Adapted from Vasilios Bouzas’s novel, Deathkeeper struggles to engage as its modest budget creaks under the weight of overambition and insipid world-building.
Luke is a fallen rebel angel who is weary of a curse that ages him each time he saves a human life and rejuvenates him when he snuffs out one. He becomes cornered by his nemesis, Malagor, and decides to draw a line in the end times and fuck him up for good. Meanwhile, a possessed girl infiltrates his circle of friends, and a new love interest, traumatised by religious control, complicates his resolve and endangers the whole of humanity, as do the random decisions and disproportionate emotional investment of everyone supposedly watching his back.
Any independent cinema project that hopes to bring to life the creative dreams of others deserves some respect. The personal sacrifices, self-doubt, and strife endured are crucial to sustaining grassroots filmmaking. However, transposing these headaches into the viewing experience is severely problematic. Unfamiliar with the source material one can only assume it is as coldly generic as presented here. Yet, that is far from the most frustrating facet of Deathkeeper. I tried to like it, I really did, but some of the bizarre directions it takes left me genuinely mystified.
The cast muster a committed skirmish with a stagnant screenplay as their character arcs rocket into the stratosphere of incredulity before imploding in an effluvium of unjustified choices. Witness the pool sex scene that teases Showgirls’ levels of aquatic shaggery, only to drizzle away with the impotence of painfully banal dialogue. Deathkeeper has too many issues in too many areas to make it satisfying as a genre film. Listing them all would be commensurate with kicking an overenthusiastic pug in the gonads for licking your face. However, criticism without foundation is unconstructive.
The ostentatious showdown between good and evil in the mortal realm requires relatively epic staging, and the notion that it appears to be old Beelzebub himself infesting the young woman begs proportionate manifestation. Blasting heavy rock music when Malagor pops up and shying away from the meat of his nefarious deeds doesn’t cut it. Luke the angel has been alive for decades but has the cumulative charisma and charm of a sunken soufflé. Nor does the ham-fisted exorcism scene create sufficient gravitas for the name-dropping of Lucifer into the narrative.
For a film about the transitional nature of the human soul, it is spectacularly flawed in its interpersonal interactions. Characters engage in stilted trivialities one minute and Armageddon scenarios the next with the same level of confused solemnity. Speaking of confusion, the closing reel is a masterclass in head-scratching as exposition is completely jettisoned with characters arbitrarily traversing spiritual dimensions without any clear orientation for the audience.
Although harmless in isolation, the lack of synergistic realism in Deathkeeper robs it of any tangible jeopardy as a whole. Either a large degree of familiarity with the source novel has been assumed, or the adaptation leaves far too much on the page for adequate comprehension. Some of the dialogue exchanges and character choices are so absurd that they lurch awkwardly towards surrealism. The small town setting seems populated exclusively by folk necessary for narrative progression, and it’s one of those movies where anyone can do anything without rousing the slightest interest from any of the authorities.
Indeed, one of the main protagonists is involved in law enforcement, and his baffling decision is to burn his entire life to the ground for an evil-riddled girl he recently stumbled upon in a local toilet. To posit that he would give everything up for a clearly disturbed woman he has creepily semi-kidnapped is ludicrous; to cement it over a brief snippet of Anime is stereotypically lazy and intellectually insulting. The sentiment and heart in the kindling of Deathkeeper is admirable, but as a literary adaptation, it never catches fire, and it lacks the focus and creative cohesion essential to an arresting horror picture.
★★
Screened at Glasgow Frightfest on March 7th / Charles Cottier, Shuang Hu, Peter Thurnwald, Rebecca Barr / Dir: Tristan Barr / SC Films / TBC
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