Les Vampires (Part 9: L’homme des Poisons): building up to an eventual showdown between opposed sides

Louis Feuillade, “Les Vampires (Part 9: L’homme des Poisons)” (1916)

With the death of Satanas, a new Grand Vampire, Venomous, a chemist with expertise in concocting poisons, is chosen to lead the Vampires gang and he immediately sets about plotting to kill that near-indestructible investigative reporter Phillipe Guérande. Hearing that Guérande is planning to celebrate his engagement, the dastardly gang enlist Irma Vep and an accomplice to buy the apartment near the Guérandes’ apartment. Throught them, the gang finds out and infiltrates the caterers contracted to supply the engagement feast and two gang members posing as waiters poison the champagne. In the nick of time, the Guérandes and their guests avoid killing themselves on the hooch and the Vampires’ men narrowly escape the irate party-goers. The Vampires won’t give up ridding themselves of the pesky reporter and Irma Vep follows Guérande and his fiancée as they go into hiding. Vep discovers that Guérande’s fiancée is staying at the Pyramid Hotel and contacts Venomous; in the meantime Guérande and his trusty aide Mazamette have discovered what the gang is up to and race to save the fiancée. The men capture Vep and tie her up but Venomous rescues her and leads Guérande and Mazamette on an exciting chase and a shooting match atop a train before finally escaping our heroes.

More action-thriller than crime thriller compared to earlier episodes, Part 9 features Irma Vep in quite a lot of action herself and taking the initiative in spying on and following Guérande’s movements despite being under Venomous’s command. Once again, the plot narrative is convoluted though it revolves around the engagement party and spiriting the happy couple to safety before the Vampires can kill them. Mazamette’s troubles with the police provide plenty of tension-easing laughs and Guérande gets himself in lots of scrapes while playing the hero.

As always, the film is clear and thrilling to watch; a cultural historian will find much of interest in the interior sets and designs and the quotidian customs and activities of the middle class and their servants. There can be a lot of expressionist over-acting but it doesn’t detract from the action and excitement that it generates. Guérande’s lady is hardly seen at all and this in itself is an interesting contrast with Irma Vep’s planning and activity: the bad girl does all the exhilarating things the boys do while the good girl acts the helpless infant who must be shielded from bad people.

This time the bad guys escape and we viewers must await the final showdown between the good guys Guérande and Mazamette on one hand and the Vampires on the other in Part 10 which concludes the serial.

Les Vampires (Part 8: Le Maître de la Foudre): saga of crusading reporter against sinister gang continues

Louis Feuillade, “Les Vampires (Part 8: Le Maître de la Foudre)” (1916)

Skipping a couple of episodes of this crime-thriller serial, I arrive at Episode 8 in which Moreno the corrupt businessman has just died and Irma Vep arrested, charged and sentenced to exile in an Algerian prison. She boards the ship but the leader of the Vampires gang, known as Satanas, visits her disguised as a Roman Catholic pastor and warns her that the ship has been booby-trapped with a bomb and she needs to be at the stern to avoid being blown to bits. Sure enough, once the ship is far out to sea, it goes ka-blooey and everyone goes down with it – except for Irma Vep. In the meantime the hunt is on for the ship saboteurs; the Vampires discover where fearless investigative reporter Phillippe Guérande and Satanas goes to his house, immobilises our hero and leaves a bomb behind. Luckily Mazamette turns up in the nick of time to save Guérande and the two determine to capture Satanas and turn him over to the police. Satanas is caught all right and put into jail. Irma Vep returns to the gang’s headquarters where she learns of Satanas’s arrest and imprisonment and she is tasked to carry a poisoned letter to him in jail. Satanas receives the letter and swallows it; he dies and his suicide makes front-page news. Guérande and Mazamette vow to continue hunting down the Vampires and bring them to justice.

There are still some wonky discontinuities in the plot but the story has become so involved and complicated that viewers will forgive hiccups in the details: how Irma Vep has managed to swim or otherwise travel all the way back to France from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea isn’t explained and how Mazamette and his son Eustache always turn up to rescue Guérande and perform other brave needs in the nick of time will have to be attributed to amazing powers of telepathy on the Mazamettes’ part. Seems to be a hereditary thing. Satanas turns out to be a wealthy businessman or industrialist and this in itself suggests the penetration of the Vampires gang into every area of French society; the gang’s headquarters turns out to be a well-maintained establishment complete with waiters serving food and wine and a stage for performing plays and concerts. People of all classes wander in and out and the well-to-do bourgeoisie rub shoulders with working-class people. Perhaps the Vampires represent a genuine political and social movement dedicated to the overthrow of a sick and corrupt hierarchical society and its replacement with a democracy and an economy that distributes wealth equally among all and eliminates differences on the basis of income earned.

