Piercing

Provocation without a point, Piercing represents the worst tendencies of wannabe shock auteurs whose main reference point is earlier, better movies. Writer-director Nicolas Pesce (whose previous feature was 2016's Eyes of My Mother, a formally different but thematically similar wallow in the motivations of murder) turns Ryū Murakami's 1994 novel into a sleazy tribute to giallo movies (and by extension Brian De Palma movies), slathering the screen with splitscreen effects, bold yellow titles, and a brazenly artificial setting populated with miniature sets. Meanwhile, the soundtrack blares with music lifted from earlier giallo movies like Deep Red and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, the groovy off-kilter melodies of Bruno Nicolai and Goblin accompanying the sadism. It all makes for an eye-catching diversion, but after a while the emptiness and pomposity of Pesce's approach become more irritating than involving.    

The first scene makes it clear that we're in pseudo-shock value territory: a young father named Reed (Christopher Abbott) stands over his infant daughter's crib with an ice pick and murderous intent. Thankfully he's roused from his delirium by his wife, who inquires about his upcoming business trip; before long, he's coddling his newborn and imagines that it's rasping lethal directives at him, ordering him to tie up, kill, and dismember a prostitute in order to unleash his sadistic proclivities. 

In a swanky hotel room that's art-directed with zero regard for realism (to its benefit), Reed rehearses his imminent murder, a bouncy Brazilian pop song on the soundtrack. As we watch him go through the motions of strangulation and decapitation, the sound effects are audible to the audience (and to Reed), leaving us to imagine the grisly images. It's a creative, squirm-inducing scene, and the purpose seems to be to place us in the mind of a soon-to-be serial killer, but the aesthetic is so pronounced and the tone so gruesomely jokey that it's impossible for us to relate to this blank cypher of a character; any attempts to investigate what's going on in this man's head are left solely up to the viewer. 

Eventually a prostitute named Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) arrives in a black leather outfit, and although she needs alcohol to loosen her up (even more than the drugs she apparently has already taken), she seems willing to indulge Reed in his S&M experiments. But just when we think the movie is heading towards misogynist, torture-porn brutality, the plot is radically reversed, gender roles are inverted, the power dynamics of sadomasochism are brought to the fore, and the sexual symbolism of stabbing/penetration is winkingly underlined for the audience. And this is before Reed consumes a hallucinogenic drug and envisions surreal imagery that evokes trauma from his past, including a little girl who slaughters a rabbit and the nasty sexual proclivities of his prostitute mother, which Reed was forced to witness as a child. 

As this plot outline suggests, Piercing pretends to enter the mind of a serial killer, questioning what kind of repressed traumas and innate drives would make someone want to satisfy spectacularly gruesome urges. Murakami's novel more ably achieved this psychological penetration, exploring the motivations that underlie unthinkable crimes and contextualizing it within the economic dominance of its Tokyo setting. Murakami also wrote the novel on which Audition was based, but Takashi Miike's adaptation effectively evokes the sexual power struggles and resurgent trauma implicit in the concept. Pesce's adaptation of Piercing, however, is so aggressively stylized, so derivative of previous horror movies and so enraptured by visual artifice, that gender themes and character study are held at arms' length. In some movies, style is substance, with the crafting of an oneiric, formalist world being the entire point; but in others (like Piercing), the visual gimmickry and cinematic allusions are at odds with what the film is ostensibly trying to do. We're left with a grisly, torrid S&M show that clearly has nothing on its mind beyond provocation. 

Piercing

Grade: C–

Runtime: 81m.
Country: USA
Premiere: January 20, 2018 (Sundance Film Festival)
US Release: February 1, 2019

Director: Nicolas Pesce
Producers: Antonio Campos, Josh Mond, Jacob Wasserman, Schuyler Weiss
Writers: ​Nicolas Pesce, Ryū    Murakami (novel)
Cinematography: Zack Galler
Editor: Sofía Subercaseaux
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Mia Wasikowska, Laia Costa

That would be excusable if the film's aesthetic were unique or remarkable enough to maintain interest, and it's true that the meticulously crafted miniatures are Piercing's most compelling feature. (The best scene, actually, is the closing credits, set to Goblin's incredible score for Tenebre.) The lush set design also deserves mention, as each locale does seem to be embedded within Reed's darkly erotic fantasy world. But once the surface visual appeal wears off, the shallowness of the movie is made clear. 

Mia Wasikowska does what she can with an underwritten role, as she often does; Jackie's repeated self-harm and the eagerness with which she turns Reed's viciousness against him are hardly explored (emotionally or thematically), though Wasikowska brings shades of depth to the character's erratic behavior. (That said, 2018's Damsel offers a more interesting Wasikowska character who vehemently unsettles the gender roles of the genre and setting.) As Reed, Christopher Abbott looks the part, but he wears a blank expression throughout 95% of the movie, with that ambiguity apparently meant to denote a complex and turbulent state of mind. 

Strangely, where the movie really begins to derail itself is in the second half, when it begins to indulge a fondness for surreal, horrific hallucination. There are lush red carpets that meld into characters' skin, a nasty little succubus that enters a character through the eyeball, a prostitute with her bathrobe hanging open, a festering wound on her gut exposing her innards. These are arresting images on the surface, but Pesce presents them with overly glib satisfaction, content to throw them at the audience with no underlying meaning. And while Piercing tries to be a progressive work that reverses the gender roles of the horror genre, it still succumbs to casual sexism in its images of virginal young girls killing rabbits and haggard old prostitutes smoking cigarettes with their breasts exposed. It's a pseudo-feminist movie made by someone who clearly has no interest in plumbing his female characters, except in the most literal, ice-pick-to-the-abdomen sense.