A tale of conscience An unnamed man, outwardly very suspiciously reminiscent of Charles Manson in the very juice of his years, recovers in the woods. The hospital robe, the presence of serious bodily injuries, due to which he cannot move normally, a monstrous headache, and with it no less pleasant hallucinations, which are wonderful tides and do not give a good idea who he is (names, passwords, appearances are desirable, as it will later turn out - the list of victims) and how he, in fact, found himself in this terrible green mist, in which he often stumbles on body parts and smoothly polished bones. Wandering through the woods from his own nightmares leads him to an abandoned building, where everything eventually just begins for him.
The theme of lost memories seriously took over the work of the American underground artist and director Phil Stevens, and he approaches it as much as possible (well, or not, it all depends on the eye of the beholder) conceptually and cinematographically sophisticated. However, the expressive rawness and avarice of his debut last year’s film “Flowers” are easily compensated in his second full-length work – the avant-garde psychohorror “Conscience”, which to some extent – not so significant, however – directly echoes the “Flowers” as a general dramatic scheme – awakening, visions, memories, shocking insight – and the idea of absolute horror beyond life and death. “Conscience”, meanwhile, meets all the canons of surreal cinema, from the first frames – repulsively naturalistic, but immediately making it clear the true nature of the protagonist – plunging the viewer into a viscous and vile nightmare in which the notorious rational perception is not that impossible, it is not at all.
Having aligned his syllable in comparison with "Flowers" in the direction of greater clarity, moving from exercises in the genres of surrealism and psychedelics to a mature autonomous reading of them, Phil Stevens in "Conscience" indulges in the undoubted act of looking into the inexhaustible nature of the Hell of the inner world of the main character, in whose hypostasis the director himself appears, which makes this picture semantically close to the monochrome dementia of Guy Maddin's paintings, "The Tale of the Gimley Hospital" in particular, "Humanic" and even the second part of the "Human." Reality as an ordinary reality, unhidden behind the mask of a demon, is crammed here to a wrinkled wolfish state of its absolute incarnation, vile inauthenticity, the hero of the film is extremely far from any connections with the outside world, the entire action of the film is literally closed by two or three locations, with the emphasized convention of the space of the author's genesis - some misian scenes and episodes are solved on a white or black background: a minimum of expressiveness and a maximum of disgustation.
The director tangibly fills the frame with the crushing extreme content, which harmoniously coexists with the radical film form, postulating the rejection of any actions for objective knowledge of everything that is happening. Until the end of the film, it will be clear who the main character really is - just a psychopath who has dreamed of all the most violent violence in the delirium of schizophrenia, or a real maniac, punished in this way - through the loss of his own identity - for all his actions, which the director illustrates with the care of a homegrown sadist. It is noteworthy that such a meticulously recreated dismemberment does not look solely as a shocking element, impossible to any, however significant, interpretation. Each scene of self-mutilation, which will culminate in almost Lovecraftian erotic horror with hermaphroditic secondary sexual characteristics packed in a refrigerator, frames the gradual process of cognition of the main character - decomposition from the inside is complemented by an external frame of blood, sperm and flesh in equal proportions. The deconstruction of the world around rhymes with the complete destruction of the inner world of the protagonist: the harmony of universal death, the killing of everything normal in oneself, the truth is in madness, and madness is truly eternal. However, such a punishment strictly on hardcore one way or another would imply divine intervention in the fate of the hero, since the only character claiming some genuine power over the hero and over the viewer is not a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, a purely secondary character, but even then in his reality we have to doubt. Although there are no indirect hints of the presence of God, whether or not the Devil in the film at all; it seems that it is not customary to recall faith in Stevens’ author’s universe, since it has no place in these unreal sinister games of disassembled human minds.