As always, the film’s appearance is clear and sharp and the acting is as natural as can be for the period. The costumes worn, the interiors of houses, offices and prisons, and the cars driven will be of interest to cultural historians. The action is fast-paced and plot twists are common now but there is still plenty of room for slapstick comedy whenever and wherever Mazamette and young Eustache appear.


Le Voyage dans la Lune: delightful and charming film about space travel

Georges Méliès, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (1902)

Delightful short film, the first science fiction film and the first film to feature animation as well as live action, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” tells a tale of six astronomers chosen by their academy to ride a rocket to the moon where they crash-land and meet a most unusual race of beings called Selenites. The Selenites don’t take too kindly to their new visitors so they arrest the men and bring them before their king. The astronomers rebel against their capture and escape the court. They arrive back to their rocket in the nick of time and race back to Earth to tell everyone of their strange adventures on the moon.

The film is told with narration that was added long after it was made. The chief glory of the short is its use of animation, painted props and background scenes and the way the props are ingeniously used to simulate flight towards the moon and changes in the sky above the astronomers’ heads as they see the Earth rise above the horizon and the stars and planets circulate around them. The acting may be pedestrian but the costuming, if rather antiquated and fanciful in appearance to modern eyes, seems appropriate for the fantastic story and its setting; the Selenites in particular wear original and striking costumes fit for aliens. The actors playing the Selenites are obviously acrobats and the decision to use acrobats anc circus performers was deliberate to demonstrate how very different the Selenites are from humans. Scene changes are well done and though some scenes tend to blur into the next, this problem is not at all obvious.

It’s a film that’s well worth watching for everyone, not just students of film history; children especially will thrill to the whimsy and charm of the story and its characters. There is something very light-hearted and playful about the film that reassures viewers that, apart from a few Selenites who literally blow up when beaten by umbrellas, no-one will suffer and all the astronomers manage to get back home safely.

Les Vampires (Part 5: L’évasion du Mort): film shows corruption at the heart of Parisian society

Louis Feuillade, “Les Vampires (Part 5: L’évasion du Mort)” (1916)

This time in the serial, the crooked businessman Juan José Moreno (Fernand Herrmann) plays the leading role in hunting down that mysterious gang The Vampires while intrepid reporter Phillipe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) has a support role requiring him to do even less than his side-kick the comical Mazamette. After escaping the police by faking his death (hence the title of the episode), Moreno seeks revenge on The Vampires; he captures Guérande (who’s managed to escape a kidnap attempt by The Vampires) and under duress forces him to reveal a robbery The Vampires are planning to commit. Moreno and his myrmidons go at once, leaving Guérande bound in a hide-out; fortunately Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque) turns up – he has good timing, that fella! but he has been studying the joint so it’s no surprise he knows when to pop in and when not to – to rescue Guérande. In the meantime, The Vampires wait at a swanky aristocrats’ party until midnight when it’s time to release the sleeping gas through the aircon vents; everyone then swoons and the criminals collect the jewellery and money off the guests. Unbeknownst to the black-garbed ones, Moreno has been hiding in the getaway car; once the car leaves the crime scene, he manages to sneak up where the booty is being held and throws off the cases of jewels onto the road. He claims the stolen loot as his own.

Perhaps the stand-out in the film is the party scene after the guests have all fallen unconscious: it reminds me of 19th century French painter Thomas Couture’s work “Romans in the Decadence of Empire” with bodies strewn over the furniture and the floor. The camera forces our gaze to the very back far into the scene where doors open and The Vampires, led by Irma Vep, pick their way through the guests and take the jewellery. This is the only time in the film we see Irma Vep and her accomplices at all. The Grand Vampire himself is the Baron who organised the party and he looks a very fop. His involvement in crime and in The Vampires gang suggests that corruption exists at the very heart of Parisian society and if people are looking for the cause of that corruption, they should seek it within themselves. Guérande, Mazamette and the police may fly hither and thither to find and arrest its most obvious manifestations but where The Vampires originate from, other contagion will fly out and follow.

