Mindflesh (2008, DVD Review)
Director: Robert Pratten
Cast: Peter Bramhill, Carole Derrien, Christopher Fairbank, Lucy Liemann, Cordelia Bugeja
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“Your mind has given birth to a monster.”
Chris is a taxi cab driver and an aspiring writer who has recently lost his girlfriend. While out endlessly driving around, he repeatedly encounters a beautiful female apparition but it never allows itself to be engaged. All of his friends who know about it think he is too stressed out and needs a break from everything. Chris’ ghostly meetings begin to intensify and become more personal and he begins to have horrible nightmares of monstrous beings. The ghostly being, called The Goddess, becomes more real and materializes into human form and Chris starts to have a torrid love affair with her that is tearing him apart. Wild blackouts of tormenting sex and childhood abuse drive him to near insanity. What is The Goddess and how is she connected to the creatures from his dream?
I could go into much more plot detail without giving away the ending, but it is more fun for the viewer to go into it as blind as possible. There is so much going on in this approximately 70 minute film experience that it’s hard to take it all in. It’s an incredibly smart and engrossing tale of hurt, sexual obsession and aliens from other dimensions. I would gently place writer/director Robert Pratten’s erotic sci-fi/psychological horror tale in the same pool as David Lynch, Cronenberg, Aronofski’s early work and Gaspar Noe. Pratten tells his story without a lot of exposition and allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions to what exactly is happening in front of them. There is no spoon-feeding here, only raw psycho-sexual energy coursing through the film’s tight, well used runtime.
The imagery used to create all of this electricity is simple yet very effective. Most of the special effects are camera tricks you have seen many times before only with an utterly brilliant twist. Ripples used for flashbacks, fading images in and out, blurring to disguise exactly what’s going on, etc. Things the television show Dr. Who has used for decades, but made to look like high priced SFX. Low budget filmmakers could take some lessons from Mindflesh. The extra-terrestrials were pretty damn good too. It looked to be a combination of practical costuming and some of that fancy camera trickery that made it look so realistic. With a story like this there is bound to be lots of nudity and sex and there was. Luckily most of it featured the incredibly sexy Carole Derrien (Nature Morte) slinking around as “The Goddess”.
British thespian Peter Bramhill who played “Chris” is one hell of an actor. The role called for a soul ripping emotional drain and he delivered in spades. His tortured yet hopeful character was one you actually care about and wish the best. Something missing from too many movies, horror movies in particular. I am a fan of the filmmakers I compared Robert Pratten to because they challenge you to think, to feel and to question. Pratten is no different. Mindflesh melds science, religion and psychology, thoroughly tangling them with human desire. The screenplay is based on William Sheinman’s book White Light and if it is half as good as the movie, I will be picking it up ASAP. Get your copy of both on the movie’s OFFICIAL SITE!
