Wound (2010)

The motto of “Everything old is new again” has certainty taken a hold of many forms of media and while nostalgia is a pretty potent drug, it's not without its pitfalls. This is especially true when it comes to film and the horror genre in particular has been one of the most unfortunate victims. While obviously not every new film has to reinvent the wheel in order to be good, the sheer number of “throwback” or “homage” films attempting to recreate the styles of past decades has led the gimmick to wear extremely thin, resulting in a slew of films that, while aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately shallow with little to no personality of their own. The same could be said for attempts at “extreme” horror, when the sole attempt of the film is to shock, the gimmick gets old rather quick, rendering the intended shocks null and void. Enter Kiwi troublemaker David Blyth. After taking a ten year hiatus from narrative features following the difficult production of Exposure (2001) to teach and focus on documentaries, Blyth felt the need to go back to his roots and was ready to cause a stir the same way he did with his debut feature Angel Mine (1978). The resulting film was 2010's gut punch Wound, one of the most genuinely affecting and startlingly original post-new millennium horror films that sets a new benchmark for transgressive horror.

Delving into the mind of an extremely disturbed individual with an effectiveness not seen since David Cronenberg's Spider (2002), Wound can be a tricky film to get a handle on and defies any attempt to neatly summarize it. The focus of the film is the troubled Susan (Kate O'Rourke) who early on in the film castrates and murders her father whom sexually abused her as a child. The film follows Susan as she holds sadomasochist “therapy” sessions in front of a webcam with a man she refers to as “Sir”, has phone conversations with her dead mother Ruth who she herself set on fire and finds herself being perused by Tanya, a teenager who claims to be her estranged daughter that Susan believed to have been stillborn and who reveals herself to be just as disturbed, if not more so than Susan.

Wound is the type of film that operates entirely within the unconscious and being that it occupies Susan's headspace for its entirety, any and all concepts of reality of logic are tossed aside relatively quickly. Very few films are as successful at quite literally getting into the head of its main character, oftentimes to the point of extreme discomfort with the film being incredibly frank in its portrayal of the possible effects of abuse. Blyth strips away any possible reasonable explanation for the events happening on screen, most fascinatingly with the character of Tanya who, if Susan's past is to be taken as fact, doesn't really exist, which again goes back to how well the film pulls off taking place inside Susan's fractured mind. Despite the films (purposeful) lack of narrative cohesion, the film is anything but cold thanks to the demanding and cathartic performance of Kate O'Rourke who brilliantly transports Susan's trauma onto the audience making the film as moving as it is incendiary. The film also finds Blyth taking visual influences from his fetish documentaries Bound for Pleasure (2004) and Transfigured Nights (2007), using them in a fictional context with one S&M act performed in the film lifted straight from Bound for Pleasure and the striking, grotesque masks at the heart of Transfigured Nights are prominently featured throughout. There are even some unforgettable moments of gore splatter with Blyth holding nothing back, including two scenes that are sure to have even the most jaded “extreme” horror viewers jaws hitting the floor.

Speaking to the Never Repeats podcast, Blyth explained his intent going into Wound saying “2000 I made Exposure... and it had so many producers and I came out of it so depressed. I then spent the next ten years basically the tutor at South Sea's Film School... The whole thing with Wound was that I became so frustrated and I went back and I re-looked at Angel Mine and I said to myself I've got to go back to my roots, I've got to go back to the unconscious, to the things that drove me and attracted me at the beginning of my career because I'd lost all of it, I'd become a journeyman, I'd become a hired gun.” How fitting that 32 years after Angel Mine, Blyth's comeback film made with the same spirit would draw the ire of moral crusaders just as Angel Mine did, with there being campaigns in New Zealand calling for the banning of Wound, which failed. Much like Death Warmed Up (1984) was championed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Wound found a high profile fan in another pioneer transgressor, the legendary Ken Russell, who loved the audacity of it and was rightfully quoted on the DVD examining “Enter at your own peril!” Russell couldn't have been more right when he dubbed the film a masterpiece. A visually astonishing and potentially psychologically traumatizing experience, Wound stands as Blyth's magnum opus.