By Simon Thompson
Director/co-writer Raphael Delpard’s The Night Of Death is a strangely hypnotic cult horror movie, forged in a similar stylistic vein to The Shining and Next Of Kin. While its over the top tone makes it far from a boring watch, it sadly doesn’t come together as structurally tightly as you would hope.
The plot follows Martine (Isabelle Gougey), a young nurse working in a secluded rural retirement home. Inevitably, it turns out that the retirement home is housing (no pun intended) a dark secret, and is ruled by the iron fist of the head administrator Helene (Betty Beckers). Without going into too many specifics, let’s just say that the secret of the film’s setting revolves around the unconventional culinary tastes of the residents.
This movie is fantastic to look at. Cinematographer Marcel Combes’s lurid colour palette perfectly compliments the tone that Delpard is trying to establish as director, and the isolated rural setting is made the more distinct by Combes’s choices. What’s so striking about this movie’s look is that it combines the pulpy comic book style of a giallo movie such as Deep Red with the stately quality of a Terence Fisher movie at the same time, meaning that this isn’t a movie you will forget anytime soon.
The score by Laurent Petitgirard is hauntingly repetitive by design, with its piano melodies making you feel as if you have stumbled into some kind of nightmare that you can’t wake up from. When people think of European horror music from the 1970s-80s, their minds usually go to the synth-electronic rock style of Goblin, Ennio Morricone’s experimental scores, or Fabio Frizzi’s work in a similar vein, so for Petitgirard to go for a more traditional horror soundscape is a smart artistic choice because it allows the score to stand out from the rest of the pack.
Isabelle Gougey, does a solid enough job as Martine, but it’s Betty Beckers’s steely performance as Helene that truly stands out. While the oddball, eccentric residents are fun characters in their own right, make no mistake, this is Betty Beckers’s movie, which she stamps with the authority of a thirty four year old Zinedine Zidane beating Brazil by himself.
To conclude, the thing that sadly lets The Night Of Death down is how sluggishly repetitive and dull the second act is. After a compelling first twenty five minutes to half an hour, the movie flatlines right up until the big show stopper ending, to the extent that it takes you out of the atmosphere that had been so carefully cultivated in the first act. If you’re into European horror/cult movies in general, The Night Of Death is an interesting curio to look at, but not an essential work in the way that Suspiria or Body Double are.
