Karmadonna
Jelena (Jelena Djokic), pregnant by IVF, is strolling in a park where non-innocent children lay violently into each other when her mobile rings. It’s Siddhartha, more familiarly known as the Buddha, and he’s changing his blissed-out Zen image and wants Jelena to murder a few dozen people for him … because they’re all rotten to the core and deserve it, but also because his prime targets have all been responsible for the fall of his son Bane (Milos Lolic) – no relation to the Batman back-breaker, I think – who has gone from potential messiah to institutionalised madman star of a reality TV show. Um, well, fair enough. Buddha doesn’t just rely on persuasion but shows he can inflict pain or pleasure at will and so Jelena has little choice but to do his bidding … though her encounters with the kind of gits this God wants to die nudge her towards his brand of divine vengeance. Things start with a crooked cop and a taxi driver nostalgic for the gang rape days before regulation, then run to an influencer creep (Petar Strugar) who has written a self-help book about depression and his gangsterish father Nadjan (Milutin Kradzic) … escalating to Bane’s definitely mad, possibly demonic keepers Kronjac (Milos Timotijevic) and Danica (Milica Stefanovic).
The hook here isn’t a thousand miles away from other terror-by-voice-setting-challenges suspense-splatter films, though roping in Buddha is a genuine twist – even if the film is light on actual Buddhism and the Buddha-Bane setup feels a lot more like an Old Testament Jehovah and Jesus only writer-director Aleksandar Radivojevic (writer of – you guessed it – A Serbian Film) knows better than to piss off a relgion less known for living and let live than Buddhism. Karmadonna has a distinctive look – widescreen with a camera seesawing to make every scene queasy even if it doesn’t include male organs going into a blender, décor which takes its cues from a brutalist James Cameron tribute nightclub and some sort of insane asylum – and initially holds the attention mostly thanks to Djokic giving the only subtle turn in a film otherwise characterised by near-feral overacting to satiric purpose. Jelena’s first few encounters with awful people, as conversations evolve into violent clashes, make their points and there are even one or two subtleties, like the taxi driver speeding off to unspecified but well-earned punishment. But at the mid-point, when more and more crazy ghastly people get involved and talk gives way to flogging-a-dead-horse ultraviolence then the two hour running time begins to feel punitive.
Discussion
No comments yet.