“Livid” Movie Review – World Premiere at TIFF

Sept 10 2011 – Tonight at midnight I attended the world premiere of a French horror flick entitled Livid at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This showing is part of the Midnight Madness program which is an awesome experience in itself. We reviewed another Midnight Madness movie called You’re Next here and previewed the full Midnight Madness lineup here. After seeing dozens of Midnight Madness screenings over the years, the three most memorable ones for me have been 2008’s Martyrs, 2007’s Inside (À l’intérieur), and 2003’s High Tension  (Haute Tension). Connection – all three are French so I must confess that I went into tonight’s screening with heightened expectations. In fact, Livid was written and directed by the same duo that made Inside (Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury) so the question was; are these guys a one hit wonder or are they truly masters of the edgy French horror film genre.

The TIFF media site offers the following description: “The directors of 2007’s Midnight Madness hit A L’Interieur (Inside) return with a twisted gothic nightmare. A young woman and her friends break into a decrepit mansion looking for treasure, only to unlock a dark secret of unspeakable horror ready to dish out bloody punishment for their greed.” Before the movie started the director/writer duo let us know that Livid itself is a tribute to Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria and in fact was nothing like Inside. This is important information to keep in mind before watching this movie. The full introduction from Bustillo and Maury is found below.

With that introduction out of the way, the movie begins and dedicates the first part to character development. Bustillo and Maury cast the beautiful Chloé Coulloud as the central character and we follow her on her first day of her new job (which happens to be October 31st). This first part is well paced and the characters are quite believable. Then the weirdness begins. For anyone familiar with Susperia, the basic formula is similar: supernatural villain, haunted house, baffled protagonist. The latter part of the movie transforms from what seemed to be a horror/suspense film to a fantasy movie with some bloody horror movie elements. Pretty bizarre stuff actually. The first half and second half of the movie almost seemed not related in their direction which is neither good or bad. What can be said about the movie though is that there is great atmosphere and the locations are excellent for the mood it wants to portray. Livid is primarily set in a old manor/house outside of Paris that rivals Psycho or Amityville Horror for iconic scary houses. Overall this movie garnered mixed reactions and will polarize opinions more than most typical movies. Quite simply, some will love it and some will hate it. We took to Twitter to test our assumption and gauge public reaction after the screening. There was both positive and negative feedback but Simon Barrett the writer of another Midnight Madness film You’re Next summarized it nicely:

Other typical reactions we noticed: