07/04/2014 - Produced with just €10,000, Belgian director Nikolas List’s first film doesn’t hold back on nightmares

After going through the Gérardmer Festival, Tombville [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is being screened in its Belgian premiere at the Fantastic Film Festival of Brussels, which will be hosting fellow countryman and filmmaker Nikolas List, in his first feature film.

There is something intriguing in David’s problematic past. Plunged in darkness, he wakes up every time something from that time comes back to him. Even more worrying is that he cannot leave the place, which is haunting him. The threats and the unhealthy habits of people around him push him to rebuild his own memory puzzle and get on the road to get out of his living nightmare.  

The experimental film is set to provoke mixed responses, but deserves respect for many of its aspects, starting with the fact that its self-created budget was €10,000. Even if Tombville only lasts 70 minutes, it remains a well-written film entirely written, produced, directed and edited by the young filmmaker so that he could bring his nightmares to life. These are somewhere between the surrealist follies of Eraserhead and the surreal horror from Hostel, going towards modern German expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) or M – The Monster of Düsseldorf (1931).

Tombville takes the spectator into the psyche of a disturbed and traumatised person, forcing audiences to relate to the character, with whom they will share a sensorial experience: reduced sight, obscurity, time lapses, spatial disorientation, and growing horror at the hands of David (Pierre Lognay, convincing), who re-emerges from his past. The film disturbs, explicitly caresses torture and incest, keeping the spectator’s head underneath the water. The public needs to be prepared, and ready to immerse itself in a nightmare in a film without any form of pleasure or displeasure.

With its chiselled editing, Tombville includes the power of sounds (including those taped by the director) and those of images. These are enough to make audiences ignore the low budget. Actors, most of them unknown, but among whom an excellent Eric Godon , give the film an unhealthy twist, which has not been seen in Belgium since Calvaire [+see also:
trailer
interview: Fabrice du Welz
film profile] by Fabrice Du Welz, another author of that Belgian cinema, which has been populating its most eccentric ranks with new hope: that of finding Nikolas List again behind a more consistent type of production.  

(Translated from French)