The standard of acting is better than in earlier episodes and from Episode 5 on, the stories are longer, hinting that story-lines are improving (there are still gaps in the plot that need explaining – how does Moreno manage to get onto the car, tip off all the booty and escape without being noticed?) and Feuillade, his cast and the technical crew are growing more confident as film-makers and story-tellers. Close-ups are being employed and there’s not so much reliance on car-chases and secret hidey-holes in walls. Ingenious if not always plausible twists are a major part of the plot and help to advance the story which always moves at a brisk pace.

As with previous episodes of “Les Vampires”, the quality of the film is very clear when its age is taken into account. Parts of the film sometimes look very modern and the costumes worn by the evil Baron’s guests are stunning to see and are of historical value to culture historians.

Les Vampires (Part 2: La Bague qui tue / Part 4: Le Spectre): microcosm of public paranoia and terror

Louis Feuillade, “Les Vampires (Part 2: La Bague qui tue)” (1915), “Les Vampires (Part 4: Le Spectre)” (1916)

Here be two further episodes in which investigative reporter Phillipe Guérande (Edouard Mathe) has encounters with members of that dastardly criminal gang The Vampires who go skipping about in head-2-toe all-leather black costumes (ooh, ah!) and evade all attempts to arrest and identify them. In “The Killer Ring / La Bague qui tue”, a ballerina and Guérande’s supposed fiancee, Marfa Koutiloff, receives a visit from aristocrat Count de Nourmoutier who unaristocratically shoves a strange ring he himself has just received from a stranger onto her finger; the ring scratches her skin and injects a poison that later kills her while she performs a ballet dressed as a vampire bat. Guérande tries to pursue the Count but is captured by the Vampires who plan to execute him. Guérande’s trusty side-kick Mazamette (Marcel Levesque) turns up unexpectedly to rescue him and substitutes another fellow in his place. They make their getaway, the Vampires execute the substitute but before they can uncover his face, the cops arrive so the baddies escape, but just narrowly. The cops find the body and discover that the dead man is a chief justice.

In “The Spectre”, businessman Moreno is taken on a trip through an apartment by real estate agent Treps and is shown a secret safe. Vampire gang member Irma Vep overhears their conversation and starts planning some mischief. Impersonating a secretary, she takes a job at a bank where manager Metadier is preparing to take a large sum of money to another bank by train. On his trip, Metadier is murdered and his body disappears. Reporter Guérande reads about the murder and, snooping about and finding clues, goes to the apartment with the secret wall safe and attempts to make a citizen’s arrest of Irma Vep. She and her accomplices overpower Guérande and escape. On recovering consciousness, Guérande finds the dead Metadier in the safe. Moreno also arrives and he and Guérande confront each other. Moreno tells Guerande how he found Metadier on the train tracks and then attempts to flee but police, called earlier by Guérande, arrive and arrest Moreno.

As in Episode 1, coloured filters indicate the time of day and inter-card titles the passage of time in the story. In these subsequent episodes, the Vampires gang is revealed to be a more amorphous and trickier entity: it seems that their members are hired from different social levels and their leader, the Grand Vampire, changes a lot as well. The Vampires assume the veneer of a radical political movement opposed to the bourgeois nature of society which is perhaps why the city of Paris is so afraid of them and the police and Guerande are so keen to capture them. A parallel can be drawn between the Paris of “Les Vampires” and the present-day post-911 world in which citizens across the First World fear terrorists, Islamic fundamentalism and banksters alike. (Only one of these is worth fearing, the others most likely don’t exist or exist only because of the odd one out and its depredations across the world.)

The acting is not remarkable – there tends to be considerable over-acting and emotional excess which are par for the course in silent films – but more emphasis is placed on action-thriller activity and skulduggery with each episode under review here featuring a car chase and some form of evasion. Humour is present whenever Mazamette turns up which is not often. Props and sets are significant characters as well, the interiors and in particular the wallpaper patterns of the apartment with the secret safe quite lurid in this respect!

