by Jason Adams
Anyone who's ever seen a Horror Movie surely already realizes that this genre is a good place to see Actresses really give it their all. Whatever the reasons are that connect the female experience with cinematic trauma -- and it's not that I don't know the reasons, it's just that there are too many to list -- no other genre has spent more time rooting around in what it means to be a woman than the Horror Genre has. From Carrie White to Rosemary Woodhouse to Mother Abagail and Annie Wilkes -- you name her, she's had her Horror Movie...
One look at the line-up of this year's currently running Brooklyn Horror Film Festival here in New York will show you that. There's the fabulously good Hayley Bennett as a pregnant housewife suddenly driven to gulping down dangerous household items in Swallow (reviewed here); there's the lonely temp in a new city finding herself in over her head due to the over-friendliness of her new neighbors in 1BR (reviewed here); there's Azura Skye giving a fearless performance as a mother on the verge in The Swerve (reviewed here).
And then there's Silvia (Luiza Kosovski) in Brazilian director Alice Furtado's film Sem Sue Sengue -- the literal translation is Without Your Blood but here it's interestingly been translated to Sick Sick Sick, mirroring the film's three-act structure which takes a look at Silvia, a love-struck teen girl, from a different angle each go. The film is fascinated by this girl's coming of age and all its complications, and first-time actor Kosovski is in turn fascinating -- she's a natural on-screen and I'll admit I thought of Timothee Chalamet's turn in Call Me By Your Name on a few occasions (no small compliment coming from me).
In the first act, the first Sick, Silvia is merely a lovesick teenager, pining for and winning the dreamy new boy in her class. He reads poetry out loud and that's that -- they're naked with each other practically before the poetry book's even been closed. But in the grand tradition of romantic melodrama the boy is actually literally sick himself, he's a hemophiliac, and Silvia is forced into emotional widowhood before she's anywhere near being mature enough.
This leads to the second act, the second Sick, which has her become physically ill herself -- with grief presumably, but you also get the feeling that she's psychosomatically taking on the boy's illness as a way of coping. Horror Films about women often love to wallow in body fluids -- think of Ginger Snaps or Raw for good examples -- and this section revels in blood and barf in equal measure. Silvia seems to be disintegrating.
The final Sick, the third and longest act, seems to infect Silvia's brain. Her parents take her on vacation to find relaxation, but even as everything slows down -- and this last act is slow and abstract, almost punishingly so -- she projects her trauma onto everything she comes into contact with. A sleepy beach community becomes a hotbed of voodoo and superstition on her watch (there's a nice small turn from BPM's Nahuel Pérez Biscayart in the "Udo Kier in Suspiria" role) and eventually, as it must, horror, blood, and violence.
A girl's coming of age befouled, love twisted into horrible selfishness, and that all seems just about right to me -- I remember my own first love and its eventual collapse as a time of acting out and passions that slipped too easily into meanness. Sick Sick Sick smartly uses the tropes of the genre most fit to expressing that callousness, that hormonal tumult, showing a trail of tears and blood left in our wakes on our way to self-actualization and adulthood.