Danish extreme horror Your Flesh, Your Curse (Denmark - 2017) features Kasper Juhl, author of horror films such as Nekromania, Madness of Many, Monstrosity and also of the incisive A God without a Universe. One of the very actresses in this film, Marie-Louise Damgaard, plays the troubled protagonist Juliet White in Your Flesh, Your Curse.
Divided into five chapters highlighting his experiences, Your Flesh, Your Curse is interspersed with fetishistic curtain calls but also with surreal sequences that depict her and hold her in a kind of limbo. Here, too, her soul will be forced to relive atrocious, repressed memories making pain and suffering eternally alive.
Pessimism, violence and degradation are the constants on which the story of this extreme film is installed, violently intersecting with the drama genre. A plot dripping with suffering gives space to a female body that has been abused since childhood and becomes an object of desire for those who want to take pleasure from it by exploiting the painful situation in which the drug-addicted protagonist, a girl trapped in an apathetic and glacial life, finds herself.
In Your Flesh, Your Curse death will not serve to end the pains but, as in a spell (hence the title of the film), Juliet will continue to suffer even more heinous torments and humiliations. Into this context of hellish rebirth comes the horror component. Your Flesh, Your Curse in fact trespasses into the demonic realm by hooking into diabolical pacts but also perversions and bloody lesbian scenes that alternate with torture (Janus Vinther's gore special effects are effective). It all converges toward an inexorable truth that elevates Juliet to queen of the suffering of the fairer sex.
Punctuated by transporting melancholy music with dramatic overtones (Anders Norddal), Your Flesh, Your Curse is ruthless, disturbing because of the deep sense of oppression and malaise it manages to convey to the viewer but this is a skill Kasper Juhl has already demonstrated in A God without a Universe. The whole is enveloped by a frosty, curated cinematography that illuminates the most striking and impressive shots.
The cast includes Marie-Louise Damgaard, Mie Gren, Bill Hutchens (The Human Centipede II and III), Frederik Carlsen, Emma Nymann, Paw Terndrup, Louise Gammelgaard, Rose Milling, Natasha Dratinskaia, Lina Nemi Nielsen, Nina Grønbech, and Ninna Raiden. They are also joined by Danish actor and director Kim Sønderholm (Succubus, Sinister Visions, Høsten).
The screenplay is by Kasper Juhl.
