The Loved Ones

Magnificently demented and entertainingly appaling, The Loved Ones is a brutally sadistic horror film dressed up in pink-ribbon, school dance aesthetics. It kicks off with great opening static shots of Victorian suburbia accompanied by Little River Band's Lonesome Loser, demonstrating the beautiful cinematography that goes on to make the film such an enthralling and visceral, skin-crawling experience. A good opening like this can mean so much, it pulls you into a film and piques your curiosity, and in this case the film holds the viewer tight for all of it's brief, heart-stopping 84 minutes.

Brent (Xavier Samuel) is a teenaged boy who accidentally kills his dad in a car crash after a freakish looking guy wanders onto the road. Flash forward to the end of the school year and he's now a mess... he blames himself for his father's death and a suffocating gulf has now opened between him and his grieving mum. He's emotionally numb, cutting himself and smoking pot to control his pain levels. So when a shy girl from his school, Lola (Robin McLeavy), kidnaps and imprisons him in her house of horrors he finds himself experiencing new levels of pain with which he never imagined he would have to cope. Meanwhile, his girlfriend and the local cop begin to piece together his whereabouts... but will they find him before it's too late?

What makes The Loved Ones so memorable is that it's tonally twisted and colourful in ways that most horror films aren't. Most mainstream horror films tend to be so obsessed with being scary and serious that they all have this whitewashed drabness that renders them identical. The Loved Ones boldly and successfully combines the dark and the broad... Lola and her devoted father are competely and utterly bonkers, but they also indulge in some pretty jaw-dropping varieties of torture. Robin McLeavy is incredibly over-the-top as the 'monster' of the film, dressed in vomit-inducing fuschia and with the emotional age of a spoilt bratty 10 year old, and it really works in the film's favour. There's also perverse oedipal overtones to her relationship with her helpless depraved father, and the film uses a heightened sense of violence to straddle the line between black comedy and vile slasher territory. In fact, if it wasn't for the broad characterisation and colourful performances, it would be downright excruciating and unbearable to watch (some of the torture scenes had me squirming in my seat).

The Loved Ones combines styles and tropes to create something new and exciting in the horror genre... tapping into films like Deliverance, Carrie, Misery, The Shining, etc, to bust completely free of the well-trodden cliches that the genre has been endlessly exploiting for decades now. The only problem I had with the film was the subplot where Brent's friend takes the 'hot' goth chick from their school to the dance... the way it ties into the main plot isn't made clear until the very end but even then it doesn't feel entirely relevant or worth the screentime it takes up. This is only a small point though, the film is still brilliant despite this and I can't even fully describe it as I don't want to spoil it. The way that it keeps ramping things up a notch and taking the story further in unexpected directions makes it a fun and gaspworthy experience.

HIGHLIGHTS: I loved Lola's father's line when he produces the hammer and the foot spike; "This one's for the Kingswood".

DIRECTOR: Sean Byrne
WRITER/SOURCE: Sean Byrne
KEY ACTORS: Xavier Samuel, Robin McLeavy, John Brumpton, Richard Wilson, Victoria Thaine, Andrew S. Gilbert.

RELATED TEXTS:
- There's some structural similarity to The Shining, and the school-nerd-goes-psycho routine is remniscent of Carrie (but unlike that film, The Loved Ones doesn't play it for sympathy).