The slasher genre of horror deserves its due respect for lasting so long as a staple of film and giving us some truly iconic characters like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, but those villains are ultimately two-dimensional. You can flesh out their back stories as much as you’d like, but once they pop up onscreen they’re little more than menaces lurking in the dark to slay sexually awakened teenagers. So while their visages may be the most recognizable faces of horror, they’re far from the most terrifying. That distinction belongs to the killers who seem very real, the ones that can more easily be explained by a stunted or very twisted intellect and whose treachery isn’t fully known until the victims are too close to run. Though the killer of Bereavement doesn’t have the complexity or depth of Hannibal Lecter and the film is a bit lacking in great performances, Director and Writer Stevan Mena delivers a chilling tale about the warping influence of one twisted mind on that of a young child.
Kidnapped from his backyard at the age of six, Martin (Spencer List), a young boy unable to feel anything, spent the next five years in the care of his abductor (Brett Rickaby), a psychologically damaged and delusional slave compelled to a tortured routine of murdering teenage girls. In present day, he still lives with his crazed mentor who prevents his every attempt at escape. Meanwhile, the story shifts to that of Allison (Alexandrea Daddario), still reeling from the death of her parents, who has moved out to the quiet countryside to live with her aunt (Kathryn Meisle), uncle (Michael Biehn), and their daughter (Peyton List). Eventually, she meets her potential love interest, William (Nolan Gerard Funk), a relationship that puts her at odds with her uncle. On one of her daily runs she spies Martin looking out the window of a dilapidated old house and in doing so attracts the attention of his captor.
Though the film is technically a prequel to Mena’s film Malevolence, the film is less about Martin’s development than it is the insanity of the man whose heinous acts he witnesses each night and Allison’s inevitable fall into the killer’s grasp. Rickaby does his best to give us a killer who’s clearly insane on a Norman Bates level but without taking it to a comical place, and for the most part he succeeds. Perhaps the most interesting angle worked into the pair in the killer’s house is how the older half perceives Martin’s inability to feel, considering it at first a sign of his absolutely clear conscience and then the absence of a soul.
The weak part of the film arises on Allison’s half, where the very basic teen romance suffers from poor writing and some awful acting by Funk. Consequently, the film is off-kilter with one half being so clearly better than the other, and disturbing as it is, you just can’t wait for Allison to wander into the path of Martin and his master so it can even out.
For horror fans looking for that far too rare decent horror film, Bereavement offers up enough in atmosphere and tension to make other recent slasher flicks look mild by comparison. Mena has no reservations about throwing buckets of blood around and yet he does it with enough control that it never feels over-the-top like so many other films. Just as the gore is well-used, the Mena has a great eye for switching between the wide open expanses of farmland from above to the more claustrophobic view of the same area when viewed from the ground where the corn stalks form an imposing wall. The shots within the killer’s slaughterhouse or the more basic residences are less impressive, and so the real tension comes from the performance of Rickaby.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Stevan Mena might not be the greatest director or writer, but he clearly has a passion for filmmaking and it shines through in both the great audio commentary and the respectably long, 35-minute making-of featurette. After that the extras are nothing special with the basic trailers, TV spots, deleted scenes, and a second, but lesser on-set look at the film’s creation. The 25th anniversary edition also includes a digital copy of the film.
"Bereavement" is on sale August 30, 2011 and is rated R. Horror, Thriller. Written and directed by Stevan Mena. Starring Alexandra Daddario, Michael Biehn, Nolan Gerard Funk, Spencer List, Brett Rickaby.
