Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer is an homage to '70s giallo, a riff on erotic slasher-horror movies made by the likes of Mario "Twitch of the Death Nerve" Bava and Sergio "Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key" Martino -- not to mention, of course, those made by the genre's maestro, Dario Argento.
But instead of fashioning Amer into a nostalgic exercise, Cattet and Forzani have taken some of the key identifying elements of giallo -- artfully salacious nudity, razors slicing into bare flesh like butter, the greatest-hits image of a single, unblinking eye peeping through a keyhole -- and distilled them into a dream scrapbook of alluring cut-and-paste images. Unsettling, energizing and more than a little mystifying, Amer is the kind of movie that may leave you feeling indifferent or puzzled at the end. But damned if it doesn't return, days later, to visit -- kind of like a killer in black leather gloves.
Amer -- which is a French-Belgian coproduction -- is low on plot, but by the end, the subtle threads of a story do begin to emerge. The picture is divided into three sections: In the first, a child -- her name is Ana, and she's played by Cassandra Forêt -- listens mutely as her parents argue about, we assume, her crazy granny, who has locked herself in an upstairs room to perform strange spells and stuff. Ana can't resist peeking into the room -- through the keyhole, of course -- where she spies grandpa's dead body and other assorted curiosities. We get other snippets of her bored existence: When she sits down to dinner, all by herself, she dips her spoon into a stew made of who-knows-what. (It's filmed in a way that suggests a swarm of maggots will start writhing though the sauce any second -- the fact that they never appear is kind of a dour, witty joke.)
Before you've even begun to figure out what's going on in the first section of Amer, we're on to part two, in which an adolescent Ana trails behind her mother as the two set out on some sort of summer road trip. Ana, by this point, has a Lolita pout (the actress who plays her is Charlotte Eugéne-Guibbaud) and a habit of chewing a thin strand of her hair -- the gesture is perhaps partly an expression of boredom, partly a kind of seductive affectation. Either way, the scrawny preteen lad she encounters when she and her mother reach their destination is captivated; she spurns him, of course. This section of Amer is less about horror-film conventions than it is about mother-daughter psychosexual rivalry -- which, you could argue, is its own kind of horror.
Cinematographer Manuel Dacosse gives the movie's middle section a dreamy, golden, half-awake quality, which leads beautifully into the last third, where Amer shifts into something of a hyperalert dream state. Ana, now grown up (and played by Maria Bos), has returned to the mysterious mansion-like house of her childhood. (In real life, this magnificent, semi-creepy house is located in the South of France, although Forzani has said in interviews that he fears it will soon be torn down, since it's been vacant for decades.) It appears that someone is following her -- might it be the handsome cab driver who brought her there from the train station? Or maybe no one is following her -- who knows? Ana is now a full-fledged temptress: At one point she lounges in an empty bathtub adorned with lit candles; trickles of water eventually appear in the tub, though it's not clear where -- or who -- they're coming from.
Very little is ever spelled out in Amer, but its opacity is part of its seductive mystery. Sometimes the movie is barely horrific at all -- it bears a resemblance to some of Catherine Breillat's coming-of-age films, or to another France-Belgium (and also UK and Japanese) production, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's 2004 Innocence, set in a half-idyllic, half-sinister boarding school for girls, a story that becomes a not-so-metaphorical metaphor for the end of childhood.
The crowning glory of Amer is a gruesome, elegantly cut sequence in which a switchblade is used (by whom? Who knows?) to desecrate the perfect skin of a victim's throat; it also perches, just millimeters away, from a wide-open eye. The sequence is too stylish to be funny -- it's not the sort of thing that first scares you, and then makes you laugh at yourself for being scared. Haughty, cold and beautiful, it's more like an odd but masterfully designed piece of jewelry than a film sequence: I watched through two fingers, but I couldn't look away. I still can't really explain Amer to you -- its images keep slipping through the noose of mere words -- and it's really more a visual study than an out-and-out horror film, anyway. But if its approach is at times overly clinical, in the end, it goes for the jugular with a velvet touch. Its chilly embrace is harder to escape than you might think.