. And unlike the other heroes who fell under the tools of Abraham, Alison does not feel in essence an ordinary fear of the “knowledge of death”, she is a character rather of an inauthentic nature, but she is at the same time a classic object of knowledge itself, determining the plot trigger, while the director plays the role of an observer. And it is she, and not the unhappy six who later joined her, who will be given the right to immortality, thus justifying all her earthly deeds and meaninglessly searching for the essence of mortal existence. Moreover, a meaningful multiple and preferably painful death in the picture is more correct than an absurd earthly life. And death, which director Stanze admires with the passion of an obsessed necrorealist, is not the greatest existential drama, but as a modulation of the inevitable otherworldly good there, beyond the cardiogram and the black ice of the human desert. The director speaks about the constructivism of death, literally repeating the phrase after Michel Montaigne that “he who has learned to die has forgotten how to be a slave.” Therefore, a new paradox is that we are hostages of life, and only death finally forgives and liberates us.