Gravy

Instead of a biting spectacle that blends humour with cannibalism and murder, we get an exhausting, wordy flick with overwrought dialogue, in which every character has at the ready a sharp bon mot, ideally with the scope of a long newspaper report, for every situation. The narrative about a group of characters held captive in a windowless restaurant by a gang of deranged maniacs who want to gradually savour their prisoners physically and gastronomically is given a cruel meta-level when the film, with its changing demeanour through irrational diffusion and exaggeration, sucks the life out of viewers to the point that they can’t even leave the screening room. Another level of this meta-horror movie is the characters’ Orwellian lot in life, as they are deprived of their own will and have to deliver moronic lines and act like idiots at the instigation of a sadistic screenwriter. Gravy comes across like one of the many 1990s clones of Tarantino movies, whose makers also thought that clever monologues and bizarre characters were enough to be successful. Unfortunately, this is further accompanied by the syndrome of shitty post-quality TV, where if you don’t have real quality, you just beat the audience into submission with spectacularly fake sophistication. (27.02.2014)