Holes in the narrative do exist and the second episode’s plot seemed quite sketchy but on the whole these episodes are packed with activity and story and so are exciting to watch (though the downloading on Youtube took a while and broke up Episode 4 which was annoying). Above all, the atmosphere in these episodes is sinister and Paris itself appears as a city of menace with deserted streets over which long shadows in the afternoon loom and where strange deaths and disappearances occur without rhyme or reason at night.



Les Vampires (Part 1: La tête coupée): enthralling early crime drama serial about a sinister gang of criminals

Louis Feuillade, “Les Vampires (Part 1: La tête coupée)” (1915)

First episode in a ten-part serial about a gang of criminals called Les Vampires and the efforts of young investigative reporter Phillipe Guérande to catch them, “The Severed Head / La tête coupée” is an engrossing story filled with drama, intrigue and mystery. It doesn’t end well for a couple of characters but the narrative is bound to whet viewers’ appetite for more. Guérande of The Chronicle newspaper is enquiring into the decapitation death of Police Inspector Durtal; he visits the castle of Dr Nox, where Durtal was last seen alive, and stays the night. During the long night, the reporter discovers secret caches and passages in the castle. Morning arrives and fellow guest Mrs Simpson discovers she has been robbed; Guérande is framed by Dr Nox for the crime. Our hero high-tails it to the magistrate’s office with Dr Nox and Mrs Simpson, the buyer of the castle, hot on his heels. Conveniently, the magistrate arranges for the irate couple to stay at the court under police guard and he and Guérande with a couple of other men drive off to the castle and investigate its interiors. They find the head of Durtal in a box in a secret hole behind a painting in the room where Guérande had slept overnight. On returning to the court-house, Mrs Simpson is found dead and Dr Nox has disappeared.

The film has an intense, brooding quality and the locations selected promise much mystery and chilling suspense. The camera work includes plenty of shots that embrace the distinctive exterior and interior appearances of Dr Nox’s surprisingly modern-looking mansion. Close-ups of actors’ faces are not used; instead considerable distance filming of the actors arriving at the court-house in open sedan cars and of Dr Nox’s domicile is featured. The use of coloured filters to show changes in time and lighting conditions is very effective and looks very avant-garde for the film’s time (1915). Clues such as cryptic notes on cards, hidden safety vaults behind paintings and characters’ secret comings and goings, some of which are done off-screen, advance the plot and give it a frisson of suspense and dread.

The story flows well and comes to the point quickly and smoothly; the climax which reveals the unhappy fate of Dr Nox and shows the Great Vampire leader’s daring cat-burglar escape across the roof-tops and shimmy down a hose-pipe to the ground, is rather long and the film ends awkwardly and abruptly on that note. Viewers must wait for future episodes to find out if Guérande captures not just the Great Vampire but his (or her) infamous crime gang whose presence is more sensed than heard. The music accompaniment, full of zest and drama, fits the action well.

For its period, the film looks well done and quite accomplished. There’s silly humour and some of the acting and stuntwork may look amateurish to modern eyes but the story is enthralling enough that I think I will see more episodes.

The film may have some cultural relevance to post-911 times: as in the film, made in the early years of World War I, the public in the present day is spooked by an unseen and poorly understood enemy who may not be what s/he seems but can cause serious and fearsome upset and catastrophe.

Asparagus: colourful surreal exploration of female sexuality

Suzan Pitt, “Asparagus” (1979)

A stunning and very colourful film short with a distinct animation style reminiscent of old cartoons from the 1930s, “Asparagus” is an exploration of female sexuality and wish fulfilment. An unidentified woman who is viewed mostly from behind lives alone in a house rich in flowers, small objects, cosy and lived-in furnishings and a doll’s house that in the manner of matryoshka dolls reveals more doll’s-houses within. The woman puts on a mask from one of the inner doll’s houses, goes to the cinema and observes claymation figures watching a barren revolving tube; she sneaks off behind the screen, opens a briefcase and releases a Pandora’s box of marvellous objects, familiar yet also alien and vaguely of a sexual nature, through the tube. The objects breach the fourth wall and stream over the heads of the astonished viewers who are also nearly overcome by the fragrances that waft out from the tube as well. Satisfied, the woman returns home, removing her mask to reveal a blank face.

The animation has a lush, rich, decadent style: very curvaceous and sexually suggestive in its vegetable and flower forms, harking back to the Art Deco artistic style of the 1930s and the Pop Art of the 1950s  perhaps. Colour is an important element though there isn’t much overt symbolism in the use of particular colours; I note only that the revolving vagina / cornucopia tube on the cinema screen is a cold cobblestone-blue colour which doesn’t change when the objects start floating out of it. Many scenes involve red curtains or screens being pulled across windows to reveal or to cover images of gardens and garden plants and a sexual message is implied here. The pace is always steady and calm: although surprise builds upon surprise, somehow we viewers ourselves expect the unexpected to happen, not the expected; the sexual imagery is also no surprise though it becomes more blatant as the film progresses. No obvious narrative is to be discerned here although on repeated viewings the film’s message becomes clearer and it is this message that anchors the film.

Unfortunately the volume was low even when I turned it up to 100% but the dream-like carnival music, composed by Richard Teitelbaum, is steady and even and doesn’t relate to the film in any way at all. It could have been removed and no-one would notice.

The eponymous asparagus fulfills quite a few varied functions including one that bananas might have been expected to fill and viewers may not view the humble monocot vegetable the same way after seeing “Asparagus”. Some viewers may be impatient with the film’s rather bland, steady and unemotional presentation and the apparent lack of plot or structure. It’s worth seeing a few times just to take in the layered animation and its details; there is a lot of detail to appreciate!


Stairs: a deceptively simple film with a deep and powerful message about finding meaning and purpose in an alienated life

Stefan Schabenbeck, “Stairs / Schody” (1969)

A minimalist claymation 7-minute piece, “Stairs” is one of those teeny-tiny classics about the human search for meaning in life and the often fruitless efforts one puts into finding that meaning only to get no answer or a strange one. A little figure is mooching along the sand when he (we’ll call the figure a “he” for the sake of convenience) sees a raised platform so he steps onto it. He comes across another raised platform so he steps onto that one as well … only see more such raised platforms, all layered over one another in the form of stairs. He eagerly investigates these stairs and discovers himself lost in a maze of stairs leading upwards or downwards in random ways. He determinedly wanders all over the terraced landscape, trying to find the highest point of these stairs – but the only problem is whether his body and spirit will give out before he finds the staircase of all staircases, overseeing its ziggurat dominion, and discovers the whole raison d’etre for this massive tiered sculpture.

Comparable to a much later Polish animation, Tomasz Baginski’s “The Cathedral”, “Stairs” is as barebones in its style and story-telling as can be: the trumpet-dominated music follows the travails of the little character and reflects something of his frustrations in its melodies and plaintive tones. Although the film might seem long for its 7 minutes due to its narrow focus, there is a reason for that apparent obsession: the journey is hard and arduous, the character cannot go back or retrace his steps but must continue his quest, and the whole lanscape around him is seen to be unforgiving. There may very well be a hidden commentary about navigating one’s way through a brutal and uncaring bureaucratic society or trying to find meaning in one’s life when everything around is indifferent. Because the film is so minimalist in its theme and presentation, and lacks a context the viewer can relate to, it becomes timeless: viewers can attribute whatever message that seems most relevant to them to the film and the film communicates that message back so well. Having seen “The Cathedral”, I imputed the message of that film to “Stairs” but had I seen something else with a different message and theme but a similar story, I might have interpreted “Stairs” very differently.

Deceptively simple but very powerful indeed.

Les Jeux des Anges: blackly humorous indictment of concentration camps and police-state societies

Walerian Borowczyk, “Les Jeux des Anges” (1964)

So far the strangest film I have seen from Borowczyk, “Les Jeux …” at first doesn’t appear to have anything resembling a plot but on second viewing I realised the short is a minimalist satire of the concentration camp experience in WW2-era Poland and of Soviet-style collectivisation of agriculture in Poland’s post-war period. The first half of the film is a survey of a factory, its tools and machinery; the second half shows how human beings are processed by the machinery in the manner of a sausage-machine (I use the metaphor very euphemistically) into angels.

The original film’s colours emphasised red but in the version I saw on Youtube, the predominant colours were variations of dark blue and grey which made the film more sombre and depressing to look at but not so much so that I couldn’t appreciate Borowczyk’s blackly wicked humour which turns church-organ pipes into rifle butts and people’s heads into so many little metal balls to roll down little funnels while the camera’s focus switches from one funnel to the next and back in clockwork rhythms. A glamorous blow-up doll figure, possibly representing a warped mother / Virgin Mary figure, presides over the factory work.

