31 Days of Hallowe’en, Day 24: The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)

Another day, another not-quite giallo film. This French-Danish-Luxembourg production has a lot of colours, a lot of noise, a lot of repeating sequences and crazy music, but almost nothing in the way of plot. It’s the perfect movie to watch at 1am after a really long day that started with a cross-county commute.

Said plot is as follows: Dan (Klaus Tange) is searching for his wife. Rather than file a missing person’s report, he goes door-to-door to the various apartments in his building to try to figure out where she might be. He meets a series of increasingly bizarre characters, all with their own vices and weird stories, including a man who says that people are basically living and hanging out in the walls. So, sort of like The Shining, but with everybody still alive.

There’s so much – just so much – dizzying, vivid imagery that punctuates every one of these episodes, that it’s hard to sift through and realise what’s actually happening. The non-dream segments are just as trippy – I was tempted to start a drinking game every time I heard Dan’s ear-grating apartment buzzer, and the shot composure and angles force an unnatural, deliberately jarring perspective. It’s a meticulously-shot film of colourful, beautiful and disturbingly violent sequences, but the problem with such style overriding substance is that it had the potential to be interminable, and the ending was starkly anti-climactic. It’ll at least inform some rich dreams when you go to bed after watching.

Advertisement