Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jens Dahl
Starring: Sara Hjort Ditlevsen, Signe Egholm Olsen, Anders Heinrichsen, Morten Holst
Watching director Jens Dahl's gruelling Danish thriller
Breeder, I was reminded of a moment from Horse Feathers where
Groucho Marx breaks the fourth wall and advises the audience: "I've got to
stay here, but there's no reason why you folks shouldn't go out into the
lobby until this thing blows over." In order to write this review, I had to
endure all 107 minutes of Breeder, but why would anyone voluntarily put themselves through such an empty,
immature experience?
More torture yawn than torture porn, Breeder is the latest in
what appears to be a new wave of extreme horror movies coming out of
Denmark. Unlike the New French Extremism movement of the 2000s, the recent
Danish horrors I've seen have nothing to offer in terms of style, innovation
or political or philosophical musings - they're simply the products of
cynical shock merchants at worst, juvenile edge-lords at worst, and they
have more in common with the wave of American horrors that arrived in the
aftermath of Eli Roth's Hostel.
Breeder has an intriguing setup at least. Like a modern day
Countess Bathory, Dr. Isabel Ruben (Signe Egholm Olsen) has developed
a way to halt the aging process (we're told she's 61 but looks two decades
younger). The means of doing so are far from legal or ethical however, and
so she finds her "investors" through a process of blackmail. Her latest
"backer" is wealthy veterinarian Thomas (Anders Heinrichsen), whose
equestrian wife Mia (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen) is desperate for a child
but can't get her hubby interested in any slap and tickle.
When Mia finds herself held captive in Ruben's secret facility, we learn
the grim reality of why Thomas was reluctant to impregnate her. Ruben has
been kidnapping young women and impregnating them with the semen of her rich
clients, harvesting the blood of their infants to develop what Peter Cushing
might have referred to as a "serrrrrrum."
After a promising opening act that lays out this nefarious world,
Breeder devolves into an atrocity exhibition. Desperate to
shock us, Dahl forces us to watch such scenes as a guard urinating on Mia,
another female captive having her teeth pulled by a pliers, and a skip
filled with the corpses of newborn babies. Ooh, you're well hard Jens!
Herschell Gordon Lewis did this sort of thing in the 1960s, but that was an
act of rebellion against a stuffy, censorious society that balked at the
idea of two people sharing a bed onscreen. In 2021, such images have
completely lost their power to shock, leaving them redundant.
While I'm not drawn to it personally, I'm not opposed to the inclusion of
such gross-out imagery if it serves a greater overall purpose. I'm a
defender of the much maligned
A Serbian Film, as that movie actually tells a story and has something to say, and its
litany of horrific images builds to a knockout punchline.
Breeder has no story to tell and nothing to say; it simply
attempts to provoke a reaction, as though it's the product of a neglected
child. The notion of a cabal of wealthy men exploiting vulnerable young
women in an attempt to cling onto their youth should be a winning premise,
but Dahl doesn't seem all that interested in exploring his own film's
ideas.
