Dead Europe - Film Review

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Thu 15 Nov 2012 - Mon 31 Dec 2012

Soon after his father's tragic death, a young photographer named Isaac decides to travel from Australia to Greece, in order to finally lay his father's ashes to rest. However upon his many travels, the young photographer soon discovers a powerful curse running throughout his family. Despite attempting to distract himself with copious amounts of random sex and drugs, Isaac cannot seem to pull himself away from that terrible occurrence, which involved his father and an adolescent Jewish boy.



Dead Europe certainly achieves it's main aim with much ease; that is appearing to be depressingly aware of the world around us, maintaining a constant heavy flow of drama between the main characters, and remaining beautifully shot for a significant proportion of its duration. However this undoubtedly decent effort from the entire cast and crew is somewhat cursed by a few obvious flaws. The two main glaring problems I had with Dead Europe was the unnecessarily messy narrative, and the rather paper thin character arc. Having not yet read Christos Tsoliakis's original novel from which this is adapted from, it is rather difficult to tell where the story telling went wrong, or whether this was simply a tale much more suited to paper. Whatever the exact issue was, it is rather surprising how the screenwriter, producer and director all blatantly overlooked it.



For those who are expecting this to be 2012's answer to Animal Kingdom, prepare to be incredibly disappointed. Although if you crave nitty gritty Australian drama like ants to sugar, then this might just be your bleak cup of tea.



I request just one thing from any interested readers before you go out and buy your ticket, that is allowing me to leave you with a fair warning. None of the confronting material portrayed in this feature is for the simple sake of pure exploitation, in fact the film itself seems to rather detest it, however it will remain nonetheless highly disturbing to at least some. Throughout Dead Europe we are exposed to frequent references/images of the following; full frontal nudity, sex, murder, coarse language, violence, rape, incest, child abuse, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, paedophilia, child prostitution and drug abuse. I wish to say I hope you sincerely enjoy this feature, but that probably isn't in the most tasteful choice of words.



6/10

OFLC (Office of Film and Literature Classification) rating:


Still In The Mood For Australian Cinema ?
Try[LINK=http://www.weekendnotes.com/i-am-eleven-film-review/] I Am Eleven
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!date 15/11/2012 -- 31/12/2012
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