Nicolas Pesce
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Filmography
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American Psycho (2000)
Directed by Mary Harron
influenced Piercing (2019)
Themes Characters Dialogue
To get the obvious out of the way, Piercing has this palpable and murder-driven atmosphere not unlike American Psycho; female victims, sticking to a routine plan, and being an adaptation of a book from the 1990s makes Piercing feel like homage to what is arguably Christian Bale’s breakout film.
Abbott conjures up terror and laughter on par with Christian Bale’s performance as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho as he balances the embodiment of a lingering threat and comical character.
There's a dab of "American Psycho" in materialistic details.
The sophomore feature film from writer-director Nicolas Pesce ( The Eyes of My Mother ), Piercing is a psychosexual thriller that shares some of the same DNA as American Psycho but is entirely its own creature.
So he concocts a plan to commit a murder, in a very American Psycho voiceover.
Picture American Psycho for millennials, with less business card panic attacks and more feminist subversion, and you’ll be somewhere in the right ballpark.
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
influenced The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Visuals
Pesce’s heartland Gothic visuals — specifically the very inky expanses of Zach Kuperstein’s glorious widescreen lensing — conjure spooked memories of Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.”
Not so innocent is the leering home invader (Will Brill) who, in one terrifyingly framed interior shot, seems designed to bring back memories of Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955).
Shot, digitally, in beautifully composed black-and-white, this darkly comic feature about a young girl growing up in violent times is set on an isolated American farm that looks like it could be just down the road from where Charles Laughton’s classic and equally unclassifiable The Night of the Hunter was set.
The striking feature debut of music video director Nicolas Pesce is a poised and meticulously controlled slice of American gothic that blends together a slew of influences from Hitchcock to Haneke via David Lynch and The Night of the Hunter .
Writer/director Nicolas Pesce makes an accomplished transition from music videos with this darkly disturbing slice of American Gothic that wears its debts to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) with quiet pride.
And the humour is of the nature that is sure to elicit awkward fits of laughter, reminiscent of David Slade‘s Hard Candy or Mitchell Lichtenstein‘s Teeth , both horror films where women turn the tables on men.
Following the success of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring , The Grudge confirmed that there was audience interest (read: money) in adaptations of successful Japanese horror franchises, in this case the Ju-On films originated by Takashi Shimizu.
But for all its genre appropriate flourishes and gory craftsmanship which defies the theatrical release date in which its studio abandoned it, Pesce has little wiggle room to revitalize a familiar story which became a derivative template for countless films in the wake of Shimizu and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) remake.
When The Ring , the American version of the Japanese horror film Ringu , came out in 2002, it was like I had been hit by a truck.
It wasn’t long before Hollywood took notice, cranking out a Grudge remake in 2004, The Ring in 2002 and Pulse in 2006.
It’ll likely be compared to the macabre works of Chan-wook Park (“Oldboy,” 2003) and Takashi Miike’s “Audition” (1999), and fairly so: Miike’s bloody mating game was based on a novel by Ryû Murakami, who is also behind the material in “Piercing,” though Pesce’s followup to his equally eerie debut, “The Eyes of My Mother” (2016), isn’t quite as visceral.
A quick survey of the familiarly-titled carnage: 2016’s dismal Blair Witch , 2009’s regrettable Friday the 13th , 2018’s limp Halloween , 2010’s pitiful A Nightmare on Elm Street , 2017’s dull Leatherface , 2013’s passable Evil Dead and 2015’s dreadful Poltergeist .
It’s especially dispiriting to see producer Sam Raimi’s name attached to this lunk-headed project – but then again, he was responsible for the equally flimsy/unnecessary remakes of classics like Poltergeist , his own Evil Dead , and yes, you guessed it, 2004’s The Grudge .
Sam Raimi (director of the first three “Spider-Man” movies, “Evil Dead” and “Drag Me to Hell”) is a producer of all of the Hollywood versions of “The Grudge,” so it’s disappointing that he’s behind a horror movie as boring as this one.
Así, psycho-killers tan célebres como el Norman Bates de Psicosis (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) o la chica con telequinesia de Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) encontraron una excusa para su enfado contra el mundo en la educación castradora recibida de unas madres de sexualidad frustrada y refugiadas en la religión, mientras que otros como May (Lucky McKee, 2002) o Willard (Glen Morgan, 2003) se construían su propio mundo de amigos imaginarios –rodeados por muñecas y ratas, respectivamente–, en respuesta al rechazo que sufrían desde pequeños por ser diferentes.
2016’s THE EYES OF MY MOTHER takes a similar approach, ushering in a small horror moment about young, socially isolated women who are seemingly trapped in a time that no longer exists.
Instead, West seems to delightfully frolic in other terrifying remembrances from yesterdecade with an unsettling setting similar to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and the creepy cinematic stylings of “Burnt Offerings” (1976) and – much more recently – “The Eyes of My Mother” (2016).
Movies like last year’s Escape Room or 2018’s Insidious: The Last Key are effective little genre pictures.
“The Grudge” - the first official movie release of 2020 - joins the ranks of “The Devil Inside,” “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones” and “Escape Room” as lower tier January offerings dumped at the start of the year to basically guarantee you’ll forget its existence.
Ari Aster’s debut feature feels, in many ways, like a culmination of the art-horror renaissance ignited by the likes of Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and elaborated upon by Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy .
Richard Stanley adapts "The Colour Out of Space," H.P. Lovecraft's favourite of his own stories, as the de-anglicized Color Out of Space , doing an exceedingly faithful job of it.
Director of photography Zach Kuperstein (“The Eyes of My Mother”) gives the flashback an additional edge, shooting Brake from behind with a wide angle lens.
Adapted for the screen by Paulo Campos and directed by Antonio Campos (whose works as a producer include The Eyes of my Mother and Martha Marcy May Marlene ), The Devil All the Time is beautifully executed and very disturbing.