I watched Friend of the World before heading to bed last night (at the time of writing), at least I think I did, it's entirely possible that this Brian Patrick Butler written and directed darkly humorous body horror was part of a fever dream I had as it was an extremely surreal watch. The one part of my synopsis I got from online was that the film takes place within a bunker, I didn't pick up on that fact while watching this!
Diane (Alexandra Slade) awakens in a room full of the dead bodies of her friends and colleagues with not too much memory of how she came to be there. Managing to escape from the sealed room by descending a lift shaft, she soon passes out and awakens to find herself in the room of a very eccentric army general, Gore (Nick Young - The Case of: Dakota Moore). The man is disappointed to see that she has survived the apocalyptic event that has led to them both being in the bunker (for that is where they are), but with supplies low, he decides to lead her out of the bunker with him, constantly lecturing her on his insane world views as he does so.
This is a black and white (for the most part) experimental movie that spreads itself across several genres. This is most definitely post-apocalyptic, with the surface world displayed as a Hellscape full of flames and ruins. It doesn't really do a good job of bringing the viewer up to speed on what has occured, though the characters themselves seem aware of the events that led up to them being in the bunker. There are also sci-fi and body horror elements, even the odd zombie type being here and there. It is split into chapters, and this is successful at splitting up the film into slightly self contained segments. The first chapter, which sees Diane escaping the room of corpses, played out almost dialogue free. This was a great introduction to the film world, not only gaining my attention immediately to the bizarre and mysterious situation the protagonist finds herself in, but also provides some claustrophobic locations which permeate the movie. It always feels like characters are in rooms and corridors that are too small for them, each new place just as cramped and contained as the last. Not realising this took place within a bunker, I imagined that the characters were trapped within a world that only existed within a building, with vague reminders of Cube.
The core of the film, and what it makes it the most experimental has to be Gore, a man who is a larger than life and an obviously insane person. The two characters seemed to almost be polar opposites of each other, Diane is a young filmmaker, someone shown to have some liberal views. Gore on the other hand is an unhinged madman, someone who seems to blame the apocalyptic world on artists like Diana, even when it appears to have been some kind of devastating war that led to the current situation. At times this came to feel like a series of deranged lectures, and certainly had the feel of a stage play with the low number of characters and events that mainly play out as purely dialogue. More than anyone, Gore reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield's character from Natural Born Killers, he was someone who had a feeling of off-balanced unpredictable danger to him, and someone who more than likely had something to do with the predicament that Diana found herself in at films start.
Friend of the World is a comedy, but one whose humour is jet black and very surreal. There are not any laugh out loud moments, instead scenes become funny while also staying dark and slightly creepy. There is a subplot about people becoming zombies with body-horror abilities to merge themselves with their victim by melding their flesh into them. This leads to some great looking special effects, and a few scenes of insanity, such as the manic smile that is plastered across one of these zombie type characters that is killed. With the apparent antidote to this infliction having some LSD style side effects the film soon becomes quite trippy, with distorted voices, and a cool looking scene of a corpse that has Gore's talking face growing out of its chest.
At just fifty minutes long this never dragged, and with all the content jammed into the run time it felt like it was over quicker than even that short time. I can't even begin to pretend I understood a lot of what was happening here. The plot remains purposely obtuse and some of the ideas were a bit brain melting. There was one scene that included the repeated use of a bodily function sound effect that didn't appeal, and I thought parts of the violin based soundtrack were quite grating, but overall I was impressed with this cohesive depiction of an insane world. Friend of the World has recently released on Apple TV.
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