Beyond the Grave
Director: Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro
AKA: Porto dos Mortos, Más Allá de la Tumba
2010
Drama/Thriller/Horror/Western
Set is another time and another place, the story more or less revolves around a cop of sorts who’s searching for a possessed serial killer. But possession is not all there is, there are also zombies and black magic rituals going on throughout the entire plot. It’s kind of incomprehensible most of the time but I really like the cinematography and the image compositions most of the time. There’s a lot of visual clichés going on but they seem to fit the production and makes it interesting.
The script itself confuses me by being too ambivalent there are so many different things going on that it’s hard to separate them. Perhaps this is even hard as the dialog is spoken in Portuguese, at least most of it is. I mean, it’s subtitled in English and that’s no biggie really but there are still things that tend to get lost in any translation. But it is a Brazilian film and it should be in Portuguese or it would seem wrong anyway.
Actor wise I think it works really well and some of the makeup effect are almost brilliant. But the movie is rather slow-paced and that makes I kind of boring anyway. There are some strange characters which I think is designed to make it look more interesting, but this isn’t a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky and it’s not tense enough to make it work. I like the ambition of trying to make something a little different but in my opinion it gets a little too complicated. There’s not enough western to make it a western, it’s not enough post apocalypse to make it post apocalypse and it’s not enough zombies to make it a zombie flick.
The main problem is the script no doubt and maybe the direction could have been better too. I think it would have needed some more nerve to make it as interesting as the plot deserves. As it is I can’t even tell what the bottom line is supposed to be.
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