CAUTION!! Contains spoilers
This is a strange story in that normal morals are suspended. We see the main characters, April and Luc, brutally kill Said, a schoolmate, in the opening scenes. While we are not eager to treat the pair as innocents, they are curiously child-like.
Alice is a pretty girl who, like a small child, can be utterly cruel one moment and then tender the next. She ruthlessly plots the murder of a boy that she lusts after. She lies to get her virginal boyfriend to help her do the killing. Yet later, she cries when he accidentally runs over a rabbit in their get-away car. What's more, she anxiously insists that they bury the rabbit, while the murdered boy's body is still in the car trunk. In one telling scene, she is in a store to buy a shovel with which to bury the boy that they have killed. As she strolls leisurely past a display of Barbie dolls we see that they catch her interest. I half expected her to stop and buy a doll along with the shovel.
Luc is Alice's virginal boyfriend. As we see from his brutal participation in the opening killing, he is not an innocent either. He is still a virgin, but that may be that he's gay and hasn't figured it out yet. When April tries to seduce him Luc pushes her away and we hear that this is not the first time that Luc `can't'. He has no trouble `sticking' Said. He stabs him brutally after watching longingly for a while.
After their crime, Luc steals his family car and the young couple takes off to bury the body committing a petty theft at a jewelry store along the way.
But all does not go as planned
After burying the body in the woods, they become lost and end up discovering a rustic cabin in the woods, inhabited by an ogre or `man of the woods'.
When they are caught stealing food, `The man' imprisons them in a cellar under the cabin. Later he brings Luc up from the cellar and locks Luc in a dog collar and fastens him to the bed by tying the end of the rope to the bed.
The `man of the woods' looks vile and does gross things like skinning rabbits but seems to treat Luc gently and while he does molest Luc and eventually have anal sex with him these scenes are non-violent and its ambiguous as to how Luc reacts.
Throughout, the movie is curiously nonjudgmental and a bit ambiguous which I thought made it interesting. It doesn't place any value judgments on the murder, nor about the homosexual leaning of Luc, nor of `the man' molesting him. It even makes `the man' out to be a bit benevolent (When Luc and April are escaping he opens his eyes at the last moment and looks knowingly at Luc but does nothing.
The film does have its plot holes and these did bother me. Several times we see Luc straining `at the end of his rope' and yet the end is fastened to the bed with a very simple knot. Why doesn't he just untie the knot?
When Luc escapes he doesn't cut himself out of the collar that the `the man' put on him. I can't decide if this was a practical point or a symbolic one.
In the end, after Luc has rescued the girl, he can now perform sexually with her. Prior to that the most intimate things that he did with her was to do her hair and make-up.
This is a strange story in that normal morals are suspended. We see the main characters, April and Luc, brutally kill Said, a schoolmate, in the opening scenes. While we are not eager to treat the pair as innocents, they are curiously child-like.
Alice is a pretty girl who, like a small child, can be utterly cruel one moment and then tender the next. She ruthlessly plots the murder of a boy that she lusts after. She lies to get her virginal boyfriend to help her do the killing. Yet later, she cries when he accidentally runs over a rabbit in their get-away car. What's more, she anxiously insists that they bury the rabbit, while the murdered boy's body is still in the car trunk. In one telling scene, she is in a store to buy a shovel with which to bury the boy that they have killed. As she strolls leisurely past a display of Barbie dolls we see that they catch her interest. I half expected her to stop and buy a doll along with the shovel.
Luc is Alice's virginal boyfriend. As we see from his brutal participation in the opening killing, he is not an innocent either. He is still a virgin, but that may be that he's gay and hasn't figured it out yet. When April tries to seduce him Luc pushes her away and we hear that this is not the first time that Luc `can't'. He has no trouble `sticking' Said. He stabs him brutally after watching longingly for a while.
After their crime, Luc steals his family car and the young couple takes off to bury the body committing a petty theft at a jewelry store along the way.
But all does not go as planned
After burying the body in the woods, they become lost and end up discovering a rustic cabin in the woods, inhabited by an ogre or `man of the woods'.
When they are caught stealing food, `The man' imprisons them in a cellar under the cabin. Later he brings Luc up from the cellar and locks Luc in a dog collar and fastens him to the bed by tying the end of the rope to the bed.
The `man of the woods' looks vile and does gross things like skinning rabbits but seems to treat Luc gently and while he does molest Luc and eventually have anal sex with him these scenes are non-violent and its ambiguous as to how Luc reacts.
Throughout, the movie is curiously nonjudgmental and a bit ambiguous which I thought made it interesting. It doesn't place any value judgments on the murder, nor about the homosexual leaning of Luc, nor of `the man' molesting him. It even makes `the man' out to be a bit benevolent (When Luc and April are escaping he opens his eyes at the last moment and looks knowingly at Luc but does nothing.
The film does have its plot holes and these did bother me. Several times we see Luc straining `at the end of his rope' and yet the end is fastened to the bed with a very simple knot. Why doesn't he just untie the knot?
When Luc escapes he doesn't cut himself out of the collar that the `the man' put on him. I can't decide if this was a practical point or a symbolic one.
In the end, after Luc has rescued the girl, he can now perform sexually with her. Prior to that the most intimate things that he did with her was to do her hair and make-up.