There is a mighty and vengeful thunder that echoes across the skies of Queensland and charging just ahead of it, before the rain hits to cleanse the blood-soaked land, is the crowbar wielding revenge of The Horseman.  Brutal in content and in execution, Steven Kastrissios’s directorial debut is a sinister and satisfying take on the revenge tale.  With the splatterhouse gore of a Horror film, the harrowing events detailed within The Horseman will simply leave you speechless.

Dead simple in its hard-edged plotting, The Horseman is based around a grit-fueled performance by Peter Marshall as Christian, who relentlessly murders all the men involved with the molestation and killing of his runaway and drugged-up daughter (Hannah Levien).  In quite a disturbing turn of events, his fiery intensity, as the avenging father, smothers the grief the audience feels over the filmed rape and eventual death of his daughter.  He is a man out of control.  As he continues to kill and kill again in gruesome torture-driven ways, his performance as a man in the last throes of sanity makes it hard to cheer on; he knows – hell, we all know – he is doing very, very bad things in the name of his daughter, yet he can’t stop and his recognition of this simple fact makes for an interesting situation because, as extreme as his violence is, we can’t stop watching either.  Then, to complicate things, Marshall extends his credibility and actually garnishes sympathy from the audience; it is a performance to be seen and studied.

Like an exterminator moving from one client to another, Christian roams the countryside looking to quell the blood-hunger awakened from the discovery of his daughter’s last known presence: a low-budget porn movie recorded on VHS and sent anonymously to him.  Memorizing every face and every nuance of the location in that porno, Christian’s apocalyptic journey sees him bonding with a pregnant runaway teen named Alice (Caroline Marohasy) whose own story can’t pull him from the clutches of his revenge.  Despite Alice’s similarities with his own daughter, Christian can’t kill enough men in order to stop his reliving of the last minutes of his own daughter’s life; his haunting memory quickly becomes a very real experience.

Definitely not for the faint or weak of heart, Kastrissio’s excellence at visuals and creating atmosphere is altogether restrained enough to allow the imagination to fill in the gaps the blood splatter leaves behind.  His ferociously timed executions, bloody or not, will upset the stomach and knock the senses about for at least 90 minutes.  They will also, unlike most Hollywood features, upset the stomach to such a degree as to thematically haunt well past the ending of the movie.

This is a film that gets better as it digests.  Having seen it twice already, there is an honest character impact in the placement of the shots – especially when Christian begins cutting himself so that he can feel what his victims feel.  That being said, the beginning is such an effectively timed sequence of events – flashing back from the daughter to the father - that watching it again, after the first viewing, is highly recommended for a deeper appreciation.

Violently haunting in scope, the stabbing brutality of The Horseman might not be a fun ride for everyone, but it is definitely a worthy addition to the revenge-driven canon of film literature.  For those dark hearts seeking a little maddening murder in their diets or just a hell of a good production with limited funds, then The Horseman, if you can find it, will lead you to the Promised Land.

Component Grades Movie DVD DVD Experience

Blu-ray Details:

Available on Blu-ray and DVD - June 15, 2010
Screen Formats: 1.85:1
Subtitles: 

Special Features:

Visually stylized to look a tad dull and bluish gray, the Blu-Ray welcomes the atmospheric touches of HD camera used to record the movie with.  The Blu-Ray includes a punching soundtrack delivered by Dolby Digital 5.1 & 2.0 sound.  There is also an exhausting featurette entitled The Making of The Horseman and it is exactly what it claims to be.  This featurette is very detailed and informative for first-time, non-Hollywood feature filmmakers.  The disc also includes three deleted scenes, the original short that inspired the movie (with commentary) made for $600, then some cast and crew interviews concerning the process of bringing this feature to life.  Finally, there are two separate commentaries: one with Director Kastrissios and one with the cast and crew.  For my money, the one that pays the most is the Director’s commentary.

{pgomakase}