Princess

There’s defrocking a-plenty in this grotty, anti-porn polemic from young Danish director Anders Morgenthaler, as the strange death of a celebrated porn starlet known as The Princess prompts her clergyman brother to renounce his faith and dedicate his remaining days to tracking down the monsters who led his sister to an early grave. There’s an unsettling pot/kettle logic at the film’s core as Morgenthaler seems to blame the porn industry for all of society’s ills in one breath, then offers up leery images of sexualised tots and eye-wateringly graphic violence in another. As such, potential thematic focus towards the Catholic anxieties so beloved of Abel Ferrara and the lone male miscreants of Paul Schrader’s films goes unfulfilled in favour of stock revenge-thriller histrionics, addressing the issues at hand with a rabble-rousing tabloid approach. Unstable ethics aside, you’d be hard pressed to fault the animation, a colourful, smooth and innovative riff on the classic anime style, interspersed with slickly rendered live-action cutaways. Sure, the rage is palpable in every cell, but poise and rational thinking are sadly lacking.