Vile

Most filmmakers have at least one outlier in their resume;  a project that served as a proving ground or first break that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of their oeuvre.  Right now, Taylor Sheridan is sitting at the top of his profession, having earned critical respect and financial success as a screenwriter (Sicario, Hell or High Water), director (Wind River) and creative mastermind (Yellowstone and its many spinoffs).  But in 2011 he was making his directorial debut with Vile, a nasty bit of Saw inspired torture porn that shows barely a glimmer of his future talent.  

Kidnapped and locked-down in a barricaded home, 9 people awake with a medical device strapped to the back of their necks.  A video succinctly explains their situation.  They are unwilling participants in a  drug “harvesting” process in which chemicals produced by their brain during moments of extreme duress fill up the implanted vials.  In order to earn their freedom, they must cause each other enough physical pain to reach 100% capacity.  How – and to whom – that pain occurs is up to them.

 

Writer Eric Beck, who also plays the lead role, doesn’t waste any time getting to the good stuff; we jump right into a gory vivisection before the credits even roll.  From there our characters resort to burning, boiling, stabbing and clubbing each other in an attempt to produce enough “juice” to free themselves.  Like an episode of Survivor gone horribly wrong, there are also plenty of secret alliances, double-crosses and free agents in it just for themselves.  And, even if you can’t stomach the scenario, you have to admit there’s a plenty of material to work with.

 

A clever director might have sensed the been-there-done-that aspect of Vile’s exploitation aesthetic and amped up the ridiculousness of the situation.  After all, watching 9 strangers take turns breaking each other’s collar bones and brand themselves with waffle irons practically demands some comic relief.  But Sheridan plays it all deadly serious, even laying down a wildly inappropriate music score that generates more eye rolls than sympathy.  It takes skill to shoot a locked-door mystery in one location with this many characters and, credit where credit is due, Sheridan handles the mechanics of things very efficiently.  But his intuition as a filmmaker still needed a few years to develop.

 

Released on Blu-ray courtesy of MVD, Vile has a distinctly flat video look inherent to the original shooting style.  It’s not pretty, but it looks intentional.  Extras include a couple of deleted scenes and a trailer.