Beyond the Grave – 2010

Beyond the Grave is set in another time and another place. The story more or less revolves around a cop of sorts. He’s searching for a possessed serial killer. But possession is not all there is. There are also zombies and black magic rituals going on throughout the entire plot. It’s kind of incomprehensible most of the time but I really like the cinematography and the image compositions most of the time. There are a lot of visual clichés going on but they seem to fit the production and make it interesting.

The script itself confuses me by being too ambivalent there are so many different things going on that it’s hard to separate them. Perhaps this is even hard as the dialog is spoken in Portuguese, at least most of it is. I mean, it’s subtitled in English and that’s no biggie, but there are still things that tend to get lost in any translation. But Beyond the Grave is a Brazilian film and it should be in Portuguese or it would seem wrong anyway.

Works well overall

Actor-wise I think it works really well and some of the makeup effects are almost brilliant. But the movie is rather slow-paced, making me kind of bored anyway. There are some strange characters which I think are designed to make it look more interesting. But this isn’t a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky and it’s not tense enough to make it work. I like the ambition of trying to make something a little different. But in my opinion it gets a little too complicated. There’s not enough Western to make it a Western, it’s not enough post-apocalypse to make it post-apocalypse and it’s not enough zombies to make it a zombie flick.

The main problem is the script no doubt and maybe the direction could have been better too. I think it would have needed some more nerve to make it as interesting as the plot deserves. As it is I can’t even tell what the bottom line is supposed to be.