Shudder Streaming: Trouble Every Day (2001) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Shudder

The cannibal film or that troublesome subgenre depicting humans eating one another’s flesh and blood, has gone all around the map.  Whether it be the inception of the subgenre in Cornel Wilde’s 1965 action-adventure The Naked Prey to its logical end with the reprehensible Cannibal Holocaust, the cinematic depiction of another human biting off and eating the living flesh of another human is generally associated with exploitation horror.  

But around the 2000s with the then-burgeoning New French Extreme subgenre spearheaded by such provocateurs as Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noe, the face of the cannibal film began to change considerably, bookended by Titane director Julia Ducournau’s Raw and especially by High Life realisateur Claire Denis’ French-English 2001 shocker Trouble Every Day.

 
Disaffected American Dr. Shane Brown (a wolf-like Vincent Gallo) and his fair wife June (Tricia Vessey) venture to Paris for their honeymoon.  In actuality its a ruse for Dr. Brown to track down a fellow neuroscientist named Dr. Leo Semeneau (Alex Descas) and his wife Core (Lux Aeterna’s Beatrice Dalle) whom he’s had a fixation on for years.  

Descending on his former colleague’s home, he makes a startling discovery: Core may in fact be a serial cannibal murderer with her devoted husband there to cover up her crimes by hiding the bodies.  Despite the gravity of this, it proves secondary to the carnal animalistic impulses she awakens in him after they meet.   
 
Currently on Shudder’s streaming service, this corrosive, elliptical, drenched-in-viscera exploration of the gulf between cannibalism and carnality (often working as one) is at once an uncompromising work of feminist art and a fearless headlong dive into sexual transgression.  The kind of film that is difficult to talk about plainly given its extremity, the film opening on a mournful opening cue by composer Tindersticks has the skin of a moody French drama that gradually unfurls to reveal its blood-and-semen soaked fangs.  As with High Life with Robert Pattinson, the film is an uncomfortable fluid dripping confrontation and cornering of the viewer that dares you to either walk out or shut the film off.

 
In addition to Denis’ astute, assured direction lensed beautifully by frequent collaborator Agnes Godard which has the hand of a master guiding us through the crimson and feces, the film presents an Antichrist level of bravery and conviction from the actors.  Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle all but completely leap off of the far end of the limb welcoming the impending pandemonium and chum with open arms.

Dalle who has been a sex symbol in film for years before becoming one of the faces of New French Extreme horror with Inside gives an astonishing physical performance, almost transcendent as she moves about the cold interior of the household casually bathing the walls in blood.  Gallo generally plays an iteration of himself in the movies, judging from Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny, but here the character of a cold and distant doctor yearning for an unquenchable thirst represents pitch perfect casting with Gallo.

 
Unlike other cannibal horror shockers designed simply to frighten or disgust the viewer, Denis’ Trouble Every Day confidently charges right past a lot of them.  A genuinely deeply disturbing, upsetting and oddly enlightening treatise on the raw, deeply buried animalistic urges lurking beneath civilized gender politics and daring exploration of the limits of the horror film itself, Trouble Every Day means to get past your barriers while also being intensely difficult to digest.  Not everyone will be able to stomach this fiercely ferocious beast of an arthouse film, but the brave few will be left with a lot to ponder when the end credits finally roll.

--Andrew Kotwicki