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| An aesthetically appealing, clean-styled, and plague-indicating poster for Juan Carlos Medina's Painless |
A group of kids, in the time of Franco-fascism in 1930s Spain, get locked into complete seclusion somewhere in Catalonia, because they suffer from a condition that entails that they cannot feel pain. The other story concerns a doctor in today's Spain, who learns that he is dying, and who feels compelled to seek for his roots.
- The two stories, of course, turn out to be connected, but when the link is made clear towards the end, my interest in that illumination was regrettably at an absolute low.
Painless is a Spanish-Portuguese-French film which looks like a horror film but is really not. It has horrific elements, but I was at no time close to being scared. It has several issues:
In the storyline with the kids, the kid cast are simply too cute-looking, SPOILER and their bizarre games of self-harm are never explained. These off-putting effects are technically well-made, very gross, but also, in my mind, totally inconsequential for the narrative. And so the film hands us numerous scenes of children cutting themselves, burning their flesh etc. that are not cool or scary, but rather disgusting and depressing.
A similar problem is that many times during Painless, random people are killed haphazardly with no dramatic explanation, or real reason, which just adds to the depressive air the film already suffers from. Often the motivations of the characters are indecipherable. The result comes across as flat, lacking in mystery and low on interest.
In the contemporary storyline, the doctor is played by Alex Brendemühl (Ma Ma (2015)), who comes off as an extremely uncharismatic, Catalan actor. He looks tired and/or in pain throughout the movie, and never strikes up any sympathy for his dying character.
The film has an interesting core idea of the inability to feel pain, which is served in a handsome, expensive production, but which is lost, ultimately, mostly, perhaps, because of the unnecessarily grand scale of the script: Spanning decades, involving Spain's civil war past, drama, horror, and stabs at mysticism. It seems drawn out and overly elaborate, a rackety skeleton for co-writer/director Juan Carlos Medina's (The Limehouse Golem (2016)) feature debut, which he co-wrote with Luiso Berdejo ([Rec] (2007)).
- Perhaps signifying that the recent wave of great Spanish horror is coming to an end, Painless got me to the theater wanting more after such great horror experiences as I've gotten from titles such as Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001), Alejandro Amenabar's The Others (2001), J. A. Bayona's The Orphanage (2007), and especially from Nacho Cerdà's The Abandoned (2006), an absolutely nerve-racking film.
If you are not familiar with any of these, all of the above mentioned films are well worth looking up long before considering to watch the very dubious Painless. - I should point out, however, that although the film is a Spanish-Portuguese-French co-production, Medina is actually from Miami, Florida.
Related posts:
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
Here some of the stars of Medina's second film talk about it, The Limehouse Golem
Cost: 3.5 mil. €, or approximately 3.73 mil. $
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown (likely a mega-flop)
[Painless premiered 8 September (Toronto International Film Festival, Ontario) and runs 100 minutes. It seems to have been released in 13 countries, (and the US is not among them). Its box office information is scarce; it is listed to have made 207k € (approximately 221k $) in Spain, which is very little considering that it is set in the country, which is normally a big horror market. It seems likely that the film was a mega-flop. 2,727 IMDb users have given Painless a 6.2/10 average rating.]
What do you think of Painless?
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