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Contains strong sex and bloody violence
French filmmaker Bruno Dumont deliberately flaunts nearly every convention of the horror genre in the experimental Twentynine Palms. But it's a film that fails to entertain and leaves its audience short-changed, disgusted and bewildered. The story follows two cross-cultural lovers (American David Wissak and Russian Katia Golubeva) as they journey through the barren Joshua Tree desert of California. Along the way they make love, squabble and dawdle for what seems like an eternity as a shocking, unheralded climax approaches.
The action between the two protagonists is consistently undramatic. Torpid, disjointed dialogue and laughably uninvolved sex scenes take centre stage, while brutal editing cuts out any tension or emotion. Dumont tries to create a feeling of suspense based on paranoia. A boundless, unpopulated desert landscape and scenes most kindly described as banal and lifeless are not the traditional prelude to horror. But Twentynine Palms, with its allusions to American isolationism, presumes that we'll find a way to feel threatened, even in such a vacuum.
"THE SHOCKS FEEL TACKED ON"
Although descriptions of the film's climax would undermine its central idea, it is safe to say it delivers two shocks. But these are shocks of the most graphic and unsophisticated kind, and they feel tacked-on, as if they were not part of the same film. Dumont has attempted something very different by dumping the usual smoke-and-mirrors of horror movies, but he has failed to replace the parts taken away with anything similarly effective. To the uninvolved and bored, the ending comes as a final hammer blow of disappointment.
