Review #688: 'A Serbian Film' (2010)

If you like your horror movies extreme, then chances are you would have heard of, or seen, Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film. Pushing boundaries of taboo to their very extremities, the movie features rape, paedophilia, necrophilia, and all manners of degrading acts, mainly towards women. It also features a scene where a women gives birth to a baby, only to hand it to a man who then rapes it. They call it 'newborn porn'. The most terrible thing abut A Serbian Film is the way it tries to disguise its cheap exploitation tactics as some kind of social allegory of life in Serbia.

Retired porn star Milos (Srdjan Todorovic) is a man that knows little apart from how to please a girl, and audiences, on screen. Bored with his life, but happy with his wife and child, he is drawn into a mysterious new film by a whopping pay cheque. The movie's eccentric director, Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic), keeps the production close to the chest, promising it to be a piece of high art and something that its audience is crying out for. Filming begins at an abandoned children's orphanage, and things take a downward turn from there as it becomes apparent that Milos has been drawn into a snuff movie.

I can appreciate the film's themes, certainly. With the availability of the internet and its most popular asset, porn (as well as other mediums of humiliation such as Youtube), has become so accessible that society has become obsessed with masochism and degradation. A Serbian Film attempts to challenge our desires by showing the most repulsive things that its director can come up with. So, we get to see a man raping his own six year-old son and the blood spattering from his anus and down his legs. How exactly is this repulsive imagery supposed to make us reflect? Perhaps if the cheap tactics weren't so laughably obvious and exploitative, this may have been a powerful message.

Even more disturbingly, A Serbian Film looks very nice. The cinematography, lighting, and even the acting is akin to your standard A-grade movie, so the film occasionally achieves a hint of atmosphere. But ultimately, this is from the Hostel School of Torture Porn, and revels too much in its own misery and blood-shed to take seriously. This is simply unpleasant viewing, which is fine, as long as it's relevant. I simply don't see how knocking a woman's teeth out and then choking her to death on an erect penis serves as a metaphor for Serbian society. I just don't buy it.


Directed by: Srdjan Spasojevic
Starring: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic
Country: Serbia

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie