World premiere review of Justine (Mexico – 2022), an extreme erotic film drawing from the novel Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) by Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, one of the most controversial and elusive figures in literary history.
Justine is an international exclusive from TetroVideo and will be released by the label in the near future.
The film is directed by Mexican filmmaker Alex Hernández, already behind the shocking Blood For Flesh and The Prosperity of Vice, the latter featured in the extreme anthology Dark Web XXX.
Alex Hernández proves once again his ability to stage brutally uncompromising visions of horror, crafting films that linger for their ruthless display of suffering, where pain is inseparable from existence itself.
With Justine, the director draws directly from the Marquis de Sade's philosophy of terror, long associated with a radical rejection of moral and social boundaries. His work thrives on the collision between pleasure and cruelty, where torment becomes a mechanism of control and the victim is spared only to prolong the inevitability of further suffering.
De Sade's work stands as a portrait of how instinct, when shaped and distorted by imposed morality and social constraints, can spiral into deviance. His own extreme and often cruel sexual outlook led him to push boundaries, filling his writing with relentless depictions of violence and perversion.
These same themes are fully embraced by Alex Hernández, who translates them to the screen with striking precision, crafting a visually arresting portrayal of Sadean eroticism steeped in psychological disturbance and cruelty.
Structured in four acts, the film follows Justine, a young girl determined to hold on to her virtue, yet after taking a position as a maid in Dr. Rodin's household, she is gradually drawn into corruption. Driven by a perverse fixation on purity, the man turns her into a willing subject of escalating torment, where suffering is inseparable from desire.
Justine opens with a deliberately shocking real-life sequence: a post-partum vaginal tear shown in close-up, while a voice-over reflects on human nature as something inherently bound to blood and violence, not only in birth and growth, but even within the act of sex itself.
The narrative then settles into a bleak emotional landscape, focusing on the characters' deep-rooted anguish, a condition that follows them throughout their lives, trapping them in a warped dimension shaped by submission and suffering.
Both in the novel and in the film, Justine embodies a form of “virtue” rooted in virginal purity. Within the framework of the roman noir, she is stripped of her humanity, reinforcing a deeply pessimistic view of virtue and its consequences.
Alex Hernández reworks this Sadean figure by placing her alongside Dr. Rodin, a character driven by an obsessive pursuit of pleasure that manifests through increasingly perverse and pathological impulses, to the point of becoming a living extension of the Marquis' worldview.
Dan Zapata and Enrique Diaz Duran take on the roles of victim and tormentor, delivering performances that leave a lasting impression.
In the first act, the director foregrounds sadism, an explicit nod to de Sade himself, shaping a form of sexuality rooted in cruelty and domination. Within this hellish dynamic, where arousal is inseparable from inflicted pain, Justine endures a state of total submission, subjected to degradation and abuse. Among the many ordeals she faces, even the least invasive, forced vomiting, stands as a disturbing marker of the film’s escalating brutality.
In the second act, the film's striking visual composition and carefully crafted cinematography evoke the dramatic intensity of Caravaggio's paintings, particularly during scenes of flagellation, an act of bodily punishment deeply embedded in Sadean imagery.
Unfiltered and uncompromising, Justine features explicit full nudity and lingering close-ups of the female body, especially during the Doctor's experiments, where the most graphic moments are reinforced by effective practical effects.
The narrative then shifts into a passage shaped by poetry and religious overtones, before tightening its focus on the idea of omnipotence. It is this impulse that drives the tormentor to place himself on a godlike level through acts of cruelty, pushing further into taboo territory with incest and, ultimately, necrophilia as a means of extending pleasure even into death.
In this regard, what unfolds around the necrophilic act, both before and during, reaches extreme levels of horror and revulsion, heightened by the effective use of practical effects.
With Justine, the film pushes toward an unsettling eroticization of both inflicted and endured pain, building into an escalating chain of horrors rooted in the corruption of desire itself.
Carefully written, directed, and performed, the film channels Sadean eroticism with precision, shaping a vision where violent impulses and emotional detachment, even in the face of death, feed into a distorted sense of omnipotence.
Framed by a refined visual approach, spanning cinematography (Dante Belmont), period-inspired costumes (notably the pleated ruff), and a classical score, Justine emerges as a dense, uncompromising work of sadism, transgression, and cruelty, conceived as a direct tribute to the literary universe of the Marquis de Sade.
Immoral and deeply transgressive, Justine stands out as one of the most accomplished entries in extreme cinema, an uncompromising work that not only pushes the boundaries of the subgenre, often neglectful of craft, but also brings unexpected attention to cinematography, performance, and score.
At the same time, it plunges headfirst into the realm of sadomasochism, unfolding through relentless cycles of brutality and desire that amplify its impact with striking intensity.
The cast includes Dan Zapata, Jacqueline Blanca Bribiesca, Enrique Diaz Duran, Juan Manuel Martinez, and Marisela Plaza.
The screenplay, on the other hand, is by Alex Hernández himself in collaboration with Juan Manuel Martínez.
Produced by TetroVideo, Justine is presented by Domiziano Cristopharo.
