The Deadman

A woman leaves her dead lover and staggers through torrential rain to a dingy bar where she fucks, sucks and pisses on the assembled staff and clientèle. Based on a story by Georges Bataille, high-priest of Erotico-Necro Theory, The Deadman is a joyless exercise in the transgressive imagination that gets its kicks defiling the mouldering body of silent cinema. Shot through monochrome drizzle with an exaggeratedly raw soundtrack that makes every cough a thunderous eruption, every urinary trickle a sonic deluge, the story is framed as a fragment from some apocryphal silent era, the libertine visuals intercut with funereally solemn, wryly redundant intertitles. As a dour exercise in 'anti-porn', liberating excess from the titillating rhetoric of 'erotic' cinema, you can see where it's aiming, but it never really engages the viewer in any interrogation of the viewing process, largely because it's dull.