 |
| Image courtesy Uncork'd Entertainment |
Imagine a scientist so power-hungry and demented that they would force medical procedures on innocent people under the pretense of helping the human race at all costs. Imagine that scientist being remunerated in exuberant amounts by desperate millionaires who do not care how their business destroys lives as long as they get their place in the future. No, this does not pertain to current events or breaking news of our beloved global dystopia. This is the basic plotline of Danish horror film, Breeder.
Breeder is about a ruthless scientist, Dr. Isabel Ruben (Signe Egholm Olsen) who elicits a partnership with a skillful financial adviser, Thomas Lindberg (Anders Heinrichsen) to partner in the establishment of a medical facility. This medical facility mostly concerns the pursuit of longevity and at its helm, Dr. Ruben makes preposterous claims of practically perpetual youth to those who come to her for treatment. However, when Thomas’ wife, Mia (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen) finds out that a neighborhood au pair had gone missing after a botched kidnapping, she investigates and what ensues is absolutely horrific when she herself becomes one of Dr. Ruben’s subjects.
The film starts with a bland introduction to Mia and her strained sexual relationship with her husband, based on the suggestion of his problem with infertility. At first, it is a very simple and casual look into the couple’s relationship and vocations, but once Breeder starts getting nasty, the film transforms into a nightmare of medical experimentation and human suffering.
Mia is captured by Ruben, but even while Thomas implores Ruben to let his wife go, he is strangely pacifist about it all…or is he? This only exacerbates things for Mia, who gradually begins to realize the extent of Ruben’s depravity and the abhorrent practices she employs to create the wonder elixir that would make her richer than Midas.
The film is heavy, moody and runs at a stiff pace of abuse, desperation and evil. A decrepit looking old factory is the setting where Ruben and her minions – called The Dog and The Pig, respectively – hold all the kidnapped women. They use their captives’ forced pregnancies by artificial insemination to harvest Ruben’s apparent secret to youth from babies.
Breeder’s abandoned factory presents a powerful metaphor about how facades of pristine facilities with helpful doctors usually get their bread from the cockroach-riddled kitchen of experimentation and torture. The cold harshness of the factory gives a perfect ambience for all the visceral atrocities we witness, but somehow, Breeder is less of a torture porn film and more of a stance of ethics and morality.
Many of the scenes are emotionally disturbing in that they evoke our own feelings of helplessness and need for freedom of choice. The acting is down the middle, believable, but uninteresting, save for Morten Holst, who portrays The Dog with a chilling indifference under his obvious misogynist psychosis. Of all the main characters, The Dog is the only one that makes you wonder about his origins.
Breeder is a cold, ugly Hostel-ish kind of film, but it uses setting, lighting and effects to impress a visual hell upon us. It excels at provoking emotion and disgust at what is realistic in the annals of science and so-called progress. With women in cement cages where you can practically smell the urine and blood, Breeder effectively makes you think. It begs the question – just how much poking and provoking do we take from cruel captors before we actively begin to bite back?
-Tasha Danzig