A minimal approach is used to portray the factory and its interiors with an emphasis on repetition; there is no narration which forces the viewer to watch the film’s proceedings closely and judge for him/herself what the message is. Several shots are done “close-up” to various subjects and acquire a very abstract quality that Borowczyk uses to advance the film’s theme and “narrative”, and for comic, satirical effect as when he turns the pipes into weapons. The music soundtrack which features much church organ is droll, cheerful and unnerving; its association with the industrial processing of humans into angels speaks mountains about organised religion’s all-too-ready acquiescence to powerful political elites and its willingness to co-operate in the subjugation and oppression of populations.

The angels are sent out on the train tracks in a way that suggests their function is to collect more human materiel for angel-making and so the film concludes as it begins in a closed loop. A more devastating indictment of a police-state society and culture couldn’t be made in a film that blankly and silently presents its case in just under 10 minutes. Perhaps the true horror of such states is to be found in the film’s banal presentation of the factory and its inner workings: the matter-of-fact, almost casual yet relentless and repetitive mass-production processing of death.

Crime and Punishment (dir. Piotr Dumala): unusual and subtle animation no substitute for lack of plot and unsatisfactory resolution

Piotr Dumala, “Crime and Punishment / Zbrodnia i Kara” (2000)

The style of animation associated with Piotr Dumala is unusual and often emotionally intense: using plasterboard painted in black under a camera, he scratches white lines with a needle and creates drawings with considerable line-hatching to achieve a 3-D effect and subtlety in mood and changes of mood. By necessity at times, there is a strong emphasis on negative shapes and outlining, shading of characters and objects, shadows and night-time: overall, a suitable background context in which sinister, almost unconscious events can take place away from the public gaze. The look of Dumala’s films can be fragile: characters appear to be sensitive, existentially tormented people and objects, even buildings, seem impermanent in keeping with the animator’s aim to present the unsteady inner life of his main student character before and after the crime he commits.

“Crime and Punishment” is very loosely based on the original Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel. Although the film short in itself is technically accomplished, its plot is very weakly developed: it builds up quite slowly to the central student character’s killing of the old woman and her sister and thereafter falls apart. No attempt on Dumala’s part to portray the student’s internal anguish and guilt over killing the two women, no young woman to offer comfort to the student (and in so doing, add to his turmoil as he wrestles with his conscience) and an anti-climax in which the student finally gives himself up to the authorities, is tried, convicted and banished to several years’ hard labour in a Siberian camp … all this completely disappears. It becomes obvious that the novel serves mainly as inspiration for Dumala’s own superficial version in which animation artfully demonstrates emotion and changes in emotion; the film is little more than an unusual art film. In this version, the student anti-hero appears to be tempted or provoked by an older man, who may or may not be Satan in disguise, to carry out the crime; the student later feels remorse, some depression and loneliness and is driven to kill himself. There is not much character development here and viewers won’t feel much sympathy for the student. Given that Dumala by 2000 had nearly 20 years’ animation experience, the lack of a definite story narrative, whether linear or not, is a complete disappointment. While Dumala is at liberty to reject large chunks of the Dostoyevsky novel as it suits, by throwing out most of it he has ended up with a story that is banal. A man takes his time agonising whether he should dock a horrible woman, does so almost by accident and spends the rest of the film feeling guilty

The pace of the story is slow and much attention given to the slightest of movements which reflect internal emotional states; eyes and faces in particular are rendered finely and sensitively, and have a very sharp sculptured appearance. No dialogue appears and the whole film is carried by a piano-dominated musical soundtrack. The city landscapes are spooky: there’s no hustle and bustle on the streets, horse-drawn carriages are uncommon and people, on crossing a bridge over a river, make gesticulations and other movements that suggest they might throw themselves over the edge of the bridge! All the splendid artwork Dumala does here is a mind-boggling labour of love: I can’t imagine his particular style of destructive animation readily lends itself to quick, easy work – but his obsession with his form of animation means he neglects the film as a story-telling vehicle.

“Crime and Punishment” could have been a very great film indeed if Dumala had drawn more inspiration from the novel and maybe developed the film short’s plot further so it includes redemption or at least an attempt to reconcile the families and connections of the student and his victims.