Rob Dean examines the overlooked, unappreciated or unfairly maligned movies. Sometimes these films haven't been seen by anyone, and sometimes they've been seen by everyone - who loathed them. This is Missing Reels.
Revenge is a confession of pain.
- Latin Proverb
In the 21st century, critics have lent more credence to revenge movies - positing that they're cathartic expressions for audience members who are unable to visit their anger on the various trespassers they believe worthy of such treatment. The driving force behind this renewed bloodthirst was usually identified as the amorphous, generalized anger people felt in the wake of the terror attacks and subsequent wars beginning in 2001.
There was no clear cut "Us" vs. "Them," the definitions were more subtle and thus harder to picture and more difficult to envision fitting punishment. In essay after blog posting, critics posited that since the enemy was more an ill-defined idea ("Terror"), Americans (usually the driving force behind movie trends) needed villains with faces and, more importantly, needed to see these villains pay.
Personally? I think that's a load of shit. Not that Post-9/11 films weren't full of cathartic escapism where Liam Neeson or Denzel Washington slapped people around, or Jack Bauer used "enhanced interrogation methods" on his own brother. Of course that was catering to a collective unconscious need for such vindication, usually wrought in a very visceral and primal fashion. But I don't think that 9/11 is the root cause for revenge films' popularity.
The Theatre of Vengeance has been popular in the arts since the very beginning. Theatre of Vengeance is beyond international borders and cultural mores, pervading every medium and thriving in societies throughout history. The schadenfreude experienced by watching great kings undone by their own stupidity and hubris on stage (Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Goethe); the giddiness of readers exciting at the tales of a wronged man or men targeting their antagonists and ripping them asunder (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Iliad, Richard Stark's The Hunter); and the past century has brought us many classic tales of revenge writ large on the silver screen from Cape Fear to Get Carter to Enter the Dragon to Django to Kill Bill to Oldboy to today's entry, 2008's The Horseman. The tale as old as time isn't star-crossed lovers - it's the journey that begins with digging two graves and ends with both of them filled.
Numerous times I lie in bed at night and imagine the cruellest torture. I imagine the most miserable ruining of that person's life. After that, I can fall asleep with a smile on my face. As long as it stays in the realm of imagination, the crueller the better - that's healthy.
- Filmmaker Chan-wook Park
The Horseman is the tale of Christian Forteski (Peter Marshall), a father seeking answers and place to put all of his rage and confusion over the death of his daughter, Jesse (Hannah Levien). As the first scene begins, though, we don't know that. All we know is that a squat middle aged man dressed in the uniform of an exterminator is suddenly in the house of a younger man, brutally beating the man in ways that seem un-choreographed and unglamorous. One of the handful of DVD special features that have stayed with me through the years was a behind the scene feature for Fight Club where they showed the blocking for one of the fights, constantly revising anytime it seemed too polished. Even though it wasn't that safe and not too aesthetically pleasing, if it was ugly then it rang true. First time Writer/Producer/Director Steven Kastrissios appears to be a student of this school of thought; violence in The Horseman lacks any sort of sheen, but comes with a sloppy immediacy that grounds it in reality and makes it much more engaging as a viewer.
I won't delve too much into the plot - not that there are a lot of twists or anything. It's a standard revenge 
film where Christian has a path laid before him of his own making, believing that when he arrives at the destination he will find peace and clarity that eludes him in the wake of his daughter's death. Along the way he meets a substitute for his daughter in the awkward hitchhiker Alice (newcomer Caroline Marohasey) and Christian finds himself with a lot of unfettered emotions and a very limited way of expressing them. If you like well done revenge films that are stylish in their rejection of style and define their themes through a careful disregard for orchestrated shot composure or theatricality, then you will enjoy The Horseman.
But there are many elements that go in to making The Horseman much better than a simple vicarious experience of getting back at people. First and foremost is Peter Marshall who plays Christian as a man that desperately wants to blame someone for his daughter's death but refuses to absolve himself of any part of her demise. Marshall is reminiscent of the protagonists from 70s films - a time when Walter Matthau could play a badass leading man (Charley Varrick) - which is to say, he seems very real, very relatable and instantly recognizable. He's an average man, a blue-collar worker with his various tools of his trade and his pest control van, wading into waters he doesn't really want to enter but feels compelled to do so. There are moments when Marshall is confronting his prey where he just lashes out, screaming barely coherent words and repeating random phrases his captives just uttered, where he seems truly dangerous and utterly capable of hurting these people. You believe his anger - Marshall does a great job revealing that it's easier to express such rage rather than examine his guilt and his grief. When he fights these men, he's not graceful and he's not Tony Jaa moving at a rapid clip; he's awkward, he flails, he fights dirty.
The fights, as mentioned, are not slick. They are less action set-ups and more a quick explosion of animosity that reveals Christian's efficiency and single-minded obsession with punishing these men. The real brutality comes from the "interrogation" scenes - when Christian speaks with his captured prey to get the names and locations of next person he will visit (much like Stark's Parker in The Hunter or Lee Marvin's Walker in Point Blank). Here he employs household items to great gruesome effect - mostly offscreen, with implied ghastly ramifications occurring in the minds and sympathetic genitals of audience members. Yes, there's a lot of male genital mutilation, although none of it is ever shown. Tools from Home Depot become weapons of depravity in Christian's hands, and the banal nature of these instruments makes them even more menacing.
I can see why some may think that The Horseman fetishizes violence - particularly in the scene where Christian takes inventory of his tools that he will now put to a more sinister use:
I think this scene - and others that focus on the contents of Christian's toolbox as he examines them - isn't meant to make these tools look sexy or inviting or empowering. It's to reassert that they are tools, instruments designed for a particular purpose that will fix a unique situation. Christian becomes such an instrument himself when he transforms into an obsessed man with one purpose who will meet his goal, no matter the consequences. He isn't a specialized weapon, or an exotic method to extract his revenge - he's an every day, commonplace item that is now being put to use in a very different context. There's no titular line in The Horseman and there's no scene that attempts to explain the nature of the title. Allegedly "horseman" is Aussie slang for "worker," as in the blue-collar variety like Christian. Horseman is also a type of knife, very similar to the one Christian uses on his victims. The worker has become the tool, and the tool has a job to do.
I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
- Genghis Khan
*Please Note: As of this writing, The Horseman is currently available on streaming Netflix.*