Begotten

Saw Begotten, a grainy sort of art film that opens on a man killing himself. He seems to be cutting his own throat, but the film quality is so poor and so grainy that he may well be squirting chocolate sauce on his neck. Once he is dead, a woman emerges from behind a curtain and copulates with him. The film carries on like this, mixing sex and death and being fairly repulsive along the way.

It's got a fair share of arresting images which I really liked but unfortunately these images are usually milked past the point of yielding returns. Sometimes the symbolism of a film is the most direct way of talking about abstract things, but here I feel the effect is too coarse, too grainy. It feels willfully obscure. The closing credits, for example, reveal the woman to be "mother earth". How are supposed to know this? We aren't.

The film feels like an overgrown music video. There are some interesting images and a general theme of death and rebirth becomes apparent, but it would have been better I think if it were cut to about a third the run-time and put to some music. Indeed Marilyn Manson, that great magpie of creepy images, has cannibalized this film for one of his music videos. As is, the soundtrack is mostly frog croaks and bird tweets. It's meant to evoke a bog (death a rebirth, see?) A slog of a film. It wouldn't stand up to much mockery. Approach with friends looking for a spooky time.