Conrad, Coppola, Du Welz — Travellers on the Same Boat

Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz burst onto the horror scene in 2004 with Calvaire, an unforgivingly black tale of a young man running afoul of a town whose exclusively male population would make Leatherface blanch and get the hell out of Dodge. A distinctly European concoction, it nevertheless paid tribute to Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was an attack on the audience as assured as it was original. Now, Du Welz has followed up with Vinyan, which is no less original, no less assured, and stakes out its own identity distinct from its predecessor, while still sharing many of Calvaire‘s thematic preoccupations. People, I think we have an auteur in our midst.
A vinyan is, in Thai mythology, an angry ghost, the spirit of someone who has died a bad death and cannot make its way to the afterworld, and so remains to cause trouble for the living. A bad death is certainly what the son of Emmanuelle Béart and Rufus Sewell suffered: he was swept away by the Boxing Day tsunami. His parents are still grieving, still in Thailand, and Béart in particular cannot let him go. When, at a charity function, a video of the devastation in Burma is shown, Béart sees an indistinct image of a child that she insists is her son, still alive, sold out of a hospital instead of deceased. Sewell sees nothing of the kind, but agrees, in the face of his wife’s implacable obsession, to try to find the child in the film. This means contacting the Triads, as they are the only means of sneaking into Burma. So begins a long journey into Hell.
If Calvaire‘s touchstone was the survival horror films of the 70s, Vinyan too looks to that decade for inspiration, but its model is very different: Apocalypse Now. In fact, I dare say that it is to that film what Apocalypse Now was to Heart of Darkness: a parallel journey with transplanted events and similar tones and themes. Both films and novel share, along with a nightmare boat odyssey into the jungle, a languorous pace that effectively conveys the enervating atmosphere through which the characters move, a careful attention to the oppressiveness of the jungle, which becomes a character in and of itself. There is also an abyssal loss of hope in all three works. Vinyan even re-creates a number the Coppola film’s shots of passing trees. There is also a shared sense of penetrating into a strange, surreal world where nothing is explained and everything is possible. Had Marlon Brando appeared in the midst of the feral children that populate Vinyan‘s last act, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
But this journey into another world, signaled by crossing through barriers of fog and rain, is also one of the things that links Vinyan to Calvaire. While the pace and content of the two films is very different, their horrors both occur in dark forests, and both stories concern themselves with the destructive properties of grief. In Calvaire, innkeeper Jackie Berroyer convinces himself that poor Laurent Lucas is his wife come back to him, a psychosis that the entire town shares. Similarly, Béart refuses absolutely to believe that her son is dead. When presented with a boy who is clearly not her son, there is still a moment where it is clear that is willing to believe that it is. In both films, grief and desire are one and the same. They are creative in a the most terrible sense, distorting reality in toxic ways, and therefore, in the final analysis, utterly destructive. The true name for what they really are, then, is the death drive.
Viewers will find Vinyan a challenge. Even fans of Du Welz’s first film might find this too slow. But don’t go in expecting a visceral roller coaster. Instead, remember Apocalypse Now, especially in its second, increasingly bizarre half, and regard the work as a doom-laden tone poem, and your patience will be richly rewarded.
Oh, and is there an angry ghost? Not in the traditional supernatural sense. But in terms of psychological effects? Definitely. And there is more than enough of the uncanny to go around in the last act.