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| Images courtesy of Syrena Films |
Which brings us to Skolimowski’s 2010 pure action thriller Essential
Killing, a “kind of” war film stripped bare of its sociopolitical leanings
and alliances, offering up a nonjudgmental character study of a man backed into
a corner using his every means to survive just a few more minutes. The story is an exceedingly simple one: Gallo
plays mute Arabic Taliban soldier Mohammed who kills three U.S. soldiers in the
desert mounds of Afghanistan. Upon
capture and imprisonment inside a secret prison replete with waterboarding,
Mohammed is passed around military personnel before being transported with
other prisoners to Poland when a car accident on icy roads capsizes the car and
provides a window of escape for Mohammed.
The remainder of the film is a relentless pursuit and physical endurance
test that gets increasingly suffocating and overwhelming.
An astonishing feat of physical acting for Gallo and predating
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar winning endurances on Iñárritu’s The Revenant by
five years, Skolimowski’s reunion with The Shout producer Jeremy Thomas
and first collaboration with Gallo is one of the greatest action films of the 2010s
few if any American filmgoers have actually seen. Outside of Roger Ebert’s endorsement, Gallo winning
the Best Actor award alongside Skolimowski’s Special Jury Prize win at the
Venice Film Festival, like most of Skolimowski’s uncompromising works the film
slipped under the radar. Watching the
film is every bit of a relentless experiential experimental journey through sight,
sound and key editing as you’d expect from the Polish maestro.
Shot
on location in Israel, Poland and Norway in the winter by The Mill and the Cross cinematographer Adam Sikora, Essential Killing utilizes the
director’s interspersal of handheld photography, wide shots and a tendency
towards Dutch angles. The soundtrack by
eventual EO composer Paweł Mykietyn is a freeform avant-garde atonal
soundscape veering between nebulous fear and a poignant sense of doom, as
though we’re pursuing a character not aiming for a positive ending.
Though Gallo doesn’t utter one word of
dialogue and side-characters English/Polish dialogue is incidental at best, Essential
Killing is like a new kind of silent filmmaking where the imagery and sound
design is navigating us through the story.
While Skolimowski provides scattershot flashbacks to Mohammed’s life
before finding himself a fugitive, Essential Killing keeps things vague
enough for us to fill in the blanks ourselves.
Mostly you feel for Gallo’s character after awhile regardless of your
leanings, simply pitting a man against the elements in a fierce wordless battle
for survival.
Like
most of Skolimowski’s works, Essential Killing is the kind of film you
have to surrender yourself to and go along with its labyrinthine journey into
hard and heavy wooded areas in the dead of freezing cold winter. Arguably an even harder watch than the
aforementioned The Revenant with just a bit more daring in some areas (an
encounter with a woman and her baby will shock a few viewers), Essential
Killing might be the quintessential Gallo performance suffering physically
and mentally for his art.
A film that
must’ve been painstaking to make let alone watch, Jerzy Skolimowski’s short but
sweet action adventure survival epic is one of the very best examples of the
endurance film on the globe. Besides
being a continuation of the director’s ingenious streak of cinematic and artistic
grandeur, Skolimowski’s film serves as something of a redemption piece for Vincent
Gallo. Whether you still like Gallo or
not after the film remains to be seen, but you will come away with a new
measure of respect for the man and the risks he took for this one-of-a-kind
actioner.
--Andrew Kotwicki
