Flesh of the Unforgiven (2024) - Horror Film Review

Flesh of the Unforgiven is an indie horror film that was directed and written by Joe Hollow who also stars. At its core there is a decent story I think, for whatever reason, I just could not follow what was going on in this. Not having the faintest idea what was happening didn't add to my enjoyment unfortunately. The synopsis will be based on what I believe the story might be.

Jack Russo (Hollow) and his wife, Sienna (Debbie Rochon - The Man in Room 6, Clinger) are going through a tough time. Three months previous, Sienna had cheated on Jack with his best friend, and while the couple have stayed together, it has caused many issues. Adding to Jack's stress is that he is a writer struggling with writer's block, and he is days away from the due date with nothing to show for it. Sienna starts to experience nightmares in which a masked man threatens her. Elsewhere, Jack receives a strange VHS tape in the post that promises to offer him inspiration for his writing, but which instead seems to show a man torturing a chained up woman.

I really struggled to follow the story and I'm well aware that was the intention. The movie has so many nightmare sequences that it is purposely hard to tell when one of these sequences starts and ends. You can be watching a scene thinking it's the real world before realising that no, it is a nightmare. I did like that part of the film. One thing you couldn't criticise Flesh of the Unforgiven for is lack of inventiveness, it has that in spades, there is constantly something new going on. I appreciated the many dream sequences, they were so sporadic that they felt like a mini-anthology within the film. The idea for the horror I think is that there is a demonic being known as the 'Death Dealer' who puts victims into deadly nightmares that they have to escape from to survive. There was a Freddy Krueger vibe to this part, though the antagonist figure of a masked man with a cartoonishly evil sounding voice didn't have the same impact as that legendary movie maniac.

The parts of the film that were likely taking place in the real world were also the most dull. Scenes set in a small bar, the unhappy couple bickering at home; none of this made me feel engaged with the characters. Both protagonists had huge faults that made it hard to care about either of them. I also wasn't a fan of the overly cheesy music. Likely an ode to the classic horror of the eighties, I found the tracks gave an almost comedic vibe to the scenes they appeared in. It wasn't all bad however, I did think the ending scene going into the end credits sequence was perfectly blended with an appropriate track, lovely stuff.
Obviously an indie horror, it sometimes felt hard to take scenes too seriously, parts of this I was wandering if it was purposefully over the top. It didn't help that some of the more digital special effects didn't really fit the film well.

Flesh of the Unforgiven had a lot of good ideas to it, and at times it brought an almost arthouse dream fugue type feel. The story I found too hard to follow, likely my own fault, but it still took me out of the experience when I was trying to work out what was going on and who all the random characters were. This sometimes veered too far into cheesiness, something that diluted a lot of the horror out of the scenes. There were certainly some great scenes to be found here at the very least.

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