FrightFest review – Crushed (2025)
I first heard about ‘crush videos’, a minority interest genre of sado-porn involving fetishist trampling of small animals by high-heels, in Simon Rumley’s entry in The ABCs of Death. I have no doubt it’s real but also am not particularly inclined to do online research to confirm or deny that such a product exists. Writer-director Rumley returns to this subject with a feature film which is mercifully inexplicit in what it shows us, though goes in harrowing depth into the effect a viewing of a crush video has on ten-year-old cat owner Olivia (Margaux Dietrich).
The daughter of Bangkok-resident Anglican priest Daniel (Steve Oram) and his Thai wife May (May Nattaporn Rawddon), Olivia is shown the video by the teenage son of one of Daniel’s church colleagues, who is numb to the effect it might have – he thinks of it as no different from a scary movie. As an indirect result of the hysterics caused by the traumatic viewing, Olivia’s own cat Missy, so named because when they’re apart the little girl misses her pet, goes missing (ahem). Suddenly aware of humanity’s capacity for evil and not too impressed by her father’s insistence that God will bring justice, Olivia becomes a little sleuth in her neighbourhood – which gets her into a bad situation with Stanley (Christian Ferriera), the producer of the crush videos. Stanley, estranged from his own children, immediately sees that by selling the girl to an American paedophile (Jonathan Samson) he can raise enough money to get back to South Africa and perhaps repair his relationship – though, just as the parents of the missing girl are subjected to crises of faith, Stanley’s commitment to callous evil is stretched as he gets a sense of just what the Hawaiian-shirted sweaty overweight creep is likely to do to the little ‘princess’.
An inescapable fact about micro-niche porn is that to anyone who doesn’t have the particular fetish it’s simply ridiculous – though, in this case, the animal cruelty makes it hard to find all that funny (which wouldn’t stop, say, Troma making a comedy about the subject). Rumley knows this and goes the other way, underplaying even the angst as key characters are forced to reassess their core beliefs. It’s intricately-plotted, and intercuts several strands of story in order to make connections, juxtapositions and contrasts … at least two key plot turns involve what audiences might consider miracles (one is an old, welcome cinematic convention) but the characters whose faith is strained aren’t in a position to realise this and slip further into the darkness. There are also near-demonic levels of wickedness unpunished and martrydoms inflicted on the less guilty, climaxing in another kind of crush video staged in an oblique manner which avoids a comic aspect but has to be taken as some sort of ultimate deadpan joke.
Rumley’s films are all deliberately uncomfortable watches but he’s extremely sensitive in his handling of extreme subject matter. Here, he gets extraordinarily nuanced performances out of Oram, Rawddon, Ferriera and Dietrich – even characters who usually drift to the sidelines in pictures about abduction and revenge are given depth. A theme of the film is that children are as incomprehensible as cats and one key bit of inexplicable behaviour on Olivia’s part (perhaps influenced by a turn in William Faulkner’s abduction novel Sanctuary) has a ripple effect perhaps as dreadful as that idiot showing her the video in the first place … but it’s also a sacrifice made in the hope of divine reward.
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